Tuesday, May 06, 2008

[texas levees] and security fences


To bring non-Americans up to speed:
Man-made levees can fail in a number of ways. The most frequent (and dangerous) form of levee failure is a breach. Levee overtopping can be caused when flood waters simply exceed the lowest crest A sand boil occurs when the upward pressure of water flowing through soil pores under the levee (underseepage) exceeds the downward pressure from the weight of the soil above it.

There's not much doubt that, in Texas, this is a sizeable problem - look at how many levee locations there are in the state and they all require cash to maintain.

Plus the Federal government wants Texas to build an enormous security fence to keep the aliens out but not everyone is enamoured of this:
The proposal has raised environmental concerns because plans for a fence that small wildlife could pass through were replaced with plans for a 16- to 18-foot-high impermeable concrete wall. Many residents and elected leaders in the Rio Grande Valley are opposed to the plan to build a fence. They fear that private land would be lost and that the sister communities in Mexico would take offense.

However, politics makes strange bedfellows and thus they now have:

The federal government and a county in South Texas have reached a final agreement to build a combination of levees and a border fence, a project intended to address national security concerns and local flood-control needs. The agreement on the $113.9 million project, which will stretch along 22 miles of the Rio Grande, calls for the federal government to pay about $65.7 million. The pact, announced on Monday, puts long-awaited levee improvements in Hidalgo County on a fast track, with a goal of completing them in less than a year.

The security fence proposal is a genuine puzzle. With the NAFTA superhighways and the SPPPNA start date of March, 2009, one wonders why the need for such an expensive structure as the security fence?

If North America is soon to be a free trade zone, with most functions of state under the control of the NAAC, then why the wall where it is actually scheduled to be?

4 comments:

  1. The whole idea of this fence just made me cringe when I first heard of it some time ago. And do they actually think it might work? Not likely.

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  2. Ask Israel jmb, or any of the other countries (besides the US) that have them or are installing them.

    The most famous of fences in the world worked wonders (although not necessarily good wonders).

    The Great Wall of China worked until the Mongols go the Chinese to open the door and the Berlin wall kept emmigration to almost nil until a few years back.

    The wall in Israel has severely hampered the suicide bombers.

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  3. It's sad that not even 20 years after the "wall" in Germany was pulled down - a symbol of oppression that was attacked by the freedom-loving west for 30 years - here we are building walls everywhere.

    Israel's building one that surrounds the Palestinians in a de-facto prison, the US is building one along the Mexican border (but not Canada, because we don't mind if white folk want to come to the US), and the US military is building one in Baghdad.

    Did no one learn the lessons from the Berlin Wall?

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  4. roughly 20million people seemed to have learned the lesson wil, they got in before the wall started.

    That prison for the palestinians seems to be doing the job it was intended to do (keep down suicide bombers) while the 'government' on that side of the wall seems to have failed the people miserably (hamas/fatah)

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