The Galveston Hurricane ~100 ago was worse

[plasgears]

New Orleans/Katrina is the worst disaster in recent history. Lest we forget our past history, the Galveston hurricane of about 100 yrs ago claimed 6000-8000 lives. It destroyed thousands of homes and swept half the city into a tangle of rubble and bodies. It also occurred in Sept.

They rebuilt by constructing a long 15' high concrete retaining wall with curved face and riprap placement. The land within was filled with pumped sand slurry. Thousands of homes were raised accordingly.

 

[davidbeach]

Was the hurricane worse, or are we just better prepared now? As badly as things went in New Orleans, think about how it would have been if the storm had come out of the Gulf with nearly no warning.

 

[PSE]

The improvements in Galveston may be getting a full test pretty soon. Rita had been upgraded to category 5 the last I checked.

 

[sms]

We got out Wednesday. I didn't want to deal with the traffic.

-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!

 

[RDK]

Also remember that the population was not as great 100 years age. 6,000 to 8,000 people was a much larger fraction of the total than it would be today.

Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com

 

[jmw]

I'm sure someone has thought of it already so i'll just ask why fuel-air bombs wouldn't be a good way to disrupt hurricanes out at sea and while they are still not fully developed?

It occurred to me that a suitably sized FAB delivered by a cheap cruise missile, for example (it doesn't have to defeat any enemy radar etc) and targetted appropriately could disrupt the wind patterns.

After all, these are circulating air flows that create very stable free vorticies. They can grow, they sometimes do not. Sometimes they are disipated, sometime they split and frequenty they vear away from the expected path. All events that have a cause and I would have bet a fuel air bomb could influence at least some of these outcomes.

I say "why not?" because this seems so obvious an approach to try that it must have been considered and rejected for some reason. Maybe this is a dumb question but hey, i don't mind asking dumb questions sometimes (outside my field, of course).

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[unclesyd]

I think the last experiment has everyone a little skiddiest about any experimenting on a storm. The last major attempt was to seed one that was moving thru the Atlantic well to the East of Bermuda and after the seeding it turned left and hit the US mainland, end of testing.

You have to also remember that a goodly number of people are making a good living working on models that hope to predict the paths and landfall of storms.

A little nostalgia:
There was a serious proposal way back in the heyday of peaceful uses of nuclear energy to drop a good ole big one in storm.

 

[RDK]

In any complex system, making any changes may evoke the law of unintended consequences.

Hurricanes are a major method or redistributing the solar energy that falls on the planet. If you disrupt this you just very well may cause a larger energy gradient to develop resulting in larger and more destructive hurricanes.

It’s not nice to try to fool Mother Nature.



Rick Kitson MBA P.Eng

Construction Project Management
From conception to completion

http://www.kitsonengineering.com

 

[sms]

Or maybe you split the storm and end up with two hurricanes instead of just one....

-The future's so bright I gotta wear shades!