Your Survival Blog
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Storing healthy foods
Disaster gurus like to talk about things you can keep in your pantry or basement (or wherever you store this stuff) for long-term sheltering in place. These usually involve, besides water, lots of (a) canned goods and (b) shelf-stable simple carbs — white rice, white flour, that sort of thing. Maybe I’m reading the wrong blogs, but I don’t see a lot of information on how to store things that are good for you and your family, should you need to eat from your grocery stash for an extended period of time!
So here are some foods to consider for your food-storage arsenal.
Whole grains
Now I’ll admit there’s a very good reason many folks don’t suggest that you stock up on whole grains: they can go rancid before you blink twice, and rancid oils are not good for you. (Various sources suggest safe storage times from one to six months.) The tricks are to store very carefully, not to rely on them in a catastrophe (you may wind up hitting that indestructible barrel of white rice instead), and to rotate them out of storage frequently. (Buying whole grains rather than ground ones can also help; exposing the oils inside the grain to air accelerates the process.)
The most common grains in North American shops are wheat, corn (maize), brown rice, oats, rye, and barley, and wild rice (technically not a grain, but containing similar nutrients). Thanks to the wonders of importation and small specialty farms, many others are available, some of which the average American or Canadian shopper never saw before the last decade. If you decide you’d like to store some of these rarer grains — in my area, those include amaranth, buckwheat, millet, teff, and quinoa — you should immediately head to a health-food store with decent traffic and a lot of turnover. (In the specialty section of a supermarket, these are much less likely to sell quickly, so they’d be a lot less fresh before they even went home with you.) Buying a well-sealed package, instead of from a bulk bin, is another way to increase your odds of freshness; if you must buy bulk, sniff first! Scan the area around the shelves for any sign of flying insects — they might indicate that your grains are already infested.
Once you get the grain(s) home, you want storage with tight lids, and as little air as possible. Some folks double-package: first in a zippered plastic bag or heavy-duty baggie with twist-tie, then in a glass jar; this both keeps the grain fresher, and (in a refrigerator or freezer) protects it from absorbing other food smells or moisture. Others try to vacuum-package, either with a home vacuum sealer or the low-tech suck-the-air-out-of-the-bag-with-a-straw method. Mark the date that you store the package.
If you have the space, it’s probably best to refrigerate or freeze grains, assuming you have power. Otherwise a cool, dry, dark place (root cellar, closet away from the furnace) is best; don’t store near any appliances that produce heat, like your dishwasher or stove!
Most grains, depending on how diligent you are about storage, will last a few weeks to half a year. (Popcorn — yes, a whole grain! — can last years.) When you’re ready to use the package, apply the sniff test again, to make sure it hasn’t gone rancid before use.
Reconstituting and cooking them, of course, requires water and fuel. But then so does white rice!
Produce
Now what could go off quicker, in long-term storage, than produce? Surely you have to survive on a diet of canned peaches and mushy canned peas, should you want any color in your diet?
Au contraire, my friends. Wander through the aisles of a big health-food conglomerate like Whole Foods (in the US, Canada, and the UK) and you’ll find dried produce you didn’t know could even be dried. Strawberries! Spiced mangoes! Carrot chips! Seven varieties of “sea vegetables”! There are a number of firms online selling dried vegetables and fruit for long-term storage, as well.
One word of warning: a good many dried fruits and vegetables (including all “golden raisins” I’ve found) are treated with sulfites to retain color and retard mold growth. Sulfite sensitivity is extremely common — and to some people, including many asthmatics, quite dangerous — so unless you know everyone in your family can consume significant quantities of sulfites without health issues, try to buy the less colorful untreated products and be more diligent about storing them in moistureproof containers.
Protein
Beans, beans, beans, beans, beans. If you’re thinking of stocking up on dried beans for long-term storage, though, make sure you have a camp stove with plenty of fuel, a decent-sized pot, and access to plenty of water. For your “go bag”, if you’re evacuating to a motel or shelter in an unaffected area, some packages of dried beans might make sense — they’re relatively lightweight and easy to pack. For short-term sheltering in place, though, you’ll probably want a stash of canned beans.
Meat storage may not be practical for you, unless you’re in the habit of drying your own jerky — the commercial stuff costs the earth. If you are, though, note that the US Department of Agriculture advises that home jerky can be stored only one to two months, instead of the year that commercially prepared jerky can last. They also add: “The danger in dehydrating meat and poultry without cooking it to a safe temperature first is that the appliance will not heat the meat to 160°F and poultry to 165°F — temperatures at which bacteria are destroyed — before it dries. After drying, bacteria become much more heat resistant.” (Those temps are 71 and 74 degrees Celsius.) So if you dry your own, rotate your stock monthly — and make sure you cook it sufficiently (in an oven or on a barbecue cooker or grill) before (or while) drying it!
Eggs, believe it or not, can now be stored long-term — various suppliers can sell you powdered dried whole eggs, which are easy to carry, present a low risk of bacterial contamination, are full of protein, vitamins (including D) and minerals, and can be stored a year or more depending on conditions. You can use them in baking or scrambling; heating after reconstitution is recommended, although they’re already pasteurized, but they can be consumed as part of a drink or other preparation if you’re in need of a protein boost. (Just take care before doing this for a child or elderly person.)
Here’s hoping you never have to use your stored food, but if you do — enjoy!
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Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Love thy neighbor
Imagine a really massive disaster: a 9-point earthquake in your city that buckles bridges, collapses buildings and highways, destroys gas and water mains. A tsunami or tornado that wipes away most of the homes and stores in your town. A volcanic eruption that fills the sky with ash, ensuring that no flights will be able to come in or out of your area for a week.
Who do you suppose will help you, during the first days and even weeks after the catastrophe?
Not the emergency medical technicians or police or firefighters; not the National Guard or similar at-home military force; not international aid agencies.
No, the people who will save you, if you’re at home and you need assistance, are your neighbors. (If you’re at work, the first responders will be your coworkers and workers in surrounding offices or shops or buildings. If your children are at school, they’ll rely on their teachers and school staff. With luck, eventually, you can all reunite at home — if it’s still there — and then you’re back to working with your neighbors.)
Now I live in a cohousing community, a kind of neighborhood designed by the people who live there; we’re committed to knowing our neighbors and working together on a regular basis. Not everyone is so lucky. But if you’re in the same sort of bind we were in our previous house — where you live on big lots out in suburbia, kids need playdates to see each other, and you can’t even remember most of your neighbors’ names — there are ways to get to know them.
- If there’s an existing neighborhood association — or even a PTA or similar group with heavy representation from your neighborhood — go to one of their meetings or events, and say hello to people. If there isn’t one and you think there’s a good reason — many of you oppose a certain development in your area, or need to lobby your town for better water, or whatever — start emailing a few people and create one.
