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A Year After Sandy, Do You Approach Disaster Differently?
A year ago today, Superstorm Sandy struck the northeastern U.S.
The storm destroyed homes — in some cases entire
neighborhoods — and brought unprecedented disruptions to the New York City area's infrastructure, interrupting
transportation, communications, and power delivery. It even
damaged
a Space Shuttle. In the time since, the U.S. hasn't faced a storm with Sandy's
combination of power and placement, but businesses have had some time to rethink how much trust they can put in even
seemingly impregnable data centers and other bulwarks of modernity: a big enough storm can knock down nearly anything.
Today, parts of western Europe are recovering from a major storm as well: more than a dozen people were killed as the
predicted "storm of the century"
hit London, Amsterdam,
and other cities on Sunday and Monday. In Amsterdam, the city's
transportation system took a major hit; some passengers had to shelter in place in stopped subway cars while the storm passed. Are you (or your employer) doing anything
different in the post-Sandy era, when it comes to preparedness to keep people, data, and equipment safe?
Summary is misleading.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
So, uh, I live in Arizona, so we're pretty much still not bracing for any sort of natural disaster other than it being hot again this summer...
There were some warnings about Sandy
But what percentage of those in major quake zones have an escape bag? You know, one you grab as you flee, just before your house comes tumbling down. The 5 second bag.
If Seattle gets a strong 8, or a 9, the elevated roads in and out of the narrow strip of land will likely all collapse. Millions of people could be cut off for a long time.
I now carry a copy of all the Bear Grylls episodes on my smartphone, just in case.
Today, parts of western Europe are recovering from a major storm as well
Yeah, we're uhh, clearing some trees and that's it?
Not sure if it's the same thing as Sandy..
My employer and I are still located in the Midwest, and still do nothing to prepare for hurricanes.
Generally speaking the east coast is a dangerous place to put anything critical, they get a lot of strange weather. My thought is look for places where weather is more predictable. For instance states such as Colorado, Utah, and perhaps Arizona. Granted Colorado had floods last year, but one would hope you would place a data center in a location that is a lower to non-existent risk of that, such as Denver or Colorado Springs area. The power is underground, so heavy snow storms are less likely to take power for any significant amount of time. Anywhere in the mid-west could get tornado's which are very unpredictable. Plus, in the cooler states such as Colorado and Utah, you can use natural cooling for a fair amount of the year, thus reducing utilities.
Nope. I still run away until it's over.
If we colonize Mars, it won't be the World Wide Web anymore. UWW?
It's only called "Superstorm Sandy" because of the pathetic response of government and the self-centered hubris of nor-easters. It was just a hurricane; the Southeastern US getting far stronger storms much more often.
Being someone who goes RV-ing often, knowing how to dry camp (this doesn't just mean parking at the local Wally World or Tesco, but actual boondocking in the woods), it does help to teach someone what they actually need come a disaster. The main thing is that a power outage just means to fire up the generator [1] used for the travel trailer, plug extension cords for the fridge, a room A/C, computers, and an electric stove element, and go from there. With a motorhome (even a type "B" rig that is a converted van), one can just use that and still have a functioning kitchen, refrigeration, hot showers, and the usual things needed even if there is no water or electricity available at the house.
The best thing for a disaster is a small motorhome or campervan. Not just for bug-out reasons, but the ability to live comfortably for an indefinite amount of time until power and utilities are restored.
[1]: RV-ers tend to use inverter generators. They are much quieter than the normal contractor type, and the inverter gives clean power output.
...land based datacenters that is. If they were floating in the ocean they would just ride out the storm. Its like getting thrown clear of a car wreck when not wearing a seat belt.
Tax dollars weren't used to relocate owners of expensive beachfront properties that washed away, instead they were used to rebuild the same beaches and homes.
Which are already washing away again...
Chris Christie stirred,
Stared on the horses of the sea, and heard
The cars of battle and his own name cried;
And fought with the invulnerable tide.
