Flooding in korea - RC-Monster Forums

JERRY2KONE · **Flooding in korea -** 09.21.2010, 07:39 AM

WOW! We just suffered sever flooding here in Korea. Torrential rains hit this afternoon and left down town central Seoul, Korea crippled. Here on Yongsan US Army Garrison we had areas with more than three feet of standing water with cars floating away just from an hour or so of heavy rains. Here in the Hill house we had to barricade our front door with towels. Luckily we were at home when it hit our area. We have a mud room where we bailed water as it came under the front door and kept it from spreading to the rest of the house long enough until the waters receeded. We were able to keep it at the entranceway bailing about 100 gallons of water and dumping it into our toilets. Our next store neighbor was not home because he was at the airport greeting his wife as she stepped off the plane here for the very first time. By the time they arrived home there was about two inches of water throughout their entire house. While we were bailing water we could see the water rising through a floor level window up to about 3" above the bottom of our front door. No one got hurt though.

pinkpanda3310 · 09.21.2010, 07:50 AM

Is the weather usually that eratic over there? I mean you just had a typhoon not long ago. Good to hear you coped well.

BTW what does your neighbour store?

georgec · 09.21.2010, 08:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pinkpanda3310

BTW what does your neighbour store?

Bondonutz · 09.21.2010, 08:32 AM

Glad all is well in the Jerry Home front, luckly you were home to spare yourself a lot of anguish and cleanup by catching the water as it came in.

JThiessen · 09.21.2010, 09:24 AM

Stay dry Jerry. I have a question.....if the flooding is that bad, how in the heck do you still have electricity to be online??? Must have better infrastructure for utilities than here stateside.

Jahay · 09.21.2010, 09:36 AM

damn hope all is well over there!!!

PBO · 09.21.2010, 03:49 PM

Jerry, glad to hear you stopped the water

A friend has a steep slope into his house with a drain before the door. Needless to say the drain is occasionally unable to keep up with rainfall in storms. He installed a 12V bilge pump (with an internal float switch) into the drain that pumps water a few feet below the height of the door...he's even used a 3S pack to run the pump

BrianG · 09.21.2010, 04:31 PM

Wow Jerry, glad to hear things turned out ok. Mother Nature sure is beating up the earth lately!

PBO: When I was having flooding, I was thinking about getting a 12v sump pump in case power is lost, but then thought that it most likely uses motor brushes, and probably won't last a whole long time. AC pumps are way more reliable (reliability is a big concern in this instance), so I thought about using a regular AC unit powered by an inverter. The AC pump would be powered via the inverter/battery directly, with AC mains (when present) running the pump and charging the battery. The charger would need to auto-select between high current "run mode" and float charge. Of course, a couple of large marine batteries in parallel would be needed for any kind of decent runtime, but better than nothing. A 1/2HP (560w) sump would pull around 50A @ 12v from the battery (factoring in some efficiency losses of the inverter), depending on vertical and distance pump load. Two marine 100Ah batteries would be able to last over 4 hours, more if the pump is actually pulling less current.

PBO · 09.21.2010, 05:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BrianG

PBO: When I was having flooding, I was thinking about getting a 12v sump pump in case power is lost, but then thought that it most likely uses motor brushes, and probably won't last a whole long time. AC pumps are way more reliable (reliability is a big concern in this instance), so I thought about using a regular AC unit powered by an inverter. The AC pump would be powered via the inverter/battery directly, with AC mains (when present) running the pump and charging the battery. The charger would need to auto-select between high current "run mode" and float charge. Of course, a couple of large marine batteries in parallel would be needed for any kind of decent runtime, but better than nothing. A 1/2HP (560w) sump would pull around 50A @ 12v from the battery (factoring in some efficiency losses of the inverter), depending on vertical and distance pump load. Two marine 100Ah batteries would be able to last over 4 hours, more if the pump is actually pulling less current.

The bilge pumps typically fail after 24+hrs of continuous running & they don't transfer water 'uphill' especially well either

We use 2-pole induction motor, single phase pumps (0.50KW - I think) to empty collection pits & general pumping in our boatyards. These things are great & have run continuosly for weeks on end keeping boats afloat. They have a 50mm (2") discharge & move a lot of water (& slurry from our collection pits)...power is of course constant during this process

I imagine there aren't enough swear words available when the power goes during a flood though, that must truly suck!

bryan · 09.21.2010, 07:55 PM

Glad to hear all is well Jerry.

JERRY2KONE · **Thank you -** 09.21.2010, 08:56 PM

Thanks everyone for the kind words. Actually we did not lose power this time. We live on an elevated hill which keeps us somewhat safe. The problem here is that the US Army Core of Engineers in their brilliant thinking sealed off one of our storm drains diverting flow so they can work on something else within Army housing, causing our housing(US Embassy) to receive all of the storm flows through our yards. IDIOTS. I was pissed that this happened and I have let our senior staff know it last night. We have had to suffer in some ways, because we live on their base, but this kind of crap is moronic and now everyone knows it.

We actually faired pretty well in this catastrophy, but the surrounding areas outside the base got hit very hard with flooding over 5 feet in most places. All of our gates were closed due to water standing well over 5 feet. It seems weird to me since the base is only like a mile or two from the Han river, so you would think that water would flow easily and not get so high. When we called for help our local GSO support teams could not even get to the base because of even worse flooding outside of our walls. This weather is somewhat normal for this time of year, but we usually do not have these kinds of porblems on the base. By the time GSO arrived the flooding had done its damage, so they were here late last night cleaning up the mess next store. It was frightening for the kids, but we kept them busy helping keep the water out.

When the GSO team arrived they were amazed that we were able to keep the damage at a minimum with more than a foot of water streaming through our front and back yards.

JThiessen · 09.21.2010, 09:47 PM

Yeah, the good ole Army Core of Dummies.....two years ago we had a week of HEAVY rain out here, and most rivers were flooding, or at their crests. Guess what the Dummies did - they released water from a dam for a test....flooded half a town that hadnt flooded in 45 years. All they had to say was "ooops".

JERRY2KONE · **Educated. -** 09.21.2010, 10:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JThiessen

Yeah, the good ole Army Core of Dummies.....two years ago we had a week of HEAVY rain out here, and most rivers were flooding, or at their crests. Guess what the Dummies did - they released water from a dam for a test....flooded half a town that hadnt flooded in 45 years. All they had to say was "ooops".

Yea and these are all senior educated people with degrees in mechanical engineering. I am surely disapointed seeing their performance over the years. Makes you wonder though about the level of education being taught in our schools these days for rediculous sums of money. Needless to say but we have seen them do quite a few really stupid things in our lifetime. The sad thing is that its always some kind of test that they dream up and we end up paying for their stupidity. The area in question yesterday ended up with more than 5 feet of standing water costing our soldiers about 100 cars, which are now great big paperweights.

pinkpanda3310 · 09.21.2010, 10:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JERRY2KONE

I was pissed that this happened and I have let our senior staff know it last night.

I sure a man of your worldly experience gave them a few pointers on where they might try a little harder.

You still haven't told me the neighbour stores water

(sorry, just my off kilter humour)