Good question, but I'm planning on using a portable electrical pump. I don't want my wife to have to muscle a manual pump if she wants to draw water out of the well. I also have an older well that the previous owners used that I've been thinking of utilizing for this purpose. Of course, I would have to get the water tested and consult the local well company before I did anything. Better safe than sorry...
All of this of course would lead to the question, why build a major city on ground that is below sea level in the first place?
To be clear the power grid here in Puerto Rico wasn't poorly constructed. It's just old and in need of a serious upgrade.
Since it gets below freezing up here during the winter our pump is submerged in the well and directly wired into the circuitry in the house. The rig I'm thinking of building would be external on both counts - a portable pump that sits on top of the well cap and plugs into an extension cord that runs into a 110V outlet in the house. The run on the stores recently has somewhat reinforced my determination to get this done in the near future. The first thing that vanished off the shelves of our local grocery and convenience stores was bottled water and the nearest reliable source of water is a river that is located 4 miles away down a series of unpaved country roads that would probably be impassible after a big hurricane. Needless to say, our alternative sources of water are severely limited.
Is there a way to connect a generator to the pump that is submerged in the well? Is it a 220 or 115v pump?
I don't suppose that anyone was actually criticizing the quality of the grid, just the vulnerability of it. Like why not put it in the ground where falling trees won't have an impact... Just saying.
The old method of putting in a power grid was to use poles. Is the US any different? No. The cost of putting power lines under ground is enormous and will take many years to complete. I believe removing trees that are close to power poles and replacing rotted poles with the newer aluminum poles would be a better way to go at this point. And I'm will to discuss the newer smaller 4th generation nuclear power plants that don't need a water source to keep the rods cooled.
My standby will run the generator during a power outage but I'm not aware of how I could get it to run off a portable. Besides, I'm thinking of putting that idle well to good use so I'll have two wells in operation. If I recall correctly it's the latter.
Just before Maria (I believe the aftermath of Irma, which skimmed PR), I heard an NPR story about PR's power grid. It claimed that PR could barely keep the power grid going in good weather, much less in any storm. PRs power grid was in shambles at that point, and was in poor shape--maybe not poorly constructed, but it was poorly maintained.
Absolutely. The maintenance was shoddy and funds were scarce. I've been here for 17 years and we've always experienced power outages. When I retired from the Coast Guard here I bought a generator.
Thank you, Grau! I mainly observe and comment when I see fit. Thank you for your kind words regarding my sister. I think she will be ok, Flo has taken a jog to the south and looks like my area of metro atlanta will be impacted. Our Governor just issued a SoE for all of our counties.....
It doesn't have its own CB and if I recall correctly its got a small breaker on our electrical panel. I'm 99% certain it's a 110v pump. The pump was installed by the previous owner and fortunately I haven't had to service/replace it, but that's another argument to get a second well operational.
Welcome to the PF from one of the Ancient Ones, Jenn. It's always nice to see a newbie. How big an impact are you expecting down there?
I agree partially. I see down here, and elsewhere in the news, people just rebuilding in flood areas after the govt (us) bail them out even if they didn't have flood insurance. I don't btw but I'm over 100 miles from the coast, 150ft plus up, and the last flood we had here was man made, and my house was still 30 feet above flood stage. But its a risk I accept. But after Katrina I was very surprised when I learned how many of us live near coasts. I grew up in a mountainous state with a smallish pop, and never considered it. But it makes a sort of sense. A lot of people live where their parents and grandparents did. Down here, the state insurance commissioner regulates how much insurers can charge, and creates pools of funding. With Katrina, the insurers just didn't pay off, because wind coverage was separate, and people didn't have it. And no one was around to watch the tidal wave was houses away even after their roofs blew off. I'm ok with offering people who had no insurance get low interest loans to rebuild. But imo that's about it. People assume risk, and need to live with it.
There's no way to evacuate all the poor from NOLA. The bus drivers weren't sticking around. A goodly number of the NOLA cops left too. People with cars and money mainly got out. NOLA's pretty unique with so much of it below sea level. I thought about taking a job there a few years back, but then, did I really want to live with having to have a truck always gassed and an trailer ready to grab my stuff and go. And the pets. But Nagin and Blanco were disasters themselves. Imo, W not so much. At least on Katrina. He was pretty bad on other stuff. My worst evah vote. LOL
And you will continue to have power outages. All that effort and you still end up where you started. Not thinking outside the box seems to be the issue for your island.
Puerto Rico sits in the middle a ocean currents sufficient to create all of their electrical power needs, forever. They just have to build it. https://www.boem.gov/Ocean-Current-Energy/ Their only exposure, then, is how vulnerable they make their distribution network. On the amount they would save year on year burning fuel oil... im sure some enterprising democrat will figure out a way to stop any effort here. Like ALWAYS....
No need to worry. Pat Robertson Casts 'Shield Of Protection' Ahead Of Hurricane Florence Now the insurance industry can sleep at night Speaking in Virginia, home of his Christian Broadcasting Network and in the potential path of the storm, Robertson cited a Bible passage in which Jesus commanded the wind and water on the Sea of Galilee to “be still.” https://www.yahoo.com/news/pat-robertson-casts-apos-shield-043533804.html Pat says he's heading to high ground though but he'll be out in the storm riding it out...
Look up the online information on project stormfury an see that only a few hundreds pounds in the eyes walls seem to in some cases reduce the wind vel. up to ten percents. In any case, it seem now that we have far better modeling and larger planes and instruments it is way past time to revisit the subject. I can still remember the very large stack of IBM computers cards that a professor was about to feed into IBM 360 mainframe at the University of Miami computer center modeling one test of the stormfury project. In fact he drop some of the cards and needed to run them through a card sorter once more.
Sure but that is expensive and who really wants to rely on mother nature? I prefer a more reliable source of energy.
PR's utility is bankrupt because they ran it like a credit card aiming for discharge. I dislike Trump, but there's no hope for that place. It should be a retirement paradise with cheap renewables ... but no.
