Disasterpiece Theatre: 1994 Edition

h/t Commander Zero

Mind the gap. Meet the five luckiest people in CA in January 1994
without winning the Lotto jackpot. Underwear resupply inbound.

Thanks to Commander Zero (who should already be on your blog-read list), you get this to make up for the post I just wasn't feeling yesterday.

For those who haven't delved back six years ago, when I put up a post a couple of times a week, I commend to you the four-parter regarding the Northridge Earthquake of 1994.

It will be germane to a lot of people, including anyone west of Yuma.

BTDT, got the t-shirt.

FWIW:
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/04/northridge-earthquake-pt-i.html
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/04/northridge-earthquake-pt-ii.html
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/05/northridge-earthquake-pt-iii.html
https://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2013/05/northridge-earthquake-pt-iv.html

Also entitled:
How I Spent The New Extra Week Before The Start Of Third Semester Of Nursing School in 1994.

There are lessons there. If you want some lessons particular to quakes, and some applicable to all disasters, give them a peek.

I only bring them up because they're germane today, and just sitting there in the catacombs of my blog collecting dust. And they're free. So if you learn anything, you're welcome, with my compliments. That's why I wrote it all down.



The formerly brand new Student Parking Structure at Cal State Northridge after
Mother Nature redecorated. Five stories tall, now only two. The vertical beams
were 1'x4' steel reinforced. If this had been at 8:31AM on a weekday,
the death toll there alone would have been hundreds. And parking still sux there.

TL;DR?

1) No one is coming to help you. YOYO. Plan accordingly.

2) 72 hours of supplies? AHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Try 14-30 days, minimum. Yes, really. IMHO, if you're not ready for 60 days totally self-sustained, you're selling yourself short.

3) Northridge utilities/situation overview:

*Power: Nada. For 11 days. They weren't even sure they could reboot an entire city from scratch when they flipped the switches, but it worked. That time.

*Water: Boil water orders for 30+ days, thousands of breaks in water mains (18" from sewer mains, btw). 25 years later and L.A. still hasn't found and fixed them all. (Doubt me? Google "L.A. sinkholes" since 1994-yesterday. The prosecution rests, your Honor.)

*Heat: It was sunny the day after, even in January. If this had been cold, wet winter, like anywhere in 49 other states, or half of even this one, we would have started loosing people to exposure within two-three days.

*Communication: Ha. Pre-cell era. No POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) for a week. Now, >50% of people don't even have landline POTS. (Might want to rethink that clever strategy, kids.) And cell towers have far less capacity, and maybe 24-72 hrs battery back-up. Maybe.

*ATMs: AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Cash in hand, or do without.

*Retail business: AHAHAHAHAHA. For two weeks. Only when the power came back on.

*Transportation grid: Hundreds of normal overpasses condemned.
The I-5 down to one lane in each direction for a month, and 300 yards of 100-foot-tall overpass gone.

*Gasoline: Did I mention there was no power for 11 days??
You had the gas you had, until it ran out, or you drove 50 miles away to fill a tank, out of the affected area.
So, imagine that was not possible, or a lot farther away than 50 miles.
And remember, hundreds of freeway overpasses were out.

*General destruction: they were still pulling bodies and victims out of rubble two days later, and that was with less than 100 actual rescues or fatalities, and everyone within 200 miles helping out.
Now imagine 1000, or 10,000 victims.

It's bad when your third floor apartment is now on the second floor. It's
even worse for the people who lived on the first floor. And who are now pate.

I repeat: YOYO: You're On Your Own!
If you have gloves and a shovel, you're the only rescue squad you're going to see for days to weeks.
Also the only fire department.
And police department.
And EMS.
And hospital.
And pharmacy. (How many days of your meds do you have for back-up?)
And restaurant.
And market.
And building contractor.
And garbage collection.
And so on, ad infinitum.

Welcome to the real Day After.

Now tell me what's in your kit.

Best Wishes.
-A.

And The Hits Just Keep On Coming...

The geo-dweebs warn after an earthquake that there's a lottery-level chance a bigger one is coming. They always say that. Tonight, it paid off.

I was at the bookstore after dinner out. Decided I was either having a stroke, or it was another quake.
Saw everyone else looking around and concluded B) was the operative answer.

The swaying was less intense, but it was a lot longer this time (90-120 seconds, minimum), so I figured it had to be a bigger event. (Rule of Thumb: When it feels like a 4 to you, but it lasts two minutes, somebody else's world got f***ed up.)

Ding! Ding! Winner!

7.1 this time. (Yesterday's was a 6.4.)
This one was 7 miles NW of yesterday's, and about as far from any humans - still out in the middle of Mojave Desert BFE.

God help the people in Ridgecrest, and aboard China Lake NAWC.
They'll definitely be over this nonsense now.

A 7.1 shake for 1 1/2-2 minutes is nothing fun. Nothing at all.

And being bigger this time, that officially makes the July 4th quake the foreshock.

On the plus side, the wind-up radio was fully charged by the sun today, and I consolidated some medical supplies, including the Catch-22 jump bag.

What disaster is your local flavor?
Where's your stuff for that?
You're far better off checking it two months too soon than five minutes too late.

Have a nice weekend.
I'm hoping the only rocking and rolling you do is to the stereo speakers.
And not the front yard.

Pretty Hellacious Earthquake Here...

Developing...