I wonder if anybody is thinking twice about having a datacenter on the 17th floor of an office building, in a city by the ocean? Unless there is some specific need for you to be close to Wall Street, It's probably a good idea to make sure your servers are hosted where there is minimal likelihood of natural disasters, and also in a place that is easily serviceable from the ground. Although having it on the ground would have likely been worse in some cases, being a lot further inland where flooding is pretty much impossible would be even better.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
So many worse storm disasters have happened in the last few years, and people get worked up over Sandy?
Because the problem lies above me, with the move towards centralized control of everything. Power wouldn't've been a problem if the system was more decentralized. Same with communications. Cellphones were designed as dependent devices from the beginning, no p2p mode to be found. Same with the data centers. A lot less productivity would've been lost had people taken charge of their data instead of trusting 'the cloud' for everything.
The rest of it is really just a case of shit happens. Most of the time, hurricanes aren't a big deal up here.. They knock some trees down and create a ruckus that is recovered from in a few days to a week or so, but that's about it.
The week before Halloween on 2011 we had a freak snow storm on the East Coast. It came in the middle of a MILD Fall so the leaves were still green-ish. It was a a lot of heavy snow... so trees and branches went down all over the north-East. New Jersey was without power for a while... my town was without for a week, many longer. No power meant no heat for many, so it was a cold week.
A year later, almost to the week, was Sandy... just before Halloween 2012. Obviously Sandy was a lot worse for the coastal cities because the water crept in and the wind tore up the boardwalk... but further inland it was the same s**t different year. No power or heat for a over a week, loss of many services, etc. This one was a big more wide-spread though, and getting gasoline was a BIG PitA. But otherwise it was the same pain for those more inland.
As an ex-boyscout I try to be ready for these things anyway... I have plenty of flashlights and batteries, canned food, a couple gallons of drinking water, a lighter to start the stove, warm clothes on-hand, etc. I was able to deal with mostly everything fine except the gasoline situation. After a week most of us were running low.
I still flirt with disaster, but I'm not looking for anything serious.
More music, fewer hits
I put a flashlight down there, batteries, a mattock to "break out" if necessary, and 2 cases of water. No food, but I figure if I'm down there that long, I've got bigger problems than eating.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I live in tornado alley. Sandy was weaksauce
Earlier this month Atlas struck the Black Hills of South Dakota. 4-8 inches of snow were forecast for the higher elevations (5000+ feet), but here on the foot hills at 3500', we got 31" of snow. It was a wet, heavy snow that snapped power lines and tree limbs. 60+ mph winds made for zero visability and took out a large number of power poles.
Our little datacenter lost utility power Friday evening, and promptly switched to UPS, which had a lifespan of about 2 hours. Power was restored after 85 minutes, but the decision was made to power off all the servers in case we lost power again, with an eye towards starting recovery procedures in a day or two. The data center was restored to full functionality by Sunday noon, even though the businesses didn't re-open until Monday noon.
We have a complete DR plan, so if the outage persisted for another day, we could have resumed operations at a sister site. The key takeaways here were backup validation for off-site replication, lines of communication between Operations and the affected managers, and validated, sequenced shut-down and power-on check-list. I was able to get on-site through the storm thanks to my big 4x4 and coordinate the shutdown and power-on processes. Without being onsite, we would have had some more challenges due to area wide loss of network connectivity.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Sandy did not change my view of disasters. I still remain prepared for disaster, and when stuff looks like it is going to happen, I use my brain instead of burying my head in the sand and thinking things like "oh it won't happen to me" or "oh well Government will be there to save me," which is exactly what happened in New York.
The entire city lived in a state of denial leading up to Sandy, and continued to live in that state for a week afterward, even having the nerve to attempt to hold the NYC marathon despite there being people in need of the resources that were being used for it. Marathon organizers had generators, clean water, gasoline, and everything they wanted, while thousands of people all over the city had no power, no water, and no means of transportation out of the city.
Mayor Bloomberg is a disgrace.
Summary is misleading.
Was it really misleading, or did your ability to assume really stoop to that level of ignorance in thinking there are actually lung-breathers here on earth who think a storm is large enough to escape the very atmosphere it thrives in to damage an object in orbit...