- Hold a block party. Put flyers on everyone’s mailbox suggesting a gathering and soliciting a team to help plan it. If your locality requires permits or fees for street parties or alcohol consumption outside homes, cross your t’s and dot your i’s before you continue: being shut down by the police is no fun. Plan several activities (popular ones include face-painting for children, live music, races or contests, bouncy castles, talent shows, and sprinkler or other water play), issue another round of flyers inviting everyone to the party, and enjoy!
- In small towns, there are often unexpected hangouts: the town dump (or “transfer station"); Town Meeting. Go socialize at these whenever possible.
- Invite the dozen closest families to a party at your house with games for the kids and tasty-but-light beverages for the adults. (This might be a look-it’s-spring! celebration, barbecue, back-to-school party or even holiday party, depending on the season. If holiday, though, make it as secular as possible, so neighbors from different religious and cultural backgrounds will be more likely to attend.) Find openings to chat with each neighbor and to introduce them to each other.
- Take a walk around the neighborhood with small packages of cookies or home-baked bread, introducing yourself to everyone. (If you’ve lived in the neighborhood for years and so have they, this will feel completely intimidating; I know, because I chickened out on doing it myself. But depending on how extroverted you are, you might succeed.)
And think of all the other benefits of getting to know people. Not only are you more likely to work well together in an emergency, but everyday safety will be enhanced (neighbors are more likely to look out for each other, and for the other children in the neighborhood, when they know each other). You’ll be able to borrow a cup of sugar more easily when you need it, or find a babysitter in a pinch. You’re less likely to argue over minor annoyances like barking dogs. And you’ll find people who potentially share your interests. If luck is with you, you may even expand your circle of friends!
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Wednesday, February 17, 2010
“No other medicine / but only hope”
After Hurricane Katrina, the chronically ill who’d escaped without their medications were among the first survivors to die.
Many evacuees had high blood pressure or asthma with no way to control their disease. Kidney recipients escaped without their antirejection medications, and lost function in their transplanted organs. Type I diabetics were stranded without insulin. By some estimates, six percent of the people of New Orleans had some form of diabetes, and a medical professor was quoted as saying that if fifty thousand people were crammed into shelters, that was three thousand diabetics “with no medication and no testing supplies.”
Which made me wonder: what would happen to my friends and neighbors in a similar disaster?
“The miserable have no other medicine/ But only hope: ” —Shakespeare (Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1)
My dear friend Colin (all names have been changed to protect identities) has Addison’s disease. It’s an adrenal-gland insufficiency which (like HIV infection) used to be a death sentence, but now is a perfectly manageable chronic illness — providing a patient takes meds on a daily basis. He takes dexamethasone (or prednisone) and fludrocortisone every morning; without them he’d be dead in three days. I asked him his plans in the event of a disaster. “I have a month’s worth of prednisone,” he said, shrugging. Fludrocortisone? Nope. He talked to his doctor about stockpiling it once, but was told insurance wouldn’t pay for it.
Kerry and Aidan carry EpiPens (epinephrine injectors) — Kerry’s due to unfortunate experiences with stinging insects, Aidan’s because of a dangerous food allergy. Last summer Kerry discovered the EpiPen in her purse had expired two years earlier, which might have been a tragic oversight if the dive-bombers at her picnic had been a tad more aggressive. Aidan, a second-grader, has already gone into anaphylactic shock during his short career at school. Yet Melanie, a school nurse in Washington, notes that because EpiPens are specifically prescribed for certain children, her school could not keep extras on hand: “If a kid was dying of a bee sting and they had a different kid’s EpiPen in the cupboard it would be against the law to use it.”
Melanie also told me about a child she’d encountered with adrenal hyperplasia syndrome: “She was too young (or the dosage was wrong) for pills, so she had to have a liquid form that needed replacing constantly. They wanted to keep a backup amount but it was very expensive, so they always had to remember to put the new medicine in the ‘backup’ spot and use the former backup medicine up. It was doable, just something they had to constantly do properly.”
James and Robert are young cousins with moderately severe ADHD, and both take stimulants based on methylphenidate. While their parents are able to cope (with gritted teeth) on days they don’t take their meds, the need to focus on tasks in hand in a real emergency might make a difference in their risk of serious injury or death. While stimulants are tightly controlled by the United States government — it’s not even possible, in many cases, to replace a prescription that’s been lost or damaged — James’s mother has carefully saved enough pills over the months they’ve been filling prescriptions (by not always giving meds on weekends and holidays) that she’s squirreled away an entire month’s backup supply, ready to go in case of emergency evacuation.
Ann has epilepsy. After years of experimentation, she hit upon a drug which works very well for her, carbamazepine; without it she’d be “a complete mess.” But she lost her job and has lived without health insurance for a long time, surviving partly on the contributions of relatives toward her medications. The drug used to cost over $100 a month without insurance coverage; she considers herself lucky right now, because a big-box retailer offers a special discount program on certain selected medications, and she can now buy carbamazepine for $17/month. It prevents her from having grand mal seizures, leaving only myoclonic jerks. Another drug she takes daily, clonazepam, smooths out the “kinda twitchy” aspects; she says she wouldn’t function well without it, but at least she’s able to obtain it at reasonably low cost from warehouse-store pharmacies. She hasn’t tried to stockpile either drug, however, and is now curious about how to do that; she gets a month’s worth at a time, and is often down to a four-day supply before replenishing.
She points out that epilepsy, like many illnesses, is made worse by stress and lack of sleep; with exhaustion and anxiety, seizures become difficult to control. And if her illness is not controlled, she cannot live an independent life. But she wonders how people on limited incomes, without access to extremely discounted drugs, can manage their illnesses on a regular basis — much less in an emergency?
Doreen has a thyroid disorder, which she takes pills for. “I am pretty sure I wouldn’t die without it,” she says, “but it is fairly essential to proper metabolic function.” Her mother, in an independent-living retirement community, has Parkinson’s, Crohn’s, and major depression, and is on “a boatload of drugs” for these and other chronic conditions. “We normally all have at least a week’s supply, maybe two, extra,” says Doreen. “I don’t think we can make any plans to stockpile, because the pharmacy won’t let you renew beyond 15 days out by mail order, one week out in person.”
“How do each of you plan to make sure you have your meds with you in case of emergency evacuation — earthquake, wildfire, hurricane, flood, that sort of thing?” I inquired. “Have you talked to your doctors about emergency backup plans?” No, she admits: “That’s a good thought; I’m realizing just how unprepared we are. You’re right, we all need a disaster plan, especially with ill parents, pets, kids, spouses that work in different directions, and so on.”
And hers is an excellent summary. We all need a disaster plan — and if we take essential prescription medications, we need to be prepared to manage for days or even weeks without a pharmacy.
Posted by eks on 02/17 at 10:31 AM(0) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
The power’s out. Now what?
Snap. Crackle. Pop.
