Flood Protection

If the water came down far enough away to make it someone elses problem then you could try it for a while until they came and shut you down.

Beyond that where do you propose to get the funding for the massive amounts of energy required to move any appreciable water mass at those velocities ?

As you say, nothing is impossible, however there's plenty of unrealistic.

Put it in big tanks....

...and ship it to drought stricken areas....

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/tag/california-drought/

This won't work because what goes up must come down. Even with a small nozzle and high pressure the water is not going to go far and there is only so much water you mist or vaporise and suspend in the air (rain is natures way of saying "the sky is full").

What you need is a pump to pump water from one place to another via pipes. Another workable solution is to pump the water into tankers and then transport it elsewhere. Another solution is to clean out the blockages vegetation, rubbish, mud, etc) the sewer system to allow the water to drain away properly as it is supposed to. Sand bag dams, etc

Obviously the effectiveness and cost of each of these solutions will vary from site to site and weather conditions.

Given the current (temporally bad) weather conditions might it be better just to wait it out?

The end result could actually be more net rain and thus more potential flood damage.

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Spraying water at high velocity in to the air could cause water that otherwise would have stayed in the sky to instead precipitate. Increasing water vapor and latent heat driven temperature reductions are sure to pull more water out of the sky than you can keep up pretty quickly.

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Probably for far less cost and certainly far less energy, instead of sending it briefly skyward, a more effective campaign of shipping or piping it seaward could be undertaken....though the investments required to make a meaningful difference would likely exceed the cost of rebuilding all the houses you might save.

"does anybody think this idea might go somewhere towards alleiating flooding,"

No.

It wouldn't go anywhere toward alleviating flooding either.

News just in: The Waterboys and Wet, Wet, Wet are heading-up the music festival at Glastonbury this year. That's something to look forward to!

There's ridiculous, then there's sublime.

Then there's ridiculously sublime.

Then there's jaypauldini

First there was: Flood Prevention Idea

Now this?

I think we should freeze the water as it comes out when we, "pump the water up like fountains, thus putting the water somewhere" and compact it so that it becomes ice.

Then we can tow the ice blocks across the oceans, and then, "pump the water up like fountains", into ditches we have dug to towns we can build so that people can live in places where nature never intended them to live.

I have the plans all drawn up and if you can come up with the $4,000,000,000,000,000.00 USD it will take to pull it off, I can begin tomorrow.

Wait a minute there.

I get the strong impression nature doesn't want humans living most everywhere. I can't think of a single location on this planet that does not have at least one natural occurrence a year that tries to kill us.

Even if we lived in cave in the planet it's still going to try and drop the ceiling on us now and then.

Why not. It was here first! Then we came along and F'd it up with all our junk, like old tires and billions of tons of plastic that finds its way into the ocean to mix with all the oil from oil spills, tires, tons of hexa-methyl this and poly-vinyl that, tires, and old engine blocks.

Well, sooner or later, Yellowstone is gonna blow its top and we're all gonna choke on glass shard dust.

Nature will have its way with us and the Earth will be none the worse for wear.

And, on that happy note, I think I'll have a drink.

We are breathing millions of years worth of microbe farts.

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Oxygen as a pollutant was profoundly devastating to the environment and life at that time. The anaerobes went from dominant life form to reclusive crevasse dwellers....from their own pollution. And yet if it hadn't happened, we wouldn't be around.

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In a couple million years, the chlorofluorocarbon breathing pterodactyl-like dominant species will be arguing about whether the tires they mine are of abiogenic origin, or if the steel belting really is remnants of a skeleton (further evidence the ancient religious texts, Goodyear Prorated Warrantee, is not true inspired scripture), as they munch on mined aluminum cans and continue their quest to pave the oceans.

Holy good goobers! What if all the coal we mine today is really just what's left over from ancient garbage dumps that a previous societies made while burying their garbage?

The mind boggles.

Sooooo, when I am dumping my plastic into landfills I can feel safe in the knowledge that I am helping future engineers power their societies?

Definitely! Unless you happen to wuus-out and use plastic completely devoid of things only humans make, like Bisphenol A. Which is of course what they are after.

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The universe is a novelty generating mechanism.

Instead of turning it into ice why not vapourise and let clouds fly away.

Darn, water tends to expand when freezing. Sorry don't think compacting is gonna happen but the volume increase is small unless you are a crack in a rock, lol

I take it you've never put a narrow-necked bottle of water in the freezer, thinking "It'll be fine, there's no cap on, so the water will just expand up the neck," only to discover that the ice that formed at the top made an effective plug against the narrowing shoulder of the bottle, keeping it from expanding up, so it expanded out, bursting the container.

The expansion of water as it freezes is the closest thing you'll find to an Irresistible Force on this planet.

I think you should put it in your pocket until you need it

Finally a sensible answer!

