No chatter about Capetown?

[wdfifteen]

Originally Posted by ckelly78z

In my Northern Ohio town, we have the opposite problem as Capetown. Every time it rains 2-3" we get a massive flood that seems to go nowhere for several days. Too many times in the last few years, this has virtually shut a town of 60,000 down because of flooded streets.

All kinds of government feasability studies, meetings, failed engineering plans, and public outcry for the last 10-15 years, and still nothing has improved.

You live in the Black Swamp. The Swamp has been drained, but geologically it's still a swamp. There is only so much you can do with it.

[GH85Carrera]

Many millions of people live along the Mississippi river from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. They all seem to have floods on a fairly regular basis. Some cities very regular, some cities only every decade or two. The cities along the Mississippi all want better flood control paid for by the feds.

The coastal cities from the Corpus Christi, TX to Portland, Maine have Hurricanes that destroy the beach front houses and cause damage inland.

California to Oregon has their own brands of disasters. California has the certainty of an overdue mega earthquake in the future. More fires and mud slides. A few race riots, and drought. Oregon to Southern CA was recently under a Tsunami warning as well. That is one disaster I fell totally safe from, tidal waves are a non issue around here. One hurricane the hit Texas a few years back dumped 12 inches of rain on our house in under 24 hours. No flooding or mud slides in my area but the low lying areas indeed had some flooding. Nothing even remotely like Houston with 60 inches of rain that fell.

Yea, we have tornadoes. The meanest baddest of them all is a F5 tornado and the worst of the worst has hit Moore, OK twice in just a few short years. 300+ MPH winds, the highest ever observed on the planet and one of the F5 was 3 miles wide! That is the one that killed several professional tornado chasers.

The real point is that both of them devastated the area that was hit. But it was a very small area. Just a couple of blocks from the utter devastation is normal civilization. Electricity, water and hospitals. It is not like Hurricanes were and entire city is plunged into chaos. It is just a few blocks wide and and a couple of miles long.

Personally I think FEMA needs a total mission change. Change them to a rescue operation only. They can set up the command posts and bring in some water and keep law and order as much as possible. They (the federal government) need to get totally out of the funding of the rebuilding and paying for housing. Put that on the local citizens of the area. If they don't want to pay for it themselves, move away. Don't make the citizens of the country pay for the choice of living in a flood zone along the Mississippi, or on a cliff overlooking a ocean, or on the beach front, or a trailer home on a fault line. Pay for it with local taxes only. And that sure as heck goes for tornado damage.

[vash]

Well done.

Trying to get thoughts on capetown. I place in real trouble. Real people scared and suffering.

At least we can all bring it right back to what’s really important. US! .

There’s more sympathy on the dead amaricas pastor thread. Haha.

[GH85Carrera]

There is positively absolutely nothing any of us can do about Capetown. Or the people in North Korea. Or a lot of place on the planet.

[ficke]

Originally Posted by Willem Fick

Guys, don't ever underestimate the stupidity of government.

You have a situation in Cape Town where the city (and the province for that matter), is not run by the ruling party, the African National Congress. The area has historically had little water, but due to the economic failures in the rest of the country, run by the ANC, there has been a massive influx of people over the past twenty years, that has stretched resources to critical levels.

The real problem is that major water infrastructure is the responsibility of an absolutely inept national government, who have been far too busy looting to devote even a fraction of their time to a problem that doesn't affect their support base. As a result of this we have in the past year had several rural towns run dry, and a major city that is about to run dry. It is beyond a crisis, yet this was only grudgingly declared a national disaster in the past two weeks.

In addition we have a national minister of water affairs that is absolutely clueless. She has cancelled various infrastructure upgrades and extensions in the last few years, has de-funded water treatment and recovery plants, and has on occasion shown her complete ignorance (stupidity), by going as far as publicly stating that:

"You must have heard, from one source or another, how South Africa will 'run out of water' in 2013, 2015, 2025, or 2030, depending on which news source you rely on. Let me assure you, as the custodian of water resources in this country, that as we enter the third decade of equity and redistribution, South Africa will not run out of water in the next 100 years." (2014)

Another piece of wonderful government logic:

"You (the "apartheid" government) built the dams too big , so they take a long time to fill. You should have built them smaller, they would fill quicker and we would have plenty of water and never run out."

As for the way forward;

There are several desalination plants in the pipeline for Cape Town, with a view that the first of these will come online towards the middle of the year. In addition extensive work is done on trying to tap the underground aquifers in the area. The big game in town is now to see if that water reserves can be stretched to last until these are brought into operation, hence the draconian water restrictions that are in place. Sadly, human nature is a challenge, and only about 50% of the city's inhabitants are at this point making the target of 50 liters per day.

Thankfully I don't live in Cape Town, though a fair number of my family members do. I believe it is tough. My parents are on their way to visit as we speak, and as opposed to the normal gifts and pleasantries, they have been asked to rather bring as much water as they can...

This post needs to be read again to get a clue on the government made water issue in Cape town.

This video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLhWzMOccTg can be watched to get a clue on the severity of crime measure allowed and taking in South Africa.

The place is a disaster, a fabricated disaster by incompetence and greed at levels hard for people in the US to comprehend.
Sad because this is a product of the ANC not the environment.

[vash]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

There is positively absolutely nothing any of us can do about Capetown. Or the people in North Korea. Or a lot of place on the planet.

agreed..

but some of us would pray..bare minimum.

i wouldnt jump it off the track and talk about FEMA.

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Vipergrün

California needs to cancel that damn bullet train to nowhere and build de-sal plants throughout the whole coast. Not to PARF this up, but too bad the idiots in our State government are too wrapped up in ignorance and special interests to do anything about it.

California has plenty of water, but we are intentionally flushing a great deal of it out into the ocean because of enviro-wacko lawsuits.
it's all documented for anyone who cares to look it up.
In the Sacramento delta there is a NON-NATIVE species of fish, not much larger than a minnow.
The enviro-wackos said that by using our fresh water reserves, we were endangering this NON-NATIVE fish.

So the spineless judges caved to the wackos and forced the gubmint to reduce the amount of fresh water we were using, and instead flush it out into the ocean.

We don't need water, we don't need crops, we don't need food. What we really need is to waste our fresh water protecting a 2" long useless NON-NATIVE smelt.

[Tobra]

They have the same problem as California. Too many people living in a desert, with horrible mismanagement of resources.