Quietly Awaiting #Frankenstorm

When I sat on a planning board, I listened carefully to engineers speak of 20 year, 50 year and 100 year storms, the worst case scenarios that ought to guide our decisions as to the adequacy of sites and structures to accommodate impending disaster.  Obviously, 20 year storms happened with greater regularity than 100 year storms, so the demands of a 20 year storm had to be met.

But they say Frankenstorm is a 100 year event, the big one.  Sitting in Simple Justice World Headquarters, I’m wondering what I should do about it. There has been nothing on the television news except storm reporting, even though there is no storm here yet to report about. It’s been days, pre-empting the existence of any other news. Other than the Giants win over Dallas and reruns of Real Housewives of Somewhere, every station is obsessed with reporters getting their hair blown.  The engineers never mentioned the role of the media in 100 year storms, and whether there was anything to be done about it.

For the moment, there is a breeze outside. It’s expected to pick up later in the day, eventually reaching minor hurricane proportions, which are more than the mid-Atlantic coast states were designed to withstand.  No doubt there will be damage, likely extensive in some areas.  They have been warned to evacuate in low-lying areas. Others have been told to prepare.

How to prepare isn’t necessarily clear. Remove objects likely to fly away. Have batteries for when the electric is lost, as the power company robo-called the other day to warn they anticipated 7-10 days without power. Stock up on drinking water for when the ground water is contaminated and the pumps that send clean water to homes fail. 

Frankly, it all sounds like government should have been prepared and isn’t.  Every time something worse than a 1 year storm hits, they can’t seem to muster whatever it takes to make it through unscathed.  Some will say it’s because they don’t have the money to fix poor infrastructure decisions that were penny-wise and pound-foolish made years ago, and which we still endure.

Others say baloney, we simply piss away infrastructure money on silly toys, gimmicks and social choices. Most people never took econ 101, and aren’t familiar with macroeconomics and the allocation of scarce resources. Nobody ever talks about guns and butter anymore.

As for SJ World HQ, I anticipate the imminent loss of electricity. The north shore of Long Island loses power whenever anyone sneezes too hard, so it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion.  Since New York City is shut down, it’s not terribly consequential. We’ve been here before, and survived. We will again. It’s boring and annoying, but that’s hardly moves the needle on human suffering.

Until then, the plan of action is to just keep doing what we always do. We’re as prepared as we can be, and as unprepared as ever.  For now, the only thing we can do is listen to the wind whistle through the trees and await the storm.

I hope everyone remains safe and free of damage. In the meantime, there isn’t much else to do but continue wait. So forgive me as I shift back to normal mode and think about things other than Frankenstorm, as it will happen whether I spend the day worrying about it or not. 

22 thoughts on “Quietly Awaiting #Frankenstorm

  1. Nicholas Weaver

    As a Californian, I can probably answer the “how to prepare” based on what I’ve done for earthquakes.

    You need the ability to stay put and hunker down for 6 days. So about 6 days worth of food and water, cached in a hardened location for the specific threat you face. Flashlights. A battery powered (or ideally solar or battery powered) charger for your phone. Use txt messages and/or email from your phone to communicate any “I’m OK” messages but keep it off otherwise to save battery.

    If you can also have “transportation after the event”: the ability to get 50 to 100 miles when roads are impassible to cars and gas statios are not working, thats also something to have: Being comfortable for that distance on a bicycle OR having a motorcycle, as both hurricanes and earthquakes have a ~50-100 mile radius where if you get out of it, infrastructure is back and all is good enough for you to get transit to out-of-town.

  2. SHG

    I note the complete absence of any mention of single malt scotch. You Cali guys are so avant garde.

    Thanks. I have no motorcycle, but I do have a John Deere 6×4 Trail Gator. Unfortunately, I get no cell service where I am, as we have no cell towers, but I plan to go to Starbucks, in the Gator if necessary, for my morning joe and the occasional twit.

  3. Nicholas Weaver

    Don’t think I haven’t thought through the alcohol situation. I DO live in Napa, after all.

    The booze cabinet is loaded low: No bottle is above the 2nd shelf, so in the event of an earthquake that should be fine, so I should have at least some single malt survive. Since you aren’t having to worry about shaking damage, I’d assume than your liquor cabinet will survive just fine.

    Likewise the wine cellar has the shelving bolted to the wall and is generally low: I expect some to moderate breakage but not too much, and the really nice bottles are strapped into the racking.

    One other thing to be aware of: Cell service will probably be BETTER on day one than day 3: The east coast power outage from last year’s big storm showed that the telcos skimp on backup power on cell sites: They can last for a day but not much beyond it. So send “I’m OK” texts early rather than later.

  4. Nicholas Weaver

    Oh, and that trail-gator is VERY nice for an emergency transit: I’d just make sure to get now (and keep generally ready) a full 5 gallon gas can for it: which should get you the key 50 miles.

  5. SHG

    Will do, boss. And the wine cellar is full, though not so much Napa as Bordeaux.  It’s always comforting to know that lawyers share a common sense of priorities.

  6. Nicholas Weaver

    IANAL. I’m a computer security researcher. Aka Practicing Practical Paranoid. I have just the computed as economically rational level of paranoia. 🙂

  7. Eric L. Mayer

    The toughest part is going to be evading all the zombies. Remember, you must “remove the head or destroy the brain.”

    Oh, an keep a chainsaw handy. Not for clearing trees, but for hacking a path through the zombies in order to evacuate your family to the Catskills.

  8. Kathleen Casey

    Hope you and yours and your millions of neighbors come through safely. May most all of the trees stay put. It’s tough to lose trees and a big problem when they come down. On wires.

  9. Eric L. Mayer

    Nor will they. They’re part of the conspiracy.

    Oh, and you’ll need guns to weather a hurricane. Lotsa guns.

  10. John Neff

    It is best to seriously inconvenience a large number of people for a few to ten days once every ten years or so or spend huge amounts of money on the infrastructure to manage the problem. Obviously the answer is to inconvenience a large number of people.

    My view that the infrastructure will be replaced as it wears out and the replacements should be more robust. That process involves planning and critical thinking and that unfortunately is rare.

  11. SHG

    Sadly, it’s not every ten years, but every few months, and they replace infratstructure piecemeal, so it’s just a straight swap.  In other words, 100 years from now, it may well be the same as now, giving us something to gripe about.

  12. Nicholas Weaver

    Unfortunately, its something that takes regulation to fix, mandating that utility providers meet certain levels of preparedness and robustness.

    E.g. there was a talk at TPRC (Tellecommunications Policy Research Conference) on Japan’s amazingly good resiliance on the telecom side during the Sendai quake.

    But they prepared and the providers are required to provide 3 days of backup power on the cell towers. So the cellphone system effectively stayed up: the only towers that went down were the ones washed away by the tsunami or those in the Fukushima exclusion zone which dropped out after 3 days when the fuel was exhausted.

    One person in the audience noted (well, complained) how it was very different in the US after the last major east-coast tropical storm, where the cellphone service cut out after a day and never came back until the overall power was restored.

    The big difference was mandates and regulation: The Japanese take their earthquake planning seriously, and the infrastructure companies take it seriously as a result because they are forced to.

    Here? It doesn’t pay to be prepared for a disaster as an infrastructure company, and you aren’t REQUIRED to be prepared, so you don’t.

    Far cheaper to let the power fail, and the phones fail, as so much of the cost of failure is not born by the utility but the utility’s customers, a classic externality problem. And externality problems, especially in infrastructure, usually require regulation.

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