Here it comes!

[dreinecke]

Just saw some pics of Lower Manhattan - the Twin Towers site is now a swimming pool.

I pray everyone is safe.

[waaytoomuchintothis]

Here's the picture.

[Ember]

Hope everyone's ok. We've been getting news reports for much of the day.

[dreinecke]

Rob - that looks like the pic I was seeing. Storm damage aside - and I hope everyone is ok!, I have to thing this just wrecked any previous work and will have to be redone.

[waaytoomuchintothis]

It is a huge site its true, but in my experience with building sites big and small, a big rains fill up big holes in a big way all the time. In Venezuela as a missionary for two years, I built many buildings all of which had deep founding pits for concrete that held posts for 2 story buildings. It took a week to dig them all, then we could rig the rebar grids and pour concrete. They filled with rain two or three times during the week, and frequently had trapped iguanas in them in the mornings (yes, they were lunch- tastes like chicken, etc).

By now, there are huge truck-mounted pumps at work at the WTC site, but they will be slower because they can't use the drains. The complicating factor is that after a hurricane, the storm drains are useless because the sea water has to drain out to sea first. Then you can pump water into the storm drains as usual.

New York has abandoned subways as well as current subways, tunnels all over the place, and lots of other underground vessels for water that are cut into "living rock" and will not drain on their own. They are going to have to use pumps all over the place and its going to be tough. You can't leave standing water in the shallowest underground vessels because they become incubators, but the deeper ones are okay, because the temperature in the deeper ones never gets high enough to cause growth of deadly bacteria. Some of these underground areas will have been vented, so that is a big help, and the storm surge has receded for the most part, so the storm drains will be more and more useful. Also, the weather is getting cooler all the time going into winter, and that helps hold back the bacterial growth tremendously, as does the fact that lots of the flood water is sea water, and the salt also inhibits bacterial growth.

[dge467]

Not to many problems at the house in the North East part of Mass yesterday. Just some small broken branches and lost power for about 9 hours. At my parents house the next town over, their house had a close call with a pine tree. Snapped a couple of pictures of a rainbow at work this morning.

[waaytoomuchintothis]

That's definitely close! My neighbor had a tree fall on his house, and one limb pierced right through the eave of his roof, not making a water leak at all, and that twisted the tree a bit and it missed the rest of the house completely. Lucky duck.