Shook moderately hard here for 30-40 seconds, got bigger as it went. Probably a lot bigger somewhere else than here. Lasted almost a minute, all tolled.
...

6.6  6.4 per USGS (For reference, the Northridge Quake was ultimately listed as a 6.7.)
...

Near Ridgecrest, BFE out in the Mojave Desert.
Halfway from LA to Vegas, and north.
Fort Irwin and China Lake probably got the f**k rattled out of it.

The epicenter was 10.72 miles from the center of the runways at China Lake NWS, on a bearing of 82.72°, according to GoogleEarth. USGS puts the coordinates at 35.7052N, and 117.506W.
Right in the middle of a big dirt nothing.
It's about 11 miles from the town center of Ridgecrest, and about 400 yards from the nearest building at China Lake.
...

That's over 100 mi. from where I'm sitting.
The people close to that are going to be in some major doo-doo, and definitely in need of a fresh set of underwear.
...

I tried to post a report on the USGS "Did You Feel It?" site, because it helps them get an idea of where and how strong it was beyond raw seismograph data, but it was locked up (from traffic, most likely), which is never a good sign.
According to the interactive shake map, it was felt by people from Phoenix AZ to Chico CA, which is about halfway from Sacramento to the Oregon state line.
...

It's good that this was in such a lightly populated to virtually uninhabited area.
(Still waiting for any reports of any local casualties.)
If this had been, say, right under downtown L.A., with acres of pre-1933 construction masonry buildings, it would probably be a body count in the three- to five-figure range by tomorrow.
---

I Hate That Stuff

Our thoughts, prayers, and sincerest sympathies are with the residents in and around Anchorage at the moment.
A 7.0 earthquake ain't no kind of fun; BTDT-GTTS.
But the day after mine hit me, it was 67°, not 27°  like it is in Anchorage today.
That's going to make a huge difference on what happens to people next.
Hang tough, Sourdoughs.

And to think we spent last night binge watching Coast Guard Alaska...

Plop Plop Fizz Fizz

story Link

Florence Update

HEADLINE: Camp Lejeune being evacuated.

Yeah, they're evacuating the dependents and non-essential personnel, and telling civilian workers to stay home.

Meanwhile, the guys on active duty, with nowhere to go, will likely be filling water jugs and canteens, wearing K-pots and IBA anytime they leave the barracks, pushing wall lockers up against the glass windows, and hunkering down until it blows over.

And best of all, eating MREs 3X a day until further notice.
Ask me how I know.

Best wishes if you're anywhere close to this, and I hope it keeps sputtering down.

Miguel at GFZ FTW, Again

h/t Gun Free Zone

CNN tweet: The Cajun Navy, the famous volunteer rescue group that formed in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, is in Columbia, South Carolina, with at least two air boats and 600 Jeeps ahead of Hurricane Florence.

 "Several hundred American have gotten into their own vehicles to drive over 700 miles to get ready to help total strangers in the immediate wake of a natural disaster.
They have paid for this out of their own pockets and have done this without any expectation of reimbursement.
...I don’t see a lot of Liberals driving pickups south down I-95 to lend a helping hand."

RTWT.

Fire the CNO. Hire whoever's running this group.
Somebody understands "Mission Before Virtue-Signalling" better than guys in Flag Quarters.

And this thing is headed straight for a bullseye on Marine Corp Base Swamp Lejeune, and the entire 2nd MarDiv. I'm talking right at them.

Word to the Commandant of the Marine Corps:
You better get your people's crap in one bag, because the whole world's going to be watching this one. This ain't gonna be a dog-and-pony show.
And you better hope God will have mercy on all y'all if you screw the pooch on this, because Chesty sure as hell won't.

Anybody With Leave On The Books, I'd Take It Now

h/t Phil

Hurricane Florence projected track

If NOAA is on the case, Swamp Lejeune and the 2nd MarDiv, along with UNC-Wilmington, and then Ft. Bragg, look like they're about to get effed up in a major way Thursday/Friday by Florence, just in time for the weekend.

Semper fi, ladies, but if you can take leave, and have a POV, I think I'd be headed anywhere 500 miles away from the post NLT Wednesday at 1600.

Odds are half the division is already playing at Fort Bragg, and about to find out what a dissipating hurricane does to 100' pine trees sometime Friday morning.
(It sux; ask me how I know.)

I'm thinking I might hit Disneyland that day. The Summer ugly crowds are gone, and it's probably going to be 80+ and sunny, just like the rest of the year. Earthquakes are come as you are, no 3-day notice for an appointment to screw up your life.

These Are My People

h/t Peter @ Bayou Renaissance Man

Vegas shooting ER team

Ironman, Captain America, Superman, and Batman 

From this month's Emergency Physician's Monthly (the trade paper for ER docs):

I’m a night shift doc. My work week is Friday to Monday, 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. Most people don’t want to work those shifts. But that’s when most of the action comes in, so that’s when I work. It was a Sunday night when the EMS telemetry call came in to alert Sunrise Hospital of a mass casualty incident. All hospitals in Las Vegas are notified in a MCI to prepare for incoming patients.

As I listened to the tele, there happened to be a police officer who was there for an unrelated incident. I saw him looking at his radio. I asked him, “Hey. Is this real?” and he said, “Yeah, man.” I ran down to my car and grabbed my police radio. The first thing that I heard when I turned it on to the area command was officers yelling, “Automatic fire…country music concert.” Ten o’clock at night at an open air concert, automatic fire into 10-20 thousand people or more in an open field—that’s a lot of people who could get hurt.

