On Sep 25, 2005, at 10:02 AM, Gary Nunn wrote:
What's the answer for cities, that are at higher risk of catastrophes,
that may require mass evacuations? More highways? Hardened shelters?
Some cities in the world are investing *MASSIVE* amounts of money and
effort to protect them from various natural disasters. Take, for
instance, Tokyo, which is building the world's largest flood-prevention
system of mind-boggling proportions, of which some too-cool-to-be-real
photos are available here:
http://www.g-cans.jp/intro/07photo/
It's all in Japanese, but there are half a dozen free translation
sites that can handle some of it for you, provided you can parse
stuff like this:
The national capital region contour sluice may overflow takes in
the flood of the small-to-medium-sized rivers which become to
the underground, lets flow to Edogawa through the tunnel of the
entire extension 6.3‡q which penetrates underground 50 m, it is
the worldwide biggest flood prevention facility. It concentrates
the leading engineering works technology which Japan is proud in
the world, to presently entire approximately 8 tenths complete.
The remarkable flood control effect is shown e.g., it works
partly from 2002, processes approximately 450 ten thousand t
thing floods so far safely.
I, personally, would feel safer knowing that "approximately 450 ten
thousand t thing floods" were being processed.
These photos made the rounds of various blogs about a year ago,
if only because they were at first thought to be very impressive
computer-generated game scenery. Minds began blowing when it was
pointed out that this is a real place under Tokyo. Here's how it
appeared on BoingBoing:
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/21/gcans_massive_underg.html
Seriously, this is the kind of investment that would need to be made to
keep New Orleans dry in the future, and I'm pretty sure we're not in a
position to do so. Of course, there are very sound reasons that we are
not able to do so, but Japan is: Japan doesn't have to go around waving
its dick around to show that it is the biggest, baddest country around.
Japan builds things like this to protect its people while we go off
pretending to be John friggin' Wayne.
The self-proclaimed greatest country on earth should be the kind of
country that has the sense and discipline to build something like this.
Dave "We can and must do better" Land
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