Today we find ourselves three days out of a hurricane that wasn't, as I've continued to see in the comments of the NYTimes, but really it was the hurricane that IS.
What it is begins with the word deadly. More than 40 people died in this storm, from a 9-year-old child to an 89-year-old lady. There were heroes who died as well as stupid people. Too bad because we need the heroes.
Another word to describe this storm is costly. One of the Times' headlines today is "Hurricane Cost Seen as Ranking Among Top Ten". Just how costly is going to come to light later as the massive loss of crops in the Hudson valley come to light, as the infrastructure costs to repair and replace roads in Vermont and other factors which haven't yet come to light.
And yet another word to describe this storm is confusing. It appears that were quite a number of people who's personal beliefs allowed them to poo-poo the admonitions of the authorities to move to safer environs rather than pay attention to all of the science that allowed our meteorologists to have a high degree of accuracy in determining the path of the storm.
True, the storm acted in a different way than expected primarily because of an infusion of dry air being trapped between a south flowing cold front and the storm's initial rain bands. That lessened the intensity of the wind, but didn't change the amount of water contained in the storm, and that water was significant enough to flood vast areas 100 miles plus away from the path of the storm.
What I would like to talk about are the heroes that lost their lives in the attempts to save others, but I'm not going to. They have their own place in history and in Heaven, if you believe in that stuff. But I can say that most who lost their lives trying to save others wouldn't have been necessary if these people had been less than stupid and putting other people's lives into danger.
And this is what brings about what I want to discuss.
It is not just those people who gave their lives to save others, but about just how bad things have gotten in America when not one single article actually talks about how badly America is knocking on Heaven's door.
You see, we are like the stupid people getting ourselves out into a deadly situation and expecting to somehow miraculously be rescued. But the problem is that there is no rescue available, no hand to pull us out of the quicksand. And certainly there is no help from people, particularly those in positions of power, who determine that there is no reason to rescue people or the country because the problems are made up.
Yep, you've got it. These people believe in their hearts that there are no reasons for storms becoming stronger, droughts larger and longer lasting, and crop failures from around the world are causing millions to go hungry and die.
The concept of Act of God has got to go. These are no longer scenarios where an Act of God is causing the problems, but the inability of our greatest thinkers to get new concepts across that show us the way to manage our calamities better by being better prepared.
Rather we need to understand the one thing far more prevalent, or at least should be today, that these problems are a product of nature being nature.
To me, if I believed in it, an Act of God would be some unnatural or paranormal activity such as destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, or the worldwide flood, which, btw, destroyed all the animals in order to destroy humanity. Where's the compassion in that?
But a product of Nature is far easier to understand because there are facts and figures that allow thinking humans to take control over the circumstances that otherwise could become a larger problem.
Nature can kill you or me on any particular day, but in that same day Nature can kill millions of us, if not a billion or two. You see, we can't go to war with nature because we have no weapons it respects, nor would it accept unconditional surrender, and if it wants humans to be gone, Nature knows how to take care of little life forms.
If you build a house, even of the best materials with the most solid foundation, if you don't maintain that house, in 50 years it will go away. Nature will reclaim the land, send vegetables and trees in to decompose the foundation, and away goes even the memory of the house.
Our house is in trouble and to any real thinking person we all know that we dodged two major bullets in the past week on the East Coast. Both only represent what could have happened, but isn't that why we continue to develop the art of prediction?
Our house is in trouble because we have ignored the house for lo these past 30+ years as we attempted to think our creations had a life of their own. We looked to the past and viewed the Coliseum, the Aqueducts, Hadrian's Wall, and thought that we had perfected the art of creating indestructible infrastructure even as we had people slapping on plaster to hide the needed repairs.
Our house is in trouble because we can't reasonably predict some events such as earthquakes, we can only measure the power and observe the effects.
What can happen will happen. It is a universal constant. Every conceivable instance of calamity and dining in the Garden of Eden can happen and will happen. The time to make the adjustment towards calamity is when we get up from the table in the garden. To wait for the calamity means we aren't very much of a thinking people.
