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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.
My employer and I are still located in the Midwest, and still do nothing to prepare for hurricanes.
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.
So many worse storm disasters have happened in the last few years, and people get worked up over Sandy?
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.
According to various shows and friends, being prepared for the next major storm/earthquake/tsunami/fire/drought/etc. is to have a large gun and ammo cache, an underground bunker, food and water for a year, off-grid energy generation and the willingness to shoot the roaming hoardes of looters, bandits and otherwise famished and unprepared bleeding-heart hippies that will try kill your dog, rape your mother and steal your food.
In the meantime, past experience indicates that 5 days of food and water is plenty of supplies to wait out the rebuilding effort, along with a house that matches the local building codes. Society is not going to collapse, Mad Max will not come to pass, and I'll be most worried about paranoid neighbors shooting me as I come to check in on them.
So my plan: backup important data across the network, have food and water for a few days and hunker down while the roads are cleared and energy access is restored. If I get bored, I can always hunt turkeys in the backyard.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I still flirt with disaster, but I'm not looking for anything serious.
More music, fewer hits
Two quick things:
Actually, as much as you personally are intellectually lazy,
You're a dick.
has elaborate plans in case of drought. and severe floods aren't unheard of either.
These "disasters" aren't. We regularly have flooding (localized, due to rains, not rivers or levees), excessive heat (110+ for weeks straight), and drought. That's normal here, benign, and we're not doing anything differently because of disasters elsewhere, because we're mostly immune from anything other than what passes for a curiosity story on CNN/Fox when we hit 118 in the summer.
I wonder how much societal collapse could be caused by a storm. Sure, not complete societal collapse, and not national societal collapse, but it seems likely that many parts of a single city's society could collapse if there was a big storm. Maybe in the US, this is much less likely, because the government would send in disaster relief, but look at what happened when Haiti was hit by that earthquake. Had the world not come to their rescue, things could have been much worse, and they were pretty bad anyway. Many cities in less better off nations could be pretty much completely ruined by a large storm.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
Oh come on, you're a dick too, patronizing people who suffered extraordinary disasters with your post.
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.
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.
Theya rent a dick. I'm sorry you don't like being confronted with the truth, but that doesn't make the poster a dick.
It means that you need to stop being so intellectually lazy and take 2 minutes to see if your view holds any factual water, so to speak.
"That's normal here"
So? They are still disasters.
"benign"
no, people die, infrastructure gets damaged and so on. Those disaster have a minimal impact becasue, ready for it?...they have a disaster plan. duh duh duuuuuuh!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yeah, sometimes things like "disaster recovery" and "security" get a bit out of hand and/or miss the point. You get people really into the idea "If a nuclear bomb hit my office, I could get my operations back up and running from another location immediately, because all my data is immediately synced to a location on the other side of the country." Well yeah, that's great, until you realize the person has confused a "sync" with a "backup", and besides if a nuclear bomb hit your office, you'd have bigger problems.
What few people will admit is that most of us can afford to be out-of-commission for a few days. You might not like it, and you might lose some money, but the world would keep turning and life would go on. It can be tremendously expensive to protect yourself against every possible disaster scenario, and you may end up spending a bunch of money to save yourself only a little, for a scenario that almost never happens. And then, of course, there's also the possibility of some weird nightmare scenario that gets past all of your safeguards, which you couldn't have predicted.
Sometimes you're better off accepting that bad things happen, instead of trying to protect yourself from every possible bad scenario.
Of course. The next, obvious question though is: what is going to bring about societal collapse? And the answers I get to that range from riots to super storms to earthquakes to hyperinflation to asteroid impact to brand new plague. Most of the answers also mysteriously assume that those events are likely enough to warrant shelling out multiple thousands of dollars immediately.
The reality is that we've been through everything short of an asteroid impact, and civilization has not collapsed. Especially not western civilization. Maybe that's why Europeans are non-plussed by all these possibilities, and look at the US like a family does at its crazy uncle who is raving about government brain scans: they've been through all of it, and they've come out alright. True, there were a few World Wars that came about from some of those events, but it wasn't a collapse of civilization. If anything, it proved that civilization was rebuilt pretty much instantly by citizens working together and sharing their meager means.
