CNN Politics decided to put Trump’s proposed border-long monument to xenophobia to the test by asking a group civil engineers exactly what would go into the project and how much time/energy/bombast it would take. Unsurprisingly, the wall Mexico should just be super chill about paying for turned out to be what many have expected: a vortex of wasted resources and capital
According to the consulted engineers, the supplies needed for construction would consist of about 339 million cubic feet of concrete and 5 billion pounds of steel, explaining those materials would prove to be the strongest and most durable.
While Trump’s envisioned racist migrant-blocker might seem like a simple undertaking to the presidential hopeful, the engineers pointed out otherwise. Building it “block-by-block” like a Trumpertantruming preschooler would be unfeasible and “labor-intensive,” and pouring the aforementioned concrete into a solid mass would leave it vulnerable to the elements, eventually weakening the structure as a whole.
The solution, then, would be to manufacture a series of panels to be fitted together. Each individual piece would need to be 20 feet high and ten feet wide, with a foundation running at least 5 feet underground and “reinforced steel along roughly 2,000 miles of border.”
When it comes to cost, it looks like Trump wasn’t exactly quick enough with a calculator. Instead of taking roughly $8 billion to construct, the experts estimated a $10 billion expenditure with an expected timeline of over four years—longer than one of Trump’s (hopefully) theoretical terms would last.
Image via Getty.
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