This just in from the Washington Post!
This comes hot on the heels of a story yesterday on CNN:
No sooner can Trump’s crack construction teams get something done than brand new sections of the damnable wall up and blow over in the wind, or get knocked over by flash floods when their slats, called “bollards”, clog up with floating debris like the grilles of neglected storm drains. Get a load of this:
And this:
Oh, man. That’s embarrassing. Especially after stealing all that money from Pentagon appropriations to do it. That toppled wall was probably supposed to be new base housing for service families, or spare engines for an F-35, something like that. Ouch.
According to WaPo, the only solution to the flooding threat is to open up gates at the bottom, and leave them opened, unattended, for months, until the rainy season has passed. See, it turns out that contrary to all engineering projections, it rains out there in those vast, abandoned border lands, and the run-off creates great f’ing flash floods that Trump’s mighty barricade can’t withstand. So they have to build them with sizeable sluice gates, and, well, when the gates are left open for the duration of the local monsoon season, as sadly they must be, they aren’t really walls anymore. Well, that is to say, they’re still walls aesthetically. Just not functionally. It’s more like they’re oversized cat doors through which most critters, human ones included, can just come and go. Except maybe Rhinos, or Elephants and such, which would be too big for the apertures. If there were ever any Rhinos or Elephants out there, Trump’s Great Big Barrier would still qualify as a megafauna control wall of a sort.
Except they’d probably just push it over.
OK, so anyway, let’s stipulate that the rain problem is handled. Nobody seems to be suggesting what to do about the wind though. Seems it gets really windy out there too. Land o’ Goshen! Both rain and wind! What is this, Mars!? Did the construction crews take a wrong turn and wind up at Utopia Planitia or something!? If it’s going to be windy on a regular basis, that’s a real problem. Those walls have a lot of sail area. There’s not a lot you can do about that, once they’re up. You could slope the sides I guess, but then they wouldn’t be walls again, but more like hills or something.
Oh, and then there’s this – the bad guys, refusing to play fair, have upped the ante with that tunnelling thing they were already known to do pretty darned well:
Tunnels! Dammit! We forgot about tunnels! And so freaking long! 4,309 feet is about 1,000 feet short of a mile. To put it in terms the MAGA people can understand, that’s 14 football fields and change. All of it over two feet wide and five-and-a-half feet tall, with electric lighting, powered ventilation, and a rail system (but apparently no movie theatre), dug through the terrain at an average depth of 70 feet, well under the wall already erected at that part of the border, which goes down only about 20 feet. Nobody’s quite sure how long this subterranean contraband railway had been up and running. A while.
Surprising conclusion in light of all this bad press: TRUMP’S BORDER WALL IS THE SINGLE MOST IDIOTIC POLICY INITIATIVE IN AMERICAN HISTORY. Though that would have been true even if it worked.
I bet those savvy Mexicans are glad they got cold feet and decided not to take up Donald’s offer to pay for the thing, eh? Just think of the buyer’s remorse!
OH, CRAP! WE FORGOT ABOUT LADDERS TOO!!
the needlefish 