The World's Largest Water Pump

1. Lv
   August 18th, 2009 at 4:57 pm

   This just might work, until something breaks right in the middle of a storm.

2. Johnny Cat
   August 18th, 2009 at 5:01 pm

   Wow, a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse escapes.

3. Skipweasel
   August 18th, 2009 at 5:08 pm

   What I don't understand is that since New Orleans isn't really a very good idea, what with being underwater and all - why live there?

4. Lv
   August 18th, 2009 at 5:27 pm

   At New Orleans, the average flow rate is 600,000 cubic feet per second. That's 4493400 gallons. If they close the gates (thereby blocking the flow of the river.) the pumps cant even keep up with the average river flow much less a flood. Or am i missing something?

5. Ed Skinner
   August 18th, 2009 at 7:38 pm

   Turn the pump around.

6. Grant Laru
   August 18th, 2009 at 8:09 pm

   Works great until it runs out of diesel.

7. crescentCityRay
   August 18th, 2009 at 11:08 pm

   Lv said: "At New Orleans, the average flow rate is 600,000 cubic feet per second. That’s 4493400 gallons. If they close the gates (thereby blocking the flow of the river.) the pumps cant even keep up with the average river flow much less a flood. Or am i missing something?"

   Yes you are missing something. This gate and pump house are not in or even near the Mississippi River.

   As a matter of fact, as a flooded resident who rebuilt our home (above the flood line from the federal floodwall failures), I pay real close attention to exactly what the Corps of Engineers is building to protect us from storm surges, but to tell the truth, from this post, I cannot tell which project they are talking about, but I didn't think any one pump station had this large of a capacity. They might be talking about the combined capacity of all three of the new pump stations being built in our three outfall canals.

   Our river levees did not fall down. New Orleans was flooded when outfall canal floodwalls' foundations failed and the levees breached long before the storm surge rose to a height for which they were supposed to have designed to withstand because of really bad negligent engineering by engineers employed by the US Army Corps of Engineers as reported in all three of the levee failure investigation reports. They failed long before being overtopped. It was not a natural disaster. Had the engineering not been negligent, there would have been no floodwall failures and 140 very urban square miles of New Orleans would have been just fine.

8. Kalel
   August 18th, 2009 at 11:18 pm

   This would make one very manly toilet.

9. crescentCityRay
   August 18th, 2009 at 11:33 pm

   skipweasel said: "What I don’t understand is that since New Orleans isn’t really a very good idea, what with being underwater and all - why live there?"

   It's been my family's home since 1765. I feel like a fish out of water whenever I've tried to live anywhere else. After the storm, we tried to figure out where else we could live and could never think of any other place. And then there is that thing where... well... somebody has to live here. My job is tied to our port(s). I kinda gotta live here. And, besides, nowhere else has our food or music and I definitely can't get along without that. Man, we got a lot of real bad problems, and feel abandoned by government at all levels, but it's home.

   We rebuilt our home way above the floodline from the levee failures. The Corps put water in our house up to the ceiling fans and we had 9' ceilings and the house was two feet off the ground. That salt water sat for weeks. Still, this time of year, we keep life jackets on the coat rack and a pirogue on the porch.

   People have been led to believe many myths about New Orleans. For example: 50% of New Orleans is above sea level. 70% of us had flood insurance which is higher per capita than almost anywhere else. The Lower Ninth Ward is but 2 of the 140 square miles flooded because of the collapse of federal flood control structures in just Orleans Parish, but flooding from the failure of USACE structures also swamped St. Bernard and Plaquimines Parishes. The Mississippi Gulf Coast was destroyed by wind and then storm surge because they saw the right hand side of the storm. Katrina' left hand side collapsed coming ashore and most of its energy was on the east side of the storm.

   "why live there?"

   I'd be willing to live here on a house boat. If your home town was carpet bombed by the US Army, would you rebuild? We were and we did. My neighborhood is 60% repopulated despite roadblocks tossed in front of us by utility and insurance companies as well as local, state and federal governments.

