Good Morning All,

Y'all know me, ever the idealist.

Just wanting to open a topic for conversation. It may provide me with some answers or (as is the case most of the time) provide me with more questions than I started with.

After the "fun and games" of recovering from Gustav, Ike, and Mid West flooding, I'm thinking we've each done what we can to prepare our homes and families to weather storms, terrorist attacks, etc. Now what do we do to prepare our community and infrastructure?

It seems a logical step in protecting one's home and family is to make sure the environment that surrounds our "fortresses" are as safe as possible.

What measures are feasible?

Is burying power lines so that they aren't knocked down every hurricane or ice storm a practical idea?

In the midwest, is changing building codes to allow partially buried earth-ship type homes to protect from tornadoes even worth considering.

If you had cart blanche, what would you do to "bullet proof" your community and thereby decrease the threat to your home and family?

Personally, burying power lines, and having above ground mass transit for my area (Baton Rouge) would be high on the list along with designated flood zones where the rivers are allowed to flood rather than cramming them into ever narrowing channels.

Here in California, shake shingle roofs were de riquer. Eventually enough wildfires in Southern California led to their ban in new construction or total replacement.
The shake shingle industry mobilised CONSIDERABLE lobbying efforts to stop this law, though eventualy defeated.

Before you can change one building method, you must first change the people.

NYC has "burried power lines" as LAW since the blizard of 1888. One of the big ones would be "sorry folks, no more building permits on barrier beaches -anywhere in the US". This would include places like Fire Island in NY, Galveston, etc

Burying power lines is becoming more common in my area in newer neighborhoods.

I don’t know, but I would make a guess that this would be a bad idea in earthquake areas.



As far as how to become disaster proof, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect any level of government to do this with any gusto, efficiency or even to do it right. It’s not a strong point of the governments to do things right, or timely and frugally.

What can we do to get the government to build things right? Realistically nothing. You can spend years trying to effect change and every time a new guy gets elected you have to start over. You can spend your whole life trying to get them to be proactive and it will not work. Government is not proactive (and this is the essence of survival preparedness, being able to be ready for what ifs that are coming at us) Government is reactive, they only fix things after a problem becomes a glaring failure (Can you say Katrina?)

Better to buy or build a Solar / wind system and get it running. This way, you are in charge of your power and not some bureaucrat that is looking out for his own rear end.


I think the best action for us and our families if to personally make our homes as disaster resistant as possible and not expect a government to do it. Government is notoriously deficient in doing so and it seem foolish and dangerous to expect them to suddenly get it right.

Even when they do something they don’t get it right. Look at the dikes after Katrina, they were government paid and built, they failed. Any time you have politicians, and bureaucrats involved and a contract for the lowest bidder you get poor results.

I think the problem is that elected officials look no further ahead than the next election. They don't look at the long term implications of their generally poor decisions.

+1

Whether we're talking physical infrastructure, our education system, Social Security, Medicare, etc., the time horizons we're talking about are too long to fit into our election cycles (and even our attention spans). Not so easy to take credit for a new levee system when the first shovel of dirt won't be turned until years after you've been booted out of office amid complaints that you spent too much money on a levee system that is still on the drawing boards! Very perverse.

The free market has a similar problem due to this quarterly earnings report mentality. Why spend $2 billion now on infrastructure now when the benefits won't appear until I have long left the company with a big fat bonus for keeping costs down under my watch?

However, if people actually voted for candidates that supported these kinds of projects, then that is a tangible here-and-now benefit to them and they would respond. Unfortunately, you don't see too many excited voters saying, "Yeah, X is my man, yessiree. He voted for that billion dollar sewer bond. This guy has vision!"

"They'd rather spend 3,000 to replace a downed pole here and there than pay 3,500 to put the cables underground. Power companies are notoriously infamous for taking the cheapest route."

The husband of a woman I used to know worked for a power company. He was a logical kind of guy, and the company drove him nuts. He said the reasoning above is NOT the cheapest route, it just APPEARS to be the cheapest route. In reality, it is based on job security and keeping your costs high enough to justify price increases to the consumer.

Sue

Well that certainly sucks. I wonder if I should let a few criminals slip away in the name of job security. Maybe I'll concentrate only on those who steal copper power lines. This will help to drive down the power companies' losses so they don't have justification to raise rates as often.

One thing to consider (that likely I'm the only one who will think of it) is how failed elements of the system can be fixed.

I have a friend who is researching improved ways to locate insulation breakdown sites in underground utility cables.

I like buried cables for many reasons. But one reason I don't like them is that they are very hard to locate problems on and even harder to repair. My in-laws lose power pretty frequently due to old buried cables getting shorted by heavy rains.

Digging up the easements every 30 years to replace failing cables sounds fine during Year 1 but is a scary thought at Year 29.

In the normal course of things the folks who advertised the benefits have retired before the long-term consequences come to pass.

I've heard the same concern from people in the know in my neck of the woods.