
Venice without water - okket
http://strangesounds.org/2018/02/venice-water-levels-are-the-lowest-since-records-began-with-some-canals-almost-completely-dried-up-and-it-has-not-stopped-sinking.html
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r3bl
To me it seems like reading this makes one believe that the blood and blue
parts of the "super blue blood moon" had some minor relevancy in all of this
and made the water levels slightly lower than usual.

To clarify, the eclipse part has nothing to do with tides. The "red" part
couldn't even be seen from Italy from what I could find. The "blue" part is
totally arbitrary as well (two full moons in one calendar month).

So, a super moon affected this, the blue and blood parts are more of a
coincidence... I think. Took 15 min to search for all of this to confirm my
initial suspicion, but my search results were filled with the event from a
couple of days ago, so I could be wrong.

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mikeash
An eclipse means the moon lines up with the sun, which adds their tides
together. It’s basically the same as what happens every two weeks when they
_nearly_ line up, so it’s not particularly special, but it is relevant.

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ultimoo
I had no idea the canals were this shallow! For some reason I thought they
were at least 10 meters or so deep.

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JoachimS
The bigger canals must be deeper. But I was also stunned how shallow they are.
Good thing the gondolas ride high.

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twblalock
Some of them definitely are. I've seen motorboats in them. The propellers
would hit the bottom in some of the canals in the pictures.

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jsjohnst
Most of the motorboats in the canals (but not all!) are inboard motors with
very shallow draft (or are small outboards). You don’t generally see
inboard/outboard boats which generally have a deeper draft than the other two.

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wojcikstefan
To an uneducated eye (like mine), Venice looks inadaptable and bound to
struggle, and eventually fail. Buildings require constant repair due to
erosion. Too much water brings flooding, too little exposes mud and filth, and
hinders transportation... I'm very curious to know what counter-measures are
put in place to protect the city from these (and many more) dangers.

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Kagerjay
I went to venice a few years back, there's an outer seawall that protects it
from tides.

Venice also naturally floods all the time, when I was over there the large
square next to the cathedral / church flooded.

When it floods, it usually floods several inches on average

There's a good article on it here

[https://www.visit-venice-italy.com/acqua-alta-venice-
italy.h...](https://www.visit-venice-italy.com/acqua-alta-venice-italy.htm)

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klez
> I went to venice a few years back, there's an outer seawall that protects it
> from tides.

As I said in another comments, no, the wall (MOSE, several walls, actually)
has not been completed yet and is non-operational.

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Kagerjay
hm, didn't know it wasn't operational yet. I just remember seeing a diagram of
it relative to the venice map

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aerovistae
I feel like this is a good thing....it's not going to last, and it gives them
an opportunity in the meantime to more easily clean and repair places that are
normally less accessible.

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fauigerzigerk
I have my doubts. There's probably no standby army of cleaners, builders and
engineers waiting to jump at this glorious opportunity.

I would even guess that the work already in progress has come to a complete
standstill. Surely, they are not equipped for wading through deep mud, and
they have lost their main means of transport.

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gnopgnip
Here in CA we have to wait on the tides to do work on the sewer. It is only
about once every two months that the tides are low enough for certain work

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fauigerzigerk
I got the impression from the article that the water is almost never too low
to use the waterways for transport. If it happens regularly then it's of
course a wholly different matter.

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dredmorbius
The view of the (very shallow) canals of Venice brings to mind the Erie Canal,
which I've been reading up on.

The initial channel was 40 feet wide, but only 4 feet (1.2 meter) deep, with
canal-boats having a draft of 3.5 feet -- leaving 6 inches of clearance
between those and the canal bottom. Given the speed of travel -- about 3-5 mph
(4.8 - 8 km/h) behind a horse or donkey tow -- bottoming out would like not
have been disastrous, but would still have been at the very least, a nuisance.

Considering canals to alternatives, I also realised that one of these was that
the surface was _uniform_ , effectively _flat_ , and immune to the hazards and
treacheries of road-based travel, most especially mud, ruts, and wash-outs. A
canal is the original self-healing substrate.

Even at 5 mph, the constant and smooth travel, as well as the size of the boat
relative to the tow (1-3 horses, boats of up to 78 ft (24 meter) in length),
travel time was cut in half and costs by an order of magnitude. From a note on
the Wikpedia entry:

"Using Clark's Works of Man figures, a mule can draw 60,000 lbs but carry only
250 lbs, which need men to load and unload daily, have a need to carry grain
as well (parasitic weight), and for same tonnages, required far more men as a
labor force, drastically increasing running costs. A 95% reduction is probably
conservative, 250#/30t is 0.4% the expenses, so reduction to 5% costs still
indicates someone is taking a lot of profits."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal)

The Erie Canal was eventually enlarged. But in its day, the initial
configuration was an absolute revolution in transport for the United States.

