Redstate

At this point, at times he'll direct people to carry out an operation (Ex: Yo, AMZ - go and target the US) and then al-Zarqawi would be like (Yo, Jordanian associate - find some peeps to target the US) and then the silly non-engineer "Walter Mitty"s (credit: Streiff) will plan the op.  

Good for us.

Heard him on TV this morning. His first comment wasn't that it was great to see that our intelligence agencies had uncovered and prevented this plot. No, the first thing out of his mouth is that this proves that Bush needs to reallocate more Homeland Security funding to his area.

As usual, no matter what the Administration does right, the Dems will find a way to make an anti-Bush spin out of it.

About breaching dams with explosives. I hope they waste their time and resources planning those kind of attacks. It would be incredibly foolish to try to do anything to those targets when there is no shortage of soft high casualty targets around.

Allah can make the water flow uphill!, The Prophet, praise be his name, made a mountain move and turned the infidels wine into goatsmilk!

  All is possible, Death to unbelievers! Death to the Great Satan. Death to everyone!

Not a bad idea. But in hindsight, looking at the makeup of the tunnels, blowing it up enough that the resulting rubble doesnt plug the breach caused would be difficult. A small breach (say 200-300 gpm) could be handled by pumps. It would require time to set up, and would eliminate use of the 7 line, but would be doable.

I'm wondering if a full bore tunnel breach (not that feasible) could flood tunnels all the way out to brooklyn, given the interconnectivity of the system.  

Still, a bomb in a subway tunnel would still be bad, just not as calamtous as I originally thought.

would indeed result in both tubes of the 7 being flooded, possibly as far as Times Square, I'm pretty sure the trackbeds of the Shuttle and the uptown lines you mentioned would still lie slightly above sealevel. Is there any documentation on this?

Whenever the propeller-hat crowd at the CIA-Ops develops a tin-foil hat with the proper frequency to intercept UBL's ethereal maniacal emanations (that is a lovely turn of phrase BTW, Marcus) to the DNC/Kos bunch, the nyt will faithfully report that to al queda. On the front page, above the fold, as is the usual location for their coded super-secret missives.

Of course, if somebody just borrowed Little Dick Durbin's hat for just a coupla days, we would not have to expend all the R&D money.

and prone to deliberate archaisms.

As I recall, the breach of the Chicago Tunnel Company's tunnel in '92 was dealt with fairly expeditiously.

a fascinating article about how more than 300,000 people were ferried off Manhattan by boats on 9-11. It was the largest evacuation by boat since Dunkirk and was similar to it in the sense that everyone with a boat on the river that day picthed in to help.

From Captain's Quarters

First, if the ties to Zarqawi can be verified, it underscores the necessity of continuing pressure on the only al-Qaeda network with obvious operational capacity. Zarqawi wanted to exploit Iraq in order to keep the Iraqis from forming the first representative democracy in the Middle East, but also to get financing for his network to sponsor other attacks abroad. Osama bin Laden publicly called on him to broaden his operations to the United States, and it appears that he tried to do so. His death not only made it a little easier for us in Iraq -- rolling up hundreds of his agents -- but also made America safer.

Exactly. I argued al-Zarqawi's ties to external plotting many times before his death, and believe this is a more important effect of his death now.

According to Fox (h/t Hotair), an "anonymous souce" says it was aimed at the Hudson Tubes (PATH), which are below sea level.

running after 9-11? I recall there was flooding in the tunnels under the WTC.

They invited him, but by the time the mule arrived with the message, Russ Feingold had already gotten the notes for Bin Laden's speech from the Townhouse list and given it for him.  

is the center of the American financial industry, and thus a keep hub of the American economy. Any major attack there will have large-scale repercussions throughout the country in a way that an attack on Chicago or even LA would not. Only an attack on Washington DC might have potentially greater effects on the nation as a whole.

with the MSM's new role for OBL and Al-Zawahiri. They are now spiritual leaders primarily responsible for fomenting violence from within countries indigenous population.

They don't actually oversee operations they inspire them through ethereal maniacal emanations. This way, until we actually kill them the Democrat's can continue to claim we have not eliminated the real threat.

Geez, have you forgotten your propaganda 101?

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The New York Times does it all the time so it must be OK, no?

1. The sheer tonnage of explosives necessary to breach one of the underwater segments of the tunnel. Sure there are Ryder franchises around but you it's doubtful that a fuel-oil/ammonium nitrate bomb would have what it takes to do the job. And that certainly isn't the job for a 'lone wolf'.
   
2. Assuming the bomber is a suicide bomber and thereby ignoring the difficulties in abandoning a large truck in the tunnel and running out in the midst of traffic, the explosive has to be tamped with something of approximate equal mass to the section of wall that it is trying to breach. Blast follows the path of least resistance. If you did set off a big bomb in the tunnel the blast is going to reflect off the tunnel walls, doing some damage but not catastrophically so, and blow down the tunnel. Lots of mangled cars and bodies but the tunnel wouldn't be breached.