...and that said lung-breathers congregate here.
Thanks. Appreciate that.
We are totally befuddled that anyone is still even mentioning Sandy. It was a MINOR storm. Sure, New Jersey had a lot of flooding, but Sandy was nothing! Ask anyone in New Orleans, Sandy was NOTHING!
The only indirectly interesting thing about Sandy is that there hasn't been a larger storm since, as would be normal.
Meanwhile, has anyone heard about Typhoon Phailin? If they have, it certainly seems like no fucks were given.
Summary is misleading.
Was it really misleading, or did your ability to assume really stoop to that level of ignorance in thinking there are actually lung-breathers here on earth who think a storm is large enough to escape the very atmosphere it thrives in to damage an object in orbit...
...and that said lung-breathers congregate here.
Thanks. Appreciate that.
Go home Aqua Man you're drunk.
even worse, Enterpise isn't even a real shuttle, it's a full scale glorified mock up, to do glider tests et. c.
Disaster recovery was already part of our operations. When Sandy hit, it took out a couple of branches for a few days, but operations were just DRed over to other geographic areas. We have fiber cuts all the time, and traffic just gets rerouted or DRed to another area.
Pretty much when Sandy hit, everything happened exactly as it was supposed to.
Since Sandy, disasters don't approach me at all, actually....Its been about 12 months now, I think, since I was last approached by a disaster. They have given up I think.
We have hurricanes (there is no such thing as a "superstorm") here in North Carolina all the time. When Hugo hit, we did not get a $50 billion aid package (We *only* got 1 billion). When Fran hit, we did not get a $50 billion aid package. When Floyd hit, we did not get a $50 billion aid package. All three storms were way more powerful and devastating than not-so-superstorm Sandy. By the way, since when did Alaska become part of New York since $150 million of that "aid" bill went to Alaska. We had less deaths too because people actually evacuate when they are told to.
DARPA X-Prize Project, build a multi use robot that can dismantle a Red Tagged home. Not demolish, dismantle. Pile everything up, neatly. Personal items in a pile. Building supplies in another. Because everyone knows what's going to happen When OSH, Lowe's, and Home Depot opens in the morning. Why not make this a War College exercise. And how does one dismantle a home one nail at a time? I hear that Katrina, and Sandy may have some interesting test sites here and there.
Another thing, with 10 million under employed, or out of work engineers in America; that they can't figure this out? One word, Blender3D.
Over the past two years I lost power for about 4 weeks.
The last two weeks were miserable because it happened in early November when the weather was cold.
So I spent about 5k for a good multi-fuel generator and installation of a manual transfer switch. So now a prolonged grid outage will at least not leave me freezing in the dark.
No, I live in Florida, we live differently after Andrew.
Not to mention, how many "storms of the century" have there been in the past 5 years?
I have several customers on long island, and my customers were some of the quickest to recover (they just had to get themselves back online) as all data and POS systems are in the cloud. I keep 3 separate geographic locations of server clusters and a fourth backup at our office. Those IT guys who think data centers / companies are infallible have not been around long enough to see a data center go under financially, or have servers raided because the police don't understand what a virtual server means. Much less an actual natural disaster. IMHO there is very little reason to be 'down' these days, with on demand services from rackspace and S3, it just takes proper planning.
neorush
Summary is misleading.
Was it really misleading, or did your ability to assume really stoop to that level of ignorance in thinking there are actually lung-breathers here on earth who think a storm is large enough to escape the very atmosphere it thrives in to damage an object in orbit...
...and that said lung-breathers congregate here.
Thanks. Appreciate that.
Go home Aqua Man you're drunk.
Of course he's drunk! How would YOU like to be a super hero that pretty can only swim real fast and get fish to school
Super Villain: "Oh Look! Aquaman is getting a bunch of squid to school together! Oh no! Quick, get the Italian breading, hot oil and tomato sauce! He's going to kill us with Calamari!
What next Aquaman?! Are you going to get Sea Squirts to squirt at us?! We're sooooo scared! Bweahahahahahahahahahahahaha"
And he wears Orange and Green?! Not BLUE and green - ya know - SEA COLORS?!
