Strange Things are Afoot...

15 years ago
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43 Responses:

  1. fo0bar says:
    15 years ago at 10:37 pm

    Gas or liquid?
  2. vxo says:
    15 years ago at 10:45 pm

    Strange. Usually they just use that roll-up PVC hose that looks like really cheap'n'nasty firehose.
  3. thegreatdoogie says:
    15 years ago at 11:06 pm

    PG&E...isn't that the company from the Erin Brocovich movie?
  4. romulusnr says:
    15 years ago at 11:29 pm

    I think it's good though that they put the barrier where the pipe is... not, say, around where the water is going.
  5. evan says:
    15 years ago at 11:33 pm

    Is that in your neighborhood? There was a bunch of that going on at, uh, maybe 19th and Valencia tonight.

    It's like they're bloodletting the water system...
  6. sc00ter says:
    15 years ago at 5:02 am

    If there are more pointed in the same direction I say it's a big plot to get the earth to either slow down, or speed up.
  7. foozini says:
    15 years ago at 5:41 am

    This could also be an area where there is steam piping or simple water piping. If they have had a major leak and water is spewing everywhere in the tunnel area, it is kind of hard to work on the actual piping when it is under a dozen feet of water, so they drop in a submersible pump and let it rip to get all of the water out of there and into the sewage system instead.
    • phoenixredux says:
      15 years ago at 7:09 am

      That's far too logical for LJ at this early hour. Please try again, and try to incorporate robots, mutants or Cthulu.
    • badc0ffee says:
      15 years ago at 10:26 am

      Nitpick... water spewing out onto the street would probably end up in the storm drains, not the sewer. When you mix up the two you end up with 18th century London.
      • foozini says:
        15 years ago at 10:37 am

        Ah...good point. Knowing what the different drainage systems in an area are is always a good thing to know. Particularly when you are running that extra fiber connection across the street unbeknownst to the local authorities... ;)
      • scullin says:
        15 years ago at 11:48 am

        Or 21st century San Francisco -- there's no separation between sanitory and storm sewers in San Francisco.
        • badc0ffee says:
          15 years ago at 12:12 pm

          I guess it's possible that's the case, but how does it explain this:

          http://www.cockeyed.com/lessons/storm_drains/drains.html

          The sanitary/storm systems are separate because you don't need to treat street runoff. You're just moving the rain off the street and letting it "fall" to the nearest body of water. If the street drains went directly to the sewer, the streets would smell bad, and you'd have a horrible problem on your hands if the sewers backed up during a heavy rainfall.

          I heard that parts of New Orleans had combined storm/sewer, but I figured San Francisco was too new and too wealthy.
          • scullin says:
            15 years ago at 12:38 pm

            Those little warning labels don't appear in San Francisco proper that I've noticed, just all surrounding areas. Not that the storm sewer doesn't flow into the bay or the ocean eventually, but unlike most separate storm sewers, it's treated first. As a result San Francisco sewage treatment plants have to handle huge surges in volume relative to a city with separate sewers. As this notes, New York, Boston and Philadelphia also have combined sewers.
            • cananian says:
              15 years ago at 8:59 am

              Yes, in Boston/Cambridge we have combined sewers, which is why the Charles River becomes unswimmable after heavy rains. Usually the rainwater and the sewer water both go to the treatment plant together, but when influx is high the (mixed) overflow gets dumped in the river.

              They have been busy digging up roads in Cambridge for years now as part of a long-term plan to separate the two, and the bacteria count in the Charles is slowly declining as bits of the work are completed.
  8. smackfu says:
    15 years ago at 7:22 am

    I like the tension created by not knowing where the water ends up.
  9. roninspoon says:
    15 years ago at 7:59 am

    I saw something similiar a year ago while driving past a hotel construction site. Except the pipe was easily 8" in diameter and instead of popping out of a manhole, it was being held up by the bucket of a front end loader and instead of water shooting out it was a jet of flame that shot about 6' into the air and sounded like a jet engine, which I suppose it may have technically become.
    • vxo says:
      15 years ago at 12:22 pm

      That is fucking awesome.

      While driving across 'Alligator Alley' late one night, just after leaving Naples, I saw to the north the mechanism used for 'flaring' off natural gas from an oil rig. (Yes, there is oil drilling in Florida, and it's right the heck next to the Everglades. You pansies think drilling in the Gulf would be anything new?)

      It looked like a GIANT rendition of the Olympic torch - a large pan on top of a tower, filled with flame. I suspect the pan thing may have been full of water, so the gas had to bubble through that and fire could not travel back down the pipes...

      It was friggin' cool. Wasteful, considering you can get a nice turbine engine unit from Capstone that'll generate you a good 50 kW of power off that instead of just flaring it, but... cool.
      • benfrantzdale says:
        15 years ago at 9:43 pm

        See gas flare.
      • foozini says:
        15 years ago at 10:40 am

        Hrm...I suppose this is a bigger rendition of the burning flames you get off the top of your local Mt. Trashmores down in south Florida.

