Looking at the destruction after Sandy and thinking about what needs to be rebuilt.
An enormously complex ecosystem has been devastated. Not just the natural world but the human-made world, whoever ‘built that’.
One of the most striking books I have on my shelves is ‘Infrastructure: A Field Guide To The Industrial Landscape’ by Brian Hayes.
Superb photographs and clear, concise explanations of what is going on.
I really recommend thus book to anyone who wants to understand our real world, and get a glimpse of the extraordinary skills of ordinary people who make and maintain this world..
This is what the author says in the preface:
This book adopts the form of a nature guide, but its subject matter is everything that isn’t nature. It is a guide to the common sights of the built environment—the power lines, water tanks, street lights, manholes, traffic signals, cellular-telephone towers—that we pass by every day and yet seldom really notice. In these pages I identify and classify some of the species that inhabit this familiar urban ecosystem. Farther afield, there are more exotic industrial habitats to explore: coal mines, oil refineries, railroad freight yards, power plants, garbage incinerators. These are places that most of us never see close up; many of us would go out of our way to avoid seeing them. But they are nonetheless a part of modern life…
Infrastructure explores, describes, explains and critiques the world we have made for ourselves—the modern technological landscape that has transformed so much of the surface of the planet. The story begins with raw materials, with things that come out of the earth—coal, ores for making metals, oil and gas, as well as other inputs such as water. It covers all the networks that lace their way across the country: power lines, communications channels, roads, railroads, aviation and shipping. And it ends by closing the cycle, with the wastes that go back into the earth.
This book helps you understand what it takes to bring clean water to peoples households, and foul water away from them. What it takes to get electricity to where it is needed. Why there are different kinds of cutoff switches in electricity substations and why flooding one can cause an explosion. Why everything in the electrical delivery industry is done in threes. And many more things you might never think about on any given day, but on which you rely to work 24 hours every day.
An ecosystem, and that system has taken a big hit.
If you want to get an idea of what needs to be done in the Sandy-devastated areas you need the information in this book.
In the next few months we will find out who builds that.
Now you can probably find this information on the web, and that’s good. But for my old-fashioned mind looking through a book like this with its outstanding photos helps me discover the questions I didn’t know I needed to ask.
Disclaimer. I have no connections with author or publishers. I’m just the son of an engineer who honourably served the public in the wartime (British) army and later as part of the sewage disposal industry.