09:11 – I just read an interesting article about hurricanes: The flip side of years of no hurricanes: Good luck runs out
The point of the article is that we have been extraordinarily lucky over the past century. Katrina and other memorable hurricanes notwithstanding, we’ve suffered only a small fraction of the loss of life and property damage we might have expected based on historical norms. People tend to underestimate hurricanes. Even a small hurricane is gigantic, and dissipates enough energy to make a hydrogen bomb look like a BIC lighter in comparison. The real nightmare would be a Cat 5 hurricane striking Houston, not just because tens of thousands of people might die, but because the damage to our petroleum and gas infrastructure would be devastating and take years to replace.
Another email from Jen. She, her husband, her brother, his wife, and their two kids had a different kind of Memorial Day get-together. First thing Saturday morning, they declared a test emergency. Her brother and his family evacuated to Jen’s house, where they hunkered down in emergency mode. Jen’s husband turned off the electric power at the main breaker, as well as the natural gas and water. They spent the three-day weekend using only their emergency supplies. They did grill out Saturday, but as Jen said they’d also be doing that in a real emergency before their frozen meat spoiled. Jen said that things went pretty smoothly, but they did encounter a few unexpected issues, which they treated as learning experiences. They’re planning another emergency simulation over the July 4th three-day holiday.
More kit stuff today.
“Jen said that things went pretty smoothly, but they did encounter a few unexpected issues, which they treated as learning experiences.”
Would she share those issues with you or us, perhaps? We’re looking at trying out a week or two off the Grid this next winter here. Like our grandparents used to do all the time.
Another full night and day of steady rain here; we’ve been planting tomatoes, early-, mid- and late-growth varieties. Finishing off six raised beds and we’re gonna build three more; plus we have big containers all over the place.
Off for dump run, picking up more compost, manure, etc., and some more vegetable seedlings. Then back here to clean out the back porch to the point that I can sit at it during the coming warm weather and do small workshop stuff with firearms, radios and suchlike.
None of the items she mentioned were showstoppers.
□ their propane tank ran out, forcibly reminding them that they had only one spare 20-pound cannister.
□ The toilet seat designed to clamp onto a 5-gallon bucket didn’t fit any of the several different 5-gallon buckets they had, so her husband and brother rigged up a frame for it. She’s going to buy a folding bedside commode locally, measuring to make sure that a 1/6-barrel t-shirt/thank-you bag fits over the rim.
□ they have so many cases of canned goods stacked up that they weren’t able to find one or two items that they planned to cook. Jen is going to do a detailed inventory and make a 3-D map of where each item is within their stacks. Longer term, she’s going to put in more shelves so they can keep stuff more visible.
□ Everybody thought everybody else had bought packs of D-cells, when no-one had. So they weren’t able to use their D-cell lantern, but they had plenty of AA-cell lanterns and the cells to feed them.
□ Their experiment with solar battery recharging didn’t go well. They have an Anker 14W portable solar panel and an Anker 20,000 ma storage battery. The storage battery charged in the sun, although slower than they’d hoped, but their USB AA charger did nothing when they plugged it into the Anker storage battery. Problem is still to be determined.
Are the vegetable seedlings you’re buying open-pollinated (“heirloom” or true-breeding)?
Hurricane Ike, the September 2008 storm that landfalled in Galveston and proceeded up I-45 into Houston, had Cat 2 winds (90+ mph) with a Cat 3 storm surge (24 ft) at landfall.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike
Most of the damage was done by rising water and wave action. The 90+ mph wind in Houston caused an enormous amount of trees to fall into power lines with widespread outages from several hours to several weeks.
I still think that a Cat 5 hurricane striking Houston would have a life loss of over a million due to the 30+ ft storm surge and wave action. It is just impossible to evacuate a large city like Houston in a day or two. Over half of Houston would have waist deep water in it. The storm last Monday night was an eye opener with up to 12 inches of rain over six??? hours.
“It is impossible to simultaneously understand the theory of evolution and to believe in blank-slate cognitive equality among human groups of different continental origins.”
http://takimag.com/article/evolution_or_equality_pick_one_jim_goad/print#axzz3bqV9L1MF
But of course the progs and libtards want it both ways and declare it Holy Writ.
Well, evolution IS true.
@Lynn
Is Sugarland so much higher than Houston that storm surge wouldn’t be a problem there?
“Well, evolution IS true.”
Sure it is. The other thing is not.
Is Sugarland so much higher than Houston that storm surge wouldn’t be a problem there?
Sugar Land is 70 to 90 ft above sea level and forty plus miles away from the Gulf of Mexico.
