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ocelotOriginal: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/5/10/204712/383
Thoughts about the power situation in California and disaster preparedness.
We got rolled (my verb for the act of being hit by a rolling blackout. I'm hoping it will catch on) at work the other day. We're in block 14, which was the first(?) block hit in this latest round of blackouts.
Power outages at work are always entertaining. There's the collective gasp when the outage first occurs (even this time, when we had 15 minutes warning), and then we all stand around talking because, well, we're IT. There isn't a whole heck of a lot we can do with the power out. As the temperature in the building begins to rise, people start to go home, as the power most often goes out relativly late in the day.
The power outage before this, one of the groups stuck an old arcade version of galaga on a UPS, so we all stood around and watched people play that.
This time we performed a covert raid for office supplies on the same group (well, their cubicle...they were dissolved a few months ago).
I think that next time we need to have a building-wide game of hide and seek.
From a memo we received today:
We're going to revise the lighting conservation efforts on the second floor. We've received requests to switch off the row of lights near the windows on the south side of the second floor. During a Stage III alert we will alternate the lights off to help conserve energy. For the next alert we'll turn off the switch behind the Ficus tree (affecting desktop & admin) and then for the following alert we'll turn off the switch to the right of the stairway (affecting the south of the second floor). This way the same folks won't always have to be in darkened areas.
So, apparently we're battling rolling blackouts with...rolling blackouts! This strikes me as slightly ironic, for some reason.
What I don't understand is why they turn off the lights over desktop & admin. That's the area farthest from the windows. If they opened up the blinds all the way, they could probably always leave the row of lights closest to the windows off without any problems.
Speaking of outages, the network at work has been down for the past 500 seconds or so. It really does destroy productivity.
Have any of you seen the PacBell/SBC DSL commercials they've been playing lately (in Northern California, anyways. I'm sure they aren't in Michigan or wherever)? In the latest, some guys are sitting around in an office, when the network goes out. They go around and round up everyone else in the company and go out for bagels. Sounds about right. For some reason, their recent commercials all really work for me. I can't find them on adcritic, unfortunatly.
Anyways, back to power outage...
The childish glee I take in unusual circumstances nonwithstanding, these outages worry me. Have any of you read the book Parable of the Sower (and/or it's sequel - Parable of the Talents) by Octavia Butler? It deals with a near future United States (California in particular) that I find more and more believable as the years pass. Good books - I'd reccomend them.
Up until 2 weeks ago, the core campus of the University was extempt from the rolling blackouts. We aren't any longer, though we've applied from an extemption and have a reprieve during the appeal process. It's going to cause serious problems if we do. Loss of work time can be dealt with, but it could destroy literally years of research in areas that rely on climate control (such as experiments with plants, chemicals, animals, etc), especially if the outages last up to 4 hours, as threatened.
Of course, the rest of the state is stuck in the same situation. Who's to say the University is more worthy than anyone else?
It's disturbing to realize how much we rely on electricity, and how little prepared we are to function without it.
On the amusing side, they're apparently going to announce imminent power outages to the campus by running the old air raid siren.
We're supposed to get 15 minutes or half an hour of warning from PG&E before an outage. Of course, that's just whoever is the designated contact or whatever. I suspect they won't be able to get the word out fast enough, even with the help of the air raid siren, to do much good for those who must make preparations.
Fortunatly, the outages seem to be going in numerical order, despite PG&E saying that they aren't following a pattern. So we should know 2-4 hours ahead of time, when the block ahead of us goes out, that we're up next.
After I got home from work on the day of the outage, I was struck by a fear of being caught somewhere inconvienant during an outage, and went out to the store and bought flashlights. I already have several in my room (though I can't currently find the one that's supposed to be by my bed), but I got a medium sized one for my backpack and a tiny keychain-sized maglight. Now I don't have to worry about being caught in a dark windowless room, like the one I'm in right now, or the server room. Not that the itty bitty maglight puts out a whole lot of light, but enough to navigate around the racks, at least.
It struck me that I should really be more prepared for emergencies, seeing as I live in an earthquake-prone area. This is something they've been drilling into our heads for as long as I can remember, but most people I know don't really do a whole lot in the way of preparation. And if they do, it's mainly just making sure they have a few cans of food and/or bottles of water sitting around. Not that I'm the least bit better.
I like the LDS philosophy of having a year's worth (or is it 2?) of supplies on hand at any given time, though I question its usefulness in a disaster of the magnitude that such a supply would be required.
