Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.
I was tossing out some trash at the shop and when Ii flipped open the lid on the dumpster I saw that, other than two items, the dumpster was empty. Item one was a broken picture frame, item two was a cast iron skillet. Hey, I like cooking with cast iron. Lets see who made it. Flipped it over and, surprise, its a late Griswold 11.5″. Hmmm. Okay, thats going home with me. Sprayed the whole thing with oven cleaner until it was covered in foam, shoved it in a plastic bag, and let it sit for a couple of days. Took it out, ran it under hot water and about 60% of the layers of seasoning washed right off. Excellent. Lather, rinse, repeat. Next week I’ll do the fine detail with some dental tools and steel wool and then reseason it a few times. Cast iron cookware is excellent stuff for cooking in disasters…its at home on a fire of salvaged 2×4’s or on the neighbors barbecue that didnt get swept away. Free cast iron is even better. And free Griswold is even better than that.
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The news about Japan continues to be virtually devoid of anything hopeful. I used to say that Katrina would be the paradigm for disaster planning for quite some time…well, it looks like Japan will surpass that. From here on out this event will be the benchmark that emergency management, rescue, governments and individuals use to proof their plans and gear. “Yeah, thats a great emergency rescue tool…how would it have worked in Japan?”, “Nice cotraflow traffic plan, Steve…would it have helped in Japan?”, “Donna, I want a PowerPoint presentation ready for the county commissioners by Monday about how we’d handle a nuclear accident like in Japan.”
Once the shock wears off and the demand dies down the folks that make nuclear survey gear, like the Nuk-Alert, are pretty much going to have some awesome sales figures over the next year or two.
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The survival/preparedness blogosphere is full of “If you were in Japan, what would you do” type posts. Lotsa Monday morning quarterbacking. Its only natural, I suppose. Certainly, many people are revisiting their ideas on disaster preparedness after this. I’m sure theres a smaller, superstitious faction that are sagely nodding their tinfoil-hatted heads and murmuring that it is all prophecy and that [2012/Rapture/Planet X/whatever] is surely not too far behind.
You know, sometimes all the bad crap just happens at once. No rhyme, no reason. It just does. About the only thing that could make this worse for the Japanese is Godzilla coming outta the surf with a mean look in his eye. Poor slobs.
One huge lesson that I think everyone can take away from this is that, apparently, Japanese government news and updates may be a little, shall we say, “unhelpful”. Or, more accurately, worthless. It appears that .gov has been downplaying, covering up, and otherwise diluting the news. This is further proof that in a crisis you cant afford to trust the official government story. The government isnt concerned about you as an individual, theyre concerned about you as a large population group. That is to say, the Japanese government may care about the population affected by the disaster, but they may not care about your grandmother who is caught up in it. In short, take the government reports with a grain of salt and cultivate other sources of info.
