Was the 20th century abnormally normal?

FuturePundit makes an interesting observation that the 20th century may have been abnormally quiet in regard to mega-disasters. It's the best documented century in human history with photos, movies, radio, TV, blogs, etc and when we think of "history" our window is often the past 100 years. But go back another 100 years to the 19th century.

The first half of the 19th century was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, a period of unusual cold lasting 500 years from 1350 to 1850. When we think of snowy Victorian Christmas with ice skaters on frozen rivers, that was the influence of the Little Ice Age.

In 1811 there was an 8.1-8.2 earthquake on the New Madrid fault in middle America which caused the Mississippi River to temporarily flow backwards and permanently changed its course. A repeat of this today would be devastating.

In 1884 New York City had a 5.5 quake and is due for a repeat. Los Angeles and Tokyo are also past due for major quakes like the 1875 SoCal quake of magnitude 7.9.

How about a big bang like Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815? The eruption further cooled the planet so that snow fell in New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces in June. It caused the biggest famine of the 19th century.

In 1859 there was a massive solar eruption that caused intense magnetic fields on Earth. An equivalent today could fry our electronics and power grid.

The 1900s were extremely tame in comparison.

Space Weather?

On FEMA's preparedness website, www.ready.gov/natural-disasters, you'll find information about "typical" disasters like Tornadoes and Hurricanes and even some rare events like Volcanoes. But there is also a category for "Space Weather". What is that?

Our Sun has been very quiet for the past few decades but it has a history of extreme outbursts of solar flares. The strongest solar storm on record is the Carrington Event of 1859 which electrified telegraph lines, shocking technicians and setting their telegraph papers on fire. Northern Lights were visible as far south as Cuba and Hawaii. Another significant space weather event took place in 1989 which caused a power blackout in Canada that left six million people without electricity for nine hours. This flare also melted some power transformers in New Jersey.

More recently there was a flare-up in 1989 but NASA reports this was nowhere near the same scale as the Carrington event.

We have been very lucky in our digital age that there's been no massive solar storm. Imagine TVs and computers bursting into flame from power surges. The damage will be massive.

Did the Coast Guard worsen the Gulf oil spill?

“The quicker we get about the business of reducing our reliance on oil the better.”- Condoleezza Rice

Now here is an interesting story about lack of preparedness at the Federal level. Columnist Ed Morrissey writes, Did the government cause the Gulf spill?

The generally accepted view of the Deepwater Horizon disaster has focused on the blowout preventer and the non-standard procedures BP conducted just before the explosion and fire. However, most of the damage and the main source of the spill came from the collapse and sinking of the DH platform [i.e. the biggest leak was from a break in the pipe that connected the platform to the ocean floor] ... A new report by the Center for Public Integrity, based on testimony from people on scene and Coast Guard logs, contains evidence that the platform sunk because of a botched response from the Coast Guard, which failed to coordinate firefighting efforts and to get the proper resources to fight the fire.

Here's what the CPI report, Haphazard Firefighting Might Have Sunk BP Oil Rig, has to say,

The Coast Guard has gathered evidence it failed to follow its own firefighting policy during the Deepwater Horizon disaster and is investigating whether the chaotic spraying of tons of salt water by private boats contributed to sinking the ill-fated oil rig. ... Coast Guard officials told the Center for Public Integrity that the service does not have the expertise to fight an oil rig fire and that its response to the April 20 explosion may have broken the service’s own rules by failing to ensure a firefighting expert supervised the half-dozen private boats that answered the Deepwater Horizon’s distress call to fight the blaze.

... The Coast Guard’s official maritime rescue manual — updated just seven months before the BP accident — recommends Guard personnel avoid participating in firefighting aboard a rig. Instead, the manual requires Coast Guard responders to set up an “Incident Command System” and assign an expert, such as a fire marshal, to lead the efforts to extinguish the blaze.

The Coast Guard failed to obtain an independent rig fire expert but instead deferred to firefighting experts aboard the rig. Witnesses say there was no attempt by the Coast Guard Command Center in New Orleans to designate any fire marshal to take charge. The Coast Guard focused on crew rescue and allowed any boat that showed up to spray sea water on the rig. This may have flooded the damaged ballast tanks causing the rig to list, become unbalanced, and sink. The sinking broke the oil pipeline, making the oil spill much worse. Experts say the proper procedure is to use foam on oil fires but neither the Coast Guard nor the rig fire team requested foam. The rig team itself put out an SOS for ships to spray the rig with water.