It seems to me that in a disaster causing extreme shortages where relief isn't available within a few weeks (tops), adapting would be infinetly more useful than a large supply of food, except perhaps in rural areas. Any person known to be prepared would pretty quickly be looted. Keeping quiet about it, but living off the supplies, wouldn't be much better - I suspect that anyone who appeared to be having an easier time surviving or didn't participate in the new economy/society would set themselves up as a target. On the off chance that the prepared person/family/whatever was able to live off their supply for a full year, they'd most likely be terribly unprepared to survive when it ran out, while those who had survived that long without supplies would 1. have already adapted to the new environment and 2. probably be pretty talented survivors to have made it that far.
Of course, this is making the assumption that a situation requiring a year's worth of supplies is not going to significantly improve within a year, and that the other members of society still exist, and aren't being kept artificially seperated (living in their own shelters during a nuclear war, or whatever).
Still, a year's worth of supplies for one family would be enough to help a whole community in the case of a short-term problem. It'd also be helpful for personal disasters, such as unemployment. I just wouldn't rely on it being much use in the event of a real year-long disaster.
Not like those happen every day, but it only takes one... :)
It seems to me that such a supply, in the event of a real big disaster, would be most useful for buying time. Only fall back on the supplies when there is no other alternative for survival. (I'm desperatly resisting making a lame "You have no chance to survive..." joke in here somewhere...)
The Nuclear War Survival Skills page is interesting reading. Not sure how much good it would do in an actual nuclear war (well, none, unless you printed out a hard copy, since most likely a nuclear war would cause widespread network outages regardless of the original intentions of the Internet), but the information that could be applied to any disaster situation seems useful.
I've been following a disaster oriented webboard off and on for the past few years now, some times seriously, at others more for laughs. I remember last year, someone was predicting some serious disturbance (nuclear war, pole shift, something worldly devestating like that - disaster oriented boards tend to bring those types out of the woodwork), and said something, in all seriousness, along the lines of "make sure you stock up on extra batteries".
Yeah right, like extra batteries are going to help if civilization is ending. It'll just prolong your reliance on them.
And on that terribly upbeat note, I'm going to go attempt to write another page and a half of this essay that was due 3 weeks ago within the next hour.
Apropos #k5 quote of the day:
<ZanThrax> <mother-voice>Dolgaaaan, don't you know there's people in California who would love to have that power you're wasting?</mother-voice>
Thoughts about the power situation in California and disaster preparedness.
We got rolled (my verb for the act of being hit by a rolling blackout. I'm hoping it will catch on) at work the other day. We're in block 14, which was the first(?) block hit in this latest round of blackouts.
Power outages at work are always entertaining. There's the collective gasp when the outage first occurs (even this time, when we had 15 minutes warning), and then we all stand around talking because, well, we're IT. There isn't a whole heck of a lot we can do with the power out. As the temperature in the building begins to rise, people start to go home, as the power most often goes out relativly late in the day.
The power outage before this, one of the groups stuck an old arcade version of galaga on a UPS, so we all stood around and watched people play that.
This time we performed a covert raid for office supplies on the same group (well, their cubicle...they were dissolved a few months ago).
I think that next time we need to have a building-wide game of hide and seek.
From a memo we received today:
We're going to revise the lighting conservation efforts on the second floor. We've received requests to switch off the row of lights near the windows on the south side of the second floor. During a Stage III alert we will alternate the lights off to help conserve energy. For the next alert we'll turn off the switch behind the Ficus tree (affecting desktop & admin) and then for the following alert we'll turn off the switch to the right of the stairway (affecting the south of the second floor). This way the same folks won't always have to be in darkened areas.
So, apparently we're battling rolling blackouts with...rolling blackouts! This strikes me as slightly ironic, for some reason.
What I don't understand is why they turn off the lights over desktop & admin. That's the area farthest from the windows. If they opened up the blinds all the way, they could probably always leave the row of lights closest to the windows off without any problems.
Speaking of outages, the network at work has been down for the past 500 seconds or so. It really does destroy productivity.
Have any of you seen the PacBell/SBC DSL commercials they've been playing lately (in Northern California, anyways. I'm sure they aren't in Michigan or wherever)? In the latest, some guys are sitting around in an office, when the network goes out. They go around and round up everyone else in the company and go out for bagels. Sounds about right. For some reason, their recent commercials all really work for me. I can't find them on adcritic, unfortunatly.
Anyways, back to power outage...
The childish glee I take in unusual circumstances nonwithstanding, these outages worry me. Have any of you read the book Parable of the Sower (and/or it's sequel - Parable of the Talents) by Octavia Butler? It deals with a near future United States (California in particular) that I find more and more believable as the years pass. Good books - I'd reccomend them.
