Your Survival Blog
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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