He was trained as an engineer.  Perhaps too many years in the desert have caused him to forget his hydrodynamics.  

Or maybe he was at a Conquering The World seminar that day.

Why would they bother to kill 200 people in a subway train and snarl up a river crossing? They've already done much better than that. (In case your answer is "Madrid": they were shrewd enough to know that would be enough to knock Spain out of the GWOT. It won't work on us until 2009 at the earliest.) I don't think they're playing terrorism as a volume game, otherwise they're in even worse shape then they seem to be.

New York is the wrong place to plan an encore, unless they really do have (or will have) a small nuke. I'd worry about Chi or SF.

Breaching a subway tunnel would cause any other subway tunnel connected to it to flood out. That would be a nightmare. You would have to seal off the breached tunnels connection to the system then pump out. the shutdown would last years.

Disabling a major entry point to NYC and flooding a highly trafficked and often congested tunnel would still be a major event.  Especially when coupled with another attack that might have forced people to flee the island.  Think about it.

FYI people haven't called the PATH the Tubes in many years.

if you aren't constrained by size.  A bomb in a shipping container, triggered by a low-power transmitter placed at a busy freeway+railway intersection, could snarl traffic and cause all kinds of damage.  Same for a dam or bridge.  

The key, that the terrorists obviously already get, is to leverage the infrastructure against itself.  Use the high volume of vehicular traffic, seawater, or a reservoir to do the real damage.

Since you need to have a suitcase nuke to do that.  Conventional explosives in a tunnel or bridge will yield a lot more carnage for the effort required.

And yes, I laughed out loud.

A suitcase nuke in Grand Central about 8:00 AM on a Monday makes so-o-o-o much more sense.

ACE experts in Georgia recently discovered that Lake Lanier was down 5 feet, instead of the 3 feet showing on the gauge, because the gauge was not calibrated correctly. I guess they hammered the stick into the mud too far.  

Fortunately they are often the Barney Fifes of the criminal enterprise world, yet it is sobering that they only have to be right once.  Like the London bombers, not especially rocket scientists, but good enough.

We must be ever more vigilant.

And thanks again, bill keller and the treason times, for making the terrorists in our midst harder to detect.....

Was that a subway tunnel? and were there multiple interconnections to other lines.

A little example.

The 7 train crosses the east river. a large breach of the tunnel (obviously difficult to acheive) would flood the 7 line (about 100ft underground which includes grand central and times square. the 4,5,6 lex line uses grand central, and is 30-40 ft below ground level. now that line is flooded. flooding of times square knocks out 1,2,3 serivce, N,Q,W,R service. now all the signal wires are below water. now all power cables are below water.  you would have to plug the offending tunnel on the 7 line (both actually) and then pump out the system.  I dont think years is an off estimation.

exists for the New York side of the North River tunnels into Penn Station and, I think, both sides of the East River tunnels. It was rehabbed between 1997-2003 after years of disuse. (Scuttlebutt has it one test made during the Penn Central era took 24 hours to close!) I can't picture the site well enough to know if there'd be enough overhead clearance for that.

I'd assume the NYC subway has more pumping infrastructure in place, even on a per mile basis, than the Chicago tunnel system, in part because it's constantly dealing with infiltration through vents and so forth, where I'd expect the Chicago system to be more closely sealed. But the damage to the signal systems hadn't occurred to me. You might be able to restore limited service with manual-block rules as happened after the relay-room fire this winter, but I suspect you'd face a shortage of qualified dispatchers quite fast.

I wonder if any detailed projections for the effects of a hurricane on the subway system are available? A storm surge flowing into downtown subway stations would be very similar.

If our enemy is stupid, let's not say or do anything that will make the enemy smarter.

few people have any real appreciation for the art and science of explosives. The enormous mass of earth and water surrounding the tube actually protects it in an explosion, much as a tunnel is safe in an earthquake.

Fortunately the people who engage in this stuff, and the people who "train" them, are more impressed by the idea of the 'bigger bang' than actually using the explosion effectively. If memory serves, in the aftermath of 9/11 Bin Laden and company were elated at the collapse of the WTC --- they did not actually expect that to happen.

that I agree with your 30-40 feet below streetlevel figure; I would guess closer to 40-45 under Grand Central for the non-7 lines and 25-30 under Times Square. But at least according to Google Earth, streetlevel at GC is 50+-2 feet above sealevel, and TS is 48+-2 fasl. Granted that's not a lot to play with, but I think my assertion holds.

While we're at it, could a rapid-drop sluice gate be developed and installed on the 7 tubes to minimize the damage in your scenario? If possible to build, that should save the undamaged tube.