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Venice without water
- rayiner 9y agoAmericans would never deal with that shit. We’d have drained it and paved it long ago.
- traek 9y agoFunny enough, we actually did drain and pave most of the canals in Venice, California.
- pavel_lishin 9y agoWe likely would have raised the city, instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago
- zerostar07 9y agoThe water is protesting for too many tourists.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y agoThis would be the perfect time to clean up the city :)
- jordache 9y agois it filthy? do the canals have trash floating? What are you alluding to?
- lkbm 9y agoI was struck by the fact that the bottoms of the canals is just mud--no trash (at least in the photos in the article). The article mentioned the "filth buried at the bottom of the canals", but they seem remarkably clean.
- greglindahl 9y ago... the island doesn't have a sewer system.
- ivanhoe 9y agoit looks clean, but the smell of that mud, o boy...
- klez 9y agoLike greglindahl pointed out in another comment, there are no sewers in Venice, so that's not just mud. That's another reason for the smell.
- the_mitsuhiko 9y agoAny body of water in a city collects dirt over time. When the water is gone cleaning becomes possible.
- CydeWeys 9y agoDredging is a common maintenance activity on canals, and is easier to do with the water present (since you can use ships) than when it is absent. It's certainly easier to pop down with a trash bag and pick up litter when the water is absent, but for dredging the dirt, you need the water to come back. There's no good way to move it around without being able to float it off in a boat on the water.
- marklyon 9y agoCitizens of Tuvalu are disappointed.
- wojcikstefan 9y agoTo an uneducated eye (like mine), Venice looks inadaptable and bound to struggle, and eventually fail. Buildings require constant repair due to erosion. Too much water brings flooding, too little exposes mud and filth, and hinders transportation... I'm very curious to know what counter-measures are put in place to protect the city from these (and many more) dangers.
- joezydeco 9y agoStart with the MOSE Project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOSE_Project
- Kagerjay 9y agoI went to venice a few years back, there's an outer seawall that protects it from tides. Venice also naturally floods all the time, when I was over there the large square next to the cathedral / church flooded. When it floods, it usually floods several inches on average There's a good article on it here https://www.visit-venice-italy.com/acqua-alta-venice-italy.htm https://www.visit-venice-italy.com/acqua-alta-venice-italy.h...
- starik36 9y agoSame thing happened when I was there as well. But, surprisingly, it wasn't as big of a hassle as one would have thought. You could just walk around it. And a few hours later rain stopped, the flooding relented and it was back to normal.
- briandear 9y agoAnd you’ll see stepping-stone type things scattered around the sidewalks to help people walk over flooded areas as well as doors to homes and businesses sealed at the bottom to allow for about 1 meter of flooding without causing any interior damage. Then there are sandbags scattered about to help with flood protection when necessary. Venice has been fine for hundreds of years; it isn’t all the sudden going to fail.. it just adapts and moves on. By far the biggest danger to Venice is the hoards of tourists that make getting around for a local almost impossible. When I was there in November (to take a Venician Plastet/Marmolino class) — even in the cold rain it was essentially a mob of people seemingly everywhere except the most back streets of back streets. That “hidden Venice” is quite amazing — I am definitely over the crowds and kitsch that pollute the maIn drags. Pro-tip if you want to have a nice visit: explore the streets and canals at night.
- xattt 9y agoDoes this coincide with the flood mitigation gates?
- klez 9y agoNo it doesn't. Mainly because it is not finished and so it is non-operational.
- yeukhon 9y agoThis is interesting. For years, scientists warn about Venice will eventually go underwater as sea level continues to rise.
- _ph_ 9y agoThat prospect has not changed a bit.
- mathattack 9y agoThis was just due to one day of tides, not a long term trend.
- okket 9y agoThis is the difference between weather (tide) and climate (rising water levels).
- redleggedfrog 9y agoI only came to this comment thread to find the climate change denier. I was not disappointed.
- dang 9y agoPlease don't react to it by making the thread even worse.
