Thursday, September 22, 2005
..and they were running sprinklers in lake city
Look at that thing. It looks like Satan's sphincter.
Velociman has now imprinted a permanent image in my old gourd! I've been through several hurricane eyes and that is a remarkable experience. Mostly I try to not be where they are and those I've been through were as a kid near Mobile. Don't know why the parent-types were so picky about hauling my young ass back into the house when the beautiful blue sky I'd been enjoying for the last half-hour went away and there was a really neat roof sailing away! I was not quite school age the first time and hadn't seen the Wizard of Oz yet. Neat. A whole roof! Rafts of stories over rafts of years..
Building permanent structures on the coast. Always interesting and always a bad idea. Be it 20 years or 80 years, it's like building on a flood plain on an earthquake fault and God hates you. You will get hammered. There is only one type of structure I'm aware of that is probably proof against something like Rita and that's the storage bunkers used to protect the atomic weapon inventory. Of course, they are all at rather high elevations. Back when I was still considering the earth shelter, one of my buds really wanted to build a beach house and, not being totally numb, knew building on the coast is a temporary thing at best. We wandered through a bunch of designs including one that was actually built in Florida. Nice design. Doesn't seem to exist anymore. This thing here was built with only 2 purposes; 1) thermal savings, and 2) lower profile for typical inland storms. A cat 5 would eat it. It would easily take a F2 tornado, probably a 3, and would, other than glass loss, weather a cat 3. It would also take a 20 KT airburst at 2.5 miles and a 10 MT at 12 but I don't think the biological units would! 38 linear feet of glass in the front and 124 sq ft of glass in the 18' tall atrium would get overpressured. Six rooms are hard and one is F5 storm shelter quality. I'd trust none over cat 3. If Rita was pointed here, even being most of 50 miles inland, I'd see if my old buddy in Atlanta needed a bit of company that came with a pair of (mostly) reasonable dawgs for a day or so! I doubt if there is a shelter anywhere near that would take a cat 5. And yeah, this place is actually very over-designed. Then again, have you looked at those once wonderful bridges in Mississippi? Camille ate them. Katrina ate them again. Megatonnage and megabuckage of prestressed reinforced concrete. Admittedly most of this house is underground. The carefully dimentioned overhang that limits summer insolation is rather tiny. With winds of 150 mph, it can provide lift equal to something close to 55 tons with the roof weighing in at 475 tons. The roof is segmented with a secondary reinforced pour and would be at risk of paper-toweling if the wind vector was just right. At 185, it would absolutely tear apart if the wind vector came in at something close to 220 degrees.
If you've just got to live on the Gulf Coast, build it with yer beer money. Most everyone did when I was a kid. It may not be et by a 'cane, hell, some of the summer treats will eat some well-built stuff. Put it all on pilings sunk deep so it'll be easy enough to stack some lumber on it in the future if you've got a big desire to continue feeding the sand flies and salt-marsh skeeters. Yeah, I know. We folk from the 'souf invented all those heavy metal insecticides way back then so the yankees who were terrified of having all the screens black with bugs would buy all that regularly raped sand for what used to be considered fortunes. They went home mentally ill from the insecticides and became liberals. Damn dumb plan! Now we're stuck with them, their policies, AND the results of their policies. Chelation; too late. Anyone that deliberately lives below sea level on the Gulf, well, there's a fair chance they're the product of a bunch of generations what loves their bros and sisters an awful lot. With 48% of the pre-Katrina population of Nawlins on welfare, one doesn't need to do a lot of serious contemplation. Took a tour through the liberal blogs where the evacs went. Wasn't pretty.
* * * * * *
Damn. Just looked at the latest sky shot. It still has a wobble. Truthfully, the best possible landfall WOULD be NO. That sombich is just a plain-old horror story. Remember this I posted on 3 September?
They are a fact of life. Teratonnage (fitting term) of energy. I love the hell out of the coast. Living there comes with a price.
Velociman has now imprinted a permanent image in my old gourd! I've been through several hurricane eyes and that is a remarkable experience. Mostly I try to not be where they are and those I've been through were as a kid near Mobile. Don't know why the parent-types were so picky about hauling my young ass back into the house when the beautiful blue sky I'd been enjoying for the last half-hour went away and there was a really neat roof sailing away! I was not quite school age the first time and hadn't seen the Wizard of Oz yet. Neat. A whole roof! Rafts of stories over rafts of years..
Building permanent structures on the coast. Always interesting and always a bad idea. Be it 20 years or 80 years, it's like building on a flood plain on an earthquake fault and God hates you. You will get hammered. There is only one type of structure I'm aware of that is probably proof against something like Rita and that's the storage bunkers used to protect the atomic weapon inventory. Of course, they are all at rather high elevations. Back when I was still considering the earth shelter, one of my buds really wanted to build a beach house and, not being totally numb, knew building on the coast is a temporary thing at best. We wandered through a bunch of designs including one that was actually built in Florida. Nice design. Doesn't seem to exist anymore. This thing here was built with only 2 purposes; 1) thermal savings, and 2) lower profile for typical inland storms. A cat 5 would eat it. It would easily take a F2 tornado, probably a 3, and would, other than glass loss, weather a cat 3. It would also take a 20 KT airburst at 2.5 miles and a 10 MT at 12 but I don't think the biological units would! 38 linear feet of glass in the front and 124 sq ft of glass in the 18' tall atrium would get overpressured. Six rooms are hard and one is F5 storm shelter quality. I'd trust none over cat 3. If Rita was pointed here, even being most of 50 miles inland, I'd see if my old buddy in Atlanta needed a bit of company that came with a pair of (mostly) reasonable dawgs for a day or so! I doubt if there is a shelter anywhere near that would take a cat 5. And yeah, this place is actually very over-designed. Then again, have you looked at those once wonderful bridges in Mississippi? Camille ate them. Katrina ate them again. Megatonnage and megabuckage of prestressed reinforced concrete. Admittedly most of this house is underground. The carefully dimentioned overhang that limits summer insolation is rather tiny. With winds of 150 mph, it can provide lift equal to something close to 55 tons with the roof weighing in at 475 tons. The roof is segmented with a secondary reinforced pour and would be at risk of paper-toweling if the wind vector was just right. At 185, it would absolutely tear apart if the wind vector came in at something close to 220 degrees.
If you've just got to live on the Gulf Coast, build it with yer beer money. Most everyone did when I was a kid. It may not be et by a 'cane, hell, some of the summer treats will eat some well-built stuff. Put it all on pilings sunk deep so it'll be easy enough to stack some lumber on it in the future if you've got a big desire to continue feeding the sand flies and salt-marsh skeeters. Yeah, I know. We folk from the 'souf invented all those heavy metal insecticides way back then so the yankees who were terrified of having all the screens black with bugs would buy all that regularly raped sand for what used to be considered fortunes. They went home mentally ill from the insecticides and became liberals. Damn dumb plan! Now we're stuck with them, their policies, AND the results of their policies. Chelation; too late. Anyone that deliberately lives below sea level on the Gulf, well, there's a fair chance they're the product of a bunch of generations what loves their bros and sisters an awful lot. With 48% of the pre-Katrina population of Nawlins on welfare, one doesn't need to do a lot of serious contemplation. Took a tour through the liberal blogs where the evacs went. Wasn't pretty.
* * * * * *
Damn. Just looked at the latest sky shot. It still has a wobble. Truthfully, the best possible landfall WOULD be NO. That sombich is just a plain-old horror story. Remember this I posted on 3 September?
They are a fact of life. Teratonnage (fitting term) of energy. I love the hell out of the coast. Living there comes with a price.
