Nothing to add, the following tells it all.
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A forensic engineer’s evaluation of Trump’s Border Wall’s fatal flaws.
To recap: I’m a licensed structural and civil engineer with a MS in structural engineering from the top program in the nation and over a decade of experience on high-performance projects, and particularly of cleaning up design disasters where the factors weren’t properly accounted for, and I’m an adjunct professor of structural analysis and design at UH-Downtown. I have previously been deposed as an expert witness in matters regarding proper construction of walls and the various factors associated therein, and my testimony has passed Daubert.
Am I a wall expert?
I am. I am literally a court-accepted expert on walls.
Structurally and civil engineering-wise, the border wall is not a feasible project. Trump did not hire engineers to design the thing. He solicited bids from contractors, not engineers. This means it’s not been designed by professionals. It’s a disaster of numerous types waiting to happen.
What disasters?
Off the top of my head...
1) It will mess with our ability to drain land in flash flooding. Anything impeding the ability of water to get where it needs to go (doesn’t matter if there are holes in the wall or whatever) is going to dramatically increase the risk of flooding.
2) Messes with all kind of stuff ecologically. For all other projects, we have to do an Environmental Site Assessment, which is arduous. They’re either planning to circumvent all this, or they haven’t accounted for it yet, because that’s part of the design process, and this thing hasn’t been designed.
3) The prototypes they came up with are nearly impossible to build or don’t actually do the job. This article explains more:
And so on.
The estimates provided for the cost are arrived at unreasonably. You can look for yourself at the two-year-old estimate that you see everyone citing.
It does not account for rework, complexities beyond the prototype design, factors to prevent flood and environmental hazard creation, engineering redesign... It’s going to be higher than $50bn. The contractors will hit the government with near CONSTANT change orders. “Cost overrun” will be the name of the game. It will not be completed in Trump’s lifetime.
I’m a structural forensicist, which means I’m called in when things go wrong. This is a project that WILL go wrong. When projects go wrong, the original estimates are just *obliterated*. And when that happens, good luck getting it fixed, because there aren’t that many forensicists out there to right the ship, particularly not that are willing to work on a border wall project— a large quotient of us are immigrants, and besides, we can’t afford to bid on jobs that are this political. We’re small firms, and we’re already busy, and we don’t gamble our reputations on political footballs. So you’d end up with a revolving door of contractors making a giant, uncoordinated muddle of things, and it’d generally be a mess. Good money after bad. The GAO agrees with me.
And it won’t be effective. I could, right now, purchase a 32 foot extension ladder and weld a cheap custom saddle for the top of the proposed wall so that I can get over it. I don’t know who they talked to about the wall design and its efficacy, but it sure as heck wasn’t anybody with any engineering imagination.
Another thing: we are not far from the day where inexpensive drones will be able to pick up and carry someone. This will happen in the next ten years, and it’s folly to think that the coyotes who ferry people over the border won’t purchase or create them. They’re low enough, quiet enough, and small enough to quickly zip people over any wall we could build undetected with our current monitoring setup.
Let’s have border security, by all means, but let’s be smart about it. This is not smart. It’s not effective. It’s NOT cheap. The returns will be diminishing as technology advances, too. This is a ridiculous idea that will never be successfully executed and, as such, would be a monumental waste of money.
This is set to public. Have a blast sharing it.
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Why the Wall Won’t Work
This article appeared in the May 2017 issue of Reason.
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Trump's Border Wall Would Be a Disaster for Wildlife
California's border with Baja California is a complex region with unique environmental issues. Our Borderlands series takes a deeper look at this region unified by shared landscapes and friendship, and divided by international politics.
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Trump's Wall Could Cause Serious Environmental Damage
The effects of building a massive concrete wall range from increased emissions to blocked wildlife migration routes
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Trump’s wall: The inside story of how the president crafts immigration policy
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Beto explains the overlooked reason why Trump’s border wall makes no sense
You can't put a wall right next a major river like the Rio Grande.
But that means the border would, as O’Rourke points out:
- “Block access to the Rio Grande River, the 4th longest river in North America”
- “Seize land from Americans through eminent domain”
- “Exile hundreds of thousands of acres of the U.S. to a no mans land between the river and the wall”
- “Seal off critical wildlife corridors” and
- “Destroy YOUR public lands.”
The problem is that the vast majority of the U.S.-Mexico border that does not already have a wall runs straight down the middle of 1,254 snaking miles of the Rio Grande River. So, as ThinkProgress reported in April 2017, ever-worsening, climate change-fueled floods greatly complicate any plausible design.
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President Trump Border Security Briefing
JANUARY 10, 2019 - C-SPAN
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Democrats' Response To President Trump's Oval Office Address | TIME
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer offered a sharp rebuttal to President Donald Trump’s Oval Office address on the border wall Tuesday night.
