Mainstreet USA: Apex, North Carolina
On the way back to RDU airport last week, I followed “old route 1″ which took me to Apex, North Carolina. This is probably as American as it gets.
Yom Kippur: Mystery pumps
Once in a while, I get sidetracked on Wikipedia, often ending up in the strangest places like the Six Day War today. From there it is only a short jump to the Yom Kippur War, which includes Operation Badr, or the crossing of the Suez Canal, at the opening of hostilities.
The Israelis had reinforced the East shore with high sand walls that would have to be breached by Egyptian engineers:
At the water’s edge of the canal, the Israelis constructed vertical sand ramparts that rose at an angle of 45 to 65 degrees and to a height of twenty to twenty-five meters to prevent the Egyptians from landing tanks and heavy equipment without prior engineering preparations on the east bank.
A better way than using conventional explosives had to be found to remove 1,500 cubic metres of sand (roughly 3,000 tons) in 70 different places in the shortest time possible. The solution was quite simple: using portable water pumps and a high pressure water jet, the task could be achieved in a few hours only:
the Egyptian military purchased 300 British-made pumps and found that 5 pumps could blast 1,500 cubic meters of sand in 3 hours. In 1972, the Corps of Engineers acquired 150 more-powerful German pumps. Now a combination of two German and three British pumps cut the time down to only two hours. The Israelis apparently failed to appreciate the significance of the water cannon and expected a much longer completion time for any such effort.
So that is one more unknown use for water pumps. I’d love to find out which pumps were used exactly.
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Welcome
Welcome to Irakli West's personal pages on the Web. I am Danish, live close to Munich in Germany, and run FWnetz, an online magazine and training resource for firefighters. In real life, I am Regional Manager Northern Europe for Paratech and currently training to become a specialist in Urban Search and Rescue as well as Heavy Rescue (it's fun, challenging and serves a good purpose)
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