
Zimbabwe residents synchronize toilet flush - gregcohn
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AF_ZIMBABWE_WATER_CRISIS?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
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ChuckMcM
So many of my younger days were spent in Las Vegas and I remember reading
about the very real problem of a 5000 room hotel having synchronized flushing.
They could run low on water pressure and as a result tanks would not refill,
which meant a toilet bowl with no water and sewer smells could come back into
the room.

As it turned out one of the big bad guys was their porno video channel. It ran
basically continuous movies from some flat fee, and whenever a movie ended a
large number of flushes would happen, enough to cause a few dry toilets while
waiting for pressure to come back up. Their "fix" was a hack to offset the
feeds to various floors to move the breaks up.

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srj55
Haha, Is this true? ...reference?

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ChuckMcM
Yes, but so far I've been unable to cough up the Review-Journal article on it,
it would be from 1977 or 78 which is sadly pre-web.

Similar effect : <http://www.wwdmag.com/super-bowl-flush>

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dawernik
There's something beautiful about simple low tech solutions that require
cooperation or blunt force - even if it doesn't work.

I once dropped a car into a creek in a third world country and it was deep
down a ravine off a cow path. In America, that thing would still be rusting
away. But a couple trucks, some super winches and two big guys working for
four hours moving it inch by inch by leveraging trees and rocks later and...
Thing came out with hardly a scratch.

Again, don't know if it will work, but love these types of solutions as a
first line of attack before some over architected solve. Im sure there are
some good engineering analogs as well.

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zalew
> I once dropped a car into a creek in a third world country

story, please

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hinathan
This reads like satire — I mean it's a clever idea but I feel like it falls
into the 'too cute' category, subject matter aside. Will be curious to see a
follow-up as to whether it worked, was a disaster, or turned out to be a hoax
or publicity stunt.

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ojiikun
This might not work as well as they'd think.

We did an experiment in my primary school physics class: hook a fluid pressure
sensor up to the class faucet and start graphing the water pressure. We then
sent a team to the restroom to flush a toilet. Then two at the same time. Then
four. Around eight, the combined flush lowered the water pressure so much that
many of them simply refused to work.

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ars
Commercial toilets don't usually have tanks and rely on water pressure for the
flush.

But (most) home toilets have tanks that act as a buffer and can flush even
with no water pressure at all.

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antman
If this is successful, it will cause a "water hammer" which will effectively
destroy the sewage network. In hotels there is a high pressure pipe without
locally storing water so if everybody flushes together there won't be too much
water. In an apartment building or small hotel the local storage is enough to
destroy the building's sewer.

It's like if when you had a network congestion the cable broke!

The schools in my country go once a year a trip, usually staying in a hotel.
It was sort of customary the day they left the hotel to do the synchronized
flush thing to see if the hotel survives. The one I witnessed had a sort of
thundering noise and the network bursted in a couple of places.

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gregcohn
My understanding is that most water pumping and sewage systems are vacuum and
pressure driven and reversible -- ie there aren't closing one-way valves
between your toilet and the sewer pipe; it's more a system where the 'pressure
in' provides the 'pressure out'. Isn't it possible that this could lead to
reversal or other catastrophic events -- like in the sense of sewage backing
up into freshwater supplies, or massively out some exits in the system (ie
some people's toilets)?

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chaostheory
This article is interesting to me because it highlights a symptom of a more
commonly occurring problem, even here in the US. Drought or the dwindling
supply of cheap drinking water is yet another problem we need to solve.

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mynameishere
It would certainly empty out the public water towers or cisterns in a hurry.

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krisoft
Exactly my thoughts. If any civil engineering out there could answer the
question: Could this type of coordinated action lead to some 'cascading
failure' in the water system? Or it would just drastically reduce the
pressure, and that's it?

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jordanb
Toilets have their own reservoirs, so the flush wouldn't have any effect on
the supply side of the system. And I think that's the point: there's more
water stored in distributed toilet reservoirs than the city could dump in
through a centralized point.

Refilling them all at once may exceed the city's ability to supply pressure
though. If pressure is provided by pumps, they'll increase their flow rate to
maintain pressure until they reach their maximum rate, at which point the
pressure will fall.

On the sewer side, I could see the flush creating water hammers that damage
various parts of the system.

I could see them reasoning that they can do the flush and then go ahead and
repair any water hammer damage, and that will be easier overall dealing with
thousands of blockages.

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malkia
That sounds like a new olympic discipline!

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PaulMcCartney
Did it work? The article does not say

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ThaddeusQuay2
Synchronized flushing won't change the fact that Zimbabwe is a fucking
shithole. This kind of "let's cross our fingers and hope for the best" measure
was never necessary when the place was called Rhodesia, because when Whites
were in control, they knew how to engineer around droughts. If Mugabe's
government would simply stop killing Whites, there might be enough left to
help out with such situations, even if they are in the minority.

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cup
This is a beautiful statement in regards to how ignorant and racist it is.
Zimbabwe, despite It's history of turmoil and colonial exploitation, is on the
verge to economic security and prosperity. I recently met some government
ministers from Zimbabwe at a network security conference in Malaysia where
they had been instructed by their government to not come back until they
understood how to develope respectable and effective network infrastructure
that would support the local people.

Sure Zimbabwe and many other African countries have issues, but so does every
country around the world. The constant perpetual negative cloud that people
associate Africa with really denegrates the vast growth and improvements the
continent has recently gone through.

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ThaddeusQuay2
I'm a race realist, and the racial reality in sub-Saharan Africa is that
blacks have very low IQs. No amount of foreign aid and wishful thinking will
change this fact. You say that it is "on the verge of economic security and
prosperity" with the government wanting to "develop respectable and effective
network infrastructure that would support the local people", yet you
conveniently leave out the fact that Zimbabwe, as Rhodesia, already had all of
these things. Whites created economic security, prosperity, and an overall
infrastructure which supported everyone, including blacks. It wasn't perfect,
just like in South Africa, but it worked, and it did so due to Whites applying
their knowledge and creativity to solve hard problems. The current majority,
over the last few decades, has been slowly dismantling the civilization which
Whites created, while simultaneously drastically increasing the amount of
foreign aid the country now needs.

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patdennis
I love your website. <http://thaddeusquay.com/>

edit: I don't really love your website.

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ThaddeusQuay2
What's on my website doesn't change the facts on the ground in the former
Rhodesia. Unlike most people with specific belief systems, I feel that I can
be objective about anything.