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dmix
If you watch the video at the end, the sites author is inferring there's some
conspiracy or "unknown" space object or the moons 'eclipse' causing this:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEoPhPoWws4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEoPhPoWws4)

Not sure how much credibility this guy has but it sounds a bit quackish.

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ventureguy1
Junk article on junk site. Low tides are a normal part of life in Venice. I
was Kayaking there a few months ago and Tide tables determine what parts of
the city are navigable by boat. Some canals are indeed very shallow. Been that
way forever. They are dredged periodically to keep them navigable at normal
tides. The larger and deeper canals are always navigable.

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thriftwy
The comment about declining population looks really off. I think most of
protected old town areas lost population compared to 100 years ago. People no
longer cram in tiny rooms, undesirable ground level flats are converted to
shops. Why would this ever be a problem? They have Mestre just over a bridge.

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klez
What I know for sure is that Venice proper (that is, what is in the middle of
the lagoon) has been hemorrhaging residents for a long time now. Residents
strated moving to Mestre and Marghera for various reasons (for example because
they worked there) but also because Venice is becoming a touristic attraction,
not a place people want to live in. Prices for houses are completely insane,
and the fact that people are going away feeds back to a lot of shops (I mean
shops for residents, not for tourists) closing down.

At the moment the isles are home to more or less 55.000 people, while the
majority of the population lives in Mestre and Marghera.

> Why would this ever be a problem?

Because, as I said, there are very few residents in there. Would you still
call it a city or is it more Mestre's tourist attraction?

My parents moved from Venice to Mestre in the 80s, so I was born in Venice but
always lived in Mestre. I'm not sure I resent them for this, in hindsight.

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CydeWeys
Venice isn't a practical place to live for many in the modern world though.
Transportation is horrendously inefficient, land is expensive and no more is
available, and people expect nicer/roomier accommodations than in centuries
past.

It sounds like the people living in Mestre are making the best rational choice
for themselves. There are plenty of other old cities that did not survive with
their way of life intact into the modern age; it is what it is. It made more
sense as a city unto itself in centuries past, but things change with
technological and cultural progress. There is nothing inherently good with
things continuing the way they always have; indeed things remaining stagnant
is often bad, and the people who have been enabled to move out onto the
mainland thanks to modern transportation methods are likely living better
lives now than those who could not do so centuries ago.

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JoachimS
The smell must be fantastic.

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justin66
At least it's winter. The experience in summer would probably be quite awful.

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briandear
Point of fact, according to the story’s opening it said that it robbed
gondoliers or their money and residents of their transportation.

Residents don’t ride in gondolas— that’s for the tourists. Far too expensive.

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isostatic
But they do take the water busses (vaporetti)

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simonraikallen
There is so much talk these days of "rising sea levels" so its kind of ironic
to see the opposite. But I guess changes in weather causes both extremes.

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kaybe
No, this is not expected. Sea level rise occurs because there is physically
more water in the sea (both by weight and thermal expansion). Storms and wind
can alter local sea level as well, as eg el Nino does in the Pacific, but not
in Mediterranean dimensions.

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Kluny
I was surprised to learn Venice only has 155,000 or so inhabitants. For some
reason I thought it was a big city. It's half the size of my small city.

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zakk
Just about 50k people live in the islands... The density is quite low, and
much more people lived there in the past, now for locals it's more profitable
to just rent their flat to tourists, while living in the mainland.

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xattt
Does this coincide with the flood mitigation gates?

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klez
No it doesn't. Mainly because it is not finished and so it is non-operational.

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rayiner
Americans would never deal with that shit. We’d have drained it and paved it
long ago.

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traek
Funny enough, we actually did drain and pave most of the canals in Venice,
California.

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the_mitsuhiko
This would be the perfect time to clean up the city :)

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jordache
is it filthy? do the canals have trash floating? What are you alluding to?

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lkbm
I was struck by the fact that the bottoms of the canals is just mud--no trash
(at least in the photos in the article). The article mentioned the "filth
buried at the bottom of the canals", but they seem remarkably clean.

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ivanhoe
it looks clean, but the smell of that mud, o boy...

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klez
Like greglindahl pointed out in another comment, there are no sewers in
Venice, so that's not just mud. That's another reason for the smell.

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zerostar07
The water is protesting for too many tourists.

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marklyon
Citizens of Tuvalu are disappointed.

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yeukhon
This is interesting. For years, scientists warn about Venice will eventually
go underwater as sea level continues to rise.

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okket
This is the difference between weather (tide) and climate (rising water
levels).

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SlowBro
No comments about global warming and water levels?