There went all the lights, and the fan, and the music! (And, if you’re in one of those unfortunate homes where furnaces and well pumps depend on the power company, maybe the heat and water too.)
So how long are you likely to be in the dark this time? And what are you going to do with yourselves while the power’s out?
In my previous neck of the woods, power outages varied from a few minutes to much longer, though in a decade I don’t think we had one longer than fourteen hours (during the ice storm of December ‘08). We fell into a routine pretty quickly, though:
- Shut off anything we didn’t want coming back on unattended — computer equipment, a video/DVD player, the electric stove.
- Check with someone in another neighborhood, to see if they were out too (they often were, though sometimes it was just our street). Note that this requires a working landline or cell phone, as your Internet service goes out when the power does.
- Call the power company to see if we could get through and get an estimate (estimates were notoriously unreliable, but at least gave us something to work with). If it seemed like a long wait, often we’d give up and pile into the car for a day trip to some comfortable place which served food.
- Decide how long we could live without power, heat and tap water (yes, we were in one of those houses). On one particularly memorable occasion (during the ice storm), we packed our bags and went to stay with friends in another town.
Now let’s say you live in a household with no special needs — no people or pets requiring life support (that includes aquarium fish!), or with a major disability, or under the age of one. You expect the outage to be more than a few minutes, but less than a couple of days. What should you have on hand?
Light. Always on hand at our house: candles, matches, flashlights, batteries, light sticks, emergency lights (the kind that hang on walls and in closets, and can be pushed on and off) and camping lanterns. Never, ever leave candles unattended, or near combustible items like curtains — especially when people are sleeping! You don’t want to die in a fire just because your lights went out. If you want always-on light at night (we certainly do), stock up on various sizes of camping lanterns. Stash all of these items where you can easily reach them in the dark.
Warmth. Depending on your climate and the season, this could be anything from a long-sleeved shirt for everyone in the house to spare blankets and pairs of knit stretch gloves to down-filled, below-zero sleeping bags and winter hats and Gore-Tex parkas. If you live in a wintry climate and have a woodstove — and a clean chimney for it — by all means burn some wood to keep the place warm. (Do you have some on hand? and kindling, and matches?)
There are two things you should not rely on for heat. Fireplaces (the kind without woodstoves) often suck more heat out of your house than the provide — warm air escapes up your chimney, as cold air is drawn in through poorly insulated walls and windows elsewhere in the house. (We learned this the hard way.) Non-electric, non-vented space heaters (the ones which run on kerosene, gas or propane) are intended only to be used outdoors, as they’re carbon monoxide factories, become extremely hot during normal operation, and frequently burn people’s houses down while they sleep.
Note that I’m in a cool climate — if you’re in a hot one, this item might actually be about ways to stay cool without your air conditioner or fans. If your faucets still work, try a cool shower or draping cool cloths over your head and neck. Drink plenty of water (not, mind you, beer), and don’t forget to keep your pets hydrated too! Keep the curtains closed to prevent heating your house further. And if you can, go spend the day at a movie theater or other cool spot.
Drinking water, of course. (If your tap works and it’s a simple outage, great. If not, you know where your bottled water stash is, right?)
Hygiene supplies, if you live in a house with a well pump. (You won’t be able to flush, or wash from the tap — so have separate bottled water, baby wipes and hand sanitizer, and either a way to flush your toilet or an alternate plan for bathroom functions.)
Food you can get to and prepare during the outage. You do not want to open your refrigerator (or freezer) during a power outage expected to last less than a day, as it’ll let the cold air out and spoil much of the food. So you need canned, boxed and bagged convenience foods, along with a can opener and scissors (and maybe a bottle of juice you’ve stashed for the kids). If you expect a long outage, you might want to break out the paper plates and cups — or even a camping stove. (At the point where a simple blackout makes me feel like I’m camping, I generally start thinking about motels and restaurants, but I’m high-maintenance that way. I have been known to put a pot of canned soup on the grill, though.)
Entertainment! I don’t know about you, but without an Internet connection I’m often a little lost these days; I have to consciously remind myself of how much I love reading books, too. So have books everyone will enjoy at hand — if you have kids, this is an excellent time to start a family read-aloud session — and games that are easy to play by candlelight (cards? Trivial Pursuit? whatever works for you) — and a few favorite toys for every member of your family (for adults, this might mean a knitting project, or crosswords, or a guitar). Have a singalong! Play charades!
For a multi-day, can-we-tough-this-out-without-going-to-a-shelter outage, you’ll want other stuff on hand: extra first-aid supplies and medicines (if the blackout is related to a storm making travel difficult); that camping stove, and fuel for it; even a generator. But extended camp-outs are a topic for another day.
Posted by eks on 02/09 at 10:44 AM(0) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Putting your eggs in one basket
Relatives of mine live in a largely rural town on the edge of a metropolitan area in the Northeastern US. Until their power company upgraded the lines (after years of blaming squirrels) their power would go out frequently, in probably a half-dozen significant outages a year. Once, during an ice storm years ago, they lost electricity for four days; they fled to a motel. During the ice storm of December 2008, they were out from early morning till nearly midnight.
So what failed during their power outages? Electric lights and appliances, of course. Heat: they have an oil furnace, but the ignition is electric. And water: their well pump is also ... electric. None of these basic needs has built-in battery backup.
They’d bought a generator after an earlier experience, figuring they could run at least some of the items that were important to them. But they learned the hard way just how important it is to test-start a generator at least once a month: a clogged fuel line kept them in the dark during the ice storm.
Fortunately they’re experienced cold-weather campers, and the electric company in their area promised quick restoration, so they figured they could tough it out until the power returned, and did. (And the ice storm only knocked power out to some towns in the region, so if they got too cold or hungry they could have driven to a warm motel or restaurant and get fed/sheltered/washed that way. Not something you want to count on, though.)
Does your plan for emergencies (the most likely emergencies in your area) have a similar Achilles heel?
Are you expecting your town water supply to work no matter what happens to other utilities, figuring you can shelter in place as long as you have access to a water supply? Water mains do break, especially in earthquakes, and town water-treatment plants depend on access to power.
Is your tornado plan basically “drop everything, grab the kids, get to a basement?” What if you’re all eating dinner or seeing a movie in a building built on slab?
Do you figure it doesn’t really matter what happens to your coastal town in a hurricane, because you can always throw your evac bags in the back of the truck and go? What happens if you forget to fill up the gas tank on the truck? Or the battery’s dead when you turn on the key? Or there’s so much broken glass or windblown debris on the highway that you lose a couple of tires?
And remember that Murphy is not only out to get you, he’s creative. Not only can anything go wrong and will — interesting combinations of “anything” might bite you when you don’t expect them. I know someone who planned a huge “rain or shine” yard sale for her new rural home, figuring that the combination of (a) an indoor setting for sale items and (b) excellent signage to her hard-to-find driveway would bring out the buyers. What she didn’t plan on was heavy rain on the morning of the sale, disintegrating all the signs she’d carefully hung.