Up until 2 weeks ago, the core campus of the University was extempt from the rolling blackouts. We aren't any longer, though we've applied from an extemption and have a reprieve during the appeal process. It's going to cause serious problems if we do. Loss of work time can be dealt with, but it could destroy literally years of research in areas that rely on climate control (such as experiments with plants, chemicals, animals, etc), especially if the outages last up to 4 hours, as threatened.
Of course, the rest of the state is stuck in the same situation. Who's to say the University is more worthy than anyone else?
It's disturbing to realize how much we rely on electricity, and how little prepared we are to function without it.
On the amusing side, they're apparently going to announce imminent power outages to the campus by running the old air raid siren.
We're supposed to get 15 minutes or half an hour of warning from PG&E before an outage. Of course, that's just whoever is the designated contact or whatever. I suspect they won't be able to get the word out fast enough, even with the help of the air raid siren, to do much good for those who must make preparations.
Fortunatly, the outages seem to be going in numerical order, despite PG&E saying that they aren't following a pattern. So we should know 2-4 hours ahead of time, when the block ahead of us goes out, that we're up next.
After I got home from work on the day of the outage, I was struck by a fear of being caught somewhere inconvienant during an outage, and went out to the store and bought flashlights. I already have several in my room (though I can't currently find the one that's supposed to be by my bed), but I got a medium sized one for my backpack and a tiny keychain-sized maglight. Now I don't have to worry about being caught in a dark windowless room, like the one I'm in right now, or the server room. Not that the itty bitty maglight puts out a whole lot of light, but enough to navigate around the racks, at least.
It struck me that I should really be more prepared for emergencies, seeing as I live in an earthquake-prone area. This is something they've been drilling into our heads for as long as I can remember, but most people I know don't really do a whole lot in the way of preparation. And if they do, it's mainly just making sure they have a few cans of food and/or bottles of water sitting around. Not that I'm the least bit better.
I like the LDS philosophy of having a year's worth (or is it 2?) of supplies on hand at any given time, though I question its usefulness in a disaster of the magnitude that such a supply would be required.
It seems to me that in a disaster causing extreme shortages where relief isn't available within a few weeks (tops), adapting would be infinetly more useful than a large supply of food, except perhaps in rural areas. Any person known to be prepared would pretty quickly be looted. Keeping quiet about it, but living off the supplies, wouldn't be much better - I suspect that anyone who appeared to be having an easier time surviving or didn't participate in the new economy/society would set themselves up as a target. On the off chance that the prepared person/family/whatever was able to live off their supply for a full year, they'd most likely be terribly unprepared to survive when it ran out, while those who had survived that long without supplies would 1. have already adapted to the new environment and 2. probably be pretty talented survivors to have made it that far.
Of course, this is making the assumption that a situation requiring a year's worth of supplies is not going to significantly improve within a year, and that the other members of society still exist, and aren't being kept artificially seperated (living in their own shelters during a nuclear war, or whatever).
Still, a year's worth of supplies for one family would be enough to help a whole community in the case of a short-term problem. It'd also be helpful for personal disasters, such as unemployment. I just wouldn't rely on it being much use in the event of a real year-long disaster.
Not like those happen every day, but it only takes one... :)
It seems to me that such a supply, in the event of a real big disaster, would be most useful for buying time. Only fall back on the supplies when there is no other alternative for survival. (I'm desperatly resisting making a lame "You have no chance to survive..." joke in here somewhere...)
The Nuclear War Survival Skills page is interesting reading. Not sure how much good it would do in an actual nuclear war (well, none, unless you printed out a hard copy, since most likely a nuclear war would cause widespread network outages regardless of the original intentions of the Internet), but the information that could be applied to any disaster situation seems useful.
I've been following a disaster oriented webboard off and on for the past few years now, some times seriously, at others more for laughs. I remember last year, someone was predicting some serious disturbance (nuclear war, pole shift, something worldly devestating like that - disaster oriented boards tend to bring those types out of the woodwork), and said something, in all seriousness, along the lines of "make sure you stock up on extra batteries".
Yeah right, like extra batteries are going to help if civilization is ending. It'll just prolong your reliance on them.
And on that terribly upbeat note, I'm going to go attempt to write another page and a half of this essay that was due 3 weeks ago within the next hour.
Apropos #k5 quote of the day:
<ZanThrax> <mother-voice>Dolgaaaan, don't you know there's people in California who would love to have that power you're wasting?</mother-voice>
