Your Survival Blog
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
A dam shame?
After moving to a new town last year, I was startled to see that a city not far away, in its comprehensive disaster plan (which includes the usual riots, tornadoes, and winter storms, as well as “radiological plumes” from nuclear power plants), included “dam failure.”
Dam failure? I didn’t even know there was a dam nearby. I sat down with a search engine and pulled up some maps. It turned out there are two, both on brooks dammed over a century ago to form reservoirs for that city. Both are labeled “high hazard”, though they’re fairly small and neither is directly upstream of residential areas — the worst that would happen if either failed is probably some flooding on a nearby interstate.
Yet dam failures can be far more catastrophic.
On the last day of May, 1889, the South Fork Dam, a creaky and largely neglected structure holding back a private lake in western Pennsylvania for the pleasure fishing of wealthy vacationers like Andrew Carnegie, abruptly “moved away.” Sweeping downstream with the power of Niagara Falls, it carried away four small villages and hamlets. By the time it rolled into the city of Johnstown it was a forty-foot wall of debris, corpses and water. More than twenty-two hundred people died (none of whom were wealthy vacationers).
The Johnstown Flood led to the reform of liability laws in the United States, but it wasn’t the last massive dam failure, not even in the United States. In March of 1928, a giant concrete dam near Los Angeles, California, collapsed in the middle of the night; the wall of twelve billion gallons (45 billion liters) of water killed more than six hundred people. The Buffalo Creek disaster in West Virginia killed over a hundred in February 1972; residents had not been informed about the “real soggy” condition of the dam, much less evacuated. Three months later, the Canyon Lake Dam in South Dakota killed somewhere between dozens and hundreds (estimates vary widely). In 1976 and 1977, three more failures killing dozens (in Idaho, Pennsylvania and Georgia) led to dam safety laws and programs in most US states.
And failures happen all over the world, due to problems ranging from design failure to poor maintenance to extreme rain. The Great Sheffield Flood of 1864, in Yorkshire, England, resulted from the loss of a just-built dam on the Dale Dike Reservoir. In 1959 a dam in southern France (Malpasset) collapsed, killing between three and five hundred people. A 1963 failure and landslide in the Italian Alps (Vajont) destroyed several villages, killing 2500; at Val di Stava, only 65 km away and less than twenty years later (1982), a collapse killed 268 more. After a 2005 dam burst in southwest Pakistan (Shakidor), quick search and rescue saved over a thousand people, yet seventy were known dead and hundreds missing.
August 1975 saw one of the greatest disasters in history: the Shimantan and Banqiao dams in Henan Province, built for one-in-a-thousand-year floods, were unable to keep up with the water dumped by Super Typhoon Nina. Weather conditions made notification and evacuation difficult; their failure wiped a town off the map and killed over a hundred thousand people.
All that historical coverage gives you an idea of the worst-case scenarios you might face. But what can you, personally, do to avoid being the victim of a future dam breach? This is one of those forms of preparedness that differs drastically from area to area, so there’s no one-size-fits-all advice.
To begin, you’ll need to consult your favorite search engine.
First, find out what the dam safety laws and procedures are in your state or province or district. While I was putting the search engine through its paces, I randomly checked eight or nine US states and four Canadian provinces, with “dam safety RandomPlaceName”. Every search term turned up either a state/provincial office, or a detailed explanation of how dam safety was legally handled in that area. (Australian offices were harder to find, but it was clear that government advice on dam safety was available. I haven’t found the magic search terms for counties in the UK, and haven’t tried other countries yet. But I encourage you to poke around yourself. In the US, you might start with this map.)
Then learn which dams are nearest you. To start, try searching for “YourCityName dam” or “YourCountyorDistrict dams”. Ask your neighbors, or your town’s police department or emergency management agency ("CityName emergency management"). Learn the names of any dams.
Now try a search like “DamName dam breach” to learn how close you are to the predicted path of any dam breach. If your town has an emergency management plan, see what it says about notification and evacuation procedures. Is there a plan for sirens or ”Reverse 911” should a failure appear imminent? What can be done about moving yourself and your family to higher ground?
Take your research and incorporate it into your family’s disaster plan. And when heavy rains come along or a quake hits your area, pay close attention. Good luck!
Posted by eks on 03/30 at 10:39 AM(1) Comments • Permalink
Thursday, March 25, 2010
“Plastics.”
You live somewhere near the water — say, somewhere along the Canadian Maritimes — and there’s a storm brewing to the south, scheduled to come up the Eastern seaboard straight at your province.
Or you live somewhere in wooded country — say, northwestern Montana — and the wildfires are getting out of control and approaching your area....
The one thing you need most is not a picnic basket full of food. It’s not the kids’ Wii. It’s not even the family photos. Once you load up the kids and pets, head inland or to a less wooded area — where are you all going to stay? Almost certainly a hotel or motel, and those are expensive.
