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Tokyo's Underground Discharge Channel
- zuypaweu 7y agolooks like a mirror's edge scene.. :)
- melling 7y agoSaw this BBC story on it last year: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181129-the-underground-cathedral-protecting-tokyo-from-floods http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181129-the-underground-cat...
- k_sze 7y agoIs intake into that discharge channel controlled? Flash flooding is a thing. In Hong Kong, the Drainage Services Department puts up warnings and runs TV ads to tell people to stay clear of discharge channels, lest they get swept away by flash flooding during heavy rains. So if intake into the discharge channel is not controlled, isn't it kinda dangerous to film there?
- thaeli 7y agoThe "temple" where filming is done is a secondary reservoir, it only receives water after the primary detention silos are full. So there is plenty of warning.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoIt's amazing just how much stuff there is under Tokyo - not just infrastructure like this and the usual transport links but entire multi-storey shopping malls. There's almost a whole city beneath the city. It's possible to travel for miles without ever seeing daylight!
- Iv 7y agoMy favorite part is the JSDF underground bunkers where they store the giant robots used for disaster relief.
- bamboozled 7y agoWhere is this and how do I see it ?
- barry-cotter 7y agoIt’s a joke, a mecha robot reference.
- ekianjo 7y agoOsaka has also massive undergrounds. Not as large as Tokyo's of course, but massive nonetheless.
- spike021 7y agoEven just the transportation infrastructure is incredible to me. I was just there and it was honestly amazing to me how deep the metro stations can be. Multiple long escalators/stairways from surface to platform.
- getya-ass-2mars 7y agoQuaid... Start the reactor...
- Theodores 7y agoTokyo was a city of canals before the Allies firebombed the city. Apparently the canals boiled due to the incendiaries used, so there was no escape from the fire during that tragic phase of life in the city. 100,000 deaths in one night is a statistic that few people think about, the Nazi death camps worked at a glacial pace in comparison, the craziness of WW1 campaigns gains a new perspective too, the bombing of Tokyo, with the loss of those canals, was something else. Hard to imagine. So we don't talk about it. Tokyo was built on an estuary so the canals came from the management of the water that was already there. The final evolution being the water being pushed completely underground is pretty predictable. Other cities have dealt a similar fate to their rivers, London being a prime example where only the Thames is really 'welcomed' as a river, everything else is kind of banished underground.
- ekianjo 7y agoDresden was also completely destroyed by Allies (for no good reason) and its firebombing caused between 200 000 and 300 000 victims (largely women, children and elderly). We don't talk about it much even though it was a crime against humanity as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_Wa...
- bamboozled 7y agoFrom the Wikipedia article supplied: “Large variations in the claimed death toll have fuelled the controversy. In March 1945, the German government ordered its press to publish a falsified casualty figure of 200,000 for the Dresden raids, and death toll estimates as high as 500,000 have been given.[15][16][17] The city authorities at the time estimated up to 25,000 victims, a figure that subsequent investigations supported, including a 2010 study commissioned by the city council.[18]” It’s a tragedy none the less but that figure doesn’t seem actuate ?
- contingencies 7y agoA single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. - Stalin Regardless of the deaths, I understand the cultural tragedy of the destruction of Dresden is significant as it was an important intellectual center. I had a friend who passed away recently who was a boy in the bombings and recounted with tears on multiple occasions, as a lifelong opiate addict, how he felt he had personally died at that time. I visited the city a few years ago and found the largely depressing husk of a city still under wishful reconstruction. The nominal activity of its touristic center was at direct odds to the clearly economically depressed suburbs mere moments away.
