NATION WITH CRUMBLING BRIDGES AND ROADS EXCITED TO BUILD GIANT WALL

[GMDino]

Since we're going there:

http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/03/what-it-would-take-build-trumps-border-wall-mexico/126514/

Quote:As with so many things in this election, the question beggars belief. Trump is pledging the largest infrastructure project since the U.S. highway system—perhaps the most significant infrastructure project since the Erie Canal—and yet he has shared few details about the wall itself. What little Trump has said, namely that he intends for Mexico to pay for it, is unrealistic, to put it mildly.


Details are beside the point, of course. That’s because Trump can’t build a wall across the entire border. It’s a moon-shot without a rocket. The proposal crumbles at even the slightest scrutiny. No one who can build it would, and no one who would build it can.
“With the highly contested nature of this project, and the fact that many, many people object to it really strongly—do you want to be on the wrong side of that in a way that’s going to stick with you for years?” asks Raphael Sperry, president of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility.



Sperry says that his organization will condemn the border wall, should Trump be elected president. His organization may not stand alone: Other professional design associations are bound by ethics that Trump’s proposal appears to plainly violate. As with other controversial border projects, firms that built this wall could be subject to boycotts, blacklists, and lawsuits.




...


Eugene Pawlik, a spokesperson for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, declined to speculate about the border wall specifically. But he did explain that the Corps maintains few projects that could be described as “national.” Even theMississippi River and Tributaries Project, the largest flood-control system in the world, is maintained by the Corps as a series of individual elements: levees, floodways, and so on. Each project is conceptualized, built, and operated as a local concern.


So Corps projects typically start from the bottom up, especially in today’s post-earmark era. Infrastructure projects rarely begin with the executive branch, even if they do receive federal support. Seen through one lens, Trump’s answer to immigration is the supreme evocation of executive authority: The White House will build a wall. The audacity of Trump’s proposal brings to mind the earliest debates about the division of powers, when the Hamiltonian Federalist Party (later the Whigs) sponsored “internal improvements”—best represented by the Erie Canal—in the face of fierce objections from the Jeffersonian Republican Party (later the Democrats). (Today’s debate is not quite of the same calibre.)




In the here and now, a proposal for a wall crossing state lines might be broken up into smaller constituent projects, to be evaluated independently. This process could open up multiple potential points of failure—objections that an 80-foot-tall wall running through or along the Rio Grande violates the National Environmental Policy Act, for example. Or objections that the wall divides divides certain animal populations, violating the Endangered Species Act. Residents of El Paso may object to an 80-foot wall in their back yard.




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The Corps would not physically build the wall themselves. For most projects, the Corps engages a “prime” contractor, who then hires on other subcontractors. A wall running thousands of miles through hills, deserts, and rivers would take a major campaign, possibly involving multiple primes. Not to just to build the wall, but to support the builders: to build the roads that would enable the builders to reach the border. No small feat.



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There are just a handful of architectural and engineering firms with the organizational capacity to build Trump’s wall. Not the technical know-how—any engineer can design a wall—but rather the experience in management. Marshaling the array of contractors and subcontractors it would take to build a wall across so many different jurisdictions and climate regions would require a fairly elite engineering firm.

None of more than a dozen global architecture and engineering firms I contacted were willing to speak on the record about Trump’s wall. Neither did faculty at the schools of civil engineering for Texas A&M University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. But several sources pointed to codes of ethics that seek to prevent architects, engineers, and planning professionals from doing harm.



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Building Trump’s wall across the Mexican border might require one-tenth of the cement the U.S. produces in an entire year. Maybe more. Maybe all of it.

Since the height of the Great Wall of Making America Great Again keeps rising, it’s hard to give anything better than a stab in the dark at what it would cost to build, for whoever ends up stuck with the tab. One Daily Kos contributor outlined a plausible-sounding guesstimate regarding the sheer amount of cement it would take to wall off 2,000 miles of mostly natural border.


Bill Palmer Jr., the editor of Concrete Construction, offers that a concrete wall running 80 feet high (including 30 feet below grade), 1 foot thick, and 2,000 miles long would require 31 million cubic yards of cement. “If we made it higher-strength concrete, go to 700 pounds per yard, that’s 21.7 billion pounds of Portland cement, or about 10 percent of U.S. annual consumption,” he writes in an email. Cement is just one ingredient in concrete, and concrete is just one component of a wall-building project.


