You don’t need to suffer Totalitarianism in order to have a future worth hoping for. You need a map, a clue and a white male workforce. Looking at YOU, Chicago!
Sinking cities: Climate change is warping the ground our cities are built on, study says
h ttps://www.yahoo.com/news/sinking-cities-climate-change-warping-090017684.html
By Doyle Rice, 11 July 2023
Climate change is warming the world above and below ground, and what’s happening below the surface could be causing the world’s cities to slowly sink, a new study suggests.
Zzz. Wake me when it CLAIMS something.
“Underground climate change is a silent hazard,” said Northwestern University’s Alessandro Rotta Loria, who led the study. “The ground is deforming as a result of temperature variations, and no existing civil structure or infrastructure is designed to withstand these variations.”
Hold that thought. Heehee.
The study is the first of its kind to quantify the effects of underground climate change on civil infrastructure.
Translation, it’s a paper designed to push a Climate Change narrative, the findings of which haven’t been replicated yet.
Seriously, does anybody think nobody ever thought about underground temperatures in the context of human engineering before? After all those mines and geothermal power plants we Westerners built?
Using data from sensors placed beneath downtown Chicago and computer simulations, the researchers found that heat is causing the ground to deform, and it could ultimately cause infrastructure to crack.
Chicago.
Seriously?
They say the landscape of Chicago is deforming? Of course it is.
They say it’s because Climate Change? Of course it AIN’T.
Let me say this as nicely as I can…
CHICAGO IS A SWAMP. Just like D.C., it’s a soft-earth sump pit of bloodsucking insects. What happens when you build stuff in a swamp? It eventually sinks.
The first thing to do when considering underground conditions is to consult a map. First box, checked!
According to the study, urban areas increasingly suffer from “subsurface heat islands,” which involve an underground climate change responsible for environmental, public health and transportation issues. Soil, rocks, and construction materials deform under the influence of temperature variations, and excessive deformations can affect the performance of civil infrastructure, the study reports.
What an exciting new discovery of !Science! Who knew that temperature could affect infrastructure?
This is a famous, old picture of heat deformation of train tracks. IIRC, it was an early experiment in continuous welded track rather than jointed track sections, which were high-maintenance. It’s actually the weight of the rails themselves that prevent vertical buckling, not the weight of the trains.
I’ll spare you the… ah… entire fields of soils engineering and hydrology. Instead, I’ll tell you to go outside and look at your concrete street curb. Do you see how there are periodic breaks in the concrete? That’s not because street curbs are manufactured in a factory to uniform lengths. Those are expansion joints, THERMAL expansion joints.
You can also see expansion joints in bridges and sidewalks, although in the latter case, they frequently are made of factory-produced slabs regardless, and in the former case, are sometimes more worried about earthquakes.
Have you seen a sheep’s foot? No, it’s not like a rabbit’s foot. Not anymore.
It’s used to compact dirt in preparation for foundations or similar work. I know of an earthen dam… as in, a wall of dirt holding back a lake’s worth of water… and the reason it didn’t degrade into mud and wash out, is simple compaction by… this was old school… sheep. The earth movers would deposit a layer of local dirt, then a for-real shepherd would drive a for-real flock of sheep back and forth on it for compaction, then the next layer of dirt was added, and the result lasted decades until the Communists took power.
Flocks of sheep not always being economical in our dangerously technophilic Current Year, the piece of construction equipment pictured above is a reasonably effective simulator of livestock. You Midwestern homesteaders can have your cows; civil engineers and Scotsmen know that sheep are the real hotness.
This is all a windy way of saying, this cloistered globalist academic of a triple-engineering-credentialed Progtard doesn’t have a clue.
We now have our map AND our clue. Next up: white workforce.
According to the researchers’ computer simulations…
Or, engineering textbooks written by white men…
…warmer temperatures can cause the ground to swell and expand upward by as much as 12 millimeters, a Northwestern University news release said. They also can cause the ground to contract and sink downward – beneath the weight of a building – by as much as 8 millimeters.
Although this seems subtle and is imperceptible to humans, the variation is more than many building components and foundation systems can handle without compromising their operational requirements, according to the study.
Although Researchers haven’t yet directly found evidence of structural damage due to underground climate change in the Chicago Loop, but “there is indeed evidence of problems for the operational performance of civil infrastructure in Chicago from past reports,” Loria told USA TODAY.
Which is it? “Existing infrastructure can’t handle thermal expansion” or “we looked for damage and didn’t find any”? It’s the latter, of course, which means this piece is pure Agenda.
He added that some of the damage and cracking that’s been seen in Chicago over the years has been “attributed to inappropriate foundation designs and construction methods.” But underground climate change “might have exacerbated these issues,” Loria said.
Heck yeah, baby, let’s talk about inappropriate foundation designs in the context of Chicago.
Segue
Chicago Was Raised Over Four Feet in the 19th Century to Build Its Sewer
h ttps://gizmodo.com/chicago-was-raised-more-than-4-feet-in-the-1800s-to-bui-1646409024
By Sarah Zhang, 15 October 2014
In the middle of the 19th century, Chicago embarked on a quest to literally lift itself out of the mud. Water couldn’t drain from the low-lying city, so its streets became impassable swamps. The most reasonable solution, Chicago decided, was just to raise the whole goddamn city by 4 to 14 feet.
Behold anthropogenic climate change! You can do this kind of crazy when you’re whiter than sour cream!
Unlike most other cities, Chicago sat just a few feet above the water level of Lake Michigan. Water flows down, so building a system that properly drained all of Chicago’s stormwater and sewage would required a whole lot of digging. That was deemed too expensive. The city was naturally lifted up instead.