- jhurwitz 7y agoAs of last year, they now offer hourly guided tours 7 days a week for about USD$10. (In fact, I was just there earlier today!) Note: it's about 1.5 hrs (each way) from Tokyo, and you need someone in your group who can speak Japanese. Reservations here: https://reserva.be/guidetour https://reserva.be/guidetour
- 240dl 7y agoHere are some pics from when I took this tour last year: http://www.lucashayas.com/journal/2018/11/18/maoudc http://www.lucashayas.com/journal/2018/11/18/maoudc
- 60654 7y agoThese enormous underground projects are so interesting. I've been following the Chicago Deep Tunnel project, which is nearing completion after half a century of work.[1] Because Chicago was built on swampland and next to the lake, rainwater used to be a huge problem because it didn't have anywhere to go when it rains, except into sewers - which used to be well under capacity for burst rainfall, which led to basement flooding etc. So the city is building (and almost finished with) a set of huge tunnels across the entire city that regular sewers will drain into during flash floods, and then pump the water out to reservoirs repurposed from abandoned quarries on the edge of town. The target capacity is 17 billion gallons, which is apparently the volume of twelve football stadiums stacked together? [2] I'd love to tour that construction. Not sure they offer public tours though. :) [1] https://interestingengineering.com/chicagos-deep-tunnel-project-holds-17-5-billion-gallons-sewage-underground https://interestingengineering.com/chicagos-deep-tunnel-proj... [2] https://www.mwrd.org/irj/portal/anonymous?NavigationTarget=navurl://9c5c7fe35c89b6ac5694df01de50b07c https://www.mwrd.org/irj/portal/anonymous?NavigationTarget=n...
- TenaciousValor 7y agoMilwaukee, WI is building a Deep Tunnel project as well. It's certainly not as large as Chicago's, but the need is similar (city built on swampland). They are, after all, neighboring cities on Lake Michigan. https://www.mmsd.com/what-we-do/wastewater-treatment/deep-tunnel https://www.mmsd.com/what-we-do/wastewater-treatment/deep-tu... https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sewer-diving-milwaukee-tunnel/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sewer-diving-milw...
- swarnie_ 7y agoMassive side not - I have no idea why you guys insist on using football stadiums and football fields as a unit of measurement, what gives?
- justusthane 7y agoJust a handy visualization - easier to conceptualize than "12.9 billion gallons."
- howard941 7y agoRelated previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15436943
- amluto 7y ago> 78 10 MW (13,000 hp) pumps that can pump up to 200 tons of water into the Edo River per second.[4] Wow, I hope the grid can handle the relatively sudden appearance of 780 MW of load. I assume they have some protocol in which why turn on one pump at a time and coordinate with the grid operators.
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- gmueckl 7y agoI'm a bit worried that systems like this make the continued existence of large cities dependent on the availability of power and the resilience of power grids. It all works well enough usually, but when things go wrong, systems like that can make a bad situation a lot worse.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pdx_flyer 7y agoLooks similar to the old Houston cistern - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2016/05/13/150402/buffalo-bayou-cistern-opens-to-public/ https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/2016/05/13/...
- needle0 7y agoI've been there. The containment tank is positively MASSIVE, way more huge than what can be conveyed from those pictures. It took a good 3-5 minutes of walking down stairs just to reach the bottom of the tank floor, and once you're down there it takes some more to appreciate the expansiveness of it all. Definitely recommended if you're in the area.
- zeptomu 7y agoFun fact: There is a software for modelling drainage systems called SWMM (Stormwater Management Model) that has been around since 1970s (!) and is programmed in C and released as free software. Still most modern drainage and sewer research is modelled via this software and there are several companies that built a GUI for simpler usage. However the core is often still based on this nearly 50 year old software which I find amazing [edit: it has been updated since then and originally it was written in Fortran]. The model has hydraulics and hydrology capabilities [0], i.e. it can model stuff like pipe pressure but also takes infiltration of stormwater (aka "rain") into the surface into account. When using it you have to define your sewer (which is mostly a directed graph) and so called catchments where you define which areas drain into which nodes (inlets) by defining parameters like impervious area, slope, etc. You can then let it rain on your area of interest (e.g. a city) and find out which nodes get flooded at specific points in time (or hopefully not). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Water_Management_Model#Hydrology_and_hydraulics_capabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_Water_Management_Model#H...
- HankB99 7y agoThe picture "Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel" is startlingly similar to one of the scenes in the Mines of Moria (Lord of the Rings - Peter Jackson's movie.)