In Western cultures, in the 21st century, you’ll need a credit card.
If you’re like the average American or Canadian, you have thousands of dollars (maybe tens of thousands) already in credit-card debt, and may have maxed out one of more of your cards.
You might even be one of those folks who doesn’t believe in credit cards, even though it’s difficult to get along in modern society without them. But in a pinch, wouldn’t it be useful to be able to whip out a piece of plastic?
What about debit cards, you wonder? Those are great if you’re good about keeping hundreds or thousands sitting in your bank account — but don’t forget that during a disaster you might need to spend that and more.
You might need to stock up on all those supplies you forgot before the hurricane or fire or ice storm comes to town: plywood, batteries and camping lanterns, bottled water, French toast ingredients. (In New England, we refer to impending winter storms as “French toast emergencies” because everybody runs out to stock up on milk, bread and eggs. Your mileage may vary.) You might, depending on the nature of the crisis, need to have essential goods delivered.
You might need to settle your family in a motel outside your area for days or weeks, with no definite end in sight — and to pay for gasoline and food during your evacuation.
(You might even be traveling far from home and break your leg — and find that the clinic in Fiji doesn’t take your insurance.)
No matter how good your credit is, arranging a bank loan right before or during an emergency is going to be a non-starter. So pay your credit-card bills on time, and leave a generous margin on your credit limit. Or, at the very minimum, keep an emergency margin in your bank account, and have a debit card which permits you overdraft privileges. When you need money fast, there’s just one word: “plastics.”
Posted by eks on 03/25 at 12:36 PM(5) Comments • Permalink
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
How to Survive a Motorcycle Accident (part 2 of 2)
In the last column I discussed some of the reasons an old friend is still alive, after a nasty encounter between his motorcycle and a mountain guardrail. Here are more crash-prevention tips I learned while researching that piece.
Use your head — plan ahead
Don’t go faster than the road and the weather conditions allow. This is a difficult lesson for beginning riders, who often overestimate their ability to negotiate a tight curve. (Drifting out of a lane while doing this is especially risky for motorcyclists, because if a car or truck comes the other direction, they’ll plow right into you. Watch out.) But even in good weather, experienced riders misjudge curves, as my friend D. did.
Never ride beyond your sightlines, says a rider who’s taken many safety courses. “There could be a fallen tree blocking the road around that blind bend, or some sand in the middle of the corner, or a car stopped over the crest of that hill. The MSF class will teach you other stuff to watch out for.”
And while this probably shouldn’t need to be said: Ride sober! Riding a motorcycle is an activity requiring skill, balance, and decent reaction time. Even half a drink might rob you of a critical bit of coordination needed to avoid an accident. “An amount of alcohol that leaves you within the limits of the law, and after which you would feel safe driving a car, may impair you to the point where you cannot ride a motorcycle safely,” advises one motorcyclist. “My own personal rule is that I don’t drink and ride.”
Ride defensively
Make yourself stand out visually. If your motorcycle leathers or other gear are black, this will be a problem on a dark night. Some racing leathers come in colors, though, as one rider sniffs, “not everyone wants to look like a Power Ranger.” Cordura nylon gear comes in a variety of colors, including high-visibility yellow (worn by a bicyclist in my family), some with reflective patches sewn on. If you don’t want colored gear, consider a reflective vest over it at night. The most important factor in gear is its protective value — you can add the visibility options after the fact. “My synthetic jacket has some reflective on it, and is gray,” says another friend. “I have reflective tape all over my helmet.”
Even when you’re wearing DayGlo colors, pretend you’re invisible to other vehicles and be aware of where they are at all times. About three-quarters of motorcycle accidents in the US are caused by collisions with other vehicles. Careless drivers (some motorcyclists call them “Brain-Dead Cagers”, or BDCs) will run into the strangest things: “BDCs hit ambulances, fire trucks, and cop cars that are running lights and sirens,” says a disgruntled motorcyclist. “They’ll hit you too.”
Take care of your fellow riders
These tips for riding in groups were all contributed by a long-time rider I know:
Stop periodically to allow slower riders to catch up, and to make sure everybody is still with you. If you have experience, consider riding in the rearmost “sweep” position to watch out for the less-experienced riders commonly found toward the rear. And if you plan to leave a ride early, let the group leader know so he or she knows you haven’t simply gone missing.
Also: "Ride your own ride. Don’t let peer pressure goad you into riding faster than you’re comfortable or otherwise doing unsafe things. Similarly, don’t pressure others. And a group that tries to exert peer pressure to get you to ride in a way that you’re uncomfortable with is not a good group to ride with. Stay away.”
Allow for rescue
I wondered if a good rule might be to “stay on well-traveled highways if you can” — even on a state highway in Vermont there was no cell reception, and a Good Samaritan had to call in D.’s accident further down the valley. I was gently corrected by a motorcyclist who says he, and many of his fellow riders, “prefer roads less travelled. They’re prettier ... and there are fewer vehicles on them in general. The biggest hazard isn’t the road itself, it’s other road users.”