At that point, I put into action a plan that I had thought of beforehand. It might sound odd, but I had thought about these problems well ahead of time because of the way I always approached resuscitations:

1. Preplan ahead
2. Ask  hard questions
3. Figure out solutions
4. Mentally rehearse plans so that when the problem arrives, you don't have to jump over a mental hurdle since the solution is already worked out 

It’s an open secret that Las Vegas is a big target because of its large crowds. For years I had been planning how I would handle a MCI, but I rarely shared it because people might think I was crazy.

RTWT

It's written by the senior ER doc on duty, and so from his perspective. Taking not one thing from him, but the reality is, while his plan helped, it was a team effort.

For instance, they had 6 ER docs working that night, including a Trauma surgeon and Trauma resident.

We also initiated our hospital’s “code triage,” in which staff from upstairs would come down to help by bringing down gurneys and spare manpower. We took all of our empty ED beds and wheelchairs out into the ambulance bay. Anybody who could push a patient, from environmental services to EKG techs to CNAs, came out to the ambulance bay. I said to the staff, “I’ll call it out. I’ll tell you guys where to go, and you guys bring these people in.”

Unstated were how many RNs on hand, but in a 36-bed main ER, they had 10+, which swelled to probably 20-50.

What were they doing?

 At that point, one of the nurses came running out into the ambulance bay and just yelled, “Menes! You need to get inside! They’re getting behind!” I turned to Deb Bowerman, the RN who had been with me triaging and said, “You saw what I’ve been doing. Put these people in the right places.” She said, “I got it.”

And so I turned triage over to a nurse. The textbook says that triage should be run by the most experienced doctor, but at that point what else could we do?

Better late than never, doc. Nurses run Triage 24/7/365 everywhere. Should've seen that coming and made the call a lot faster.

We were in the hallway of Station 1 with the beds side by side. We were butt to butt intubating these three people. “I need etomidate! I need sux!”

Up until then, the nurses would go over to the Pyxis, put their finger on the scanner, and we would wait. Right then, I realized a flow issue. I needed these medications now. I turned to our ED pharmacist and asked for every vial of etomidate and succinylcholine in the hospital. I told one of the trauma nurses that we need every unit of O negative up here now. The blood bank gave us every unit they had. In order to increase the flow through the resuscitation process, nurses had Etomidate, Succinylcholine, and units of O-negative blood in their pockets or nearby.

Another good call. But "Duh".

By this time, all the patients had bilateral IVs. As the orange tags and yellow tags would become red tags, it became very apparent that those early IVs, put in while patients still had decent veins, were lifesaving. As the patients decompensated, we had adequate access to rapidly transfuse and stabilize patients. If we didn’t have that early IV access, we would have spent valuable time trying to cannulate flat veins.

Putting in IVs: nursing skill. Twenty-forty/night. That's why all those patients magically had bilateral IVs.

Cannulating flat veins: what ER docs do when patients don't have anything better.

So again, "Duh."

Throughout the night, I would look up from what I was doing and scan the room to see if anyone was crumping. I noticed a choke point forming for CT. We were now left with stable yellow tags. These patients needed CAT Scans. Typically, the CT Tech picks up the patient, transfers them onto the scanner, and then they bring the patient back. These yellow tag patients were shot in the torso, but for some reason were stable even after 2 or 3 hours. I told the CT Tech, go over to the CAT scan machine, and sit behind the controls. “I don’t want you to move. You’re just going to press buttons for the rest of the night.” Then I took every nurse that was free—at that point we had a lot of extra staff—and told them that all the people who needed CAT scans needed to be lined up in the ambulance hallway outside of CAT scan. We placed monitors on them, and nurses watched them. Then the nurses assisted getting each patient on and off the CT, and then back over to Stations 2 and 4. I called it the CT Conga Line.

And yet again: Good improvisation, excellent use of resources, poor foresight.

But how many hospitals deal with 250 GSWs in 6 hours? So far, just this one.

I identified another choke point with the green tag patients. Many were shot in the extremities. They had potential fractures or open fractures and needed X-rays. The standard way of doing things is taking the patient for an X-Ray, then sending it off to the radiologist so they can read it in their reading room. That was just going to take too long. So I told our CEO, Todd Sklamberg, “I need a radiologist here in the ER. I’m going to attach him to an X-Ray tech because our machines have little screens on them.” They X-Rayed patients, the radiologist read off the screen, and we would decide on disposition right there.

Another genius move. Put the people where the work is, and roll the patients past them.

Create flow; eliminate the bottlenecks, choke points, and single-points-of-failure.

IOW, destroy almost everything we do now, to do what you have to do then.

In the end, we officially had 215 penetrating gunshot wounds, but the actual number is much higher. As I would circle the ER “looking for blood,” I would hear the green tags say, “You know what? I’m not that bad—I’ll be fine.” Over time, they would walk out without getting registered. Our true number was well over 250.

The surgery team performed an unprecedented feat that night. The numbers speak for themselves. In six hours, they did 28 damage control surgeries and 67 surgeries in the first 24 hours. We had dispositioned almost all 215 patients by about 5 o’clock in the morning, just a little more than seven hours after the ordeal began. That’s about 30 GSWs per hour. I couldn’t believe that we saved that many people in that short amount of time. It’s a testament to how amazingly well the hospital team worked together that night. We did everything we could.

