Paul’s Perilous Prognostications

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I found this bit of Hurricane preparedness, from KTRK Channel 13 in Houston…

You have to wonder what they were thinking…

Was it incase the wind blew the car away.

Was it to prevent the car from floating away in flooding.

I am pretty sure that he carpet over the roof was to fend off flying debris.

I have to believe there were quantities of beer involved in the planning and implementation, or they have done it for years, and haven’t lost a car yet.

It would be nice to know how the car came out…

Okay my money is on 45MPH peak wind at ORF, and Dave is saying 54MPH, while Annie split the difference at 49MPH..

I am guessing that in SE Virginia Beach we are going to see maybe 2.5 to 3.0 inches of rain, and no more then 45MPh on the wind…

I really think Dave sends me articles like this Jersey scientists try to put brakes on hurricanes to set me off, I had whole rant about the media hype surrounding TS Chris, maybe next storm. 
The article is about a couple of New Jersey Scientists that have a plan to deploy 1.6 million pumps over an area twice the size of New Jersey, these pumps would then pump colder water from a depth of 400 feet to the surface in an effort to cool the surface temperature of the water, which in theory would temper the storm to a lower level. My basic belief is that anytime you mess with nature, you get smacked up-side the head HARD. I am not even going to go into the environmental issues here, but my basic belief is that Hurricanes exist for a reason, moving water or heat or both, a Hurricane sucks up huge amounts of water and energy from the ocean and transports it elsewhere. 
What we are going to look at here is the basic logistics and economics of a plan of this scale, and I am going to make a lot of assumptions here. From the article the pumps are described as tubes 3 feet in diameter and 400 feet long. Now lets add some type of floatation ring around this thing, so lets call it 4 feet by 4 feet, now we need a 400 foot suction tube that is going to need to be somewhat rigid like ducting for a dryer, so lets say in stored mode it is 8 feet tall. so were looking at something that measures 4 x 4 x 8 or 128 cubic feet. Now lets take a look at a Nimitz class aircraft carrier (Stick with me here, it will make sense) 1,097 feet long, we’ll split the difference between hull and flight deck width/beam and call it 200 feet wide and 18 stories or 180 feet tall, so lets take that carrier and put it in a box, that box would be 1097 x 200 x 180 or 39.5 million cubic feet, pretty big box. So lets take the pumps at 128 cubic feet and multiply that by 1.6 million and we get 204,800,000 cubic feet required to contain all these pumps. 
Now lets look at deployment the article stated an area twice the size of New Jersey, or 13 Rhode Islands, or 16,000 square miles, this comes out to 100 per square mile or roughly 1 pump every 500 feet. Now lets just assume the pattern is something like 80 miles by 200 miles, you are going to need 800 ships carrying 2,000 pumps moving at 20 miles per hour (in rough seas), dropping a pump every 30 seconds, and it will take them 10 hours to deploy this array. The United States Navy currently has 281 deployable ships, Ronald Reagan wanted a 600 ship Navy, and it was to expensive. So now we have a 16,000 square mile mine field littered with these pumps, so I am guessing it would take a week or so to gather up the surviving pumps, which would be a complete nightmare, unless each one had a tracking beacon, which would still be a nightmare, and how many of these things are going to wash up on beaches, injuring people and or marine life in the process.
Now lets look at the economics the total price tag was quoted at 1 billion dollars, which is not even close in my estimate, wont even cover the cost of the fleet of ships to deploy the pumps, or the cost of the pumps, my guess would be in the neighborhood of $100 each so $1.6 Billion, maybe they can bring them in for less, quantity discount. Now you have to figure certain loss of units per storm lets say 10% or 160,000, and then the time to refurbish the pumps, and repackage for the next storm.
So what happens if the next storm is coming in a few days and its bigger and coming faster…
The other big question is who makes the call on deployment, the President, the DHS, or the NHC, and where and when do you deploy, last time I looked 72 hour track errors are in the neighborhood 150 nautical miles. 
Instead of giving this plan a penny, why not gave more money to the tropical prediction…

I don’t have a problem lurking in the background writing code, making all this work, and generally debating Dave on this and that, but Dave has been on me for the last couple of weeks about posting my own column of stuff…
To that I say be careful what you ask for…