        All that methane gas created from rotting garbage has to go somewhere, so they have pipes leading down into the depths of the piles of trash to collect the methane and push it to the surface in a controlled manner, at which point they burn it off.

        I guess it is better than letting it collect in low-lying areas for a random spark to ignite it and set everything else aflame as well (for instance, the constantly burning tire piles in The Simpsons).
    • jkow says:
      15 years ago at 2:54 am

      you don't happen to talk about this? ;-)
  10. dojothemouse says:
    15 years ago at 10:05 am

    My bad.
  11. taffer says:
    15 years ago at 1:03 pm

    "This town needs an enema!"
  12. eviltwinii says:
    15 years ago at 3:15 pm

    I think the earth stopped rotating years ago, and the government has yet to tell us.

    This is how they keep things spinning. Somewhere in China there is another one pointed in the opposite direction.
  13. benfrantzdale says:
    15 years ago at 7:27 pm

    ...at the Circle K?
  14. transgress says:
    15 years ago at 10:09 am

    completely OT, but you are the best person I know of to ask this:

    I've had a slight disagreement with another on the origins of Mozilla/Firefox, I was under the impression that Mozilla was a 'direct descendent' of the netscape code base, while another is telling me that:
    'Netscape (the company) started the Mozilla project. The Mozilla browser
    was written from scratch as an open source project and aquired a
    significant user base even before release 1.0, which is when Netscape
    (the company, then owned by AOL / Time Warner) took a snapshot of the
    code and rebranded it as Netscape. That's why the Netscape brand name
    basically went off the map. People were used to the non-commercialized
    grass root project name so there was never any point to use the rebranded
    version unless you have some kind of brand loyalty towards the [basically
    dead] Netscape browser.'

    I personally find it hard to believe netscape rewrote the browser to make it open source, but of course I could be wrong there, so I figured you would be the best to ask.
    • jwz says:
      15 years ago at 6:15 pm

      I think this page should clarify things.
      • transgress says:
        15 years ago at 9:15 pm

        while i can appreciate your desire to not have to type, you have to realize that there is indeed conflicting information on the internet. You have the majority of websites that say mozilla was an offshoot of netscape 6 and 7, then a few websites say otherwise, thus my comment in hopes that a first-hand source was able to disabuse one of us.

        Seeing as the internet is often a cesspool of rumors and disinformation, i don't think it was really so hard to state one way or the other.
        • jwz says:
          15 years ago at 10:12 pm

          Yes, the browser currently known as Mozilla is a direct descendant of "Mosaic Netscape 0.4", circa 1994. And yes, it was almost completely rewritten between the source code release in 1998 and the eventual release of a working browser in 2002, and this was done largely by people who were at the time in the employ of AOLTWNSCP. And anything called "Netscape 6" or later is probably a re-branded "Mozilla 1.something". So whoever you're arguing with is wrong, but not totally out of the ballpark.

          Mozilla is the internal name of Mosaic Netscape and Netscape Navigator and Netscape Communicator and Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox and Netscape Application Suite and the user-agent used by Microsoft Internet Exploder and a corporation and a non-profit foundation; and Netscape is a corporation and a web browser and a web portal and a division of AOL and a discount dialup internet service and a re-branded Mozilla. What could be simpler?
          • transgress says:
            15 years ago at 10:45 pm

            despite the sarcasm at the end (to de expected), I do appreciate the reply, thank you for solving the mystery.
          • oosabeansaladen says:
            15 years ago at 12:35 am

            "What could be simpler?"

            Indeed!! :)

            I'm the one he had a disagreement with ( I may have read too much disinformation myself *cough* slashdot *cough* so er, whatever.
          • transgress says:
            15 years ago at 1:10 am

            It was suggested that you were behind the javascript in netscape, not sure if that was correct I went to google and started digging around, and in that time I ran across more official timelines of the browser than what I had previously found on wiki,etc. Sorry for bothering you into a reply when I just hadn't looked on google in the 'right way'.

            None the less, 10+ years later, time has showed you to be both correct and incorrect about being doomed.
  15. miguelitosd says:
    15 years ago at 5:42 pm

    Twice now in the last 3 months my neighborhood has just completely lost water. As in, I flushed the toilet and it was obvious something was wrong.. followed immediately with an exclamation of "Oh shit." Both times related to a construction project for some condos that noone in the neighborhood wants up on the main drag. Wheee....

    Nothing like spending the whole day without being able to flush (unless I got a bucket of water out of my pool) nor being able to take a shower (that's the one that drives me nuts). Got 2 days off *cough*working from home*cough* because of it though. OK, so I actually did do work and got a lot done those days... no interruptions from people asking questions.