   Why do you live where you livc?

10. crescentCityRay
    August 18th, 2009 at 11:43 pm

    "Works great until it runs out of diesel."

    That is the scariest thing. The same idiot engineers that caused our losses tell us to trust them - that they are going to do things right this time, but have proven to be unreliable, not trustworthy and incompetent time after time and we fear they are still dysfunctional.

    Heck, they want us to pay cost shares to rebuild flood structures, even though we paid cost shares to the Corps over the past 40 years, for them to build all of the floodwalls that failed and caused the deaths and damage. They consider us disposable idiots unworthy of anything. They are probably just building more movie props. Who knows? They will not accept local oversight.

11. Foreigner1
    August 19th, 2009 at 1:29 am

    Skipweasel- Most of the Netherlands (about two thirds) are below sealevel, with at it's lowest a polder that is some 25ft below sealevel. Over the centuries there were some floodings that all in all have cost well over 10.000 lives. The last big one was in 1953 and happened all around the North Sea in Great Brittain, the Netherlands and in parts of Belgium and Germany. Alone in the Netherlands it caused some 1800 deaths. People still live there and it is one of the best money generating pieces of land in the whole world.

    ... So should we then just desert those parts of the land...?
    One flood in New Orleans and we just decide to call it quits and walk away...? Forget it- New Orleans is worth way to much to just let it drown- That would about cause the bankruptcy and destruction of the whole of the United States.

    If I understand the defense-projects around New Orleans a little bit, it seems that the Brainz have come up with some scheme of interlocking systems. This pump is only one small piece of that puzzle. That whole system SHOULD be made such that if one piece fails, the others can compensate for the loss without endangering the whole system.

12. BikerRay
    August 19th, 2009 at 5:41 am

    Propeller? Is it going somewhere? Technically, propeller is correct, but impeller is a more common term for a pump.

13. Scooter
    August 19th, 2009 at 8:19 am

    I wonder how much 14 billion would raise the ground level in the whole of New Orleans?

14. Gary B
    August 19th, 2009 at 12:15 pm

    Out west along the Columbia river in Oregon there are 250,000 HP (as I was told, anyway) irrigation pumps - one I'm aware of raises water 300 feet and pumps it six miles across the land through a pair of six foot diameter pipes. I wonder how this compares. Guess I'll have to work out the flow capacity of six foot pipes.

15. manik
    August 19th, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    @ Biker

    You're right, technically it is a propeller judging by the image. For the most part propellers work with axial rotation and impellers work with centrifugal rotation. Most pumps do have impellers, but the configuration shown in the diagram is a propeller.

16. Vreen
    August 19th, 2009 at 2:47 pm

    Nice, but do they have a secure electric powerplant to back up the plan? A pump won't help a thing when there's a power outage....

17. Skipweasel
    August 19th, 2009 at 4:34 pm

    @Foreigner1 - Yes, but the Dutch generally maintain theirs and don't leave people sitting about in a swamp for some months/years while fixing the mess.

18. Pump Station Builder
    August 20th, 2009 at 6:41 pm

    Reply to crescentCityRay: The pumpstation is a combination of 13 pump bays side by side and two sets of gates. Like another poster said, it is not on the Mississippi, it is on the Gulf intercostal water ways. It will be located just south of the convergence of the Harvey and Algiers canals. Each bay will pump 1500 gal/sec which combined will pump about 20,000 gal/sec combined. It could fill the Superdome in just over an hour. There will also be 13, 23,000 Gal tanks to feed these 13 pumps along with 13, 500 Gal day tanks. The USACE is wasting alot of money on this and other projects to save the idoits that live below sea level. if you are worried about flooding, ugh DONT LIVE BELOW SEA LEVEL! One thing to keep in mind is that all pumpstations now have safe houses where the crew can live to ensure the pumps stay on during the hurricane. They also have generators to power every thing. And to let you know 500m is not the cost of the pumpstation, it is a bit more.

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