John
So for example during Superstorm Sandy I was reading somewhere that the way this article characterized it, the sea wall was 4ft tall but the seawater was four and a half feet tall for a distance of like 10 miles. Like six inches of seawater coming over the wall for a stretch of 10 miles. That's a lot of seawater.
Ed
Right, but you see, I mean storm surges in the Gulf are now 10ft tall and it just literally wipes everything out. And one of the videos I showed the students was the tsunami that resulted from the earthquake that also caused the nuclear plant shutdown in Japan, the triple disaster.[1]
And they built these huge cement seawalls that they planned using 100 years of storm data. And essentially the seawalls were high enough to handle a 100-year storm. But the tsunami from the Fukushima earthquake was higher than that sea wall. And you can literally see boats washing into the streets.
One of the discussions we had with the students is what preventative actions would you take? Of course, some of them would say the obvious would build a higher sea wall. Well, okay, but what are you going to use for a standard this storm? What happens when you have one higher than that? And what some of the students talked about doing, which was I think the brilliant solution was figure out what buildings have been able to withstand this water surge and paint special warning signs on those buildings, similar to the signs we used to have with the fallout shelters.
Essentially saying these buildings, if you go up to the roof of the upper floors, are likely to survive this. And so the advertising campaign, or whatever, would be that in the case of a tsunami, you run to those signs. |