Tag Archives: AAR

A mile of dead wires

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22

Remember the coworker I mentioned a few posts back? She finally got power up at her place restored Sunday night. She’s having car problems and her and her husband are sharing one vehicle.  I offered to give her a ride home and to reclaim my loaned gear.

As I was driving her outta town I saw, literally, a mile of stumps and matchsticks where the powerlines used to be. Apparently once one or two go, they yank down the others. The wires were laying by the side of the road like garden hoses on a summer day. Some power poles snapped a few feet above the ground but it looks like some were snapped at ground level. It was a mess.

I did see quite a few power trucks and crews driving around so, despite the ‘the power company gives all their money to shareholders and not into maintenance’ ranting from the left here in town, progress is being made. But…those boys have really got their work cut out for them. I hope the folks out there are treating them right.

My new water cans arrived yesterday. Even though I personally suffered zero problems at my house because of this event, that doesn’t mean the possibility isn’t there. I had a half dozen of the Scepter water cans on hand in the basement. I just upped that number with another ten. Why that many? Three reasons: First, why not? Second, it makes it easier for me to help people that I choose to help (enforced charity, rather than charity-by-choice, is not charity), and finally, at some point I’ll need to be stashing some of these at an off-site location…could be Commander Zero’s Post Apocalyptic Bunker O’ Love And Lingerie Proving Ground, or it could be at a friends outbuilding along with a Pelican case of gear and some fuel cans. Regardless, they seemed like a good idea.

I really need to get my little hideaway set up and online. I am rapidly losing my ability to let living around these useless people not get to me.

A comment over at Bayou Renaissance Man really summed up the sheeple attitude:

A few years back, I read a piece on crisis management and why people screw up so badly, over and over. The writer, who is some sort of expert on the subject, said the chain of denial reasoning goes like this:

  • It won’t happen.
  • OK, it’s going to happen, but not to me.
  • OK, it’s going to happen to me, but it won’t be that bad.
  • OK, it happened to me, and it was so bad, there was nothing I could have done about it anyway.

This commenter is absolutely correct. As a disaster progresses, the unprepared go though those stages and never imagine that their level of suffering is inversely proportional to the amount of personal responsibility they’ve undertaken. The larger overall problem, I suppose, is that no one wants to take responsibility. In my town, like many other places, we have a huge amount of homeless people causing all sorts of problems. The lefties in town demand that we provide all sorts of services and accommodations for these ‘neighbors’. But, if you ask what about the responsibilities of the homeless to actively take part in their redemption…well, you’re clearly lacking empathy. The notion of taking responsibility for your situation is just not on the radar for these people….its all about the feels. Empathy, compassion, solidarity, etc, etc.

When it’s 2am and there’s no electricty, your water pump is dead as a doornail, there’s a puddle forming under your fridge, and the kids are telling you theyre scared….which would you rather have…empathy or a generator, some stored gas, and a few flashlights?

I really don’t want to be a misanthrope. I think that people are not fundamentally bad, but they are dangerous, not just when when they’re scared. It’s just downright foolish to ignore that the other person’s self-interest will usually trump yours. Men In Black was a popcorn movie but it had this nugget that will be forever making the rounds on the internet:

“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

And, worst of all, their vote counts as much as yours or mine.

I cannot get my heavily fortified little slice of Montana fast enough.

 

More lessons

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32

One of my coworkers is still without power, which means she is also without water. She’s been coming into the office and taking our spare 5-gallon water cooler bottles and bringing them home. I asked her how much water was she going through that she needed this many. And her response was….waitforit……”It takes a lot of water to flush the toilets.”

:::shaking my head:::

I grabbed an empty garbage can from under my desk and said “Follow me please”. We walked down the hallway to the maintenance closet where the slop sink was. I filled the itty-bitty wastebasket with about a gallon or so of water.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to show you how to flush a toilet with a bucket. Lets go.”

We walked into the bathroom. “Throw some toilet paper in there.”, I said, pointing to the bowl. She did as I asked.

“Ok, now watch. Slowly and then all at once.” I slowly poured the bucket into the bowl and then dumped the rest in. The water swirled, and -whoosh-, water and TP disappeared. I turned to her, “Ok, that’ll do the job and it uses a lot less water than filling the tank and flushing. Got it?”

After I got back to my desk, I forwarded her the YouTube video you see above.

It’s not her fault, I suppose. No one ever taught her this sort of thing, and its not the kind of thing that it ever occurred to her to investigate on her own. But, still, five-gallons of Culligan drinking water that we pay a guy to deliver should not be used to flush the toilet.

Shes also cooking on her grill but needs propane. Because I’m a soft touch, I pulled two barbecue bombs from my stash and four Scepter cans of water and brought them to work over lunch and loaded them in her truck. (Her husband is outta town on a job for the week and she’s left wrangling kids and job.)

We shall see if I get them back or not.

As for me, I’m using this learning opportunity to reinforce a few things. I’m picking up another couple flats of bottled water to distribute among my freezers, and I just ordered a bunch more Scepter cans.

Still not outta the woods

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14

Interestingly, there are still large parts of town without power. Normally power is very seldom disrupted for more than 24 hours. I’m reading that a major substation took some severe damage and that may be the contributing factor.

Me? I’m happy as clam. Power never went out in my neighborhood and even if it did I have the brains to have planned ahead. I’m reading the local Reddit threads and am unsurprised at the amount of absolute dumbasses who say that they fully expected Northwest Energy (NWE) to drop the ball on this situation but, despite expecting this sort of thing, had no plans in place to mitigate it.

I know this is familiar country to you and I, but here’s some observations:

If you have any empty space in your freezer, it should always be filled with water bottles. I see people talking about how they need to buy bags of ice to keep in their powerless freezers and while that works, as that ice melts your freezer turns into a swamp of thawing food and ice water. Bottles are easy, self-contained, and you can drink them when they are no longer frozen. It’s the best way to store extra water and increase the thermal mass of your freezer at the same time. And, in non-crisis times, they are cheap cheap cheap. I just picked up a couple flats of water bottles at CostCo last week and distributed them through my freezers.

My boss couldn’t’ get to work because she couldn’t get her electric garage door open. Those of us with a y-chromosome know the solution to this, but for the rest of you – that little T-handle hanging on a rope from your garage track will disengage things allowing you to manually pull your door up/down.

Anytime it looks like there might be a loss of power, start charging your devices. Or do this. Or charge from your car. Or have a USB charger that runs on AA batteries.

Have cash. ATM’s arent gonna work and you don’t want to be driving around town any more than you have to.

I have a few people in my office who are very screwed…no water, no electric…unable to shower, cook food, have air conditioning, do laundry, etc, etc. You have an alternate method, right? It may be an unpleasant alternative…taking a shower with a garden sprayer, for example…but its better than nothing at all.

Will people learn anything from this? No. Invariably, they’ll tell their ‘war stories’ about how the suffered mightily and when I politely ask them if they’ll be buying generators or doing anything else to mitigate a repeat performance of the event they will say “Oh no, this sort of thing almost never happens”. Even though it just freakin’ happened.

And that, mi amigos y amigas, is why, collectively, we are doomed. People like you and I are outnumbered by orders of magnitude by these idiots. But they have the numbers and the collective gene pool of humanity will suffer because of it.