Poor bastard!
At least the Invisible Man got to do it with Wonder Woman AND Superman at the same time!
No. No, I don't view disaster differently, because I choose to live in one of the majority of places in the US that don't tend to get life-threatening disasters.
No, because I don't live in a backfilled coastal flood plain and then cry to FEMA when my McMansion gets washed away.
I don't live in tornado alley. I don't live in earthquake central. I don't live on the downslope side of the Rockies.
Once a century a hurricane will come close enough to tear a few shingles off the roof. Once a decade a blizzard or ice storm will knock out power for a day or two. And... That about covers the serious local disasters.
If you can't say the same - Move. Simple as that, really.
The storm that hit London does not even begin to compare to Sandy or other disasters. I don't know about you guys, but I don't count a storm that mostly doesn't more than inconvenience people (yes, I know, a few people died from having trees fall on them, but c'mon, that's more of a freak accident than anything.) There was a lot of bitching about disrupted commutes- not even entirely disrupted, just made more difficult- but man, I'm of the opinion that disasters require major consequences. If it's just business as usual, it's not really a disaster. It's just a shitty thing.
It damaged a decommissioned space shuttle on earth
Summary is misleading.
It is pretty "rare" for oceanic / atmospheric events to reach into space. Besides, all of the space shuttles are decommissioned.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Although that's what Enterprise ended up being, the original intention was to refit Enterprise to be fully spaceflight-capable, but changes to design specs during the late 70s meant a teardown and rebuild was too costly.
So we have the irony where Star Trek fans successfully campaigned to rename the first shuttle, which ended up never actually going into space.
I live in Arizona, this place is filled with datacenters for a damn good reason and any company who puts their DC in a place where natural disaster has a great chance of occurring is utterly stupid. The only thing we have to worry about is flash floods and an extremely, extremely unlikely tornado(never really had one here but they say it can happen).
http://www.crisishq.com/why-prepare/us-natural-disaster-map/
If you put your DC in a place that is at risk on the above map you deserve to be wiped out. Just poor foresight by upper level management for DR planning...
You want to know if anything is going to change, now that you finally get what everyone else has been saying? Nope. Don't need to change, we are already prepared. Hopefully, people in the area hit by Sandy have been busy planning, drilling, and preparing.
Build an elevated, reinforced concrete shell around it. Have proper sump pumps etc for seepage, have doors you can seal, and bunker down. Build it tough enough and no storm surge will bother it, but you might lose your connectivity to the outside world.
Bunker tech isn't rocket surgery. Lose the idea that conventional structures will protect your stuff, build bunkers with internal systems (such as ISO containerised data centers) you can upgrade relatively easily, and you are protected.
Don't build weak support systems, or you get "Fukushima". There is zero reason that whole plant couldn't have been built like the German U-boat pens at St Nazaire except that it wasn't built for safety.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
I Live in Amsterdam, and on this faithfull day I just looked out of the window to see if the weather was passable. So when I got on my bicycle and drove to the other end of town, everything looked more or less ok.
Ok, a tree fell on the spot i was just 6 seconds before, but all in all it was no big biggy (I've seen much worse). People weren't blown from their bikes, and no dogs where blown in the river.
Only when I arrived in the office did I found out that there was officially a 'code red', and that all my coworkers has decided to work from home. I still think people are overreacting.
Inquiring minds want to know: where exactly in the country do you live?
Is 1563649 a prime number?
Well, for starters, Jared Diamond wrote a fascinating book about it called "Collapse". It's a more popular-scientific expansion of the scientific work of Joseph Tainter "The Collapse of Complex Societies" (but I've never tried to read that).
Basically, IIRC, the first point where you notice that your society is in collapse, is that long-term regular maintenance of infrastructure isn't done anymore. For example, in Nîmes in a dry part of France, the Romans built a large aquaduct. But aquaducts need to be maintained, otherwise the kettle stone (limestone) and moss clogs up the flow over the years.