Naturally. Remember that held thought? “No existing civil structure or infrastructure is designed to withstand these variations”?
Following a plan outlined by the Chicago Board of Sewerage Commissioners in 1855, the city passed an ordinance to raise the grade level of streets downtown and along the river. Over the next two decades, the city gradually grew taller. Buildings were jacked up, new foundations laid underneath, and the streets filled in with dirt after the new sewer pipes were installed.
Remarkably, life in the city went on as normal—as normal as life in such a rapidly growing city can be. The Tremont House, Chicago’s most eminent hotel, was raised inch by inch over several days as guests, including a U.S. senator, resided inside. An entire half block of Lake Street was also lifted in one huge engineering feat. The engineer behind it? A young George Pullman, who would go on to amass a fortune with his Pullman sleeping car. WBEZ describes how Pullman pulled it off:
“He had 6,000 jackscrews put under the buildings, and hired 600 men to take charge of ten jacks each. On the signal, each man turned the screws on his ten jacks one notch. The buildings went up a fraction of an inch.
“This process was repeated again and again over four days. Meanwhile, temporary timbers were placed under the buildings and new foundations constructed. Then the buildings were lowered into place. All this was smoothly done, while business inside the buildings went on as usual.”
“How are we supposed to raise an entire hotel?”
“Screw it.”
And then he built a… hotel on wheels. Of course he did.
In other cases, whole buildings were dug up, put on logs, and rolled to a completely new location. A Scotsman visiting Chicago in 1868 observed, “Never a day passed during my stay in the city that I did not meet one or more houses shifting their quarters. One day I met nine.”
Thanks to the foresight and determination of mid-19th century Chicagoans, the city had one of the first comprehensive stormwater and wastewater systems in the country. But it came at a price: Sewage soon poured into Lake Michigan, polluting the city’s source of drinking water. That eventually led to the reversal of the Chicago River in 1900, yet another massive infrastructure project designed allow as many humans as possible to cram into the city.
Barak Obama didn’t build that. America did, and he was no American.
End segue
“We used Chicago as a living laboratory…
Because the easiest way to manufacture a crisis is to use the geological worst-case scenario for a benchmark. Come, now, if your goal is monitoring underground human behavior then at least choose a city with an underground so there’ll be human behavior underground to monitor. See what Chicago had to do, just to make room for indoor plumbing?
…but underground climate change is common to nearly all dense urban areas worldwide,” Rotta Loria said. “And all urban areas suffering from underground climate change are prone to have problems with infrastructure.”
I had the recent epiphany, that the main purpose of Utopia in Totalitarianism is to justify the suffering. Why should you let the State micromanage you into literal oblivion? Because life will be better. Eventually. Even if you don’t live to see it. Because you voted for Trump, you terrorist.
That’s why Normals dooming each other during the Plandemic helped them to relax. The lockdowns were miserable, but “we’re saving Grandma” let them feel better about it. Gave them purpose. Then I came along and took that purpose away by pointing out it was Cuomo killing Grandma, not Covid. They had to either disqualify me or rebel against a powerful, ruthless Regime.
Today, Loria is scaremongering about Climate Change in order to advance the belief that only State control can prevent our cities from sinking into the swamp. He conveniently forgets that when we had such problems before… WE FIXED THEM. You don’t have to suffer AT ALL. Not if you have a map, a clue and a white workforce.
And now you know, why Totalitarians don’t like merit. Merit creates solutions to suffering, which delegitimize Totalitarian-inflicted suffering.
I close with a guess about Loria’s real Agenda.
This is the sort of problem that worries insurance agencies.
Whoa, talk about shifting mental gears. Structural failure is a problem of the designers, builders and inspectors. Buildings don’t die overnight, or suddenly, or for no reason at all, and all of them require ongoing maintenance. Which is rarely insured against, being an inevitable expense.
Do insurance companies not know that Chicago is a swamp with big, seasonal temperature swings? Chicago is HOME HQ to many of these companies! Oh.
“We’re seeing more risk evolving because of things that are below ground,” said Steve Bowen, chief science officer and meteorologist with Gallagher Re, a global reinsurance broker. Bowen was not involved in the study.
Gallagher Re is located in… Chicago. Somebody hired an academic hit man.
For example, France may have set a record last year for the highest volume of payouts after land sinkage during droughts, Bowen said. Insured losses could be as high as $2.7 billion, according to the insurance broker’s summary of natural catastrophes in 2022.
Somebody smells money. Also, the insurance industry has long been a back-door regulator, and Imperator, of Agenda items. Remember Obamacare? Government didn’t nationalize health care. Government only punished you for not purchasing enough health care insurance from Government-approved vendors. That’s why in all the outrage over Obamacare, the insurance industry never said one word. Kinda like Israel’s silence about Kagan War: Ukraine.
“Historic heat and significant drought led to a degradation of structures,” Bowen said. “That crumbling has led to a significant increase in costs.”
This is coming from a RE-insurance company. They insure the insurers. You’d think that a company specializing in risk management wouldn’t be so risk-adverse as to submit to a competitor, but only if you didn’t know how important CYA is to bureaucracy. Which insurance companies inevitably are.
Climate change and 15-minute cities, because “our insurance carrier requires it” and “government requires us to be insured”.
I did not know that about Chicago. Or Pullman. Fascinating stuff. They didn’t drain the swamp so much as they elevated themselves above the level of it. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere…. And I just reminded myself that I hate politicians.