I suspect that, like me, you are not a big fan of Herr Drumpf’s beautiful wall. I have not begun to worry about it too much because I still think it’s a fantasy; there may end up being a fence with increased Border Patrol staffing and technology such as sensors and drones, but I really don’t think we’re looking at a 30 foot tall, 6 foot thick, concrete wall all along the Southern border.
This article explores some of the reasons I continue to doubt its progress anytime soon: these things take planning, surveying, and time. I think that his experience building buildings and golf courses makes him think that a wall is easy, but
Compared to building a marble palace or high-steepled church, erecting a wall may seem relatively straightforward. It isn’t. (Just ask the Chinese, whose Great Wall took 2,000 years to build and failed to keep out invaders.) Though most wall designs are fairly simple, builders must adapt to a wide range of terrains, explains Gary Clendenin, a senior hydrogeologist at ICF. The southern U.S. border alone contains desert, wetlands, grasslands, rivers, mountains and forests—all of which create vastly different problems for builders.
“The length of this thing presents challenges that just aren’t typically undertaken in a construction project,” says Clendenin.
And:
Before a single brick is laid, teams of scientists assemble on scene to investigate a litany of details, from bedrock depth to soil chemistry. In the case of the border wall, they would have to traverse the entire length of the proposed path, working in segments to evaluate the region, collect data, develop plans. (This necessity makes the process of erecting walls—especially ones spanning thousands of miles—more challenging than building, say, a 95-story skyscraper.)
“Quite frankly, that would take years to do,” says Clendenin, who specializes in linear projects like railways and roads. McKinnon agrees. One project she worked on, a three-mile stretch of pipeline, is now on year five of field surveys.
Given the important details the article covers, I suspect that, should this current accelerated schedule result in actual construction, within 5 years there will be major collapses of sections, adding a perfect permanent illustration of the quality of his planning, work, and service to the country.
Also, since there’s not a huge oversupply of surveyors, engineers, laborers, concrete plants and trucks, and all the support (housing, food and water, medical care, repairs, etc.) just sitting around near the border wasting away, this will have huge disruptions in nearby communities such that local priorities will get ignored. Again, I just don’t think that this scale of a project will happen quickly because there aren’t enough people to do the job without taking them from other, more productive efforts in our economy.
If only every other horror he wishes to inflict upon us required so much planning and resources!
Open thread
Keith P.
Like a trillion-dollar infrastructure initiative.
Yutsano
Where’s the money coming from? The executive doesn’t have that much discretion to reallocate funds like that and there have been zero spending bills in Congress.
Alain the site fixer
@Keith P.: which has been punted to next year or thereafter. At least improved IF would benefit the economy as a whole; barriers don’t improve border transactions.
Jeff
Mexico is right there. He could hire Mexicans to build it. At this point I think they would be happy to build it. If he follows true to form they’ll build it and he won’t pay them.
jeffreyw
You are over-thinking this. A wall needs to be only enough to keep out the walkers and we see every week how easy it is.
TenguPhule
Trump will use slave labor and his own subcontractors for the wall.
It will fall apart weeks after being erected.
A metaphor for his regime, one can only hope.
West of the Rockies (been a while)
Good info, Alain. Despite the very real difficulties in building said wall, I can already hear low-info conservatives braying, “Just build the danged wall!”
Yeah, easy peazy… a solid work crew, some good Murican-made pick-em-up trucks, badda bing, badda boom, ya got a wall!
TenguPhule
@Yutsano: He will steal it from Treasury. Who would stop him?
Thru the Looking Glass...
Oh hell, back during the campaign season, he said the wall would be higher than the ceiling of the building he was speaking in, which was about 80 feet…
I, for one, will be sorely disappointed if that wall isn’t at least 100 ft high…
Didn’t the French once build a big wall, to keep the other side out? Remind me… how did that turn out?
raven
@Thru the Looking Glass…: The French Wall “English pig dog!
Keith P.
@Alain the site fixer: Doesn’t matter when they punt, really…a border wall would eat up engineers and surveyors for years. Then there’s the inevitable concrete shortages. Since we’re only going to be guying US steel, I can assume we’ll be running out of that, too.
TenguPhule
@Thru the Looking Glass…: It was a line. Fully armed, mined and effective along its front.
But then the Germans avoided it and the government surrendered.
Certified Mutant Enemy
@Thru the Looking Glass…:
Didn’t the French once build a big wall, to keep the other side out? Remind me… how did that turn out?
“Fixed fortifications are a monument to the stupidity of man.”