Improvisation: 10

Pre-planning: 5

Success: 9.9

Takeaway: Plans fail. So does planning. People - who can improvise on the spot - save your ass. And in this case, 200+ patients too.

Top to bottom, these folks were rockstars, when it counted.

Hopefully some of the two dozen nurses and hordes of other staff members will be telling their stories from that night, especially for lessons learned from all the other perspectives.

Superpowers, bitchez.

F**k a cape and tights; superheroes wear scrubs and stethoscopes.

And they kick Death's ass.

Socialism kills; Pain teaches; Learning Heals.

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man

Peter notes today this story, which describes the dire straits things are in down in Puerto Rico, a month after Hurricane Maria left them smashed and dazed.

(Third World, US territory) Melted medications. Surgical procedures conducted in sweltering 95-degree heat. Malfunctioning X-ray machines. 

This is the reality doctors in Puerto Rico are facing almost four weeks after Hurricane Maria devastated the island. 

"We're practicing disaster medicine in real life," said Dr. William Kotler, a senior resident in emergency medicine with Florida Hospital in Orlando, who spent two weeks volunteering on the island earlier this month. "We improvise if we have to, with very little resources."

Kotler and four other emergency physicians from Florida Hospital in Orlando, just wrapped up a two-week volunteer mission in Puerto Rico. Arriving one week after Hurricane Maria made landfall, they were the first medical relief team the hospital sent to the island. A second team arrived on Oct. 8 and will stay for two weeks. 

Access to electricity was so shoddy that Trivino couldn't conduct a CT scan, but he was able to do an X-ray. To review the films, he had to go outside and hold the films up to the sunlight. Afterward, he used one of the team's two satellite phones to arrange for the patient to go to a trauma center.

I shouldn't wonder why.
Puerto Rico is in dire straits because for decades, - not years, but swaths of years - they ignored electricity infrastructure, preferring to funnel state money to social programs and cronyism rather than update a power grid cobbled together and jury-rigged since McKinley was president.

Now they're reaping the harvest of those decisions.

Color me jaded: boo frickin' hoo.

The last thing we should do is shelter them from feeling the consequences of their prior uninterrupted stupidity, because doing such is like covering hot stovetops with quilts, because the children are too stupid to learn not to touch them.

Nature/Creation put a perfectly functional nervous system in place to make stupid hurt, and what's actually cruel is to prevent it from teaching the lessons people should learn.

The people of Puerto Rico are going to learn there are some mistakes that hurt, and some of those you don't get to make twice in life, because they kill you. And as callous as it sounds, and heartbreaking as it is to hear of, the people you might otherwise pluck from the edge of the cliff moments from disaster are the exact ones who should be allowed to plunge off the cliff, or you'll just encourage the dumbest and most self-destructive of the lot to breed and multiply, which just means when you can't be there next time, even more will die. And you could have prevented it.

We cut into people, even though it hurts, because a little pain will save their lives. We force them to get their lazy, in-pain bodies out of bed rapidly, post-surgery, because it helps them heal better and faster. In short we, just like nature, use pain to teach, and to heal.

Stepping in now will only kill them with kindness.

Let them suffer, let them stress, let them get sick, and yes, even let some of them die, if they're to ever learn that the time to fix their problems was yesterday, not manana, or you're just pre-selecting an even greater number to die when you finally can't carry them any more, and even more of them die next time. Does anyone want "I saved twenty, so that 1000 could die later." on their tombstone?

Either the lesson will get painful enough to teach them, or the stupid will die off, and the smart will learn.

There is no other way for some people to learn, and it would be a greater cruelty to deny them the lesson that will save more lives in the future than will ever be lost now. And the soft racism of condescendingly low expectations is part and parcel of the entire wrong approach to deal with disasters like this. Send them all the tools they need to fix the problem, but let them fix it themselves, and do it right, so they don't need the same thing next year, and the year after that. Build a power grid that doesn't go down forever from one hurricane, or even two. Build storm drains that take into account the problem, and eliminate it the minute the clouds blow over. Instead of sending them food stamps, teach them to fish and raise food, so the entire island isn't a cargo cult dependent wholly on imported supplies 24/7/365. Teach them the hard way that they should have strategic stockpiles of medicine in storm-proof storage right there on the island, and not depend on immediate shipments because they never thought of that. And stop building things too flimsy to survive a Cat V hurricane, which they're going to get every decade or two.

I'll send you all the hose and buckets you want once, but you're going to man the pumps and put the fire out your own d*mned self.

Anti-Trump Puerto Rico Narrative Now Russian Hacking Nothingburger

But wait, there's more!

Thousands of containers sit, refrigerators running, in Port of San Juan Thursday Sept. 28. Photo: Angel Valentin for NPR

With a talentless cast and a narrative unhampered by reality, the Usual Gang Of Idiots on SNL took a shot at Trump Saturday, and tried to follow the talking points that people were "dying in Puerto Rico."