- aerovistae 9y agoI feel like this is a good thing....it's not going to last, and it gives them an opportunity in the meantime to more easily clean and repair places that are normally less accessible.
- icebraining 9y agoThat was my first thought as well - great opportunity for checking and repairing the canal walls.
- fauigerzigerk 9y agoI have my doubts. There's probably no standby army of cleaners, builders and engineers waiting to jump at this glorious opportunity. I would even guess that the work already in progress has come to a complete standstill. Surely, they are not equipped for wading through deep mud, and they have lost their main means of transport.
- gnopgnip 9y agoHere in CA we have to wait on the tides to do work on the sewer. It is only about once every two months that the tides are low enough for certain work
- fauigerzigerk 9y agoI got the impression from the article that the water is almost never too low to use the waterways for transport. If it happens regularly then it's of course a wholly different matter.
- thriftwy 9y agoThe comment about declining population looks really off. I think most of protected old town areas lost population compared to 100 years ago. People no longer cram in tiny rooms, undesirable ground level flats are converted to shops. Why would this ever be a problem? They have Mestre just over a bridge.
- klez 9y agoWhat I know for sure is that Venice proper (that is, what is in the middle of the lagoon) has been hemorrhaging residents for a long time now. Residents strated moving to Mestre and Marghera for various reasons (for example because they worked there) but also because Venice is becoming a touristic attraction, not a place people want to live in. Prices for houses are completely insane, and the fact that people are going away feeds back to a lot of shops (I mean shops for residents, not for tourists) closing down. At the moment the isles are home to more or less 55.000 people, while the majority of the population lives in Mestre and Marghera. > Why would this ever be a problem? Because, as I said, there are very few residents in there. Would you still call it a city or is it more Mestre's tourist attraction? My parents moved from Venice to Mestre in the 80s, so I was born in Venice but always lived in Mestre. I'm not sure I resent them for this, in hindsight.
- thriftwy 9y agoI know many places that are more like a tourist attraction. Tallinn or Bruges' historic centres for example. I fail yo see what's wrong with it? The lagoon is full of islands that can offer other lifestyles if anybody wants that.
- jvagner 9y agoWhen I lived in Europe I visited Venice a few times, and what I learned from various readings is that Venice itself, from a buildings perspective, is less than 50% occupied, and the population is overwhelmingly skewed older. So, there's an economic vitality issue to that... The buildings are empty because if you renovate your building you have to bring it up to contemporary building codes, which is very expensive. So people abandoned the buildings and no one wants to pay to make them habitable by current standards. And so you're left with the tourism conundrum -- things are good enough for the tourism economy but everything behind that is failing. That said, I always enjoyed the beauty, strangeness and pedestrian culture of Venice. It's a lovely place to visit and walk and read.
- r3bl 9y agoTo me it seems like reading this makes one believe that the blood and blue parts of the "super blue blood moon" had some minor relevancy in all of this and made the water levels slightly lower than usual. To clarify, the eclipse part has nothing to do with tides. The "red" part couldn't even be seen from Italy from what I could find. The "blue" part is totally arbitrary as well (two full moons in one calendar month). So, a super moon affected this, the blue and blood parts are more of a coincidence... I think. Took 15 min to search for all of this to confirm my initial suspicion, but my search results were filled with the event from a couple of days ago, so I could be wrong.
- mikeash 9y agoAn eclipse means the moon lines up with the sun, which adds their tides together. It’s basically the same as what happens every two weeks when they nearly line up, so it’s not particularly special, but it is relevant.
- ultimoo 9y agoI had no idea the canals were this shallow! For some reason I thought they were at least 10 meters or so deep.
- EGreg 9y agoYes, this is what surprised me the most! It's just like the canal inside the Venetian in Vegas :)
- jschwartzi 9y agoOr the river in San Antonio.
- JoachimS 9y agoThe bigger canals must be deeper. But I was also stunned how shallow they are. Good thing the gondolas ride high.
- twblalock 9y agoSome of them definitely are. I've seen motorboats in them. The propellers would hit the bottom in some of the canals in the pictures.