The lesson here is: examine your assumptions. What am I relying on in this plan? What can go wrong? What else could go wrong? And what might I do about that combination?
If you have other examples, please share them in the comments!
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Tuesday, January 26, 2010
I now pronounce you … a disaster
As an American, I grew up hearing various public officials declaring that things were officially disasters. A few months ago, after a perusal of the news, I started wondering.
What does it mean, exactly, to “declare a disaster”? Why is it done, and to benefit whom? Do any officials outside the United States engage in this sort of announcement? And what do you do if your area is declared?
I decided to sit down and find out.
Let’s cover the third question first. Yes, non-Americans do this from time to time. Australians do; in 2000, the premier of New South Wales declared a natural disaster after the state was overwhelmed by widespread flooding. In France, a national disaster insurance program requires the government to issue an “Arrêté de reconnaissance” (government declaration of disaster) in order to settle a claim — an arrangement under which, according to the US Government Accountability Office, the French government declared 110,000 natural disasters between 1982 and 2005! Canada seems to have different models depending on the province; in Ontario, the Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing must declare a town a disaster area (after a tornado, for example) before it can be eligible for the Ontario Disaster Relief Assistance Program. Yet many approaches to disaster relief differ from the American model.
In several countries, the government provides national coverage for (at least some) disasters. France has a Catastrophes Naturelles program for uninsurable disasters, from avalanche to earthquake to drought. Japan provides reinsurance for earthquake coverage by private companies. New Zealand covers uninsurable risks from earthquake, windstorm, and flood — providing a homeowner has purchased fire coverage. Spain provides government insurance and reinsurance for such disasters as volcanoes, tsunami, and meteorites. Switzerland makes catastrophe insurance mandatory, and prohibits or restricts building in flood and avalanche zones. Taiwan has an earthquake approach similar to Japan’s, though it also includes explosions, landslides, and fire. Turkey established compulsory earthquake insurance in 1999, but later declared all its citizens eligible for government funds whether they had insurance or not.
Other countries emphasize the private market and have no national reimbursement for disaster victims. Germany and Italy rely on optional natural-disaster coverage added on to insurance policies. In the United Kingdom, flood coverage is standard for property policies.
In the United States, though, there are two forms of federal involvement. One is the National Flood Insurance Program (earthquake coverage is handled optionally by private insurers). The other is those formal disaster declarations, which permit assistance from the federal government to disaster victims.
Here’s how a national disaster is “declared” in the United States, and what that means to you:
In order for the President to declare a disaster at the Federal level (something done, on average, 33 times a year), the Governor of the affected state or territory makes a request through the regional office of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency). Both state and federal officials assess the damage and its impact; to qualify for Federal relief, the disaster must be “beyond the capabilities of the State and local governments.”
(In many U.S. states, local governments may declare disasters in order to qualify for state aid. The governor may then respond with a disaster declaration, activating state-level emergency management protocols.)
Depending on the disaster, FEMA may then activate disaster programs to bring relief to victims. These include aid to individuals and households; aid to public and nonprofit agencies for emergency services and repair of public facilities; and hazard mitigation measures to prevent future recurrences.
Individual assistance in the US can include temporary housing, grants to repair damaged homes (or in rare cases, replace or construct them), and grants for medical, dental, funeral, moving, legal, and other expenses. It also might include unemployment assistance to people whose jobs are lost due to disaster and who are not covered by other unemployment programs. Crisis counseling programs are sometimes established for people in affected areas — both immediate outreach, and services lasting up to nine months thereafter. Tax breaks are offered to people who’ve lost property exceeding 10% of their gross incomes, and refunds can be expedited to taxpayers in disaster areas.
Public assistance is available for a variety of projects: removing debris, providing emergency protection, repairing roads and bridges, providing clean water and other utilities, and repairing public buildings and parks.
The federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program allows communities to buy or relocate property in hazardous areas; elevate buildings prone to flood; reinforce buildings against earthquakes, wildfire, or flood; and develop mitigation plans. The primary emphasis of the program is on floodplains and floodproofing.
If your corner of the United States is declared a federal disaster area, listen to the news for information on where to go and what to do, and visit FEMA’s Web site at http://www.fema.gov.
If you’re reading from another country and have knowledge about your country’s disaster-relief programs, let us know and we’ll cover them in a future column!
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Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Auto-da-pay?: keeping your finances in shape for emergencies
We have a friend I’ll call Elaine — because that’s not her name — who is, to put it kindly, somewhat disorganized. While she sometimes gets as far as making neat piles of bills on her kitchen table, actually getting them paid on time can be something of a challenge. From what we’ve heard, she has managed, at varying times, to have her cable modem, telephone (landline) service, and electricity disconnected. That’s in the past six months.
Are you like Elaine?
Under normal circumstances, losing normal utility services is not a huge deal: a major hassle, no doubt, but something not likely to cost more than an afternoon off work while you go drive somewhere to pay a bill. But what if circumstances aren’t normal and you need those services?
- The biggest heat wave in decades comes to your town — and you have no electricity to run an air conditioner or even a cooling fan so you can sleep at night.
- An ice storm just took out your electricity, but you can’t call anyone about it because you forgot to pay the phone bill.
- You’re housebound after a major snowfall — and you discover you have no heat because you let the oil tank run dry.
- You’re trying to keep an eye on the latest hurricane track — except that your Internet and cable TV service were just turned off.
- Your town announces a quarantine — but you’re stuck at home with no incoming water because of unpaid bills. (Some towns simply issue liens, but others will actually cut off service.)
Please don’t find yourself in this position. If you have a pile of bills somewhere in your house, now’s a good time to pull them out, make a list, and try to get up to date on your obligations.
“But I can’t!”
- If it’s simple forgetfulness, consider setting up auto-pay on some or all of the bills you fall behind on. Many banks offer automatic payment options; so do some utilities. You can set up one-time or recurring payments, and even arrange for wildly varying charges (like electric or natural-gas bills) to be smoothed out by paying a prearranged amount each month.
- If it’s an organizational issue, find a buddy who’s willing to sit down with you and help you sort out your paperwork, possibly in exchange for your doing the same or a similar favor for them. (Or, if you can afford it, consider a professional organizer.)
- If it’s a financial issue, call your creditors and work out a payment plan — they’ve heard it all before, really, and would much rather have you offer to pay a bit at a time than to simply disconnect or otherwise stop serving you.
And when push comes to shove, you’ll be glad you paid up.
Posted by eks on 01/19 at 06:11 PM(1) Comments • Permalink
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Don’t call us, we’ll call you: emergency notification systems
I was paging through a local newspaper when I spotted a story on something called “Reverse 911”. (Though it’s “000” in Australia, “999” in the UK, and “112” in the European Union, “911” is usually the number dialed to reach emergency services in the US and Canada. Now ... reverse that.) In my years obsessing about preparedness and consuming articles on emergency services and disaster recovery, I hadn’t yet encountered the term.