Apparently they're also illiterate, because left-wing NPR reported the reality on the problem on September 28th, three days before the last SNL venom-gram aired:

Millions of people in Puerto Rico need fuel, water, food and medicine. More than a week after Hurricane Maria devastated the island, major infrastructure is still down. Stores have trouble filling their shelves. Families are running low on the supplies they stockpiled before the storm, and across the island, many residents say they haven't seen any aid deliveries.
Meanwhile, at the port in San Juan, row after row of refrigerated shipping containers sit humming. They've been there for days, goods locked away inside.
It's one thing to get supplies to Puerto Rico. But officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which administers FEMA, say moving goods around the island is the bigger challenge.
Crowley, a maritime shipping company, started unloading shipments on Saturday. By Friday, it will have received more than 4,000 loaded crates.  

Most of the containers coming in have never left. Crowley says it has more than 3,400 commercial containers at its terminal now. That's just one shipping company, at one port. Several other ports are accepting shipments, and stranded crates total an estimated 10,000. 

"These containers are full of food, these containers are full of water, full of medicine ... full of construction materials," says Vice President Jose Ayala, who notes a barge a day has arrived since the port opened on Saturday. "It has reached Puerto Rico. The problem is we can't get it on the shelves."

Ayala says it's frustrating: "People are out there under so much need, and there's this cargo here."

"Plenty of vessels can get cargo to the island," agrees Mark Miller, Crowley's vice president of communications. "But the real difficulty is getting the goods to the people via trucks." 

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of pounds have been delivered to the airport by commercial airlines, and the Department of Defense and FEMA have also been bringing in deliveries by air. Everybody — the government, aid groups and private firms — is having trouble moving those goods around. 

Hundreds of refrigerated containers here posing an extra problem. Stores without fuel for their generators can't accept goods that need to be kept cool. 

The Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration tells NPR that the government is working with the truck driver's union to find a solution for driving with downed power lines and damaged roads, and the Department of Defense says it has sent teams to work on clearing blocked streets. 

Not everyone believes roadways are the problem. Roberto Ramirez Kurtz is the mayor of Cabo Rojo in southwestern Puerto Rico, which is about as far away from San Juan as you can get on the island — a 2 ½ to 3-hour drive. 

He says more than 5,000 homes were completely destroyed in his town, and people are running out of water and insulin. But aid and resources, "they're staying in San Juan," he says. 

Kurtz was in San Juan to ask for help, and having made the trip himself, he doesn't believe that road conditions are an obstacle. "The roads are open," he says. "I've been able to come here. So why haven't we used this to [transport goods] west?" 

Meanwhile Juan Carlos Garcia, the mayor of Coamo in the south of the island, says the only aid his town has received is five pallets of water. "The state never came to provide diesel to the hospital," he says. People are running low on food supplies and hysteria is growing, he says. 

He, too, says the roads are clear — and that he's in San Juan to ask why no aid has reached his town. 

Along with road conditions, authorities and shipping firms also say diesel shortages are to blame. Long lines for gas are persistent all over the island. Distributing fuel across Puerto Rico is FEMA's number one priority, the Department of Defense says, to help alleviate the issue. 

Richard Darmanin, the vice president of Capitol Transportation Inc., says import paperwork is having to be done manually, which is also slowing down the process. And standing outside the port earlier this week, looking at the rows of containers, he said an even bigger problem is the lack of drivers. 

You have a shortage of drivers who have lost a lot during the storm," he says. "You may have a huge fleet but they ain't moving themselves." 

"Whatever driver shows up, we put him to work," he says. 

The governor of Puerto Rico has issued an appeal for anyone with a commercial license to help distribute gas, Darmanin says.

So the roads in P.R. are fine, from eyewitness reports.
There are tons of supplies (that many containers would ship 460,000 tons of goods).
But the Teamsters are on strike, no one's showing up to haul gasoline, diesel, or anything else, so everything's sitting and stacking up in the seaports and airports.
And nobody's dying in San Juan.

In fact Mayor Lyingbitch (hardcore Shrillary supporter in 2016) had time to go have a cap and T-shirt run off, which takes roads, gas, and electrical power.

That's a lot of resources to waste on a bankrupt story.

She just didn't have time to get anybody to come get the pallets of stuff sitting behind her BS press conference, and take it across the island to the smaller towns, where other people actually need help, and supplies.

But the crapola was shoveled solely to feed her bullshit narrative, one picked up and swallowed without any intervening brainpower by the ghormless gits on Saturday Night Propaganda.

Say, didn't some of those f**kers say if Trump won, they were leaving the US? I guess once you tell one fat whopping lie, the other 10,000 a week get a lot easier.

As no less than Geraldo Rivera tweeted at the Mayor of Bullshit,

"Attacking @realDonaldTrump for the ravages of nature & neglect is politicizing tragedy"

You're Not As Prepared As You Think You Are

Go and read the entire post over at The Daily Sheeple.

It's true on the short-term micro-catastrophe side.
And it's true on the long-term macro-catastrophe side.

Pay attention to the whole thing, and get your affairs in order.
On both accounts.

When things unwind, it will be come-as-you-are.
Or, as my namesake noted once upon a time:

In a field one summer's day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart's content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.
     "Why not come and chat with me," said the Grasshopper, "instead of toiling and moiling in that way?"
     "I am helping to lay up food for the winter," said the Ant, "and recommend you to do the same."
     "Why bother about winter?" said the Grasshopper; "We have got plenty of food at present." But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil.
     When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food and found itself dying of hunger - while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew: It is best to prepare for days of need.

