Archives For Flooding
Resilience and common cause considered in the wake of hurricane Sandy
One of the fairly obvious lessons from Hurricane Sandy is the vulnerability of underground infrastructure such as subways, road tunnels and below grade service equipment to flooding events.
The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night”
NYC transport director Joseph Lhota
Yet despite the obviousness of the risk we still insist on placing such services and infrastructure below grade level. Considering actual rises in mean sea level, e.g a 1 foot increase at Battery Park NYC since 1900, and those projected to occur this century perhaps now is the time to recompute the likelihood and risk of storm surges overtopping defensive barriers.
Did the designers of the japanese seawalls consider all the factors?
In an eerie parallel with the Blayais nuclear power plant flooding incident it appears that the designers of tsunami protection for the Japanese coastal cities and infrastructure hit by the 2011 earthquake did not consider all the combinations of environmental factors that go to set the height of a tsunami.
For those interested the interim report by Mike Weightman, the UK’s Inspector of Nuclear Installations, on lessons from Fukushima has been released.
Continue Reading...There are few purely technical problems…
The Washington Post has discovered that concerns about the vulnerability of the Daiichi Fukushima plant to potential Tsunami events were brushed aside at a review of nuclear plant safety conducted in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake. Yet at other plants the Japanese National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (NISA) had directed the panel of engineers and geologists to consider tsunami events.
So why did the Titanic sink? The reason highlights the role of implicit design assumptions in complex accidents and the interaction of design with operations of safety critical systems
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