- jsjohnst 9y agoMost of the motorboats in the canals (but not all!) are inboard motors with very shallow draft (or are small outboards). You don’t generally see inboard/outboard boats which generally have a deeper draft than the other two.
- ivanhoe 9y agoIt would be crazy hard to build a whole city on 10m deep sea. Some channels have been dig deeper to allow for traffic, but most are fairly shallow. Even the biggest Grand canal is just around 5m deep.
- Glyptodon 9y ago
- Kluny 9y agoI was surprised to learn Venice only has 155,000 or so inhabitants. For some reason I thought it was a big city. It's half the size of my small city.
- klez 9y agoThe Venice having 155.000 people isn't the islands. Those have roughly 55.000 people. The rest is spread on the mainland. In Italy when you talk about a city it's usually about the city itself and some towns around it. In this case most of the population is in Mestre and Marghera. So it's actually even smaller than you thought :)
- zakk 9y agoJust about 50k people live in the islands... The density is quite low, and much more people lived there in the past, now for locals it's more profitable to just rent their flat to tourists, while living in the mainland.
- JoachimS 9y agoThe smell must be fantastic.
- justin66 9y agoAt least it's winter. The experience in summer would probably be quite awful.
- briandear 9y agoPoint of fact, according to the story’s opening it said that it robbed gondoliers or their money and residents of their transportation. Residents don’t ride in gondolas— that’s for the tourists. Far too expensive.
- isostatic 9y agoBut they do take the water busses (vaporetti)
- SlowBro 9y agoNo comments about global warming and water levels?
- simonraikallen 9y agoThere is so much talk these days of "rising sea levels" so its kind of ironic to see the opposite. But I guess changes in weather causes both extremes.
- kaybe 9y agoNo, this is not expected. Sea level rise occurs because there is physically more water in the sea (both by weight and thermal expansion). Storms and wind can alter local sea level as well, as eg el Nino does in the Pacific, but not in Mediterranean dimensions.
- ventureguy1 9y agoJunk article on junk site. Low tides are a normal part of life in Venice. I was Kayaking there a few months ago and Tide tables determine what parts of the city are navigable by boat. Some canals are indeed very shallow. Been that way forever. They are dredged periodically to keep them navigable at normal tides. The larger and deeper canals are always navigable.
- dmix 9y agoIf you watch the video at the end, the sites author is inferring there's some conspiracy or "unknown" space object or the moons 'eclipse' causing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEoPhPoWws4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEoPhPoWws4 Not sure how much credibility this guy has but it sounds a bit quackish.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe view of the (very shallow) canals of Venice brings to mind the Erie Canal, which I've been reading up on. The initial channel was 40 feet wide, but only 4 feet (1.2 meter) deep, with canal-boats having a draft of 3.5 feet -- leaving 6 inches of clearance between those and the canal bottom. Given the speed of travel -- about 3-5 mph (4.8 - 8 km/h) behind a horse or donkey tow -- bottoming out would like not have been disastrous, but would still have been at the very least, a nuisance. Considering canals to alternatives, I also realised that one of these was that the surface was uniform, effectively flat, and immune to the hazards and treacheries of road-based travel, most especially mud, ruts, and wash-outs. A canal is the original self-healing substrate. Even at 5 mph, the constant and smooth travel, as well as the size of the boat relative to the tow (1-3 horses, boats of up to 78 ft (24 meter) in length), travel time was cut in half and costs by an order of magnitude. From a note on the Wikpedia entry: "Using Clark's Works of Man figures, a mule can draw 60,000 lbs but carry only 250 lbs, which need men to load and unload daily, have a need to carry grain as well (parasitic weight), and for same tonnages, required far more men as a labor force, drastically increasing running costs. A 95% reduction is probably conservative, 250#/30t is 0.4% the expenses, so reduction to 5% costs still indicates someone is taking a lot of profits." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal The Erie Canal was eventually enlarged. But in its day, the initial configuration was an absolute revolution in transport for the United States.