Irma Feedback

From recent comments on an earlier "Irma" post, here's a reader update on the Central FL aftermath of The Storm Haxo Said Was "Nothing":

Stormsurfer said...

Aesop,
An after-action report if I may. 

Irma hit us as a Cat 2. Winds 100-105. Gotta admit that it was spooky. 

A small percentage in our area of Central Florida are still without power. Although a couple of the more rural farming and ranching counties really got hammered and will suffer the effects for weeks if not months to come. 

We loaned out our two generators and two of our daughters and their families stayed with us until their power was restored. I was amazed at the number of people who had generators but no gas or even gas cans. 

I was getting up at 3am so that I could drive around locating gas stations which had received fuel deliveries during the night and get my many (not my first rodeo) gas cans filled before going to work and then during the day my wife would deliver them to family and friends in need (and collect their empty cans so we could repeat the process). 

Internet in this area was only restored yesterday so I'm trying to catch up on news. Thanks for your coverage of this storm. There's something reassuring just knowing that folks we'll never meet choose to give a damn about their fellow men. 

BTW, the river house on the Weeki Wachee river fared just fine. Come kayak next time you're in this part of the country. 

Regards,
Stormsurfer

Best Wishes right back at ya, Stormsurfer.

Happy to share my give-a-damn about my fellow Americans.
And for the benefit of some of your less-prepared neighbors, a word from Captain Obvious:

Glad you and yours made it through alive. The annual emergencies are always far more likely to occur than the catastrophic world-ending ones, but the "little" problems are always good dress rehearsals for the big ones, to help us work out the kinks in our preparedness planning.

My thought and prayers continue for your collective rebuilding efforts. Until the next time.

Dealer's Choice

Clostridium tetani spore (@about 12,000X magnification):
6350 of these to the inch
125 end to end would be the width of this period: .
98,000 of them would fit on it.

Clostridium tetani is an evil little sonofabitch. It exists as a dormant spore in dust, soil, feces, and manure, as well as flood waters, and in the mouths of dogs, cats, and other animals*. (Cats bury their poop with their paws, then lick their paws, and their butts; dogs lick their butts, eat poop, and drink from your toilet bowl. Neither of them brushes their teeth. You do the math on how that works if they bite you.) Because it lives in dirt and dust, it's also found on your own skin. (Which is one reason why mommy/your drill instructor always told you to wash your hands and bathe your nasty @$$.) It can also live in contaminated substances, e.g. heroin. Neither "cooking" in a junkie spoon, nor boiling in water for 15 minutes reliably kills all the spores. It is not contagious, and does not pass from person to person. The spores are robust, readily surviving extremes of heat, cold, wet, or dryness, and can hang around dormant for decades. The disease was described as far back as Hippocrates in the 5th Century B.C.

It is therefore endemic and ubiquitous throughout the world, and doesn't just live on rusty nails, it lives everywhere. The little bastard is opportunistic, remaining dormant until it's able to enter living tissue through a cut, scrape, or especially a puncture. Any break in the skin is sufficient to admit it. Once they find a nice, oxygen-starved location, the anaerobic spores mature and become bacterium, which multiply like bacteria does, and produces as a by-product of its cellular function tetanospasmin, a potent and frequently fatal neurotoxin, along with tetanolysin, which cause destruction of tissue.

We call this infection Tetanus.

The bacterium prefer nerve tissue, gaining entry, and transmitting along the cells of the nervous system until it reaches the central nervous system. It binds and inhabits the nerve tissue permanently and irreversibly, and by actions too long and arcane to describe here, stops the nerves from turning off once they turn on, which leads to severe muscle spasms, progressing to death about 10% of the time, even with treatment.
Incubation is typically about 7-10 days, sometimes several weeks, and death can occur within four days.
The shorter nerves are affected first, leading to the characteristic "sardonic smile", and lockjaw, which is exactly what it sounds like. Other symptoms include general irritability, muscle stiffness, difficulty swallowing (which leads to drooling), fever (from muscle contractions), sweating (from the fever), difficulty breathing (from muscular paralysis), and heart attack/cardiac failure (from not being able to breathe). The muscle spasms can be severe enough to break bones, including the spinal bones, and in terminal cases, the victim will be lying on a bed taut as a bowstring, with only head and heels on the bed, the body arched backwards, wracked in pain, until eventually suffocation and death occur. While you're wide-eyed, awake, and aware of it, and totally helpless in suffering a particularly gruesome (and wholly preventable) death.

 

 

 

There were 300,000+ deaths from it as recently as 1990, and it killed 56,000+ worldwide in 2015, nearly 20K of them newborns. (Until they got their act together, it killed 2400 newborns out of 3600 or so who contracted it, annually, in Uganda. It enters through the umbilical stump. Now you know why neonatal nurseries are such pricks about making you wash and gown and glove to visit.) Most of them clustered in Africa, Southwest Asia/India, and parts of South America. In other words, the exact poverty-wracked Third World shitholes with minimal medical care for vast swaths of the population where you'd expect it to be most prevalent.

 

 

In non-fatal cases, the symptoms can persist for months, as the disease only passes as the nerves are regrown, with recovery taking as long as several months.

All of this assumes first-world access to medications to treat the symptoms, and possibly intubation and mechanical ventilation.

All of this is problematic in a disaster, societal collapse, or any trip outside of modern society.

Disasters don't make reservations.

