Watch 96 million 'shade balls' pour into LA reservoir

Poor deluded personage.

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Did you possibly just hear a whooshing sound?

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Flatulence?

Brainfarts qualify, so probably yes.

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No.
I didn’t realise brainfarts emitted a whooshing sound. Been experiencing the symptoms long?

Maybe you should talk to your GP if you don’t hear them.

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Apropos of nothing: This old lady walks into the Doctor’s office and says,
“Doctor, please help me. I have a terrible problem with farting. It’s not really a social problem, because you can’t smell it or hear it, but I must have farted 20 times since talking to you.” The Doctor nods his head and says, “Take this bottle of pills and use them all. When they are all gone in about 2 weeks, come back to see me.” The old lady comes back 2 weeks later and is angry. She says “What was in those pills? I fart just as much. You still can’t hear them, but now they smell horrible!” The Doctor again nods his head and says, “Great, that takes care of your sinus problem, now let’s work on your hearing.”

Yet I reiterate. That women who wanted to innoculate her child “against all known diseases” by making her play in a ball pit is a poor deluded personage. OK said it twice. Over and out.

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tenor%20(6)

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I’m happy to see Poe’s law (in its slightly extended form) still applies.

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There are some additional considerations that come into play when you’re talking about covering up a reservoir people actually drink out of.

For one, it’s vitally important that you don’t put anything in the reservoir that uses materials that might contaminate the water or break apart. You’d need to use food-grade solar panels.

For another, the surface area of the reservoir is constantly changing as the water level goes up or down. Any rigid covering couldn’t expand or contract as needed.

If you want ideal square footage for solar panels near an urban environment you’d probably be better off putting them over parking lots. Drivers appreciate the shade and it’s a heck of a lot easier for techs to service.

image

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Given how long the stuff has been around, it’ll probably take more than 25 years to find new problems with it, though.

It’s the Los Angeles Reservoir, the tail-end delivery reservoir of the LA Aqueduct. Now officially the Van Norman Reservoir. (Used to be labeled “Lake Los Angeles”, but that included the now-empty southern half, drained after the Sylmar Quake damaged its dam.)

It’s situated at the high northern tip of the San Fernando Valley, 1200 ft. above sea level, so it serves LA as a sort of municipal ‘water tower’, allowing the downstream delivery network to be almost entirely gravity-driven.

It feeds other smaller reservoirs around the city, but Federal mandates require that all open-air reservoirs be covered, replaced with tanks, or have water post-treated after leaving the reservoir.

Several smaller reservoirs (Elysian, Ivanhoe) had floating ball covers added, but while they prevent bromate formation, they don’t comply with the federal mandate, so they’ve both been replaced with floating covers (much like large tarps).

The Van Norman reservoir will remain uncovered. All its water is already post-treated as it enters the supply system, so covering isn’t required. The black balls will remain to prevent bromate formation.

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Ludd, the Daily Mash is a satire site, like the Onion.

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What? I thought that the Onion was a reputable news site?!

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Well…now that the national news is almost parody proof…:thinking:

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I take your point re contamination but would note that the float chambers are made of PE (same as the balls) and, I am guessing, that solar panel performance would deteriorate in line with or prior to the actual material breakdown and would get swapped out in regular maintenance. Wiki notes a class of floatovoltaics that are actually submerged and achieve greater performance due to better cooling. Sure, catchments swell and diminish in size, but the panels do not occupy the whole surface and in any case cope with the rise and fall very well. Floatovoltaics are big and getting bigger, with a 40Mw installation in China. It is reported that if a 1/4 of US water catchments adopted floatovoltaics they would generate better than 10% of electricity demand. With regard to their use in public drinking water catchments: See City of Holt, California
http://www.serree.org.au/knowledge/news/article/?id=australian-company-sells-ground-breaking-floating-solar-power-system-to-us

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I didn’t say it couldn’t be done or that it hadn’t been done… I just said it’s really really hard. The Japanese ones outside of Tokyo make sense because they would have to take away farmland, which is really precious in that mountainous country. Plus, land cost savings might easily be outstripped by maintence costs. Los Angeles has the Mojave desert nearby, and there is plenty of infrastructure to connect to the existing wind farms and solar farms-- this picture shows our lake at the same scale as the cheap unused land. The free market has already picked the best option for the area. Don’t miss the wind farm in the top middle and the panels on the left:

p.s. have you tasted loc-tite? It is a thread fastener AND a desert topping!!

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Seeing what you’ve done there

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Drowning would be the best case outcome. Those shade balls will create an artifical midnight zone in the reservoir and the horrifying creatures of the abyss will move in. Lurking. Waiting.

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I could have sworn there was a story on here about this previously, I guess the difference here is this new video is doing a better job of explaining just what the balls are doing.