I mentioned it to a group of friends online. “What is it?” asked one. “In an emergency,” I said, trying to summarize the article as concisely as possible, ”they call you.” “Neat,” she said.
Out of twenty-five in the group, only two had encountered “reverse 911” services in their communities. One, in suburban New York, had been called about a minor water issue. Another, in Massachusetts, joked: “The recorded voice of the chief of police has called us a couple times about irreievant road closures. What are they going to do? Call about a real emergency? It’d cause mass panic.”
“REVERSE 911”, it turns out, is a name trademarked (by Sigma Communications , now part of PlantCML) for what is more properly called an “emergency notification system.” In the same way people say “Kleenex” when they mean facial tissues and “Xerox” when they mean “photocopy”, reporters in towns all over North America have taken to referring to any community notification system as “Reverse 911”. Such systems use recorded calls or other modalities to alert citizens in a geographic area (to blizzards, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, nuclear plant crises, whatever potential disaster looms. Some communities use it to tell citizens of sexual predators in their area, or children who’ve gone missing. Others use it to inform people of contamination in water supplies, or, as my Massachusetts friend learned, road closures.
And so through the night went his cry of alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm ...
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”
Here are a few answers for questions you might have:
Q: If “Reverse 911” is a trademark, what are some of the other systems called?
A: In one browsing session I ran across systems made by firms including Everbridge, Amerilert, Enera (RapidReach), Emergency Communications Network (CodeRED), Siemens (Sygnal), Cooper Notification (RSAN), TechRadium (IRIS), Database Systems Corp., and Amtelco (Red Alert), among others. There are probably dozens of firms and packages altogether.
Q: Who can use them?
A: Public-safety officials in any jurisdiction, including police departments, fire departments and other authorities.
Q: How many cities/towns are they deployed in?
A: Now this is an excellent question! The officially trademarked “Reverse 911” system alone claims to be used in “thousands of communities, counties, commercial businesses, schools and non-profit organizations.” So there are probably tens of thousands using all packages on the market, though it’s not clear how many users are towns and counties rather than companies or organizations. Soon Connecticut will roll out the first statewide emergency notification system in the United States.
Q: How do they notify people?
A: Most systems seem to begin with all listed landlines (both residential and business) in a given area. Some (which draw on 911 databases) have unpublished/unlisted numbers as well; others, like Tampa (Florida)’s, apparently do not. The system in Osceola, Arkansas, has both landlines and cell phones in its database. Other systems can use text messages, email, and fax. However, many systems seem to require registration of cell numbers, VoIP (voice over IP) numbers and email addresses.
Q: How much do they cost?
A: A chief of police told The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas that six providers he spoke with all quoted a range of $15K to $25K (US) a year; his community, Bella Vista, has about twenty thousand people. Darien, Connecticut, with about the same population, pays $10K a year to maintain its system. San Diego County (California) paid $200K for its newest system in 2007, and $19K/year to maintain it thereafter. Connecticut’s statewide system should cost $1.4 million/year during its first year, $650K thereafter.
Some towns in the US appear to be defraying costs with grants from the Department of Homeland Security.
Q: Are they used outside the US?
A: Definitely! Systems are in use in Lancashire in the UK, British Columbia in Canada, and Canadian towns and counties in Ontario and New Brunswick, among others.
The state of Victoria, Australia, tested a warning system (both phone- and text-based) in fire-prone areas back in 2005, but it was never rolled out thanks to debate about who would pay the cost, estimated to be $20 million (Australian). In the wake of the devastating fires in Victoria in February of 2009, politicians are now pushing for a national notification system to go live within the next year or so.
Q: Is anyone attempting to standardize these systems?
A: Yes. The "http://www.incident.com/cookbook/index.php/CAP_Fact_Sheet">Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was adopted as a standard by the International Telecommunications Union in 2007, but it’s not clear how many emergency notification systems are actually using CAP in their software yet.
Notification systems are a still fledgling tool for emergency preparedness, but look amazingly useful. We’ll cover them again as further developments arise.
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Tuesday, January 05, 2010
What to know before the power goes out
This fall I was sitting around the house of a pleasant Wednesday morning, happily pounding away on my laptop, conversing with friends in one window, Accomplishing Stuff. Then ... buzz, crackle, the lights all flashed and went out. And came back. And with a final sigh, went out again.
There was something in the finality of that sequence that made me suspect the power would be out for a while. When I stuck my head out and called to a neighbor a couple of doors down, only to discover her power was out too, I figured we were in for the long haul — and me still unshowered. (My water usually works during outages, but my water heater doesn’t. And I like long showers.)
So I was back to the dance I’d done in another town many a time: first try to guess how long the power would be out, and then figure out what to do during the outage. As I tried to reach neighbors to see how far the blackout extended (several have VoIP so their house phones no longer worked), one stuck her head in and told me the school, two miles away, was also out. I called the electric company and wandered through a voicemail maze, reaching a human. A substation by the nearest shopping mall had gone down, he told me, and their best estimate was two hours hence.
Just as I hung up, preparing to go door-to-door spreading the news, I noticed a light had come back on — the power smoothly returned as though it had never left. And though I hadn’t unplugged them yet in preparation for the power coming back, none of the electronics in the house had been fried.
The previous outage wasn’t so smooth. We were watching a DVD late at night, when lightning struck overhead (the single loudest sound I have heard in my lifetime!). The power wasn’t out for very long, but when it returned, we’d sacrificed several items to the lightning gods: an Internet router and cable modem (which took four days to replace — an eternity for a work-at-home household); one landline phone; and the contents of our basement freezer. The freezer itself actually survived, but the surge tripped the GFCI circuit it was plugged into, and by the time we tracked down the problem we had to discard hundreds of dollars’ worth of food.
As for the phone ... the phone company informed me their network was just fine, and suggested I check the “Network Interface Device” (NID) which, they said, could be anywhere in our basement or outside. (I eventually found it in our bike shed.) I borrowed a working phone, plugged it in, and got a dial tone from the NID, proving the problem was in my house. After much trial and error inside, I unplugged our answering machine, plugged in a borrowed working phone, and got a dial tone: the phone line was fine but the answering machine was fried, and while it was plugged in to a phone jack, no other handsets would function. Removing it solved the problem.
So let’s review some lessons learned:
1. Know your circuit breakers. Know where the breaker panel is. Know which outlets and devices each breaker controls. Know how to reset a breaker. Make sure they’re correctly labeled.
If an appliance won’t come on, don’t just check the circuit breaker. Check to see if it’s plugged into a GFCI outlet, and if the circuit breaker in the outlet has been tripped. If it’s a large appliance, check the manual to see if it has a built-in fuse that might have blown.
