SoylentNews

Freeman writes:

Ars has an interesting article on how a NASA production facility survived Hurricane Katrina and kept the Space Shuttle Program going.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/08/nasa-versus-nature-august-29-2005/

Wood was the facilities director at the time, and as he saw it, drainage was never the issue. The facilities' drainage system could hold a certain amount of water and, given some amount of time, that would eventually flow out. But if the pumps quit at all while the water was still coming, that calculation suddenly gets tragically out of balance.

So that night, the team had to make a decision. It was possible to change the speed of the pumps, but they were water-cooled devices, and pushing them too hard ran the risk of overheating and failure. Ultimately, Wood and company chose to push the throttle—it worked out.

"I never thought there'd be a risk, but the way it was raining, you could look at the roadways and know you were never going to pump that," Wood says. "Our calculation was roughly a billion gallons of water swept out, so we kept the pumps going because you always had some kind of seepage coming back."

That next morning, the Michoud ride out team learned it had accomplished its primary task: the facility wasn't underwater. However, it was seemingly the only thing on Old Gentilly Road—the main manufacturing drag of Michoud—that wasn't.

Original Submission