Everyone loves stories about a good, quirkily futuristic solution to a major disaster, even if it doesn’t work yet. They offer us a snappy, cheerful plot point for any ubiquitous catastrophe saga that’s starting to just depress everyone. Like, during the BP spill, we got of coverage of dubious oil-sucking machines invented by a famous actor’s brother, and a new polymer that could turn oil into gel that was far from the prime-time.So, it makes a sense that post-Sandy, a bunch of news outlets are running stories on a gigantic inflatable subway being built by the Department of Homeland Security to keep terrorists out of our transit tunnels. Here’s CNN:“Huge inflatable plugs — now being developed by the federal government to protect subway tunnels from terrorist attacks — likely could have saved some of New York’s subway tunnels from storm-related flooding, according to plug developers, some of whom are wistful that development wasn’t completed in time for Hurricane Sandy.”Popular Science did a video on the plugs back in April:CNN has a newer video:Deeper into the story, we find out that these things are still two years away from use, and have only been successfully tested once.“This is an experimental prototype. This is something that is probably two years away or so from real-world applications,” says John Fortune, the project manager. Which means there are still clearly a lot of practical questions left to be sussed out before we stuff our subway tunnels with massive balloons. Still, it’s a novel idea, and may prove useful under certain circumstances. Count me in for more subway-plugging inflatable balls.
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