Being in the periphery of the empire, Nîmes faired probably a lot better than central Rome, but when the aquaduct was no longer maintained, less people probably wanted to live there.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
It's just been that sort of century.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
After a human invoked disaster and then Hurricane Ike causing me to lose most everything I had of value twice in a five year period I approach life differently in general.
I am adopting a less hard-core version of the Buddhist "we become slaves to our possessions" philosophy. I've always believed in durable, simple, usable things, I use a cast iron skillet for about 75% of my cooking for example. I used to have a lot of books and physical media. I'm starting to use digital media, if I lose all of my physical belongings I can buy a new Kindle and get most of my books back, buy a new just about anything thanks to Google Play and have all of my music back, I would still be missing 95% of my movies, the prevalence UltraViolet and Amazon video being included with a bunch of my new disks will save a few of those. I've been ripping my disk and putting them on a local hard drive for years, I'm considering a "disk to digital" service so I don't have to worry about movies anymore. I've actually been giving my books away over the past couple of years and even reducing my tech junk laying about that I'm not using.
After the theft and the flood I'm now expecting the fire. When it comes I want it to have minimal impact. I want to buy new clothes, a few electronic devices and continue on. "The cloud" is how I intend to make that happen. My data is my most valuable possession. I need to get my pictures uploaded somewhere - thanks for making me think of that.
Once I get to where I want to be data backup wise with the exception vehicles which have escaped the past disasters, $5,000 to $10,000 should be enough to get me everything I really want and need. I just got married last weekend to someone who does not share in my reduced physical goods philosophy - so my estimates are based on a few months ago thinking. (considering I adopted the mindset a couple of years after the last disaster I'm not setting a good enough example, I haven't been wiped out since Ike). We'll see where that takes us.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Build an elevated, reinforced concrete shell around it. Have proper sump pumps etc for seepage, have doors you can seal, and bunker down. Build it tough enough and no storm surge will bother it, but you might lose your connectivity to the outside world.
Well you won't get flooded, but a normal data centre on the 17th floor won't get flooded (or if a flood does get 170' above sea level there's bigger problems)
However when you run out of fuel, that's a lot of steps to climb with buckets of fuel.
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2012/11/se-podcast-36-we-got-hit-by-a-hurricane/
My company's email went from Exchange to Office 365 and we gave Amazon a lot of money for offsite backups. We also have a generator and a few hundred feet of extension cable now. At home, it just meant we bought some bottled water and Sterno. Aside from that, business as usual
If EVERYONE followed your advice, you'd suddenly have 200 million new neighbors...
So where do you live exactly? (City or town level is close enough so I can start shopping)
Obligatory: no.
But seriously, no, I don't, and while I'm not in IT, I don't think my company does either? (But we're in a totally different geographic location - we've *always* had to worry about earthquakes, and to a lesser extent, fires, but not really hurricanes.)
Inquiring minds want to know: where exactly in the country do you live?
About 400 miles North of where Sandy obliterated. Within an hour of two cities. But my specific location by no means counts as unique.
Most of the US doesn't have the problems we hear about in the disaster-porn loving news reports. Just an hour inland from the coasts, not in the 100 year flood plain, and not living on the banks of an "engineered" river protects you from most "wet" damage - Except, that relatively tiny sliver of land framing the country contains 39% of the population (according to the 2010 census). Not in "tornado alley" doesn't mean you'll never see a tornado, but the rest of the country gets much smaller ones, and only rarely. Not in California (really, only a small fraction of it) means you laugh about "the big (3.5) one" around the water cooler rather than having a reinforced shelter-core in your house.
The US has a truly staggering amount of places with weather you would call "boring". People just seem to want to pack in to the places with the most volatile climates.
Usually i would advise people to avoid anything considered knowledge in Florida. After all, if you can't even run fair elections how smart can you be? But one thing that we in Florida do know is hurricanes. And having just watched national new showing Breezy Point in the area smacked by Sandy it is obvious that they are screwing up big time.