2. Protect yourself from surges. Don’t hesitate to splurge on a high-quality surge protector for your most critical devices. Do unplug voltage-sensitive equipment (especially computers) during an outage, to avoid surges from the return of power damaging your electronics.
3. Learn about your phone service. If you have Plain Old Telephone Service, have a basic idea how to debug it. Have a spare working phone on hand, and know where the Network Interface Device to your home is.
4. Be prepared to swap a lot of devices around to track down a problem.
In another column, we’ll cover “now what?”: what to do, and have on hand, during the actual outage.
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Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Don’t run out of gas!
One of my most enduring memories of the media coverage of Hurricane Rita, in 2007, was of huge lines of cars heading out of Houston — dozens of whom ran out of gas and had to abandon their vehicles.
I never, ever, ever let my gas tank go below half-full if I can help it (I sometimes get my car back from other family members who haven’t internalized the rule), but I’ve been reading that even that amount of preparedness is not enough. During hurricane or wildfire or ice-storm season, some say, never let your tank go below full. Top it off every chance you get, at least every day or two.
(Make sure your tires are also inflated up to spec; various sources claim a three- to six-percent hit on mileage from underinflated tires. And do all your recommended maintenance on time, before it becomes an issue: changing spark plugs and fuel filters, and using the right oil, can affect fuel economy as well.)
One for the road
Also think about whether you want to have a little extra on hand. “Jerry cans” — metal cans for storing gasoline, diesel or kerosene, which hold five gallons or twenty liters depending on country — are widely available, and some models are legal throughout the United States. (In Canada, plastic cans seem to be preferred.) If you keep one of these cans on hand for an emergency, make sure it’s clean, and that you fill it on the ground and not on or next to your vehicle (to avoid static charges). Do not overfill, and carefully wipe up any spills from the outside of the can, disposing of the paper towels somewhere other than your vehicle. Strap the gas can securely into a supported place in your vehicle’s trunk, and do not ever, ever expose it to smoking materials or other open flames. (Kaboom!) Until you need it, consider storing it in a cool dry place in your garage or other area away from any possible sparks.
Drive smart
If you are lucky enough to get yourself and your family out of town over relatively unjammed roads, don’t drive aggressively! Jackrabbit starts, stomping the brakes, and driving faster than the speed limit all use up far more gas than driving at a dignified pace. (In hilly areas, so can using cruise control, though it actually improves mileage on flat roads.) Unblocked roads aren’t likely to be an issue, though, in a widespread disaster.
Remember that idling in traffic eats gas: the California Energy Commission claims that two minutes of idling equals one mile of travel (so if your car gets 20 mpg, 40 minutes of idling would use a gallon of fuel). They also claim that ten seconds of idling uses up more fuel than turning off your engine, and restarting it once traffic starts to move again — and that shutting off and restarting adds only a tiny cost in component wear. If you’re ever in an evacuation jam, and sitting more than a minute, shut off your engine.
Air conditioning might also be a fuel hog: at less than highway speeds — below 30-40 mph (50-65 kph) — some authorities say using the AC consumes up to 20 percent more gasoline than rolling down your windows. However, many of those people fleeing Rita had to do so in heat well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit (around 40 Celsius), and had to choose between staying cool and hydrated or using up precious fuel. And getting more was not an option — gas stations were tapped out hundreds of miles inland.
Don’t put yourself in this position. If bad weather is even hinted at, go top off all your vehicles’ gas tanks, and keep them that way.
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Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Why aren’t you ready yet?
Are you prepared for it? For whatever “it"s are most likely in your area?
No? Me neither. (Yep, even emergency-preparedness writers still have work to do. I do a bit at a time and still feel guilty that I haven’t done everything I’d like to yet.) And a recent survey by the US Federal Emergency Management Agency suggests that ”the proportion of those who have taken appropriate preparedness measures is much lower than those that indicate that they are prepared.”
There’s no “one size fits all” plan, which means you have to give your emergency planning real thought. Does your household have others besides you in it? Do you have seniors in your family? People with disabilities or special needs? Kids? Infants? Pets? All these categories require specific planning, which is daunting when you don’t know where to start.
Authorities always suggest you have a disaster plan and disaster kits — and not just one, either, but one for home and one for your car and one for your workplace and one for your kids and one for your pets and and and. Some authorities suggest you plan for things you’d need if you stayed home, things you’d need if you left, and things you’d need to do if you were leaving anything you wanted to take behind — securing your building, arranging for livestock care, double-checking insurance, any number of other tasks. That’s even more lists. That leaves you with a heck of a lot of work to do just to rough out a plan, never mind to make all the lists you’d need to shop for all those disaster kits — and then you have To Do and To Buy lists and really, how many of us ever get through even simple To Do lists unless deadlines are staring us in the face?
Also, what I most want to plan for in my area (hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards and ice storms) might be very different from what a friend in California plans for (e.g., wildfires, mudslides, earthquakes) vs. what a relative in the Midwestern US needs to think about (e.g., floods, lightning storms). While many US states and Canadian provinces have their own regionally focused emergency Web sites, it can be daunting to narrow down what you, personally, most need to realistically plan for.
Many things you know you really would like to do (e.g. move your most important files to a fireproof or waterproof safe, and save photocopies at another location; back up a research project or novel manuscript onto portable media; duplicate irreplaceable family photos or memorabilia) might feel like giant unmanageable projects all by themselves. One of the things that nagged at me for years, back when I worked mostly on desktop computers, was how to save our family-history database in case we had to leave in a hurry — removable hard drives seemed impractical and expensive. Now I own an iPhone, and the whole thing is backed up into a single app. (I could, of course, have made copies on CD and stored with an out-of-town relative. But that would have been a Project, so it never got done.)
To add even more guilt to the mix, people who pay close attention to news about emergency preparedness often feel they should be doing even more — brushing up their first aid and CPR, going through drills, joining a community response team. The more we’d like to do, often, the more overwhelmed we feel and the less we wind up doing.
So let’s begin to break down those Projects and to-do lists into smaller, more manageable pieces, shall we? We’ll do that in future articles, so stay tuned.
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Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Cache or charge?
Among the things you’ll most frequently see on lists of emergency-preparedness items to have in your family disaster kit — either a to-go kit or one for sheltering in place — are flashlights, camping lanterns, and similar lighting items. Sometimes those lists include weather radios, standard transistor radios, walkie-talkies, or handheld TVs — all generally battery-operated. If you have an amateur radio enthusiast in the family, you know that using handheld ham equipment during a power outage requires batteries.
Yet how many of us, outside the areas most frequently hit by hurricanes, stock up on batteries and then check to see if our supplies (a) match the items we intend them for and (b) still work? (Yes, batteries do expire eventually.)
And who on earth thought it was a good idea to have five major types of consumer batteries (AA, AAA, C, D and 9-volt) for flashlights and lanterns alone, each of which need to be stocked separately? And that’s not even counting book lights and penlights and the like, which often use button-cell batteries, which come in a bewildering array of types!