Like it!

Bottle it and sell it to the natives.

Isnt that where the Irish beer comes from?

I got three words for you...."jet ski rentals"....

That's as good as using sandbags. All these years I am surprised no-one noticed that sand, and those hessian or poly-hessian bags, are both porous.

cnc

I take it you have never been up close and personal with sand bagging a flooding area?

1: Those bag have plastic liners in them. If they didn't the sand would sift out of the bag.

2" The wall of sand bags has a layer of plastic sheet on the water side.

Seriously you haven ever seen or paid attention to a proper sandbagging operation?

"Seriously you haven ever seen or paid attention to a proper sandbagging operation?"

I've seen a lot of that, once I got old enough to pay attention to the US Congress.

1: Those bag have plastic liners in them.

not round here they don't

2" The wall of sand bags has a layer of plastic sheet on the water side.

not round here they don't

Seriously you haven ever seen or paid attention to a proper sandbagging

operation?

Not round here, they all use sandbags and nothing waterproof.

cnc

I think tcmtech is forgetting about the 'old school'/'low tech' sandbags, where it's just the cloth of the bag holding the sand in. Those sandbag walls require more 'mass' to hold back the water, and I've seen that style to have a slow 'seep-through' effect, even though most of the water is being held at bay intil it can drain off to wherever the sandbag walls are directing it to.

Thanks for that confirmation.

In fact, on the news here recently, they were showing the defences people had made with sandbags, and there was a gate in a wall, with a pile of sandbags in the gate, but a gap down each side of the sandbags, mmm.

cnc

If you had big enough guns you could just shoot the water over to France let it be there problem.

Sacre Fred!

Aren't you worried about wearing the water out?

Isn't the root cause of the problem water falling out of the already saturated air?

Maybe using very large parabolic mirrors orbiting the earth could be used to concentrate sunlight in areas of flooding and evaporate the water rapidly?

Pumping it up like fountains sounds like a good idea, you could have a 'dancing waters' display, where the water is shot high into the air from catchbasin to catchbasin, culminating in (pardon me if my Geography is wrong here) one last gigantic water arch launching east off the Cliffs of Dover, sailing across the Channel to land squarely on some French coastal town.

(Brits and French still have that 'rivalry'/'dislike' thing going from all the old French invasions of the island, right? If not, then the French can just build a catchbasin and continue the dancing waters across to a neighbor THEY don't like.)

I just love British creativity, or is it British satire? So hard to tell the difference sometimes.

What about digging deep holes and create lakes?

The idea comes from a story about the mayor of Turin, who dug a big hole to dispose of city garbage!

That's too American of a solution. We're doing that here in Chicago: The Deep Tunnel Project.

It's a massive network of tunnels (dug/mined to be around a hundred feet in diameter) down in the bedrock to collect storm water and divert it to huge quarries, where it will be kept until it can be processed and pumped into Lake Michigan at a safe, sustainable rate. This will also help alleviate the slow draining of lake Michigan that started when we connected the Chicago River to the Mississippi River, reversing the river's flow and turning a major source of water to the lake into a sink.

You made my morning. Thank you.

I would not call an 8.5 acre lake with 22 million gallons of water being recycled through it hourly exactly bone dry. There are dryer areas around 6 hours south is Phoenix.

"8.5 acre lake with 22 million gallons of water"

We got slush filled potholes bigger than that in these here parts.

The lake behind the Hover dam is bigger that Mass. LOL

I am taking that your question is not a hypothetical question and you have a real project and will try to answer your question "water nowhere to put the excess water" accordingly. Every project has and "economy of scale" which means there is a return on investment (ROI).

The fundamental solutions are to infiltrate, evaporate or pump to a gravity system or to a lower elevation. However, the foregoing suggestions create other issues which you should consider. Also, in flooding issues you should also have a second line of defense in the event a rainfall of greater flood frequency than your design frequency.

Considering this is a bona fide project you should investigate your ROI before proceeding further. Your ROI will tell you if "rain guns" are the solution.

I went to your threads and posts in this forum and I notice you are a unique individual. Based on this note my solution to you is to build your structure so it floats when the design storm is exceeded and build a pier to your garage. In essence you have built a houseboat. You could visit a Marina and see how it is done.

Perhaps some gates to underground rivers can save. Usually it is a flash flood and lots of water in shorter time so best idea may be to have some quick evacuation plan for humans to save their lives, something like that is in the Bible.

I think that you have chosen your picture well.....

jaypauldini:

Best thing to do is to stop the rain itself. Just blow the clouds out of the place by raising temperature up there or by generating a high pressure blast in the sky. You can also think of creating low pressure elsewhere such that clouds can drift away to that low pressure zone.

Putting water up in the sky is like solving the population problem by keeping part of them floating in air in aeroplanes