But if you’re one of those riders who prefers back roads: “don’t let the lack of traffic and general tranquility lull you into complacency” — if you crash someone may still need to go for help. So consider riding with a buddy. If you can’t deal with that or often can’t find a friend to go for a ride on a pleasant Sunday, consider buying a personal locator beacon. These are GPS-based, waterproof, able to last days on a battery (at above-freezing temperatures), and can take a considerable amount of abuse. Find them at outdoor-sports suppliers.
Learn more about crashes
For a summary of findings from the Hurt Report — published in 1981 but still widely considered “the most comprehensive motorcycle safety study of the 20th century” — see this page.
Another frequently quoted study, done in Europe and published in this decade, is the MAIDS Report, summarized here.
Ride safely!
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
How to Survive a Motorcycle Accident (part 1 of 2)
When I sat down to write this I had in mind a different topic — until I heard that my friend D. was in the hospital with multiple fractures following a wipeout on his motorcycle. He crashed into a guardrail on a mountain road, by the way. Guardrails are designed for enclosed vehicles ("cages", as motorcyclists call them), not for people on two-wheeled vehicles; collisions with guardrails often cause leg, spinal and head injuries to motorcyclists.
But he’s alive — and given the seriousness of the accident, not severely injured — so I wanted to write about why. Here are some ways to survive mishaps on your motorcycle:
Wear a helmet
This seems so obvious to safety advocates that it seems almost not worth mentioning, but a significant proportion of bikers still prefer to go bareheaded — a 2007 survey found that only 58% of US riders wore them regularly. Fifty-eight percent! (Hospital transplant centers are grateful to these people, whose vehicles they call “donorcycles”.)
Your helmet should cover your ears — no novelty or “pudding-bowl” helmets, please — and be legal for road use. If possible, buy a helmet approved by the Snell Memorial Foundation. One with eye protection is preferable; the best-known study of US motorcycle accidents, the “Hurt Report” (a wonderful title, though it was named for its primary author Harry Hurt), concluded that “seventy-three percent of the accident-involved motorcycle riders used no eye protection, and it is likely that the wind on the unprotected eyes contributed in impairment of vision which delayed hazard detection.”
One European study found that 9% of helmet wearers lost their helmets during the course of a crash, so make sure your helmet fits properly and is fastened correctly.
All the Gear, All the Time
This is so much a watchword in the motorcyclist community that they abbreviate it ATGATT. “All the gear” means helmet, gloves, jacket, pants, and boots. And “all the time” means just that — not “It’s hot and I’m just going to the store down the street, so it’ll be okay to wear shorts and flip-flops this once.” One friend admitted that he “started wearing proper riding pants when I read the words ‘road rash of the penis’ in a crash report. Owwww.....”
Body armor comes in several varieties, including “motorcycle leathers” and cordura nylon gear with armor padding. (A friend prefers the latter, since it’s more water-resistant than leather and can be worn over office clothing.)
Educate yourself
There is a motorcycle safety class in or near your community. Take it. In the United States, the Motorcycle Safety Foundation can tell you where; they offer both a “Basic Rider Course” (good for those who haven’t ridden for a while) and an “Experienced Rider Course” (for learning advanced accident and road-hazard avoidance techniques). A long-time rider says that “Retaking the ERC every few years is probably a good idea.”
Tricky techniques like countersteering (the highly counterintutiive maneuver of steering-left-to-turn-right, or vice versa) are covered in depth in these courses. So is using the front brake; says a friend: “back when I learned to ride and Reagan was President, there was a widely-held but very wrong notion that using the front brake would cause you to crash. So lots of riders never learned to use the front brake, and the front brake provides 80% or more of your stopping power in an emergency stop from normal road speeds. This, by the way, is an excellent example of why you should get professional riding instruction —because if you learn to ride from your ricky-racer buddy in a parking lot, you’ll pick up all of that person’s misinformation and bad habits.”
Oh, and get a license, even if your state/province/territory doesn’t require it. More than a quarter of all motorcyclists who died in the US in 2007 didn’t have one (compared to only 15% of drivers who died in passenger vehicles).
Maintain your motorcycle
Before you set out, check that your tires are well inflated and the brakes are still good. Studies have found that these are factors in only a small percentage of crashes, but do you want to be the exception?
Check your tires for nails and the like, too. The Hurt Report found that most mechanical-failure accidents involved punctures producing flat tires.
These are a few of the reasons my friend D., thank all that’s holy, is still alive. (And yes, you can do everything “right” and still die in a crash — but doing what you can to mitigate risk will go a long way toward preserving life and limb.)
For more on crashes and how to prevent them, see the second part of this article, which follows soon.
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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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