— George S. Patton
raven
Longer version
Thoroughly Pizzled
He could build an inch-high stretch of cardboard and his supporters would be content. Trump’s masculinity is the real wall!
FlipYrWhig
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.
The Moar You Know
@Thru the Looking Glass…: Germans simply went in through another route, and then the wealthy French industrialists decided that Hitler’s philosophy of letting their German brethren get as rich as they wanted so long as they didn’t mess with the political program sounded damn good, and they signed on.
Funny how you rarely hear about that. Oh, you hear about the “Vichy government”, but that was only the front/fall guys.
Mike in DC
Hmm. 30x6x5280= almost a million cubic feet of concrete per mile. X1000-2000 miles. I am…dubious that such a wall could be built for the relatively paltry sums mentioned. It would be hard to even get started on it before 2021.
gvg
Current republicans run to “fiscal conservatives” which amounts to cheap, spend no money. I don’t believe they will really even expand defense spending. They like budget showdowns. President doesn’t have the power to authorize. Mexico was never going to pay. If he tries to declare war on them, congress may remember they actually have that power and can take it back.
My Uncle was Florida DOT. He told a funny story about an overpass they were trying to build. The pilings were maybe 60 feet long. they kept sinking into the ground and disappearing. Florida has a lot of hidden sink holes and caverns. They used to be pretty hard to find without trial and error and it’s still tricky. I think they had to reroute that road. Houses you just build somewhere else when you find a place like that. We passed on buying a house with a sinkhole near it because we weren’t sure we could get insurance. Trump ignores that the government has to pay for the land and land for access by the constitution. Even just 8 feet wide for how many miles? really adds up to a lot of money. Not to mention court costs for every parcel whose owner wants to dispute the sale or offer. Trump has NO clue. Unfortunately neither do most people.
Years ago the Orlando Sentinal did a piece on what the money goes to in building a mile of road. It broke out the land costs, materials by specific ingredients and amounts and then all the labor costs by job and time. It made so much sense of what had seemed to me to be waste and fraud. Unfortunately I didn’t save that copy and had no idea that reporting was going to go to the dogs within a decade. People need to know things like that. I have read so many articles since with that in the back of my mind.
cursorial
I remember reading an interview with a construction manager who’d built part of an existing border wall. Part of their mandate was that it had to be built without working access to the Mexico side of the border, making it extremely difficult and expensive. His point was that unless Mexico wants us to build a wall, they can make it really difficult just by not cooperating. Or force the US to build the wall set back from the border, leaving some sort of uncontrolled territory on the other side? Add logistics to the list of complicating factors.
raven
@gvg: It took two years for the city to have 100 yards of sewer line that originally went through my yard replaced and cost $300,000.
EBT
@Jeff: Cemex already said it won’t participate. That means we have to either create a new cement industry here (that might actually be a good thing, and thus won’t happen), or import cement from China.
Brachiator
As much as I despise the idea of a wall, I am also outraged by the stepped up harassment of undocumented people, and the degree to which the Trump administration has instilled fear in these people.
There is some indication, for example that income tax filings are down by people who are not citizens, but who can still legally file tax returns and claim refunds and credits. Fear of being caught up in a deportation net, perhaps.
Aside from this, I joke with some friends that if a wall somehow manages to get built, it may be a good time to invest in boat manufacturing companies. A big, huge, long wall is just a p@nis substitute for Trump. But something will probably be built. His supporters, also in need of ego gratification, want to see something. They want to see that the Republicans really love them, and have not simply been fucking them and giving them false promises.
trollhattan
Between/among the fvcking wall and fvcking yuge Pentagon budget bump and fvcking tax breaks for the richie-rich he’s going to crater this fvcking economy faster than you can say “Melania forgot panties.”
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
My maternal grandfather was a highway contractor in the 1920s and 1930s. After a few years on state roads, he got one of the contracts for a six-mile length of US Route 66 in Missouri. The contractors just had to build the road, along the route laid out by the survey teams, and they each had a six-mile length, with about two years allowed to complete the work. Of course, in many cases, they used existing routes that went in the desired direction, which simplified the survey work significantly, and they didn’t have the same level of expectations for the site survey that we do nearly a hundred years later.
But the multiple small contracts for short stretches of road allowed both for faster completion of the initial construction and spread the money around nicely. instead of leaving it all in the hands of a few large companies. Aside from the initial survey and planning work (which cannot, as Alain notes, be rushed), using a system like that for construction would speed up completion of a long-distance piece of engineering, but nobody would be able to get rich off of it, so they won’t handle it that way. That guarantees it will be more fucked-up and much more expensive than it needs to be,
.