Keep your tetanus (usually Tdap - tetanus, diphtheria, and accelular pertussis, aka Whooping Cough, because the latter two are making a comeback, thanks to hordes of unvaccinated legal and illegal alien arrivals here from the rest of the world - Thanks!) shot up-to-date. Period.

They're good for ten years for minor cuts and punctures, and 5 years for major (deep/dirty) wounds, so get a booster at least every tenth year. The only likely harm getting boosters every 5 years is to your wallet.

Keep track of your last shot, and get the booster on time, every time.
(My standard ER benediction is for you to write the vaccination date on a Post-it, and stick it to the back of your driver's license, which, hereabouts anyways, is good for - ten years - meaning if you forget, you can remember to check your ID, and if the note is gone, because the ID is gone, it's time for a booster, isn't it? See how easy that is?)

Untreated tetanus infection is lethal in 10% of cases. The US averages about 30 cases/year, and no fatalities. After the window of initial injury (+/- 72 hours is the ER rule of thumb) when a booster will probably work, there's nothing anyone can do to turn it around if you get it, except manage the symptoms (to the limit of what you have to do that - think SHTF/no hospital/on safari in BFAfrica).

So you can roll the dice with an excruciating, debilitating, and frequently fatal disease.

Or you can get your frickin' tetanus booster in a timely manner.

Horrible death or Tiny needle? Horrible death or Tiny needle? Decisions, decisions.

Dealer's choice.





*(Also horses, cattle, sheep, chickens, rats, and guinea pigs.)

Wikipedia link
Mayo Clinic link
WebMD link

Hurricane X Negligence = Prison

h/t Kenny

After five, six, eight or more (?) deaths at a nursing home in Hollywood, FL, in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, it seems like a pretty good bet someone (or someones) is/are going to prison for gross negligence.

Link

According to Hollywood Fire Rescue and Police, 115 people were evacuated Wednesday morning at The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, located at 1200 N 35 Ave., due to intense heat and no power. Broward County Mayor Barbara Sharief confirmed five people have died, but it remains unknown whether the deaths are related to the heat.
At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Hollywood Police Chief Tom Sanchez said the call was made shortly after 4 a.m. referencing a heart attack.
The mayor added that three deaths occurred at the nursing home, and three others were pronounced dead on arrival at a nearby hospital.
Sanchez said, “Right now the building has been sealed off. We’re conducting a criminal investigation inside. We believe at this time they may be related to the loss of power in the storm. We’re conducting a criminal investigation, not ruling anything out at this time.”
As a precautionary measure, Sanchez said he assigned officers to check the other 42 nursing homes throughout the city to make certain they’re properly taking care of the elderly.

Anecdotally for everyone in the medical field, 90% of nursing homes are sketchy enterprises at best, and in the aftermath of a hurricane, nobody's getting a mulligan for what amounts to mass murder.

Pity the FL Penal Code probably doesn't encompass taking the guilty out and holding them under water until they stop thrashing around, or feeding them to 'gators, but whatever they get dealt, it'll probably be better than what would happen if the relatives of the deceased were left to mete out a fitting recompense.

People dying from heat and neglect after surviving the storm is simply unconscionable, and regardless of earthly penalties, somebody so negligent in the care of elderly and debilitated patients entrusted to them deserves an eternity of suffering in a special circle of hell.

Irmagerd! It's Irmageddon!

Miami earlier today after waves breached seawall

          Waves from hurricane pounding Havana Cuba seawall yesterday

Havana street scenes today

Construction crane toppled in Miami

Fort Pierce yesterday

Fort Lauderdale pier as storm seas move in

US Virgin Islands 

(AP News) Florida Power & Light says it will be weeks, not days, before electricity is fully restored because of the damage being done by Hurricane Irma.
Spokesman Rob Gould said Sunday that an estimated 3.4 million homes and businesses will lose power once the worst of Irma reaches the Florida mainland. He expects thousands of miles (kilometers) of poles and lines will need to be replaced, particularly on the Gulf coast. As of Sunday afternoon, about 1.5 million customers were without power.
He said 17,000 restoration workers from as far away as California and Massachusetts are already stationed around the state, but it will take time to rebuild the system.

 (KTLA Los Angeles) LAFD sends 80 firefighters from Los Angeles, including three of eight CA search and rescue teams and their swiftwater rescue unit, to FL ahead of Irma's arrival.

{You douchebags from elsewhere who fall all over yourselves sending shit on the Internet to CA every chance you get? You're welcome.}

US nationals being evacuated to Puerto Rico from St. Martin

(Loop)Citizens and some news sources are reporting that the island of St Martin/St Maarten is on the verge of a civil war as organized gangs armed with machetes raid stores and homes, leaving some residents in fear for their lives.
The island, which remains isolated after widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Irma, remains cut off after the island’s main airport was significantly damaged.
French news site Depeche reported that some residents have barred themselves inside their villas, fearing for their lives after gangs broke into a customs building and took weapons that were stored there.
Residents say these gangs are smashing the doors of houses, shouting "outside the whites".
Video footage of one resident went viral on Sunday after she hinted that there are more deaths than the media is reporting. She begged for residents to be evacuated from the violence and looting.

This is just the early stuff out there; tomorrow is likely to be worse, and better.
But if this thing moderates faster than expected, I don't suppose anyone anywhere will be disappointed.