First stick built homes are no good in hurricanes. Any home in a storm zone needs lots of really good concrete. You do not put an overhang on a roof more than a few inches. In order too keep a roof on a home you simply must not have much overhang. Items like large double doors are a disaster as are large windows. The windows that you do have should be made of storm proof glass . Doors should be small and strong. The sand barriers they are packing up between them and the sea will often be as much of a negative as a positive. We see homes filled to the ceiling with sand after storms. With large waves the sand simply adds to the weight of the wave. If there is anything left of the sand barrier after a few waves it may well stop water from draining back into the sea.
The beach area is probably best built with a lower floor designed to blow out in a storm which leaves the second floor standing on concrete supports. I noted that several home owners elevated their new homes by 14 feet. Frankly 20 feet would be better and 30 feet better yet. We have seen storms where people floated out of third floor windows when a storm surge strikes.
I have lived in Florida for 60 years and went though many storms. One mistake is to think that you know about storms. Storms are each unique and can do things you would never think they can do. But i can tell you that the storm that hit Breezy Point was so mild by our standards that when younger I actually enjoyed motorcycling and even bicycle rides in stronger winds. Until winds get above 130 mph I rarely pay any attention at all and usually enjoy the heavy rains.
European storms have nothing to do with US east coast hurricanes. The later appear in a warm ocean, typically in tropical zone, and move toward to the poles. Europe has no southern tropical ocean and therefore cannot ever have this kind of hurricanes.
Let's review:
* November 7–11, 1913 – The Great Lakes Storm of 1913 claims 19 ships and more than 250 lives.
* October 4, 1914 - The Burdur earthquake was centered near Lake Burdur in southwestern Turkey and the mainshock and subsequent fire destroyed more than 17,000 homes, and caused 2,344 casualties.
* January 13, 1915 – An earthquake in Avezzano, Italy, registering 6.8 on the Richter scale kills more than 29,000
* July 1–12, 1916 – At least one shark mauls 5 swimmers along 80 miles (130 km) of New Jersey coastline during the Jersey Shore shark attacks of 1916, resulting in 4 deaths and the survival of one youth who requires limb amputation.
* May 21, 1917 – Over 300 acres (73 blocks) are destroyed in the Great Atlanta fire of 1917.
* January, 1918 – 1918 flu pandemic: "Spanish 'flu" (influenza) first observed in Haskell County, Kansas.
* January 15, 1919, - Boston Molasses Disaster: A wave of molasses released from an exploding storage tank sweeps through Boston, Massachusetts, killing 21 and injuring 150.
* February 20, 1920 - Gori earthquake: An earthquake hits Gori in the Democratic Republic of Georgia, killing 114.
* 1921 - Russian famine: Roughly 5,000,000 people die.
* January 13, 1922 – The flu epidemic has claimed 804 victims in Britain.
* July 10, 1923 – Large hailstones kill 23 in Rostov, Soviet Union.
* July 10, 1924 – Large hailstones kill 23 in Rostov, Soviet Union.
* February 28, 1925 – The 1925 Charlevoix-Kamouraska earthquake strikes northeastern North America.
* October 20, 1926 – A hurricane kills 650 in Cuba.
* February 14, 1927 – An earthquake in Yugoslavia kills 100.
* February 12, 1928 – Heavy hail kills 11 in England.
* November 18, 1929 – 1929 Grand Banks earthquake.
* November 25, 1930 - An earthquake in the Izu Peninsula of Japan kills 223 people and destroys 650 buildings.
* February 3, 1931 – Hawke's Bay earthquake: Much of the New Zealand city of Napier is destroyed in an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale.
* March 21, 1932 – A series of deadly tornadoes in the south kills more than 220 people in Alabama, 34 people in Georgia, and 17 in Tennessee during a two-day period.
* March 3, 1933 - A powerful earthquake and tsunami hit Honsh, Japan, killing approximately 3,000 people.
* May 11, 1934 – Dust Bowl in North America: A strong 2-day dust storm removes massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the region's worst dust storms.
* April 14, 1935 - Black Sunday, a particularly severe dust storm, was one of the worst dust storms in American history and it caused immense economic and agricultural damage. It is estimated to have displaced 300 thousand tons of topsoil from the Prairie area in the US.
