re: Helene - Recovery Begins...Devastating Flash Flooding in Western NC and Eastern TN

wow

the works of man are no match for the wrath of nature

quote:

---

Forgive me if I'm not willing to take Mrs. Vandersteel's word for some that.

---

I’ve been on the ground in Asheville now for about 18hours.

The airport is full, but it’s not “being taken over” by the military. It’s just being used as a hub and private/nonessential stuff if being diverted to SC.

The government here is severely overwhelmed. There are people from all over trying to help, both government and civilians, but being left in holding patterns due to red tape and bureaucrats.

how are the home owners the problem? sounds like a developer and county issue...

A small part of the problem is landscape. What we want versus what nature needs to sustain the forests.
Look at the pictures from Augusta National Golf course and the knocked over pine trees. Not a one of the knock downs had other trees close enough to provide a web of roots for adjacent trees to lean on. Look at the edges of the rivers that flooded: solid tree lines with inter-twined roots. And they held.

We have had trees die when the gravel road in front of our house was paved by the county: the trees lost half their rainfall, and they died.

Where do you build a highway or access road: through sediments rather than through solid rock. How many of those sediments are somewhat stabilized mud slides. Add enough water to the mud, and whoosh, the toes of prehistoric mud slides are removed, and the slides resume their obedience to gravity.

Drainage patterns evolved with centuries. Mess with them and they are not longer established, but rain works to try to find new paths, regardless of what's built there.

Well people get blindsided by a disaster they should have seen coming. And we all end up stuck with the bill.

I'm not talking about the people whose families have lived there for generations. But development patterns have changed in the last 20-30 years and it helped set the stage for this disaster.

quote:

---

I wonder if the Army could use their Bailey bridge skills to bear on here...

---

They could if Biden/Harris woke up and got off their arse and authorized it.

After Katrina, Army & SeaBees stood up 5 miles of I-10 bridge over Lake Pontchartrain in a very short time after it was destroyed.

Look, are there going to be shortcomings with this relief and recovery effort at the Fed and State level? Yes. But, some of you are working hard to not see the response and the work that is being done. It is going to completely undermine any legitimate gripes and grievances going forward.

Loading Twitter/X Embed...
If tweet fails to load, click here.

quote:

---

I wonder if the Army could use their Bailey bridge skills to bear on here...

Assuming this capability still exists ....

---

It still exists but is extremely limited. The Engineers mainly use AVLBs today. There may be some Bailey assets squirreled away in some reserve units or the back lots of active units' motor pools but the majority are probably on Ft Leonard Wood for AIT and EOBC traning. The only time I was ever on the "gimp squad" was when I torqued my back building a Bailey.

Thinking about it a lot of the bridges in the area are the center of an S curve where the bridge connects roadway that follows the river on both sides. A lot of those would make it impossible to deploy a Bailey bridge. You have to have a lot of open land behind the bearing point because as you build it you have to keep adding spans farther and farther back to counterbalance the weight of the spans you have pushed out past the bearing point. IIRC you need about 1.3 times the past bearing span built to counter the cantilevered weight. If you are doing it all manually it is a damn scary thing to make the final push and let the cantilevered portion sit down on the far bank bearing. Sometimes it doesn't work as planned and you better have some heavy equipment to properly place it on the bearing.

Yep, called an acro bridge, Boh bros maintained it