This year I packed for a camping trip and discovered that some of the flashlights in the house no longer worked (not because of batteries — they had bad connections or bulbs), and the ones that did didn’t necessarily match our batteries on hand (we were low on some types, overflowing with others). So I wound up making a fast run to a local pharmacy — more expensive, but there was no time to hit a big-box store and stock up at a discount — for the right batteries for each lighting tool. Next time we’ll know better.
Lesson one: check every battery-operated item in your house (at least the ones you hope to use in an emergency; unless you have kids, you can probably skip the GameBoys and PSPs) and write down how many batteries of each type each one uses. Use this list to construct your supply checklist.
Lesson two: find an inexpensive source, whether it’s a big-box store or an online supplier, and buy a whole lot of batteries at once.
Let’s also talk about items which don’t have standard consumer batteries but you might want to use when the power’s out, after a windstorm or similar event. These you’ll need to think about how to power when you don’t have working outlets (via the electric company or a generator), or at least how to live without:
- Cordless landline phones with base stations: substitute at least one old-style Ma Bell plug-into-the-phone-jack landline. If you don’t have one, they’re cheap; try buying one online or at a local electronics shack. (You don’t have to actually use it if you hate corded phones; just have it on a handy shelf somewhere for when you do need it.)
- Cordless drills for making repairs: these might run for only half an hour if fully charged (do this before the storm!), but since you only use them briefly, that might account for a fair bit of drilling before the battery runs out of juice.
- Cell phones, PDAs, and combinations (like the iPhone or Palm Pre): these can run off backup power supplies. Do you have one for your cell phone / PDA — solar, hand-crank, backup battery? If not, which would be the best type for you to purchase?
- Motorized wheelchairs or other mobility devices: have an extra battery on hand if you can afford it. (Apparently a car battery can be used in a pinch, but it won’t last as long.) If not, there are converters for some batteries that plug into a car’s lighter socket; see whether those are available for your model. Also, if possible, learn how to charge your chair or scooter battery using a jumper cable.
- Laptops: you might be able to run a laptop off a UPS (uninterruptible power supply) for half an hour or more in a pinch, but if your laptop battery usually lasts only two or three hours, do you have a backup to swap in? If you might need to use your laptop during an extended outage, do you have a power pack capable of running it? Several vendors sell portable solar chargers, so that’s an option you may want to investigate.
If I’ve left out your particular battery concern, let me know, and we’ll discuss it in a future piece!
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Tuesday, December 08, 2009
The Last Subduction
Hold your hands out in front of you, palms down, elbows out, fingertips toward each other and touching. Now fold the fingers on your dominant hand down slightly, sliding it beneath the other until the non-dominant hand rests on top.
This is subduction, the process of one geological plate at a plate boundary slipping gradually beneath another. Unfortunately, when rocks are involved, the slippage is not nearly as smooth as when your hands do it (assuming your skin is not covered in rock): subduction is responsible for the deadliest megatsunami in history (the 2004 Indian Ocean event which killed a quarter-million people), and the largest earthquakes ever recorded by human beings (including Chile 1960 and Alaska 1964, and Lisbon 1755). These “megathrust” earthquakes can exceed 9.0 in magnitude. (Remember that quake measurements are logarithmic, so that a nine-point earthquake packs a thousand times the punch of the seven-pointer many Californians worry about.)
When you have a major metropolitan area sitting on top of a subduction zone, things really get interesting. In 1755, the thriving city of Lisbon — then only about 275,000 souls — experienced a megathrust earthquake, tsunami, and fire; these reshaped European history, philosophy, science and architecture. (Lisbon now has ten times as many people, so it’s fortunate that seismic building codes have been in effect for two and a half centuries.)
Yet we in North America also have populous metropolitan areas on top of subducted plates. The Seattle/Tacoma metro area in Washington Sate has 3.3 million people. Metro Vancouver, BC, on the other side of the US-Canadian border, has 2.2 million. Greater Portland, Oregon, to the south, has over two million. All sit firmly atop the Cascadia Subduction Zone (CSZ), source of the greatest recorded North American earthquake outside Alaska.
On the evening of January 26, 1700, a megathrust quake struck somewhere off the Northwest coast. (The fault ruptured over six hundred miles (1000 km), from Vancouver to northern California.) No Westerners had then settled in the area, but records of tsunami damage resulting in Japan help to fix the date.
Parts of the Washington coast fell five feet (1.5 m). Red cedar and Sitka spruce forests were drowned by the tsunami, and carbon dating shows their final rings were formed in the growing season of 1699. On Vancouver Island, the houses of the Cowichan people collapsed, and a village of the Pachena Bay people was wiped out. The Hoh and Makah people of the Olympic Peninsulas preserve legends of “trembling of the earth,” “rolling up of the great waters”, and starvation.
Geologists have found evidence of dozens of giant earthquakes in the prehistory of the region. Some use the figure of thirteen over six millennia; another says twenty 9-point-plus and eighteen 8-point-plus earthquakes over ten millennia, with a “return time” of three or four centuries. Many also agree on at least a ten percent chance of the CSZ rupturing within fifty years.
An Oregon state geologist announced in April 2009 that when the next M9 quake hits Cascadia, “The amount of devastation is going to be unbelievable.” Coastal towns might be struck by a tsunami 80-100 feet (24-30 m) high.
In August 2009, seismologists studying “deep tremors” in the CSZ suggested that the next megathrust might happen further inland, beneath the Olympic Peninsula, producing even stronger shaking on land. Major cities, full of highways and bridges and brick buildings, will suffer massive damage. Due to the scale of the devastation, it may take many days or weeks for rescue workers to reach homeless and hungry survivors.
So: if you live in the Pacific Northwest, what can you do?
- Start reading up about quake and tsunami hazards in your community and any you frequently visit. If your town conducts drills or education sessions, attend!
- Put together emergency kits for home, cars, and office. Assume that you might not be seeing emergency workers or other authorities for a week or more.
- Make plans. If you work in an office, ask about emergency drills. If you have kids, talk to their schools about emergency procedures. Make sure everyone in your family knows your game plan for reuniting and/or letting each other know you’re safe.
And good luck. Let’s all hope the CSZ will hold until the science of earthquake prediction becomes more advanced.
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Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Don’t make me release the flying monkeys!
Since the film of The Wizard of Oz was released in 1939 — with special effects that were truly amazing for its time, given that the SFX team creating the tornado had never seen one and had no footage to go on — people around the world have been fascinated by the twisters of the American Midwest. But how often do you hear about tornadoes anywhere else?
Granted, Tornado Alley doesn’t have a monopoly even in the United States (or northern Mexico and southern Canada, where some folks say the alley ends on each side), but did you know that tornadoes aren’t only an American phenomenon? “It just seemed so astonishing to see a twister in Lancashire,” said one British onlooker after a storm in 2005. “I thought these things only happened in Kansas.’’
