(05-22-2018 09:11 PM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote: (05-22-2018 09:03 PM)chargeradio Wrote: (05-22-2018 07:05 PM)Fort Bend Owl Wrote: My get rich plan requires a lot of money and work but in a nutshell, I think companies should form that follow super storms across the country and somehow capture and tank water that falls from these storms. They can then truck it around the country to areas that need the water the most, selling it for a decent profit.
I'm convinced storms will get more and more powerful as the climate extremes become more pronounced. In Hawaii earlier this year, one city broke Alvin's long-standing (1979) USA record of most rain to fall in a single (it was something like 44-45 inches?). Last year with Harvey, most of Houston received 30-40 inches of rain over a 3-4 day period. And even this year, Houston was starting to creep back into drought-like conditions after a pretty dry spring but on Monday, parts of north Houston got 5-6 inches of rain in the afternoon, and then over the past two days, my neighborhood has received 4 inches of rain.
When Houston flooded during the hurricanes, I thought it would make sense to have a fleet of several hundred tankers that could literally suction floodwater and truck it to a different area. They’d have to start where flooding wasn’t as bad and work their way towards worse flooding, but at least that would get some areas back to normal quickly, which makes it easier to facilitate cleanup of harder hit areas. Obviously you can’t suction nine trillion gallons of water with 11,600 gallon tankers, but making a few million gallons go away each day will greatly speed up the process.
The same could be done up north when tens of feet of snow fall. Melt the snow as it’s collected, and the disposal process becomes much more efficient.
It's a scale problem. You just couldn't get enough tankers to make a dent in the volume of water that came down. Plus you'd need some infrastructure to get the tankers loaded.
Right.
Assumptions:
*Fleet of 200, 11,600 gallon tanks
*Each tanker can fill and unload water 100 times a day (generous, IMO)
*Rainfall of 1-trillion gallons, or 1/9th of Hurricane Harvey
1,000,000,000,000 gallons / (11,600 gallons per truck x 200 trucks x 100 fills per day) =
~4310 days, or 11.8 years
Additional costs to consider would be the purification of the water as well as transportation costs. I'm sure hurricane flood waters would be rife with dangerous chemicals and organic waste.
Same goes with snow fall. You guys remember that massive snow pile Boston had stored a few years back? The one that didn't finally melt until July? It was strewn with trash and all sorts of other things I would not want in my drinking water.
If you're thinking about storing rain runoff, why not build a giant cistern a few hundred feet underground. I'm working on a Combined Sewer Overflow that does just that in Washington DC.
Since waste water treatment plants can only process a certain amount of sewage/storm runoff per day (big WWTPs are on the scale of 300 million gallons/day +), we build a giant underground tunnel hundreds of feet below the surface that can store the sewage/storm runoff. This gives the WWTP some time to catch up during heavy rainfall periods.
Then again.... this is only good for waste water treatment. Getting the effluent to a standard acceptable for human consumption is another story.