Houston is 0 ft to 150 ft above sea level and zero to fifty miles away from the Gulf of Mexico (Galveston bay shields Houston from the storms but did not do that for Ike).
Hurricane Ike was devastating in that salt water was driven over ten miles inland and ruined cow pastures, etc for years. But people who had to got out. I am fairly sure that people would not be able to get out for a Cat 5. We might see a salt water inrush for twenty miles, I just do not know. There used to be a hurricane flood map model on the net but I cannot find it anymore.
Once upon a time Our Host was a very active customer of the Netflix DVD-by-mail service. I thought this article about the automation of the DVD return process by the vendor supplying the machine-vision devices used, might be of interest.
Give each shelf & segment a unique identifier, if necessary go to three levels. For example, shelf Red – A – 2 might be ‘Ammunition, .45 ACP, 230g FMJ’. In that scheme, Red = Ammo, Blue = Foodstuffs, Green = Medical Supplies, etc. Make sure that anyone & everyone being sheltered is familiar with the naming convention, so if I say “Mary Sue, go to shelf Yellow – D – 4 and bring us two boxes of widgets.” she can find it in a hurry, even if she hasn’t the faintest idea what a widget is. And make sure that if you also have ‘Ammunition, .45 ACP, 185g JHP’ that it doesn’t get put on shelf Red – A – 2 . All of this is easy enough to index on a computer, of course. Then print out a master inventory, and shelf labels for each individual item.
Here is a video of the Brazos River flooding about 2 miles away from my home and office. The road is US 59, I-69:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noOuJ0znFho
Credit card number got stolen again. Attempts to use the card in Italy at some pizza place. Tried four times there then two more times at some other store. Transactions should have been blocked but are showing as pending on the account. I called and denied the transactions and the card is now blocked. How these thieves get the card numbers is beyond me. I have only used the card once in the last year and that was at Deutsche Bahn in Germany to purchase train tickets. I guess someone at DB stole the number. Or perhaps Chase got compromised. Or just a random number generator was used and the lowlife scum got lucky.
New card should arrive in a couple of days. Not much I can do about it as I have to have the credit card to travel. I travel with three cards in case one gets compromised. I try not to carry all three cards at the same time but don’t have much choice when traveling. The lowest level of fallback is American Express which will wire you money and get you a credit card quickly if needed.
Last time a card number was stolen was when I used the card at Applebees. Rarely use that card but generally use it when I eat out rather than my debit card. Credit cards are safer. Someone at Applebees stole the card number. Applebees corporate response was “prove it”.
@Ray, I feel for you. I had my Amex number stolen so many times I figured out their number algorithm and could predict the new card number. Usually it was most likely hotel clerks. Twice it was Blockbuster Video rental. The clerk would find a number on file that hadn’t been used in a while, charge a cd to it, and if that worked, went shopping.
Amex if very good about spotting fraud proactively, and since they work for the member, not the merchant, getting charges removed was simple. That is BTW one of the reasons merchants don’t like AMEX.
With Amex Gold you can get up to 5 cards that all charge to the same master bill. They all have different numbers and names on them. I use them to organize my charges, in case I lose a receipt or forget if something is deductible. If it is on the business card, it is deductible. In theory, I have one that I only use online with sites I don’t know. If that one gets stolen, it won’t affect any of my recurring charges. That one is also hidden in my travel bag as backup if my wallet gets stolen. Best case would be having all the recurring charges go onto a card number that never leaves the safe. Then none of the ‘organizing’ cards could affect the recurring charges if their numbers changed.
Amex is good about getting you your new card, but no longer overnights it to you unless you are traveling and ask them to. It used to be automatic.
For years I averaged 200-250 days a year on the road. My least traveled year, before I stopped traveling for work, I still had 100 days away from home.
American Express, airline mileage club, and an airport lounge membership make it a WHOLE lot more tolerable, but it still sucks.
Also BTW, they don’t need to get lucky guessing with a random number. Valid card numbers are determined by algorithm. You can download keygen software that will generate valid card numbers. There isn’t any easy way to tell if they’ve been ISSUED, or to who, but many smaller merchants don’t or can’t check every transaction, and only verify that the number could be valid. [or at least it used to work this way. may be different now that everyone is moving to card plus chip.]
nick
@Lynn, I’ve seen the map, but don’t know where to find it either. The disturbing thing was that it showed an ‘arrow’ of water pointed right toward my house in the loop. It stopped short of us, which was a comfort, until the city engineer who was presenting the info to our HOA pointed out that “the only reason the flood water stops there is because that was the boundary of the study.” In reality, the water would keep moving up the river/bayou until it flooded the whole inner loop.
