Posted on 08/21/2016 5:27:22 AM PDT by fella
The mention about caskets popping up out of the ground. That seems to happen a lot down there during floods. Up in Michigan, the casket is enclosed in a concrete vault so that can’t happen. It is also, allegedly so that the casket and its contents won’t contaminate the groundwater. are there no similar regulations down there? It’s gotta be a lot of fun every flood season seeing the dearly departed pop up and go sailing off downstream like some macabre little regatta.
No pumps made can keep up with 2 feet of rainfall.
Government is not in the business of fixing things. There’s not much to be gained in “fixing things”.
Government exists to step up when trouble strikes and exclaim, “I can fix that!”. This is now you get votes. This is how you get tax increases.
All that good stuff evaporates if you actually “fix things”.
This is true for flood areas. It is also true for government schools. Having bad government schools is very advantageous for people in government. They don’t want these things fixed. They want problems. As many problems as possible.
The supreme danger of Donald Trump is that he actually wants to fix stuff. That messes everything up and gets people very agitated.
No way the Feds would allow the canal to be built. They would argue it would hurt the wetlands and impact an alligator.
You can’t simply ‘engineer’ for a 500-1000 year event Who ever wrote the article is foolish to think ‘drainage improvements would have done any good.
I may be 100% wrong on this, but ...
I think it's French culture to bury people above ground in stone structures. Paris cemeteries are often built like this. New Orleans cemeteries are sometimes built like this. If a flood hits a cemetery it may not be difficult to damage the structure and push the contents out through a hole in the wall.
But I'm not sure that's the case.
A lot of those floating caskets have been there a long time.
All of this water is going into the Mississippi River. What is going to happen to New Orleans when it gets there. Are the NO levees going to hold up?
I believe in new Orleans the water table is so high they can’t bury people underground.
No idea about the rest of Louisiana.
[[ I may be 100% wrong on this, but ...
I think it’s French culture to bury people above ground in stone structures. Paris cemeteries are often built like this. New Orleans cemeteries are sometimes built like this. If a flood hits a cemetery it may not be difficult to damage the structure and push the contents out through a hole in the wall.
But I’m not sure that’s the case. ]]
It’s done because in some areas you can’t dig there and not hit water .
I remember standing in New Orleans by the river as a little kid where the ships move in and out and it looks like you are sitting in a hole looking up at the ships .
Water tables.
Early Halloween decorations??
He conceded that the water tables are fairly high in New Orleans; it IS below sea level, after all. But he said that actually contributes to more rapid decomposition of the body and the casket, so that the idea of rotting coffins popping out of the soggy soil is alarmist nonsense.
Then again, I think the guide was half drunk.
I’ve seen pictures where some caskets in concrete vaults have also floated up. I am guessing that in extremely soaked ground and with newly packed dirt a vault could certainly come up.
Not to mention the mighty Mississippi into which many other rivers flow.
They can’t stop the flooding in Memphis any better when the Mississippi goes into FLOOD STAGE, all the smaller inlet/outlets over flow too.
We have seen more heavy rain this year than is normal for the regions of MS, AR and TN that are a tri state area and all flow into the Mississippi River.
I have been to in Louisiana several times and it seems to be basically one vast swamp. Do not take this as a criticism of the people or anything. I was down there a long time a go for job interviews and more recently business trips. Everywhere I went the water table seemed to be right at the surface of the ground. Once I remember standing in front of my hotel and stepping on to what looked like a normal professionally kept hotel lawn and it was like stepping on to a sponge. My feet immediately sank into it and water went into my shoes.
Other then that all the trips were great as were the people and the food was fantastic.
That's not true in general. As the article notes, a "1000 year event" is an event which has a probability of occurring of .1% per year. Most disciplines of engineering prevent failures due to events with much lower probability than that.
The real issue, as you noted, is the difficulty and expense of building solutions to low probability events in civil engineering. It isn't hard to figure out how to prevent damage from a rarely occurring phenomenon, but it is hard to justify spending the money on the solution when everyone thinks it isn't likely to happen.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.