OT: Crane Collapse at One57 NYC

to think of certain SED regulars who brag about how much money they make.

There are people who are lots richer than I am, too. So what?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

The crane is just so much bent metal - no matter where it is.

The important thing is that the number of casualties so far have been minimised despite the size and power of the storm hitting New York.

Cleanup looks like it may take a while - NJ Governor Chris Christie appearing live just now seems to have a pretty good grasp of what really matters in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophic storm. He can't have had much sleep but was fielding questions very well.

Electricity may be a problem where transformers are now soaking in brackish water - impressive footage of arcing and sparking on this mornings UK news. The broken crane also made it to the news over here.

Hopefully the storm surge will have abated before the next high tide.

Good luck to the engineers in the dangerous cleanup operation and getting stuff back online. A very difficult job indeed.

Martin Brown schrieb:

Hello,

there are also subway tunnels soaked with salty water and a lot of electric equipment there too. Other tunnels for cars are unusable for the next time also.

Bye

$90,000,000.00

to think of certain SED regulars who brag about how much money they make.

In today's world, middle-class people can eat as well, travel to the same places, and enjoy most of the same things as the super-wealthy... maybe not as often. It's funny to read about some billionaire that rotted his liver on Cutty Sark or ODd on common drugs, or some rich movie star that watches the same crap network TV shows that anybody else can watch.

There are terribly poor people, but the curve is flattening out.

You would think that NYC would build a levee to keep this from happening periodically. It wouldn't have to be very high, and could have bike paths, benches, cafes, gardens, stuff like that on top. A few hours trading on the NYSE would pay for it.

So you're proposing that taxes be raised on high-income individuals or corporations to support infrastructure improvement/development?

Naaaah! Tax everyone dumb enough to think living in NYC is "living".

In 1939 my home town, Huntington, WV, on the Ohio River, was flooded... most houses had water up to the second story. So they built a flood wall system completely around the town.

Never ever flooded again.

Now, of course there's the Greenup Dam and Locks (?), built when I was in High School, now called the Greenup Dam Recreation Area, allowing much finer water control, and few necessities for installing the flood gates.

(?) So huge that, during construction, a steam locomotive pulling a crane fell in... so deep there that it was decided to not attempt recovery ;-) ...Jim Thompson

There is a almost new bulldozer under the interchange of St Rt 19 & US 441 in Central Florida. A sinkhole opened under it while building the road, and it fell so deep that it would have cost more to recover & repair it than to buy another new 'dozer. They had to drive precast concrete pillars to the solid bed of the Florida Aquifer to support the weight of the overpass.

Works out exactly like it did in NOLA - you can build against anything, but if it costs 10x for twice the protection, you can't get it budgeted.

My grandfather Thompson ran the State Road Commission Maintenance Unit in Pendleton County, WV, the highest altitude county in the state (Spruce Knob, etc.). He lost a CAT in a snow-covered "meadow" that turned out to be a snow-filled "gully". But they recovered it in the Spring ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Socialism! Class war!

One basic, traditional function of government is public safety. Flooding lower Manhattan doesn't look cost-effective to me. I'll probably make money off it, replacing equipment, but I'd prefer levees. I grew up around levees (not very good ones) in New Orleans.

Personally, I favor a tax on financial transactions, maybe a fraction of a per cent, to add some damping to an unstable system, more casino than market. But Obama works for Goldman Sachs, so he's not about to suggest anything of the sort.

It's just a rarity when government spends money on something that is useful.

Removing all the ruined cars and debris is the first step to opening roads. Submerged hazards like missing manhole covers are lethal now.

It used to be rare enough event that they could ignore the risk. This is a wake-up call from nature that the risks are increasing with AGW.

Tokyo subway is hardened against flooding in the low lying areas. Not sure how well it would do against a tsunami, but it certainly worked OK against direct hit major typhoon flooding when I lived there.

NY was particularly unlucky in that it combined a storm surge and extreme rainfall with the maximum tidal range of a full moon.

It *may or may not be due* to AGW. Climate is not weather. We/they will be refining predictions related to AGW for a very long time.

This being said, Sandy is perhaps more attributable to AGW than were the Florida/Gulf 'canes from a few years back, since Sandy happened so late in the season.

There was also a couple of really big cells arranged just right, leading to the exact path.

ughable to think of certain SED regulars who brag about how much money they make.

Not in the US. The US income distribution is becoming more skewed rather than less. As James Arthur pointed out recently, the median US income actually decreased from 2010 to 2011. What he didn't mention was that the incomes of the top 5% of the distribution went up by 5%.

This is almost certainly a bad thing.

includes, at the end, some discussion of the consequences of a high level of income inequality. The high levels of social mobility on which the US used to pride itself are now a thing of the past. If you want your kids to get ahead, move to Canada, unless you are pretty close to the top yourself - when you you stay home a let your kids exploit their unfair advantages to the full.

ing

Republican supporters have a rather narrow idea of the things that might count as useful. Levee's are obviously useful, but not very often. New Orleans/Katrina demonstrated how that works out in practice.

e.

ng

Obama works for all of you, including Goldman Sachs. Your rather unsatisfactory rules about electoral expenditure mean that Goldman Sachs can contribute a lot to his campaign to be re-elected for another term, which may make him rather more sensitive to their particular interests

They've apparently given five times as much to Mitt Romney as they have to Barack Obama, so clearly Obama hasn't done as much for them as they would have liked.

e.

Hansen published a study earlier this year that did suggest that AWG was making extreme weather events more probable.