Turns out that Britain has quite a few — though they’re usually weak, tornadoes hit more often per square mile in the UK (and the Netherlands) than they do in the US! Countries where tornadoes are often spotted include France, Germany, India, Bangladesh (where a 1989 event killed 1,300), southern Russia, Japan, China, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa. A quick mental map will show that we’ve already hopped around both hemispheres, and every continent but Antarctica.
Why don’t we hear more about them? Well, North American readers don’t get much news from other parts of the world, especially weather news, unless an event is extremely unusual or kills a lot of people (like the 1989 Bangladesh tornado). Many countries have large, sparsely populated regions where tornadoes are not reported. Some do not have a strong emphasis on weather reporting and analysis.
If American readers need a somewhat dubious point of pride, however, the US has many more reported tornadoes (by an order of magnitude) and generally stronger tornadoes than anywhere else.
That’s one geographic myth down. Here’s another: Because large buildings affect weather patterns, tornadoes don’t usually hit major cities — or at least their downtowns.
I believed this one for years; I have connections in Chicago, near the northern end of America’s Tornado Alley, and while twisters were not uncommon out in the suburbs, you hardly ever heard of them in or near the city limits. Some researchers speculated that heat-island effects of cities (more pavement, less vegetation makes cities warmer than surrounding areas), like large structures, were protective, so I patted myself on the back thinking we were safe.
But residents of several American cities can tell you different. Not counting tornadoes which went through areas other than a central business district (such as the awful tornadoes of Worcester, MA in 1953 and Oklahoma City in 1999): Nashville has been hit multiple times. In less than a century, St. Louis, Missouri had four fatal tornadoes in the downtown area alone. (Windsor, Ontario — across the river from Detroit — also had four in that stretch of time, though the fourth had no fatalities.)
In the last decade and change, Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, Fort Worth, New Orleans, and Atlanta have all had twisters roar through downtown.
The real science behind the myth is statistical: downtowns are usually much more compact than surrounding city and suburban regions. If you have a city of two hundred square miles, and its central business district is two square miles (units are illustrative; substitute sq km if you like), the downtown has a 1% chance of being struck by a tornado inside the city limits. (You can do the same math with a city itself and its surrounding metro area.)
But despite the “it can’t happen here, because it hasn’t” crowd, even Chicago’s Loop has been hit, back in the pre-skyscraper era. In 1876, an F3 came to town, merrily knocking over buildings and leaving death and destruction in its wake. Imagine something like the Oklahoma City tornado (an F5 up to a mile wide) roaring through an area as population-dense as today’s Loop!
Actually, in 2007, researchers in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society did just that, visualizing an intense tornado in downtown Chicago. They estimated that in dense residential sections up to 45,000 deaths could occur, and such a tornado could destroy 239,000 housing units and cause “substantial damage to over 400,000 homes occupied by over 1,100,000 people”; “permanent structural damage” could happen in “a broad area of the high-rise office and apartment districts”. Now isn’t that cheery news?
So no, many of us are not in Kansas anymore, but that doesn’t mean we’re safe as houses in the Emerald City. Be careful out there.
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Tuesday, November 24, 2009
E.T. Phone Home—If You Can!
A neighbor and I have a friendly argument about phone service. He long ago switched to cell phones as his primary method of voice communication, but since he and his wife have a school-aged son, they keep a house phone for “family” calls. Their house phone, though, is not a hardwired land line (the old-fashioned Ma Bell kind) — it’s a VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) service. Which lasts only until the power or cable go out, I point out. (While the Internet itself is pretty robust and can route information around major outages, the “last-mile” connections, especially cable service to homes, can be vulnerable to squirrels, heavy rain, and other minor glitches.)
Me, I’ll give up Ma Bell when you rip her out of my cold dead hands. See, I used to live in the town the electric company forgot, and on days the electricity went out to lunch, or a long vacation, the phone was the only thing in the house that worked.
(Note that if you’re a Luddite like me and think land lines are the bee’s knees, you need to make sure that at least one of the handsets in your home is the kind you plug only into the phone jack, and is NOT a cordless or other handset dependent on an AC outlet. Relatives of mine found this out the hard way.)
God bless self-powered phone lines, I tell my neighbor. Will your beloved cell function several days into an ice storm?
“If it’s ‘several days’ into an ice storm,” he fires back, “and I have had zero power, then my house is already unlivable. And I would have moved somewhere else.” (Which, I have to admit because we live in the Northeastern United States, is a point. But admitting that might lose me face.)
At this point in the argument another neighbor generally steps in and offers to go out with an axe, hack through the ice, collect rocks, use the rocks to build a fireplace in his house, make a turbine from old bike parts and install it in the chimney, generate his own electricity, and invite Neighbor Number One over to recharge his cell phone. My neighbors think they’re comedians.
Now I’ll confess that I own (and love) a cell phone; I bought it for use outside my home, but it’s also backup should land-line service go kablooey. I think everyone (especially those responsible for children or other dependents) should consider having at least two methods of communication in an emergency.
Yes, naturally there are ways to recharge cell service if your power is out: if you have a car charger, you can run your car for a bit and recharge from engine power, and if you’re running vital services in your home or office from a generator, you can borrow power from that. But if cell was my primary (or only) phone service, I’d go out and buy a wind-up emergency cell charger, solar charger, or supplemental battery unit. I’ll address some of these options in a future column.
Friends who work in the communications business — and this is by no means a scientific survey — speculate that in the event of a widespread disaster in our area, land lines will be restored first, then cell towers, then (long afterward) last-mile broadband. Your area may have different priorities (and, if they’re wrong, so could mine).
Here’s a rough overview of the pros and cons of each communication method:
land lines (Plain Ol’ Telephone Service)
Pros: Powered by phone company batteries, so they work for a while in a widespread power outage (at least a few hours, maybe even days). Work best with 911 service, as responders can tell exactly where you are.
Cons: Overhead lines susceptible to windstorms, ice storms, and ground movement.
cell phones
Pros: Portable; can be used almost anywhere there’s a signal from a cell tower service (including most of the US and Canada). Many newer cell phones have GPS, allowing you to be pinpointed by emergency responders. SMS text messages (because of the minimal bandwidth they require) may be the only thing that get through in a widespread disaster. Cell towers may survive disasters that take out telephone lines.
Cons: Batteries have short lives; recharging during an outage can be a challenge.
VoIP
Pros: Can be used wherever there’s an Ethernet connection. Often cheaper than the other methods.
Cons: Vulnerable to both power outages and outages of your cable service or Internet service provider. Guests in your home may not understand how to use your service. If you use your VoIP service for mobility, Caller ID may not tell emergency services where you really are.
Worth chewing over, isn’t it, as you prepare for the most likely disasters in your region?
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