Depends on how much freeway you could build, going to how many different locations, as compared to the planned HST which goes in a line from point A to point B and nowhere else. Your points about the graft and delays being equivalent are of course correct.
Yeah. The very first post on this thread is the declaration that, after hundreds of thousands were evacuated and a great deal of work done to improve conditions, if people were allowed home now it can’t actually have such a big emergency. You get enough people assuming fixed crises must have been exaggerated like that, and soon preventative measures become thankless and hard-to-fund work.
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The simplest, almost zero cost way to have avoided all this would be to have tested the secondary spillway every couple of years. 20-20 hindsight I know, but someone or someones needs be fired over that.
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I wonder how much the low-water levels played in weakening stuff? When you design something assuming that you will have a lot of pressure on one side, I imagine that things might loosen up a bit.
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And that’s a key factor.
Analogous: in Oz, every time there’s a bad bushfire, the right tries to blame it on a lack of hazard-reduction burning and environmental regulations that restrict excessive land clearing. “Stupid hippies care more about trees than people” etc.
The point missed in that argument is that the really bad fires tend to come after periods of sustained hot/dry/windy weather, in which the most likely result of a hazard reduction burn is the accidental creation of a really big uncontrolled bushfire.
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Responsible for making decision:
Politicians >>> Civil Servants in Charge of the Dam
Likelihood to be fired:
Civil Servants in Charge of the Dam >>> Politicians
Hooray!
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Yeah, dummy, but if you’re an American when you say that, you’re really saying,
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There’s only one group that can fire politicians. Wish they’d do more of it.
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“Screw Californians! Even the ones in areas that overwhelmingly supported him!” This, from the same dummy thoughtful individual who stated last week that a general strike in protest of Trump is irresponsibly vindictive because it could hurt innocent people:
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High speed trains are perfectly reasonably in places like Japan and Northern Europe… I use them there regularly. But California is not Japan. For one thing, the shiny new Hokuriku Shinkansen cost the taxpayers essentially nothing. JR-East does construction, maintenance, and administration of their rail lines, so it benefits them to build and operate efficiently. they run clean, safe trains, charge reasonable fares, and make a profit at it.
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The Liberal Elitism charge against the west is going to deepen as the middle states realize the Californians who do want to stay see themselves as saving the country and representative of all that is good about America, not joining them.
Oh its gonna get crazy.
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I’m not sure I feel the same way. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, extreme drought followed by extreme precipitation is sort of a horseman of the climate apocalypse.
I was camping in northern California last June, and stayed near the Oroville Dam. I don’t mean to put my experience on the same level as people directly affected, but it’s unsettling to see places you’ve visited suffer a catastrophe. I hope those people can stay safe, and that the worst does not come to pass.
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Well, we’re more than five years in, to my knowledge no track has been laid, and while estimates haven’t quite quadrupled, they only got that under control by cutting back what gets built, and they haven’t gotten to the tunneling yet, which is where it’s really going to balloon. Taxpayers aren’t screaming, but only because they don’t understand what the situation is yet. I think a lot of people really think some scientist can just wave their magic wand and make the mountains and faults, as well as all the people in the path, disappear.
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Construction has been underway since 2015 and has been continuing more or less on schedule since. I don’t know how much actual physical track has been laid thus far but that’s not really the best measure of progress since there are many aspects of construction that preclude the final rails themselves, such as the grading and support structure to actually attach the rails to.
For example, here are photos taken over a year ago of construction for the Fresno River crossing:
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A lot of that has already been done, even without a current disaster. FEMA and the Guard don’t just sit around waiting for a disaster to happen before making plans and moving materiel into multiple locations. Same for the Red Cross.
What about the other way around? (-:
Back in the 1860s, the winter of 1861-62 featured the worst flooding ever seen in California, before or since. In LA, it rained almost continuously from just after Christmas until almost the end of January.
It’s the storm sequence that led scientists to conceive the ‘atmospheric river’ model, so as to be able to explain how such extreme flood events occur.
Half the San Fernando Valley was underwater.
The next four years were the worst drought ever seen, before or since. (Though the recently-broken drought was almost as bad - a year longer, but not quite so dry. The 1860s drought featured one year in which NO RAIN AT ALL fell in some SoCal locations.)
(Plus, here in LaLa Land, there was a major smallpox epidemic!)
California has been having drought/flood cycles since we got here, and we’ve been keeping records for only a short period, ca. 130 yrs, so Mother Nature may still have some surprises up her sleeve.
But nothing that we’re currently seeing is the most apocalyptically bad weather ever - we’ve seen worse than this — and much like this, many times previously — and we’re much better to prepared for it now than we’ve ever been.
Our huge water infrastructure projects are not just about moving water from place to place, but, even more importantly, about buffering the well-known variability of the natural supply.
It’s not the apocalypse, it’s just life in California. (-:
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Thanks for providing some perspective. It’s hard to measure changes in the frequency of extreme weather events for a place that’s always had extreme weather.
Still a damn fine place to live, all things considered.
Not that hard…
The fact that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity world-wide has been established beyond any reasonable doubt.
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No.
Yes.
For now.
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