* March 17 – March 18, 1936 – St. Patrick's Day Flood: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suffers the worst flooding in its history.
* May 6, 1937 – Hindenburg disaster: In the United States, the German airship Hindenburg bursts into flame when mooring to a mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey. Of the 36 passengers and 61 crew on board, 13 passengers and 22 crew die, as well as one member of the ground crew.
* February 6, 1938 – Black Sunday at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia: 300 swimmers are dragged out to sea in 3 freak waves; 80 lifesavers save all but 5.
* January 13, 1939 – Black Friday: 71 people die across Victoria in one of Australia's worst ever bush fires.
* November, 1940 - The Armistice Day Blizzard (or the Armistice Day Storm) took place in the Midwest region of the United States on 11 November (Armistice Day) and 12 November 1940. The intense early-season "Panhandle hook" winter storm cut a 1,000-mile-wide (1600 km) path through the middle of the country from Kansas to Michigan. A total of 145 deaths were blamed on the storm.
* April 15, 1941 - Colima earthquake
* November 28, 1942 - Cocoanut Grove Fire
* February 27, 1943 - Smith Mine Disaster
* D
I have no tag line
In the time since, the U.S. hasn't faced a storm with Sandy's combination of power and placement
Am I the only one bothered by this line? The implication is clearly that Sandy was a monstrous storm that has gone unrivaled in the time since it swept through New York City. Sure, that's technically correct, but it gives the wrong impression, since Sandy was actually a fairly middling hurricane, and both the 2012 and 2013 hurricane seasons have been extraordinarily tame. Were the 2013 season ANY other season from the past decade, the summary's statement would be false, since we would have seen hurricanes of greater strength since Sandy. From 2003 to 2011 we had at least two Cat 4 or higher storms each year (except 2009, when we had just one), and then in 2012 we only had only two Cat 3 storms, of which Sandy was one, followed up by the 2013 season which has only had two Cat 1 storms (making it the tamest season in decades, I'd wager, though I only checked as far back as 2002).
Sandy was remarkable, to be sure, but it was not because it was a powerful storm. It was a perfectly ordinary one like dozens of others in the past decade, with its only unusual trait being that it just happened to hit the wrong spot. A Floridian living in a house that's built to code wouldn't even bat an eye at a Cat 3 like Sandy unless the eye was heading straight overhead (at which point they might evacuate). New York is clearly not designed to handle hurricanes like Florida is however, and that's the only thing that made Sandy particularly interesting. It wasn't its power. It was simply its placement.
Since the two major storms mentioned that affected the northeastern part of the USA (derecho followed by Sandy) I've laid in extra fuel for the
Yamaha quiet-run generator I bought 3 years ago, and installed a secondary water storage system with 350 gallons of water for showering and flushing. I use a deep well pump normally, which has it's own power drop a quarter mile from the house. It would take a substantial generator to power the deep well pump, 220V and 20 Amps. Plus being not visible from the house it would be very stealable.
So now there's a plastic 350 gallon tank and a small pump in the sub-basement, which the generator can power when needed for a shower and flushing. You can't imagine what a luxery a hot shower is in the midst of a disaster! It gives you the strength to go on to accomplish what must be done! Not to mention flushing the commode!
I think we're good for 3 or 4 weeks of independent comfort now, between the generator, the wood stove/pile of fuel, etc. I also plan to boost the cache of canned foods soon, to provide minimal nutrition while isolated from the national infrastructure. Actually, we can dip water from two unplumbed wells on the farm, which would be slow, but would provide long-term drinking and cooking water, even a shower if we run buckets of water into the reserve tank, although that would be a long hard task.
Some neighbors have installed special carbs to run their generators off the natural gas system, which costs far less than gasoline, and the carbs are available locally. The manufacturer will install them on your generator if you bring it to them! I'm going to do that as soon as I get gas pipe run around to the back yard where the generator lives. That will reduce our dependence on refineries and trucking during a disaster.
Sure! When are you sending the invite?
Don't you realize that most cities are located where they are for critical economic and trade activity not simply for the safety and convenience of the residents?