4 ms·

Naive question: Isn’t it possible to plan those things when it’s not hurricane season?

• sschueller 5y ago
  Yes, just how you plan construction on existing infrastructure that can't be "turned off". You should at least not make what exists worse.
• R0b0t1 5y ago
  Not-hurricane season is the winter, difficult for construction, though I don't know exactly about that far south.
  • btbuildem 5y ago
    Winter in Louisiana is nice and balmy, we northerners would not call that winter. Above freezing, no snow. Much better conditions for manual labour than the summer there tbh.
    • R0b0t1 5y ago
      Ok, fair enough. A lot of civil planning uses really long tail distributions for temp and so on, so I still wonder when stuff is schedulable.
    • genewitch 5y ago
      haha, it does freeze, for days at a time. It hard freezes for at least 2 days, this past winter it hard froze for nearly a week. You may have heard about that in the news, because Texas went offline. Louisiana fared better in the grid area, but we still have rough winters, depending on the year. It's snowed thrice in the past 6 years, too.
  • dredmorbius 5y ago
    "Not-hurricane" season extends from November through May, and potentially into June, in terms of low likelihoods of storms. As others note, Louisiana winters are exceptionally mild, and are generally preferable to summers for outdoor activity. Late August / early September, by marked contrast, is peak hurricane season.
  • beerandt 5y ago
    Winter is the wetter season. Which most people don't realize, because it also rains so much in the summer. But it's so hot in the summer, that evaporation out paces the rain. The driest months are Sept-Oct, which is peak hurricane season.
• egypturnash 5y ago
  Hahahaha no, the pumps are barely at capacity for a storm right now because half of them are like 100 years old and take a really weird voltage that can only be supplied by the Sewerage & Water Board's generators. One of which has been waiting on repairs since like last summer. I can't recall the exact reasons it's taking so long, I know it's a combination of "barely anyone even knows how to make the replacement part", "city's broke", and waves vaguely at all the supply chain mess caused by covid. (One of our major industries is tourism, though a lot of that money gets siphoned off to the pockets of the tourist board. Mardi Gras 2020 was the last gasp of that before covid. We normally have a shit-ton of festivals all year round that draw people in to spend money. They've all been cancelled.) And the roads are always sinking, the city's built on swamp. There will never be a time where the roads (or something under them) do not need maintenance. I'm sure the money crunch ain't helping that get done in a sane timeframe either. Also "hurricane season" is like half the year normally, and the past several years have had it well underway in the preceding month.
  • selimthegrim 5y ago
    They wanted to make sure the FEMA money wasn't stolen. I don't blame them.
  • beerandt 5y ago
    >really weird voltage No- voltage would be easy to change with a transformer. It's that many pumps run on 25hz, not the 60hz of the power grid. They have to change frequencies via mechanical methods (motor-gearing-generator) or generate their own power via on-site turbines.
    • beerandt 5y ago
      Also should add- this wasn't the result of a bad design choice. It's because many of these pumps are literally older than the electricity grid.