Alain the site fixer
@FlipYrWhig: so very glad someone caught my subtle reference! :)
prob50
Between labor and materials this contiguous 2,000 mile structure would might reach a trillion$$. Factor in the fact that many, perhaps even most of this length currently lack roads that would be satisfactory for the necessary construction vehicles and the cost might end up closer to 2 trillion.
Thru the Looking Glass...
@The Moar You Know:
Right… wasn’t this the origin of the blitzkreig? They went north, thru the Netherlands?
And now, we have Drumpf and the Shitzkreig…
Alain the site fixer
@EBT: heard a very interesting program on BBC a few days ago talking about the concrete needs for the project. One startling fact – in 2009-10, China put down more concrete than the US did in the 20th Century! And 2014-15, they increased by half-again. That scale is truly amazing! Compared to that, the amount needed for the wall is piddly, but you’re not wrong about it being a hard push. If Holcim respects the French and Swiss governments’ wishes, then there is a big issue with a source of concrete.
smintheus
The moment somebody backs a pickup truck into a wall that length, it will just tip over from end to end. Good luck pushing it back up.
John Weiss
@prob50: Ever been to Big Bend? I think that two trillion wouldn’t get it done.
Mnemosyne
I assume they’re just going to throw up a chain-link fence and insist that it’s a wall.
trollhattan
@Alain the site fixer:
Interesting. It so-happens cement manufacture is an important source of CO2 emissions, so Trump can up his anti-ante WRT climate change just by this project.
Since the Border Patrol prefers having a line of sight they’re still hoping for fencing rather than walls.
(((CassandraLeo)))
@jeffreyw: I’m going to build a giant wall of ice, and the White Walkers will pay for it.
(first thing I thought of when I saw your post)
JGabriel
Alain the site fixer @ Top:
Which Cheeto Caligula will promptly and incessantly blame on his successors.
Hopefully from a concrete cell.
Lee
There is massive hiring going on with Border Patrol (I’m in Texas so we keep track of these things).
My guess is all they accomplish is increasing Border Patrol to an absurd level.
meander
Another technical issue with concrete is that it can only travel about 1 hour after it is mixed at the central plant (which is why you’ll find concrete plants in the middle of L.A.), so if concrete is the material of choice, a massive infrastructure of plants and trucks will be necessary.
A major political issue to be watching is the Tohono O’odham Nation in southern Arizona. They have ancestral lands on both sides of the border, and they and their allies are opposed to the wall (and are already annoyed by border patrol infringement on their lands). Coverage in the Tuscon news: http://tucson.com/special-section/beyond-the-wall/beyond-the-wall-border-fence-cuts-tohono-o-odham-nation/article_24421a1a-49f2-11e6-b126-535218caaf8f.html
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Mnemosyne: And try to blame the Dems/Deep State for running interference ad foiling their beautiful plan…
Thru the Looking Glass...
@Lee:
Are they getting really cool brown uniforms to wear?
Uh… is Erik Prince involved in ay way?
jonas
@Thru the Looking Glass…:
Well, his sister is the Education Secretary now, so if there’s a grift going on somewhere in the Trump administration (viz. all of it), he’s bound to have his fingers in it.
jonas
@Lee: My understanding is that they can’t scale up border patrol recruitment without dramatically lowering hiring/background-check standards. My guess is they end up sticking a bunch of marginally qualified misfits into jobs where they turn to taking payoffs from the cartels in about 2 nanoseconds and we have a massive scandal on our hands in about two years.
jonas
@meander: The whole thing is going to be tied up in lawsuits for years if it isn’t already. You have Indian tribes, NIMBY ranchers challenging eminent domain claims, environmentalists — a whole bunch of groups who are not going to roll over for this boondoggle.
EBT
@Alain the site fixer: Yeah, we can easily source it from China, just that has both terrible optics and shipping concrete is costly.
Anonymous coward
Re:Big Bend NP. Santa Elena canyon. One place a wall makes less than zero sense.
Eric S.
@Keith P.: The building trades here in Chicago are dominated by Latino and Polish immigrants. I bet we could get some of them to hello us build it?
Lee
@jonas: They already have a scandal every few years with that happening. It will just increase the frequency.
philpm
See, I think what we’ve missed in Drumpf’s plan for the wall is to build it cheap, get the Mexicans to build it, get them all massed right next to it and then have it collapse on them. Problem solved.
I guarantee if you put this idea to any knuckle-dragging bubba, they’d be all over it like flies on shit.
Stan
@Keith P.:
This IS the trillion dollar infrastructure initiative.
Stan
@Thru the Looking Glass…:
No, no, yes.