Rob Bluey of the Washington Examiner writes,

These new details raise serious questions for the White House, which has repeatedly pinned the blame on BP. If it turns out the Coast Guard is at fault -- either because it didn't follow proper procedures or couldn't respond adequately because of a lack of resources -- the public has a right to know why we're just now learning this information 100 days after the disaster began.

The crippling budget cuts President Obama proposed for the Coast Guard also deserve a closer examination. Obama's spending plan reduced the blue water fleet by a full one-third, slashed 1,000 personnel, five cutters, and several aircraft, including helicopters. ... Adm. Thad Allen warned the budget cuts threatened to turn the Coast Guard into a "hollow force."

Bottom Line

Unfortunately this is typical for federal government rescue efforts. As with FEMA, the federal government says its role is NOT do the actual rescue work but rather to organize the effort through the Incident Command Structure. In theory the government brings value with expert, knowledgeable leadership and coordination. In fact neither occur. With the oil rig, no outside expert was appointed to lead and the Coast Guard let the rig team run the show. This was perhaps not wise - you don't fight a fire with your HQ inside the burning building and staff fleeing for their lives. 

It does seem that the Coast Guard is already a "hollow force" when dealing with maritime fires. If you can not rely on the Coast Guard to properly manage a fire at sea, who can you trust?

PS
For a different story on "everything we know about the oil spill is wrong" see Time magazine's, "The BP Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?". President Obama has called the BP oil spill "the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced" but so far the number of birds killed is 1% of the number killed by the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska 21 years ago. Only three dead mammals (dolphins, etc) have been found. Assessment teams have found 350 acres of oiled marshes, but Louisiana loses 15,000 acres of wetlands every year from erosion caused by "flood control" re-engineering efforts on the Mississippi.
Yes, every oil spill is bad, but it serves the public little good to have the press and government exaggerate the damage, destroy a company (BP) and ban all future drilling.

False Alert with Swine Flu?

“With Mexico saying the worst may be over and the new H1N1 virus starting to look more like a seasonal flu strain in the United States and elsewhere, critics are going to start asking if public health officials overreacted to the outbreak.” – Reuters news

Again I hate to bash the media but it seems that most TV/Radio/Newspaper coverage has only two modes: “full coverage emergency” and “not worth discussing”. In just over a week swine flu has gone from “The End of the World as We Know It” to “never mind, just a normal flu, nothing to worry about”.

The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Was this a false alert like the Swine Flu of 1976?
No. The President Ford swine flu was found on one military base in NJ and did not spread. In contrast, the swine flu of 2009 is very contagious. Thousands of cases in Mexico and within a few weeks it had spread to over a dozen countries around the world. The World Health Organization rightly classified this as phase 5 (Pandemic Imminent).

Is this swine flu dangerous?
Yes. One thing I’ve learned from this emergency “drill” is that “normal” flu is dangerous. How did it happen that 2000 yearly flu deaths in NYC and 36,000 deaths annually in the US are considered “normal”? Consider the mothers protesting against the Iraq War and the deaths of their sons. In six years since 2003 the numbers of US casualties has been 4284. During the same period there were 216,000 flu deaths, 50 times the number of soldiers killed. Why don’t we see mothers protesting for better flu drugs?

Was it wrong to close schools, etc?
No. Consider the game of Russian roulette. Is it safe because 5 times out of six, nothing happens? When this flu appeared it spread fast and its potential was unknown. Suppose we treated it as “normal” and allowed it to spread and THEN discovered it was a killer. By that point the horse is out of the barn and there is no going back. The right time to stop a potential pandemic is at the beginning.

Is this swine flu just a “normal” flu?
Unknown. The death toll in Mexico was overstated with many sicknesses related deaths misclassified as swine flu. Scientists now think this is NOT a “killer” flu but it may be stronger than your average flu. The medical studies are still being done to exactly classify this flu strain.

Won’t my flu shot protect me? What about the drug Tamiflu?
No. Flu shots work by giving you a small sample of dead flu viruses so your body can learn the shape and create antibodies before the live virus invades. The Mexican swine flu is a new variant that no one is yet protected against. There are also some reports from Mexico of doctors & nurses who had taken Tamiflu but still caught the flu. For swine flu Tamiflu may be better at relieving symptoms than in prevention.

Bottom Line

Is the danger over?
As stated in the article, Scientists dig for lessons from past pandemics, “In each of the four major pandemics since 1889, a spring wave of relatively mild illness was followed by a second wave, a few months later, of a much more virulent disease. This was true in 1889, 1957, 1968 and in the catastrophic flu outbreak of 1918”.

