Tag Archives: disaster

the Cascadia subduction zone

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A major earthquake in the Pacific Northwest could be really ugly, according to the New Yorker.

When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west—losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries. Some of that shift will take place beneath the ocean, displacing a colossal quantity of seawater… The water will surge upward into a huge hill, then promptly collapse. One side will rush west, toward Japan. The other side will rush east, in a seven-hundred-mile liquid wall that will reach the Northwest coast, on average, fifteen minutes after the earthquake begins. By the time the shaking has ceased and the tsunami has receded, the region will be unrecognizable…

In the Pacific Northwest, the area of impact will cover* some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.

…we now know that the odds of the big Cascadia earthquake happening in the next fifty years are roughly one in three. The odds of the very big one are roughly one in ten.

disaster kits

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We all know we are supposed to have a disaster kit with 3 gallons of water per person, extra prescription drugs, a jar of peanut butter and whatnot. I admit, I have never really done that. I figure I can drink the water in the toilet tank if I am desperate, followed by the water in the toilet bowl, and then I don’t really have a good plan after that. This Wired article says there is not a whole lot of science or evidence behind the government recommendations.

Recommendations for what’s supposed to go in these kits vary, but basically it’s a gallon of water per person per day and food, too, plus medicines, blankets and sleeping bags, maybe a tent, extra eyeglasses, lots of batteries, something to make light with, something to make fire with, maybe a hand-cranked radio…

Here’s the worst part: Nobody knows if disaster preparedness kits actually help. They might! You should still have a kit, if you can do it…

Is there stuff you should probably definitely have access to in your home? Sure. Copies of personal identification documents. Prescription medications. A good whistle. Lightsticks. Water purification tech. A crowbar. (The time you need a crowbar is the time you really, really need a crowbar.)

cyber-attack – nothing to fear but fear itself?

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Another thing Axios is worried about is a “crippling cyber-attack”.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said this week that the U.S. is in “crisis mode,” comparing the danger of a massive attack to a Category 5 hurricane looming on the horizon. Intelligence chiefs from the last three administrations agree, and told Axios there is no graver threat to the United States.

A well-executed cyberattack could knock out the electrical grid and shut off power to a huge swath of the country, or compromise vital government or financial data and leave us unsure what is real.

That last phrase is chilling to me. Even if a cyber-attack didn’t result in immediate loss of life, if it creates real fear that the systems of civilization are breaking down (such as transportation, communication, food and financial systems), it could lead to panic and severe consequences. Most of us do not have a stash of gold coins under our mattresses these days.

high tech camp stoves

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I’m intrigued by these high-tech camp stoves from Biolite (note there may be other, similar products/companies out there, and I am not selling anything on this site.) They use fans and electronics to burn wood or other types of biomass very efficiently for cooking, supposedly produce minimal smoke, and can charge electronic devices. Some of them can charge their own batteries and/or hook up to solar panels to charge them.

hurricanes slowing down

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Hurricanes appear to be slowing down. This might sound like a good thing, but no it means they could be dropping more rain in any one place, like Harvey did on Houston. In Nature:

 As the Earth’s atmosphere warms, the atmospheric circulation changes. These changes vary by region and time of year, but there is evidence that anthropogenic warming causes a general weakening of summertime tropical circulation1–8. Because tropical cyclones are carried along within their ambient environmental wind, there is a plausible a priori expectation that the translation speed of tropical cyclones has slowed with warming. In addition to circulation changes, anthropogenic warming causes increases in atmospheric water-vapour capacity, which are generally expected to increase precipitation rates9. Rain rates near the centres of tropical cyclones are also expected to increase with increasing global temperatures10–12. The amount of tropical-cyclone-related rainfall that any given local area will experience is proportional to the rain rates and inversely proportional to the translation speeds of tropical cyclones. Here I show that tropical-cyclone translation speed has decreased globally by 10 per cent over the period 1949–2016, which is very likely to have compounded, and possibly dominated, any increases in local rainfall totals that may have occurred as a result of increased tropical-cyclone rain rates. The magnitude of the slowdown varies substantially by region and by latitude, but is generally consistent with expected changes in atmospheric circulation forced by anthropogenic emissions. Of particular importance is the slowdown of 30 per cent and 20 per cent over land areas affected by western North Pacific and North Atlantic tropical cyclones, respectively, and the slowdown of 19 per cent over land areas in the Australian region. The unprecedented rainfall totals associated with the ‘stall’ of Hurricane Harvey13–15 over Texas in 2017 provide a notable example of the relationship between regional rainfall amounts and tropical-cyclone translation speed. Any systematic past or future change in the translation speed of tropical cyclones, particularly over land, is therefore highly relevant when considering potential changes in local rainfall totals.

San Francisco area earthquake forecast

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USGS reminds us that a big earthquake in the San Francisco area is eventually coming.

