SEE ROCK CITY!
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Some people would take the giant boulder for granite
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I’m no expert in comic lore, but isn’t Superman 100% Kryptonian? Like, from the planet Krypton, where he was born and then he left the faucet running and got banished to Earth, or Canada, or where ever.
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Position relative to road:
They could do like this:
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Yeah, but WHERE IS HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE?
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In his Fortress of Solitude (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)
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Let’s see – giant rock can’t be moved,… but it rolled there. So, will it gather moss or won’t it?
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Yeah, about that.
Set aside the question of whether the rerouting is actually more expensive than demolition plus re-building. (Although I’d bet good money the rerouting is cheaper.)
This isn’t about some failure of the American spirit, or the erosion of our national work ethic from back when men were men. Even if great-grandpappy would have blowed that rock up the very next day without a second thought, that doesn’t mean “no second thoughts” is the right plan. If we could magically redo the last hundred years of infrastructure knowing what we know now about environmental impact, worker safety, etc., everything would be different, and better.
And in any event, there are worse things to do with taxpayer money than to spend it employing road crews.
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I thought this was going to be an obscure reference to that weird post-Fable Peter Molyneux game about digging through cubes until you found the prize.
Well, we humans do enjoy novelty.
A couple of better angles from the CDOT website. The smaller bolder (only 2.3M lbs…) has already been blasted and removed. The highway would ony need to shift a tiny bit to clear the big rock, it appears.
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Can’t we just get a bunch of bazookas and some cheap bazooka ammunition and just blow the thing up in the most American way possible?
Actually you could fund the ammunition with a lottery by setting up five or six preloaded bazookas pointed at the Rock and the winners get to pull the trigger.
Sell tickets to the bazooka-ing. Profit.
Honestly The Rock isn’t that damn big, you mean to tell me in a country full of people who love to blow stuff up for fun, we can’t find enough private construction groups with dynamite that can blow this up?
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there. the delusional self-image of a whole culture based on a fictional character with omnipotent superpowers. thats the US. at least thats the impression I got…
??? doesnt look to bad, right? doesnt really lay on the road, right? so, 1.3 million to fix (I dont know, 20-40 meters maybe?) that part of the road?!? I mean what do I know of costs for fixing roads, but doesnt that sound a tiny, tiny bit overpriced?!?
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I man saw a stone
Just a come, to mash down Rome road
Dread, dread stone
Just a come, to mash down Rome road
I’d be curious to know if the change is cultural(eg. risk sensitivity in the face of the casualties you mention); or whether it’s a matter of the overall growth of multiple layers of government(in this case it sounds like blowing up the rock is actually the cheaper option in absolute terms; but the state agency is out of pocket for that; while federal funds that effectively cost them nothing cover the cost of rebuilding around the rock); or whether it’s a shift in priorities in the part of the feds(at least in the US the heroic blasting eras were the railroad boom, when companies were generously rewarded by the feds for track laid; and the interstate highway system, which was pushed through as a Fed program in no small part by appealing to it’s military infrastructure value).
Or some other change I’ve not considered?
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I share your surprise at ‘blow it up real good’ being dismissed as infeasible(especially since Colorado and vicinity have a decent amount of mining and quarrying activity; and those are industries where blowing up a rock real good is just another day at the office); but I suspect that man portable rockets would be an arduously slow way of doing it:
Depending on the specific model specs for penetration of concrete and masonry vary; but while generally high enough to make occupants of modestly hard cover nervous, they aren’t really there for bulk removal purposes(actual bazooka warheads I think are in the ~1 foot range; more modern ones will probably give you a meter or so; which is a harrowing prospect if you were hiding behind that wall but counts as ‘nibbling’ in the context of a huge rock).
For efficiency you need to drill into the rock so the charges go off internally and can more easily shatter it into chunks large enough to be hauled away. Bunker busters can do the ‘penetrate, internal exposion’; but I suspect that the Air Force takes a “you want us to bomb an American highway why now?!?!” attitude toward that idea; and probably can’t do the job more cheaply than the local blasting contractor.
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