If a flood swamped subway or commuter-rail tunnels, it could devastate an urban area’s buried electrical cables and foul up transportation for days or weeks. That’s not just some fantasy-based, apocalyptic scenario dreamed up to scare us: It actually happened. Twenty years ago, in Chicago, a small leak in an unused freight tunnel expanded beneath the city and started a flood, which eventually gushed through the entire tunnel system. A quarter-million people were evacuated from the buildings above, nearly $2 billion in damages accrued, and it took 6 weeks to pump the tunnels dry.

Is there a way to prevent such a disaster? They don’t make corks or bottle-stoppers that big. Or do they?  Building Blog reports that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s “Resilient Tunnel Project”

…has come up with a prototype 35,000-gallon “plug,” or “enormous inflatable cylinder,” in the words of PhysOrg.com, one that is “tunnel-shaped with rounded capsule-like ends” and “can be filled with water or air in minutes to seal off a section of tunnel before flooding gets out of control.”

The idea is to prevent underground floods from taking down whole subway systems or otherwise destroying subterranean logistical networks, such as telecom cables.

One of the companies that helped design and test the plug has many years of experience with puncture-proof materials: It designed space suits for NASA.

According to Homeland Security,

…the plug itself is made from tear-resistant fabrics—including liquid-crystal polymers—that can expand around irregular surfaces and objects, producing, in effect, an impassable blockade. The plug inflates (with water or air) to dimensions of roughly 32-feet-long and by 16-feet-wide, and holds 35,000 gallons, about the same capacity as a medium-sized backyard swimming pool. When not in use, the plug packs down to a small storage space in the tunnel, ready for remote, immediate inflation in an emergency from the tunnel system’s command center.

I realize that this is not the typical political story that one generally finds here at Occasional Planet. It is, however, a story about knowledge-based, creative problem-solving and imagination at work for the common good of our country—activities worthy of emulation by today’s cohort of Congressional politicians, whose tunnel vision [yes, pun intended] extends only as far as the next election.

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Big-money prize challenges are not exactly a new concept: Think “challenge” grants, The X Prize, the Millennium Prize, or your local public-radio station. [The daddy of them all may have been the Orteig Prize, a $25,000 reward—a major chunk of change in its time—for the first aviator to fly non-stop from New York to Paris or vice versa. Charles Lindbergh captured that prize with his historic 1927 flight,  and the boom in air travel has continued ever since.]

There have been others, of course, but until recently, challenges [as opposed to competitive, or non-competitive, bidding] have not been used to spur creative solutions to big problems addressed by government. Now, there’s challenge.gov, a new site for public and private collaboration on problem solving.

At the new website, government agencies post challenges that are open to citizens. All of the challenges offer prizes—monetary or non-monetary—for accomplishing a particular goal. Some of the challenges are narrowly focused, like the “Game Day Challenge,” a competition for colleges and universities to find ways to reduce waste at their football games.

Some challenges offer significant monetary prizes, with open-ended deadlines that reflect the enormity of the task.  Examples include:

Green Flight Challenge, created by NASA: “…build an aircraft that can fly 200 miles in less than two hours using the energy equivalent of less than 1 gallon of gas per occupant.”  Total prize money: $1,650,000

Bright Tomorrow Lighting Prize, [also known as the L prize], created by U.S. Department of Energy: “to develop high-quality, high-efficiency solid-state lighting products to replace the common light bulb.” Total prize money: $15 million

Others, on a smaller scale, offer citizens a chance to show off their photographic and design skills, tell personal stories that could help others, or share classroom tips. Among them is a challenge, with $12,000 in available prize money, to submit health recipes for school lunches—an extension of First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” anti-obesity campaign. Other smaller scale challenges include:

Poster Contest on Carbon Monoxide Safety, created by the US. Consumer Product Safety Commission: ..”to create a poster that helps raise awareness about the dangers of CO in the home.” $2,750 in prizes

Challenge to Innovate, created by U.S. Department of Education: “…identify and solve education’s most pressing classroom problems.” Individual prizes of $1,000

Sparked by the Obama administration’s Strategy for American Innovation, the challenge clearinghouse introduces “Darwinian pressure in government IT,” said Vivek Kundra, the administration’s chief information officer. “[Challenge.gov] is a fundamental shift in power. This engages the American people as co-creators in solving some of the toughest problems this country has to face.”

The site debuted on Sept. 7, 2010 with 36 challenges from 16 agencies, but undoubtedly, more will appear. All federal agencies are eligible to post challenges, and the site offers an RSS feed and an email update to keep citizens aware of new postings. Maybe someone will post a challenge asking us to figure out ways to get more agencies to think more creatively and…offer more challenges. In the meantime, where did I put those poster paints?

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Food desert neighborhoods are a real problem in America. Here’s a solution and another item for the good government file, from The Baltimore Sun:

An innovative, city-operated food-delivery program in Baltimore aims to tackle the longtime problem of neighborhoods that lack supermarkets…by bringing fresh produce and healthy supermarket fare to residents through a free delivery system that operates with the click of a mouse from the library.

The Virtual Supermarket Project offers library laptops where residents can order groceries online from [a local supermarket] and pick them up at their neighborhood library the next day.

“We know in communities around this library and in Washington Village residents must choose between shopping at corner stores that lack fresh produce or pay a premium for a ride outside their neighborhood, and we know this is not a fair choice,” said Olivia D. Farrow, Baltimore’s interim health commissioner. “Most city residents enjoy access to full service, competitively priced grocery stores. The residents of East Baltimore and Washington Village deserve no less.”

In the neighborhood surrounding Baltimore’s Orleans Street library, healthy food is a luxury. There’s a Burger King and a cluster of corner stores and carryouts, but not a single supermarket within walking distance. It’s no wonder, say health officials, that the neighborhood has one of the highest mortality rates in the city with alarmingly high rates of heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

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Here’s an innovative program that promotes citizen engagement and government responsiveness: In Arvada, CO, citizens can use a new, free iPhone application to report potholes  that need filling, barking dogs that need quieting, and graffiti that needs removing.

Arvada, with a population of 107,361 is in the Denver metro area. The town is among 22 municipalities who launched the program on February 1. According to Arvada’s website:

iPhone users simply open the app, select an issue, and take a picture – the app knows the exact location and who can fix it. You can now truly connect with someone who can help – on the go and around the clock – without making a trip or phone call to Arvada City Hall.

The GPS and camera features built into the iPhone make it simple  to alert Arvada officials about a variety of issues around the clock. When you tap the send button, your iPhone sends a photo and the precise location directly to the right person, who can easily find and fix the issue.You’ll know that your issue went to the right person without ever going to an office or sitting down at a computer, and you can also receive status updates on your issues.The app can be downloaded from the iPhone App Store by searching for GORequest.

[In addition, the application “knows” if  the notification is coming from outside the Arvada service area and notifies the sender that his/her request is invalid.]

Arvada’s program started slowly, but is building momentum, says Michele Hovet, the city’s information-technology director. “We’ve had about 20 notifications so far. They were sporadic at first, but now they’re coming in a little more like one a day to 2 days.”

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