In the 50 years prior to 1906, there were 13 earthquakes with a magnitude between 6 and 7, but only 6 earthquakes of similar magnitude in the 110 years since 1906. The rate of large earthquakes is expected to increase from this low level as tectonic plate movements continue to increase the stress on the faults in the region…

Smaller earthquakes occur more frequently than larger earthquakes. The probability that an earthquake of magnitude 6.0 or larger will occur before 2043 is 98 percent. The probability of at least one earthquake of magnitude 6.7 or larger in the San Francisco Bay region is 72 percent, and for at least one earthquake of magnitude 7.0 or larger it is 51 percent. These probabilities include earthquakes on the major faults, lesser-known faults, and unknown faults.

record U.S. weather disasters in 2017

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Major hurricanes, fires and floods set a new record for the cost of damage in the U.S. in 2017. Setting aside the human misery caused, natural disasters tend to provide a short-term economic stimulus, because it is rare time that politicians tend to set aside their differences and borrow or print money as necessary to solve the problem. In the longer term though, I can’t help thinking that this is one way climate change can make us poorer, because we will be spending money and effort dealing with a higher rate of disasters that we could otherwise be spending on more productive work, investment or innovation. The other way climate change can make us poorer is just the long, slow grind of rising energy, food and water prices. I can imagine these two trends working together, where we are adapting to that long, slow grind, but when the disasters hit we no longer have the ability to recover completely like we used to. This is not unlike a stressed ecosystem that manages to hang on until that fire or flood hits, but then does not have the soil conditions or the seed bank or whatever to rejuvenate itself in the same spot after it gets wiped out.

virtual Mark Zuckerberg tours Puerto Rico

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Mark Zuckerberg (yes, it turns out he has a Facebook page) has taken a lot of heat for this “virtual tour” of Puerto Rico. I don’t know, it reminds me of Google Street View with Mystery Science Theater cartoons up front cracking insane jokes. Except that on MST, the characters got the jokes. Nonetheless, I did get more of a sense of the scale of destruction from the images than I had before.

It also reminded me of this.

https://www.truthorfiction.com/bushvacation/

https://www.truthorfiction.com/bushvacation/

 

cascading computer system failure at Delta

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A cascading computer system failure knocked Delta airlines out of commission on August 8.

At least half of all Delta Air Lines flights Monday were delayed or canceled after a power outage knocked out the airline’s computer systems worldwide…

Delta representatives said the airline was investigating the cause of the meltdown. They declined to describe whether the airline’s information-technology system had enough built-in redundancies to recover quickly from a hiccup like a power outage…

Airlines depend on huge, overlapping and complicated systems to operate flights, schedule crews and run ticketing, boarding, airport kiosks, websites and mobile phone apps. Even brief outages can snarl traffic and cause long delays.

As the world becomes more automated, things might get smoother when everything is working well, but when something goes wrong it might get harder and harder to recover. Hopefully, major government, military and financial computer systems will have “enough built-in redundancies”.

They do, according to an article in The Week. Delta actually had backup systems in place, and the problem was that they didn’t kick in correctly. Major financial companies have even more layers of backups and pay more attention to them because they have even more at stake.

Delta, like most major airlines, likely had one or more back-up systems in place to take over in an emergency like this. Often a company has an extra system housed in its main data center identical to the main system, plus another one in a separate data center in case both local systems are taken out in a major event, like a fire. Some companies even have a third redundant system that is cloud-based or housed in a separate location.

“Some of these disruptions should not have occurred,” Hecht says. “Delta IT did something wrong that caused its redundancy structure to not function as needed. The problem was not the power failure itself; 99.9999 percent of power failures never cause service disruptions.” …

…most airlines use manual testing to verify their data protection, meaning a human being actually has to take time out of their day to test the system on a regular basis. Other industries, like banking and finance, rely on automatic systems to lower the risk of a full blackout. Automated systems can be pricey, and while Delta’s outage is probably costing the company a hefty sum (Southwest’s outage last month was expected to cost the airline up to $10 million), an hour-long outage in the banking sector would create far more mayhem and profit-loss, so finance companies are more likely to pay up for automated systems.

 

earthquake prediction

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Here’s an interesting article on earthquake prediction. Basically, it has eluded scientists so far and will probably continue to do so.

Since the early 20th century, scientists have known that large quakes often cluster in time and space: 99 percent of them occur along well-mapped boundaries between plates in Earth’s crust and, in geological time, repeat almost like clockwork. But after decades of failed experiments, most seismologists came to believe that forecasting earthquakes in human time—on the scale of dropping the kids off at school or planning a vacation—was about as scientific as astrology. By the early 1990s, prediction research had disappeared as a line item in the USGS’s budget. “We got burned enough back in the 70s and 80s that nobody wants to be too optimistic about the possibility now,” says Terry Tullis, a career seismologist and chair of the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council (NEPEC), which advises the USGS.

Defying the skeptics, however, a small cadre of researchers have held onto the faith that, with the right detectors and computational tools, it will be possible to predict earthquakes with the same precision and confidence we do just about any other extreme natural event, including floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes. The USGS may have simply given up too soon. After all, the believers point out, advances in sensor design and data analysis could allow for the detection of subtle precursors that seismologists working a few decades ago might have missed.

And the stakes couldn’t be higher. The three biggest natural disasters in human history, measured in dollars and cents, have all been earthquakes, and there’s a good chance the next one will be too. According to the USGS, a magnitude 7.8 quake along Southern California’s volatile San Andreas fault would result in 1,800 deaths and a clean-up bill of more than $210 billion—tens of billions of dollars more than the cost of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill combined.