Flu viruses are constantly evolving and changing – hence the need for a new flu shot each year. A global killer virus needs two things – the ability to spread and the ability to kill. The current swine flu shows it has the ability to spread quickly. As thousands or millions or even billions of people become infected, the likelihood of mutations increase. Most mutations will be harmless. But it takes just one bad roll of the cosmic dice to change swine flu into a deadly & contagious virus. We can hope this won’t happen but we should prepare now in case it does.

When the Sun Attacks

"There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe - only two - the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here." - Mark Twain

From Instapundit is yet another item to add to your list of TEOTWAWKI:

"Did you know a solar flare can make your toilet stop working?"

In a 132-page report from a NASA funded study, experts detail what might happen to our modern, high-tech society in the event of a “super solar flare.”

Ground currents induced during geomagnetic storms can actually melt the copper windings of transformers at the heart of many power distribution systems. Sprawling power lines act like antennas, picking up the currents and spreading the problem over a wide area. The most famous geomagnetic power outage happened during a space storm in March 1989 when six million people in Quebec lost power for 9 hours.

In 1859 the largest know solar flare triggered an explosion along electrified telegraph lines, shocking technicians and setting their telegraph papers on fire. If that same massive flare occurred today,

Power outages would be accompanied by radio blackouts and satellite malfunctions; telecommunications, GPS navigation, banking and finance, and transportation would all be affected. ... The total economic impact in the first year alone could reach $2 trillion, some 20 times greater than the costs of a Hurricane Katrina

Bottom Line

It's a good idea to have your computer, TV and any expensive electronics connected to a circuit breaker. This may protect them from power surges and nearby lightning strikes. But don't count on the breakers saving you from a monster solar flare; they will probably melt.

The Fall of the Roman Empire

"First the doctor told me the good news: I was going to have a disease named after me." - Steve Martin

When people today discuss the threat of Bird Flu, they often site the Spanish Influenza of 1918 (20-100 million killed) as an example of a pandemic. But today I learned of another much older example while looking up reasons for the Fall of the Roman Empire on Wikipedia.

Starting in 165 A.D. the Roman Empire suffered a severe and protracted pandemic, either of smallpox or measles, brought home by Roman troops fighting in the Near East. The epidemic claimed the lives of two Roman emperors — Lucius Verus (d. 169) and his co-regent Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (d 180). This pandemic was named the Antonine Plague, because no one, not even the emperor Aurelius Antoninus, was safe from it.

The disease broke out again nine years later, according to the Roman historian Dio Cassius, and caused up to 2,000 deaths a day at Rome, one quarter of those infected. Total deaths have been estimated at five million.[1] Disease killed as much as one-third to one-half of the Roman Empire, and decimated the Roman army.[2] According to the 5th century Spanish writer, Paulus Orosius, many towns and villages in the Italian peninsula and the European provinces lost all their inhabitants.

The pandemic had drastic social and political effects throughout the Roman Empire. A plague weakened Roman army was unable to hold back the advance of Germanic peoples across the Danube in 169. Over the next few centuries the German tribes grew stronger in central Europe while the Roman Legion grew weaker. The death of so many citizens started a chain of events leading to the economic ruin of Rome. There were expensive civil wars in the chaos after the plagues and fewer citizens to collect taxes from. To pay the military, coins were minted with less silver and gold content resulting in inflation. A smaller Army busy with civil wars meant the roads were no longer guarded. Merchants could no longer safely travel to distant parts of the Empire for profits (and taxes).

Eventually the Roman Empire could not afford to support its large Army. Roman swords and armor grew older and shabbier, the soldiers fewer and fewer, until eventually the Germans were better equipped and more numerous than the Romans. In 406 and 410 the German Vandals and Goths were able to sack the city of Rome - a city that had been undefeated for 800 years.

Bottom Line

The Health of a nation can depend on the health of its people (and its military). While the death of millions might not result in an invasion of Goths, it can mean fields not farmed (less food), fewer police (more crime), fewer health care professions (more disease and death), and so on. Look at any natural disaster (like Katrina) and you'll find stories of looting and overwhelmed hospitals. Now multiply that by 10,000 and you can imagine a pandemic.

A History of Emergency Planning

"I am struck by the thought that we have not come very far since my early days in this business. As a county emergency manager 20 years ago, we struggled with public education, effective warning systems, training and preparing the school systems, hospitals' the list goes on. It all sounds very familiar, doesn't it" - Avagene Moore, president of the Emergency Information Infrastructure Project (EIIP)

For today's lesson I recommend reading "Challenges, Collaboration, and Continuity" on http://www.desastres.org/. The article looks at the past 20 years of Emergency Management and Planning, where the profession is at today, and challenges for the future.