What we call blitzkreig tactics originated in WW1 with infiltration tactics, and got a lot better once motorized vehicles could be used in combat. The first combat of WW2 was in Poland in 1939.
The Germans’ main effort went through Belgium, then across the Meuse and into northern France.
The Maginot Line worked pretty wellin its tactic function – the Germans basically didn’t even try to attack it. But strategically it was a really massive failure, because it told the whole world that France would adopt a purely defensive posture. They therefore became an unreliable ally. Recall they did nothing to attack the germans while the entire German army was in Poland in September 1939.
So now yeah we have Trump and the Arse-der-welt-kreig. (little pun there on ‘zweite weltkreig’)
Seanly
There is a myriad of reasons why the wall won’t be built immediately. Nor will it be one huge project for $10B, or $20B.
Field work – as mentioned above, surveys, geotechnical, environmental, and cultural resources field work are all required. Even if you junk a lot of the regs, there would still be a lot of other regulations in play.
Site access – some of the more remote areas will need roads capable of supporting regular vehicles. Even if you use nothing but precast concrete panels, you’d still need to pour some fresh concrete. It’s only good in the mixer trucks for an hour, maybe two. Concrete batch plants need a large footprint and you’d have to relocate them every hundred miles. The batch plants require electricity, water, and men. Construction crews also require people. People require food and lodging. Moving crews, concrete, and other material require roads.
Contractors – there’s no way in hell that there would be one giant contract for the entire thing. Contractors have to provide surety bonds and insurance. This isn’t my balywick but I’d imagine there are few contractors in the United States who could secure surety for a project over $1B.
Material – a couple of my previous posts talked about the reinforcing bars & concrete. If you split the project into 4 or 5 years, you might be able to do it with only moderate impact on national material prices (ie, you’re not using up all the reinforcing produced in the US).
Engineering manpower – this would be a bottleneck. Assuming $25B project, the engineering would be $2.5B. That would include much of the field work mentioned above. This amounts to around well over 5000 man-years of production.
They can probably do a high-level estimate (meaning +/-100%) with available knowledge. From that, they could develop a few segments to do first. I imagine a few ‘pilot’ programs would be done in high profile & easily accessible areas. Look for contracts around $100M so maybe a 10-mile stretch. One in CA, one in another state. These could run concurrently (they aren’t that big in the grand scale of things). This would allow Trump to declare WIN while avoiding a disastrous boondoggle of epic proportions. It’d probably run until the end of his first (and only I hope) term.
Ruviana
@Mnemosyne: This is such a dead thread but they could grow wisteria on the fence.
muddy
All the one-truck contractors could band together. /s
During the Gulf War, I was a draftsman at a civil engineers in a rural area, about 20 people all together. The owner was hard core Republican and used to make us listen to visiting R local politicians during work hours. Anyway this guy was just sure we’d be picking up some contracts re-building Kuwait. This wee company with 4 engineers and 3 draftsmen. I had previously lived overseas (oil) and new that the companies you saw over there were multi-national, huge.
But this guy with the tiny company in East Bumfuck was sure he’d be getting a slice of that pie, and I bet a lot of Republican one-truck contractors think the same.
Seanly
@muddy: The old industry joke is that there are 200,000 civil engineers and 100,000 civil engineering companies. Okay, not really a ha ha haha type joke…
CarolDuhart2
There will be cost overruns. Bad Weather, mistakes, resistance to the whole idea. And in the end, people will simply find another rioute. Boats, anyone? Does Canada care about people who just might land on a stretch of beach and walk down to the States on foot, and who won’t cost them anything thereby? And this of course, does nothing about visa overstayers or people who simply hide in an attic somewhere until the coast is clear.
And the costs won’t end there. How much will a wall cost in even routine maintenance, and not wall is really effective without manpower. And this manpower would be located in a place where there are few amenities and a fairly harsh environment. Sounds like an appealing work environment.
Central Planning
John Oliver did a bit on building a wall last week (not two days ago). He had some concrete people, architect, builder, and someone else. There back-of-the-envelope guess for a wall was $1 TRILLION dollars. Even if they were way off and it was $500 BILLION, that is still a crazy amount of money, and money that could be better spend on all sorts of things.
Bonnie
There is also this other problem with the wall: Trump’s ‘big, beautiful wall’ will require him to take big swaths of other people’s land
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/analysis-trump%e2%80%99s-%e2%80%98big-beautiful-wall%e2%80%99-will-require-him-to-take-big-swaths-of-other-people%e2%80%99s-land/ar-BByyNIO?li=BBnb7Kz
He will be using the eminent domain law; so, the owners of the land will probably lose money, too.