In a project like this, they would be making their own concrete, so the price would go down,” Palmer writes, “but getting materials, equipment, and people to the job site and building this as a government project ([at] prevailing wages) would be very expensive.” (Emphasis his.)


View image on Twitter

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Those costs would not go away if the U.S., under Trump, [url=http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/how-much-trumps-immigration-plan-would-cost-the-us/445830/]opts to build a mere fence, not a true wall. Neither would the lawsuits, presumably all of which would need to be settled—along with right-of-way acquisition—before engineers could break ground. There is no way that the cost of building a border half the length of the Great Wall of China doesn’t reach astronomical heights.



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Here is the guesstimate from Dailykos:


http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/8/31/1416884/-So-President-Trump-you-want-a-Great-Great-Wall-let-s-look-at-the-numbers

Quote:Cost is no issue, of course, because our Maximum Leader has told us many times 'I'm really rich', but let's take a look anyway.


Average concrete cost is about $150 per yard, plus about $100 per yard for delivery. We're not building an average wall, but let's use $250 per yard anyway:
306,074,560 yards * $250 per yard = $76,518,640,000 cost of concrete


Now keep in mind that this is concrete suitable for a driveway, not a Great Great Wall. We're going to need better cement and a lot more rebar. Why more rebar, you asked? Good question.... concrete by itself isn't very strong, especially against impact, like a bunch of people banging on it with sledge-hammers. 


It's the rebar (steel reinforcing bars) that makes it strong. I'm not going to go into a long calculation on how much rebar we need.... I think you'll believe me when I guess it will be a sizeable percentage of the steel production in the US for the year.


Let's leave the cement and move on to another issue: how are we going to get all of this cement, sand (you can't use just any sand), aggregate and water, to say nothing of the concrete mixing plants, wood for forms, workers, etc., etc., etc. to the border? I just looked at the entire US/Mexico border (the wonders of Google Maps!) and found there are almost no roads within a few miles of the border. Uh-Oh!


Looks like we're going to have to build a 1,954 mile road along the border, along with another 1,000 miles of access roads to get there. Let's see.... asphalt costs.... no, wait, I'm not going through that again. Let's use $10 million per mile to get us $30 billion cost for our access roads.


There's also 2 rather large lakes right on the border in Texas... I guess that will be a management decision how to deal with them.


Oh, and as my wife (also an engineer, BTW) pointed out: we're building roads to these desolate areas where no-one in their right mind would ever cross the border because it's an un-tracked wilderness, so anyone who manages to get over or under our wall won't have any difficulty moving north.


Returning to our Great Great Wall, let's consider that an average of 3,500 men poured  160,000 yards of concrete per month for 2 years to build a structure with about 1/100th the size of our wall. We'll get lots of savings using modern tools and techniques, but it's still going to take just about every concrete installer in the country.... which doesn't matter much when you consider we're going to need all the concrete produced in the country in order to get this done in a year.


Let's say we're 10 times as efficient: we need to pour 159 times as much concrete per month with 1/10th the manpower, so that means we need about 55,650 workers. Most of the border is really desolate, so we have to feed and house them.... let's figure fully-burdened labor costs at $100 per hour (ridiculously low, IMNHO) so that's about $1.1 billion per month.


I'm not sure what the total estimated cost for our Great Great Wall would be - too many variables - but suffice to say it would be at least a couple hundred billion dollars, provided, of course, you can get all the materials and labor you need.


Oh, one more thing: a good bit of the land on the border doesn't belong to the US government, so we'll have to work out how to buy it. I'd say 'just take it', but that might get the Cliven Bundy crowd frothing at the mouth again, and we don't want that, do we?


And, of course, all of our calculations will have to be re-done if Home Depot decides to sell a 60 foot ladder in Mexico, but let's not go there, OK?
At least our Illustrious Poobah has told us that Mexico will pay for it!


LATE BREAKING: Scott Walker, in a desperate attempt to prove that he's still relevant, has floated the idea of a wall on the border with Canada!!!


Let's see..... the US/Canada border is 5,525 miles long...... the tallest ladder for sale at Home Depot in Canada is 60 feet, so we better go for 80 feet high....... we'll have to cross the Rocky Mountains with this wall, as well as 4 of the Great Lakes and a lot of the border in Alaska is virtually inaccessible, but none of that matters!



I'm just really, really glad that nobody in Central America has ever gotten the idea to build a boat and sail to Florida.