Here are some of the predictions

• Don't expect attitudes toward disaster to change. "People still make the same mistakes. People still ignore risks and say 'it won't happen to me.'"
• One of the most important things is the education of our populations, everything from websites like Ready.gov and the availability (and popularity) of weather radios to the rise of Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs)
• Funding will likely always be a contentious issue
• Challenges include the continuing quest toward interoperable communications, identity theft, data privacy and hackers.

Bottom Line
One expert states, "I've always considered the average citizen as the weakest link in the chain of preparedness. Recent events demonstrate that our work is paying off and that our "customers" are taking a more active role in their own preparedness."
Another anticipates that "Individuals and families will create personal emergency management plans that focus on fire evacuation and life safety. This will be because of a general recognition that most of us will be on our own for the first 72 hours after a disaster."

FEMA to the rescue?

Who you gonna call? - Ghost Busters

After 9-11 and Hurricane Katrina, a 2007 Red Cross survey found that 93 percent of Americans were still not prepared for a disaster. This is doubly alarming given that the media showed very clearly with Katrina how disasters can overload emergency responders, especially during the first 12 to 72 hours. The US has only one firefighter for every 280 people and one police officer for every 385 people. That means that in an emergency most people "are going to be on their own for possibly 48 to 72 hours," says David Paulison of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It is just not physically possible for every person to be rescued immediately or even within 24 hours.

A different survey conducted last year indicates that most Georgians aren't aware of what supplies they need in order to be prepared for a natural disaster, or — even worse — a terrorist attack, when supply lines, communication and electricity are interrupted. Adults surveyed thought they had enough supplies on hand to deal with a disaster, but, when pressed, they listed only a flashlight, a basic first-aid kit and some nonperishable food. About 80 percent acknowledged they do not have other necessities like extra prescription medications, a face mask, maps and cash. Only 44 percent of Georgians knew that they should be prepared to survive on their own for at least three days.

In a recent NY conference, disaster officials were taught that telling the public "to call FEMA is wrong." FEMA is not a first-responder agency. In the event of a disaster, local agencies are responsible for taking care of village and town citizens, not the federal government. In fact, FEMA does not step in until county and state resources have already been used and exceeded. In NY there is a $4 million threshold of damage that has to be met before a county like Suffolk can reach out to the state for disaster assistance. Only after $23.5 million worth of damage is done, can the sate then reach out to the federal government (FEMA).

This confusion over the "chain of command" caused problems during Katrina. The Mayor of New Orleans was loudly yelling for President Bush and the National Guard to assist. However the federal government is only allowed to act when legally requested by the state Governor. During Katrina the Governor was reluctant ask for help and delayed giving the National Guard permission because ultimately the State of Louisiana would have to reimburse the federal governments for the cost of the assistance. Until the full scope of the emergency became clear, it was not obvious to the state which would cost more - local damage or the cost of outside help.

Bottom Line
Governments are SLOW to act in emergencies and limited by red tape and budgets. Ditto for the American Red Cross. Don't count on outside help. Be sure you can take care of yourself and your family.

Not in My Backyard!

"There's no place like home" - Dorothy, Wizard of Oz

In an article published Aug 12 by Dot Earth, the author discusses studies "On Elephants’ Memories, Human Forgetfulness and Disaster". Historically when a coastal village is wiped out by a tsunami, it is rebuilt on higher ground and the village elders tell the story of the flood to the next generation. This lasts for about 100 years at which point the stories are forgotten, or no longer believed, and a village is rebuilt in the flood prone area. Today the time of forgetfulness is even shorter as a young generation disregards the lessons of their parents and peers.

"In 1992, a devastating tsunami hit the coastal resort of El Transito on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua. More than 100 died; [...] The government relocated the population up coast and inland. [...] in 1995, I was astounded to see the town rebuilt, with new bars and canteens where we counted bodies 3 years earlier. [...] the town was now inhabited with newcomers from Managua, who grabbed the opportunity of cheap coastal real estate — none of the new locals or the tourists remembered or knew that their resort had been severely hit." - "On Elephants’ Memories, ..."

Bottom Line
It is important to know the disaster history for your town and region. How frequent is drought, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquake, flooding, blizzards, ice storms, lightning, etc. Be aware also of potential man-made disasters. Do you live near a nuclear power plant? Near a highway or train where hazardous materials might be transported? Near a chemical plant? In a fire prone building? Knowing the local risks is the first step in preparation.