@RBT, since Houston is a swamp, I joke that we’re 43 feet above sea level, and 6 inches under water. It is normally a really wet place.
During Ike, the eye moved right thru my neighborhood, and we are 60 MILES inland. It was still taking out trees and ripping off roofs. BTW, when they say don’t go out in it, because of the flying debris, I’ll bet you don’t picture the WHOLE METAL ROOF from a WAREHOUSE ripping off in one piece and flying downwind. That is the sort of flying debris that will END you. I’m hiding inside for the next one.
For what a fairly minor hurricane will do to structures on a barrier island, that were built to hurricane code, google Ike plus Bolivar peninsula. There is a real good prepping lesson to be learned from those pictures. Especially the one that shows a solitary house, surrounded by the neighborhood scrubbed clean down to the sand. Even if you have a concrete bunker that survives intact, if the whole city is gone, you won’t be living there. No streets, water, sewer, trash, mail, or stores. It was a while before anyone could move back.
nick
Hurricane zones, beachfront property, Kalifornia wildfire canyons and mudslide houses, “Tornado Alley,” flood zones, earthquake faults, chemical plants, active volcanoes, and major cities with large underclass pops getting increasingly aggressive, hostile and violent. Why would anyone choose to live or choose to stay in such places???
All the nifty preps in the world can’t save us from stuff like this.
Still think we’re just gonna muddle through like always? Still believe this is a great country?
http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=230189
How ’bout them elections, eh? Field Marshal Rodham and Bernie on one side and the Repub clown car from the other:
http://christianmerc.blogspot.com/2015/06/so-you-want-to-vote-republican.html
It’s over; ‘th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!’
Lurch breaks his leg. Dispatch a C-17 with a herd of doctors to take him home. Troop gets blasted to pieces, probably gets a civilian charter turbo prop through Goose Bay for days with a candystriper.
Never a dull night at the McGuire household. The cat caught a rat and I beat the rat to death with my cane. The million dollar question is, did the cat catch the rat inside? Or did he catch the rat outside and bring it in?
This is rat number four in the last year or so. I am beginning to think that we live in a free range rat zone.
I am thinking about giving Rand Paul’s campaign a few bucks. Maybe he is more of a chip off the old block than I thought he was.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/436757e3df5b4dc3878033ca7dd24390/analysis-design-paul-stands-alone-presidential-race
@nick, I think that this is your picture of Bolivar:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Ike#/media/File:Hurricane_Ike_Gilchrist_damage_edit.jpg
Yup, those are bare foundations. The old standard to build on Bolivar was 16 ft tall piers. The new standard is 24 ft.
There is an episode of “Buying The Beach” on the Destination channel that follows a couple buying a beach home on Bolivar. At one point the lady says, “all the homes are new!”. Yup, because the old beach homes got swept away in the wave action!
Amex is good about getting you your new card, but no longer overnights it to you
Discover Card was really good. Had my car broken into because the spousal unit left her purse in plain view on the seat. Cretin busted the side window to grab the purse. It was at a local high school football game.
Immediately called the credit card companies to block the cards. None had yet been used. This was about 10:00 at night. Next morning on Saturday at 10:00 AM FedEx shows up with a new Discover Card. VISA had to wait until I called the credit union on Monday and asked for a new card. Took 10 days for the card to arrive. I was not impressed.
Biggest hassle was replacing a driver’s license, redid the locks on the house, had the vehicle computers reset to void the security keys and had new keys made and replaced the passenger side window. Cost me over a $1000 to get it all taken care. The thieves got about $3 in change out of the purse. If I would have caught them the cretins would now be missing five fingers and two thumbs.
@Lynn,
That one will do just fine.
Funny thing is, it’s hard to find current pictures to see how recovery went. Supposedly it’s all back, but you’d never know it from the web. You’d think at least ONE person would have done a retrospective by now.
nick
@lynn
If RPaul doesn’t cut back on the spam email, I might have to change my mind about him. If you do give him money, you can look forward to a packed inbox. At least 4 times a day he’ll have his hand out. I know they need money but come on.
If McCain, and the two turncoats McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, don’t like him, he’s doing something right.
nick
Lordy. We still have folks who believe in the elections, voting, campaigns, and handing even MORE money over to political hacks. I give up.
I give up.
You gotta have faith man!
I have faith where it counts, but not in our rulers or the minions who keep voting for them and recycling the rubbish endlessly.
If nothing else, the arithmetic dictates that our votes and money are badly outnumbered now by the Other Side and they intend to complete the ruination forthwith. RUTHLESSLY.