Best wishes to those of you in the $#!^ the last day-plus.

Key West

 

So, about 2 1/2 hrs ago, all three of the live streaming cams on Key West that I was following went to no signal, as the 130MPH winds of the eyewall was approaching them.

In one of them, a near-total power failure was visible in the area before the signal went as well.

Another at the southernmost pier, showed just before LOS that storm surge had risen some 3-5', and there was a foot of water on a formerly dry surfside sidewalk.

Anyone riding this out down there is now totally on their own. God help 'em.

How Bad It's Liable To Be

So out of disinterested (from 3000 miles away) curiosity about the details, I pulled up a random 7.5 minute topo of Florida's west (Gulf-side) coast, in this case, the Ft. Meyers SW grid.

free pdf online link

Unlike some topos, where the elevation stadia are 40-ft increments, FL's on the USGS map for this region are measured in 5-ft increments.

I knew FL was low-lying, but I didn't know just how low-lying.
We're talking Netherlands-low low-lying. Nawlins 9th Ward low-lying. Damn near Death Valley low-lying.

There is no spot on the entire map topo above 10' over sea level.

(For comparison, here in SoCal, the beachside parking lot, right beside the beach is more than 10' above sea level. The seaside docks inside the the Port of Long Beach/San Pedro breakwater, FFS, are higher than 10' ASL. Where I live, a short drive away, I'm already several hundred feet higher than that, higher than the highest point in the entire state of FL, which is 305 feet, up in the panhandle. In FL, altitude-wise, my avg. daily commute would require a set of wings and a private pilot's license.)

The predicted storm surge for the danger area is currently at least 10'. The total range predicted is 5-20'.

Everything on this map in gray or red is land less than 10' in elevation:

IOW, where most of the people live.

If Irma hugs the western side as forecast, pretty much the entire southern half of the west coast of FL is toast, from Saturday night into Monday afternoon.
And that's just storm surge, before a foot+ (6-20+ inches per NOAA forecast) of continuous rainfall for a day and a half is factored in. 

Harvey?
Just a warm up.
Looks like Irma will be biblical.

If you live in FL, I hope a few millions of your friends and neighbors did indeed GTFO.

If not, and you live in Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, or South Carolina, and you have a boat and trailer, you might want to think about heading south early next week, after you stock up.

FL isn't going to need the Cajun Navy.
They're going to need the entire Redneck Fleet.

This is going to make Dunkirk look like a pool party.

God help those people that stayed.

Irma Forecast: Shifting Westward - Attn: Tampa Bay and MS residents...

                         (This embiggens.)

Bad news if you live on the Gulf Coast side of the FL peninsula.

Prepare, Prepare, Prepare

 

In the last few weeks, Houston, the southeast of Texas, and the south of Louisiana were flooded and slammed by Hurricane Harvey; Mexico had a magnitude 8 earthquake in the southwest, as it's bracing to get hit by Hurricane Katia on the Gulf Coast side, and Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina are about to get epically pummeled by Hurricane Irma for the entire weekend. And I don't even bother to mention the typical raging wildfires that hit the western half of the US from about August to October since lighting and trees became a thing here, going back some millennia.

If you don't have plans in place and supplies on hand already for the types of anytime and predictable annual disasters your particular area could foreseeably face, you're either homeless and living in a shopping cart, or you're an oblivious idiot.

There is no third option, but there's an obvious solution to not falling into either sorry category.

Make A Plan. It should be brutally realistic, mathematically logical and precise, and as comprehensive as you can make it, covering the potential problems anyone in your area could reasonably expect. And the point to remember about 100-year floods/storms/earthquakes/etc. is that any year could be Year 100, forever. Prediction just means you might not see two of them, but should expect to see at least one in your lifetime. Nature doesn't read a calendar.

Gather supplies. Anybody who hasn't the means at hand to amass 3 days of emergency supplies for everything you need, both to stay put, or GTFO, is already in a survival situation. The other 99.9999% of humanity living in this country has no excuse for being braindead idiots, and failing to prepare - other than where on this graph their IQ is.

And you should have 3-6 months' worth in short order, or you're still an idiot, unless you want to live in a FEMA shelter after the first 72 hours.

Execute when necessary. Think things over, and brutally consider your own If/Then set of contingencies. If something happens, then you do...what? That's for you (and your Significant Other, it that applies) to work out. If you're in one of the 45 states not currently under the gun with regard to being on CNN 24/7, count your blessings. Then go over your plans, fix deficiencies, and be ready for the day your turn comes. There's precious few places in this country that are immune to any disaster. In fact, close to none. Some definitely have more, and some less, than others. But wherever you are, make your contingency plans for them, and be ready to be the solution in times of distress, not part of the problem.

The last two weeks and the next two are a golden opportunity to bring the topic up, if anyone else in your family is hard-headed or weak-willed when it comes to dealing with those realities. Do what you've got to do; I don't want to see anyone looking clueless, shivering under a blanket, and wondering what hit them. Disasters have three types of people: victims, volunteers for being victims, and the guys driving the boats and helicopters and running the shelters. Do your damnedest to be the last type. They're the ones that save the whole town when it has to be done.

"Out of every hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back." - Heraclitus, 500 BC

And as we watch the tragedies that befall others, wherever you are, remember this absolute truth:

Your turn in the barrel is coming, to a certainty.
Failure to plan, is planning to fail.