Full disclosure: my parents still tell me stories of The War. It's as close as Europe ever came to total collapse, and it didn't.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
You must not have been in New Orleans after Katrina...
It would help to get an amateur radio license before hand so you can contact what's left of the authorities to regroup (or just let them know not to shoot you). A CB would work just as well, but you're more likely to get in touch with them on the amateur 2 meter 144 MHz VHF frequencies than the CB 11 meter 27 MHz HF frequencies. 70 centimeter 440 MHz UHF frequencies may also help if you want to link up with others operating FRS/GMRS radios, and a GMRS license will give you the privilege of working the GMRS emergency repeaters.
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.
Well indefinitely, or until you run out of propane for the heater and stove, fuel for the generator and fresh water.
>> I wonder how much societal collapse could be caused by a storm? I can answer that for you. Hurricane Katrina caused a lot of death and destruction. Everything fell apart here for a lot of people. The people trapped in the Superdome and Convention Center turned on each other like animals. Society is back to normal now but for a few weeks this place had a total societal breakdown.
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.
You are incorrect, uninformed, and perpetuating misinformation. Licensees participating in ARES (amateur radio emergency service) and RACES (radio amateur civil emergency service) drills practice not only how to operate their stations in power blackout situations, they also practice operating frequencies under net control conditions and how to report and relay relevant emergency information in concise, brief messages that won't interfere with any ongoing emergency response efforts. A disaster is the time in which it is most important to be licensed, understand how the equipment works, and understand protocols and procedures for operating on the air so you don't interfere with the ongoing radio communications during the disaster. The last thing that will help is someone who doesn't know how to work their radio, how to follow authorized operating protocol, and how to be helpful and keep your head screwed on under duress. What will get you a stern talking to in a time of peace will get the book thrown at you in a time of crisis when there really are lives on the line. You will also be more likely to be caught operating illegally during a time of crisis since that's when the powers that be will need that resource the most.
NOLA shouldn't have residential areas below sea level. No reason other than sentiment exists to rebuild them there.
I have the option not to live in areas absolutely guaranteed to get hammered by hurricane storm surge. Not living there is part of my "disaster prep". The US is vast and so are ones choices of domicile.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You are correct regarding standard hurricanes. You expect to pack up and leave, spend 3 nights in a hotel, then come home. Or spend three nights reading books by candle light and boiling your water if you elected to ride the storm out.
Katrina, however, resulted in a large city being mostly abandoned for several months and a large portion of the population that for whatever reason (there are many that we will not debate) decided not to leave happened to also coincide with the large criminal portion of the New Orleans population.
Looters set one of the malls on fire and then shot at the firefighters who responded to put the fire out. They shot at the rescue helicopters... I do not know why these people decided shooting at the national guard was an appropriate response, but they did. The looting really was just as bad as they reported on TV.
These people decided that since the city was mostly abandoned they were justified in setting random parts of the city on fire and stealing things. There were also normal, sane people who stayed behind and enforced law and order in various places. The easiest way to do this was to post a sign that said 'we shoot looters' and then make good on that promise because the only person making sure some asshat didn't come and burn your house down for fun was you.
Normal society works because the sane people vastly out number the nut jobs who like to hurt other people and set things on fire. Sane people also happen to be the type of people who see a cat 5 hurricane heading towards a city below sea level and get the fuck out of town before it hits. When most of the sane people leave, that leaves only the nut jobs who think it's ok to set other people's things on fire and no one to stop them.
Police stop crime because someone is there to report the crime. When no one can report the crime, criminals don't worry about the police.
Indeed, Superstorm Sandy only affected people in the eastern seaboard. As to do I approach disaster differently? Not since Sandy, since March 12, 2006. Fo or folks down in St Louis it was 1994 when they had a 500 year flood. Folks in Louisiana with Katrina. And what about the folks in Oklahoma, who go through worse than the tornado I was in almost every year? How about Colorado with its fires and floods?
Hell, what about the British RIGHT NOW. I hear they're having some really shitty weather, that people have died.
What's so damned special about New York except the Church of Mammon and its high priests?
Free Martian Whores!