We have not done this for 30 years. We have an unmanageable electrical grid that even allowed Enron to have generation plants shut down in order to make more money. This is not only a felonious action by people, but it is a management problem, which needs to be fixed. Supposedly we had a 2003 East Coast blackout due to one single tree, which I don't believe for an instant. At that point in time, it is more likely to have been a computer attack from Al Qaeda than a stupid 400 foot tall tree in Ohio growing right next to the massive power transmission towers.
So lets look at the idea of two natural adverse and disparate events running back to back without any improvements in our infrastructure, including the electrical grid, the roads and bridges, and even our city's building construction. These are the points where failure will have the greatest adverse effect.
I spent a bit of time over the weekend tending to my own home, which, by the luck of the draw, didn't suffer any major problems. Due to the threat of Isabel in 2003 I bought a generator and have tried to work my way into being more self-sufficient. My problem in my self sufficiency is that I'm still under the gun to provide storage for a couple of weeks of gas and oil for the generator, and I'd also be under some level of assault by neighbors as their food was spoiled due to the lack of electricity. Now I'm not adverse to helping my neighbors and in fact after Isabel a number of us shared the generator to "charge" the refrigerators and freezers.
Since then more generators are appearing on the block, but not enough for a sustained outage of power, again, because storage of hundreds of gallons of gas becomes problematic. And one of my neighbors got a natural gas power 15 kV auto start with throwout switch to run his house, and he's always had problems with the unit when it was needed.
Now while this may seem a little off topic, nah, not so much. Preparedness is the key to overcoming adversity. This doesn't say that any adversity will be negated, but the overall adverse effect will be mitigated over the long run.
So what happens when our country doesn't have a working generator and one is needed? People suffer, food spoils involving lost money and the inability to replace the food because you have no place to keep it.
When it comes to infrastructure, encompassing an earthquake and a hurricane within a week, any luck of the draw would have presented a much different picture than the last week here on the East Coast. At 6.0 on the earthquake we would have been testing whether our nuclear plants would have survived, since this is the supposed limit they are supposed to be able to survive.
So, let's say a 7.0 had happened, cut power across the board because their are 10 nuclear plants which would have been susceptible, and then let's just throw in a hurricane 6 days later, bearing down on the East Coast and let's just say that it maintained its Category 3 level up the coast.
Ah, but we forgot, didn't we. A 7.0 anywhere along the entire East Coast will rock the entire East Coast, so we didn't have time to check out the 30,000 bridges crossing rivers and bays susceptible to impact from the earthquake, and likely to have additional problems with the hurricane.
And oh, we didn't take into consideration that in many cases the only way to evacuate people from the major population centers are those bridges we didn't have a chance to check, and certainly didn't have a chance to repair, but we're going to tell millions of people to evacuate when the only avenue of egress is over these same bridges.
Does anyone get the picture that we're pretty much screwed at about this time. Every car that goes over a bridge which could have been adversely effected by the earthquake takes a chance that they will not make it. If a bridge fails, egress from the city becomes problematic if not causing a major traffic problem, placing more strain on the civil authorities and probably breaking down authority in the first place.
If, as happened to both New Jersey and New York, the high tide is coming in when the storm front is pushing massive amounts of water up the Hudson (remember we now have a category 3 hurricane, not the category 1 we got), then much of the lower lying boroughs and Manhattan would be underwater. This includes the MTA, sewer systems, electrical transmission lines and communications. All under water, so there is no ability to repair any of these systems.
And as we've seen, not only would the destruction of infrastructure happen in the beginning of these events, but still there's more to come, as we've seen with the massive flooding over vast areas which have not been considered previously as flood plains so people have built houses and farms and businesses on these rivers and creeks which are going to flood up to and above 10' over normal.
Who thinks about this stuff and has a plan in place? Where are America's problem solving abilities when you've ignored all of the infrastructure that has carried America along a lot longer than originally designed?
Where's the money to do all of this within the next ten years, and why aren't we applying what we should have just learned in the past week towards actually fixing problems before they end up being counted in the deaths of good American Heroes?
And yet another word to describe this storm is confusing. It appears that were quite a number of people who's personal beliefs allowed them to poo-poo the admonitions of the authorities to move to safer environs rather than pay attention to all of the science that allowed our meteorologists to have a high degree of accuracy in determining the path of the storm.
Posted by: cheap jerseys | September 07, 2011 at 01:37 AM