More Derecho lessons...

As described yesterday, at the end of June the Eastern states were hit by a rare summer storm of strong, sustained winds blowing from the West. It produced hurricane force winds that gusted as high as 91 miles per hour in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Trees fell everywhere and the damage was massive. Here's some comments from a reader of SurvivalBlog.com

We here in West Virginia are used to disasters such as floods but the mountains tend to shield us from tornados and high winds are rare. Within an hour span[,] power was knocked out to 50 of the 55 counties in the state. The towers of major transmission lines were twisted wrecks.   [...]

· Gasoline was gone within 24 hours. Lines were just like the 1970s fuel embargo.
· Ice became the chief commodity and was in short supply or no supply.
· Water was out for most people at least for the first two days.
· Most big box stores and gas stations were up on generator power by day three.
· A new shipment of 250 generators was sold in a few hours. [...] 

 With all traffic lights out it was hectic but for the most part people were safe and courteous.  [...]  

The local radio station stepped up to the plate and suspended normal programming and went live 24 hours on generator with news and call-ins giving information. The unpreparedness of some of the call-ins was instructive. On the second day several were screaming for FEMA to arrive.

Dude, where's my electricty?

On June 29, the Atlantic coast was hit by a rare "derecho", a powerful wind storm that blows in from the Midwest and out to the Atlantic Ocean.  The storm and following heat wave without power has killed at least 23 people; some died when trees fell on their homes and cars, and heat stroke killed others.

In the U.S. we take electricity for granted and assume any outage will be brief. But five days after the deadly storms, there were still 1 million homes and businesses in a swath from Indiana to Virginia that remained without power. In Virginia alone emergency crews worked around the clock to deal with 60,000 outages.

Long duration outages like this occur after wind or snow storms bring down hundreds of thousands of trees on power lines.  With 3000 workers in Virgina and West Virginia combined, each person may have 40 lines to locate the break and fix.

"This was not a storm where tree limbs just fell on our wires," [Pepco spokesman Clay Anderson] says. "This was a storm where large mature trees were uprooted and lifted and just thrown into our poles — snapping our poles in half and wrapping our high-voltage wires around homes, businesses and cars."

You might say, bring in outside help, but that's exactly the problem with large regional storms. Your neighboring states are in just as bad shape and have no one to spare. So you have to ask for help from far away that will take a day or two to arrive.

Bottom Line:

Be prepared with a week of food and water and light. 72-hours is just not enough.

Please don't burn down the Dormitory!

I'm an ordinary guy
Burning down the house
-Talking Heads song

When you sent your young son or daughter off to college this year, one of the last thing you'll want to hear is that they burned down the dormitory building. Most college students lack knowledge about fire safety and prevention (and may lack common sense in general). Students may think it's cool to burn candles or incense and it's also cool to get plastered drunk. These don't mix well. In more than 50% of adult fire fatalities, victims were under the influence of alcohol at the time of the fire. Alcohol impairs judgment and hampers evacuation efforts.

The United States Fire Administration (USFA) offers these tips:

Cooking is the leading cause of fire injuries on college campuses, closely followed by careless smoking and arson. Students are careless with ashes or fall asleep with a lit cigarette.

Many factors contribute to the problem of dormitory housing fires.

• Improper use of 911 notification systems delays emergency response.
• Student apathy is prevalent. Many are unaware that fire is a risk or threat in the environment.
• Evacuation efforts are hindered since fire alarms are often ignored.
• Building evacuations are delayed due to lack of preparation and preplanning.
• Vandalized and improperly maintained smoke alarms and fire alarm systems inhibit early detection of fires.
• Misuse of cooking appliances (In my college days we evacuated for a fire caused by food forgotten on a stove downstairs.)
• Overloaded electrical circuits and extension cords increase the risk of fires.

Bottom Line Safety Precautions

• Teach your kids how to properly notify the fire department using the 911 system.
• If you can visit the college, inspect your child's room for fire hazards like overloaded electrical outlets.
• Know the location of emergency exit doors and windows.
• Urge your kids to take each alarm seriously and to participate in fire drills.
• Teach safe cooking techniques. Don't encourage cooking in dorm rooms.

Appliance Fires

"If you see anyone acting suspiciously near or on a sub-station, please call the police."-alert issued in UK

The Guardian reports an unusual story in the town of Bolton, UK. Thieves broke into an electrical substation and stole £20 worth of copper switching parts to sell on the black market. This caused a power surge as the voltage jumped from 230 to 400V which started fires in 71 homes as TVs, microwaves, washing machines, and other appliances burst into flames. Several hundred houses had blown fuses.

"Then suddenly I heard a 'poof' noise. At first I thought, 'What was that?', and sat down in my chair. Then I saw smoke coming out of my digibox [TV] and I jumped up quick and turned off the box at the plug. Shortly afterwards my husband was in the kitchen, and he saw a huge flame come out of the microwave. It frightened him to death. It all shook me up. You don't expect to see smoke coming out of your television."

Sadly the response from the power Utility did not impress me. They issued a warning that the thieves were endangering their own lives as well as those of others – and face the threat of prosecution. "Threat" of prosecution - that will surely discourage copycat thieves. What ever happened to, we will track you down and you will pay for your crime? Why are the authorities being so polite? "Please don't steal this, you might hurt yourself." This is a crime against society and needs to be taken very seriously.

Bottom Line

There is a reason that homes have a circuit breaker box. An additional surge protector may protect your TV but you're unlikely to have every appliance on a surge protector. And if something does go up in smoke, you want a working fire alarm to give you warning ASAP. And of course you have a fire extinguisher -right?

How to Do Anything

“Bad planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”

An amazing resource to know about is the web site, How to Make Anything.com. The site contains "GigaBytes of data collected from all over the world" with detailed instructions on how to do just about anything. Items include:

UNDERSTANDING CEREAL CROPS I-WHEAT, OATS, BARLEY, AND RYE
How to Dehorn Cattle
Raising Yaks (a Yak is pictured above)
Cheese making
Donkey work made easy
Snail farming
Making Yoghurt
and more like all types of stoves, making bricks, making Ox carts, sanitation, medicine, education, etc.

Bottom Line
Sites like How to Make Anything.com are amazing and fun to read. But they are not much use after a disaster that knocks out electricity. Or if the site is popular and well know, the server may become overloaded by too much traffic under emergency conditions. You need to prepare in advance to make this site useful:
1. Print out topics of interest and create your own survival manual this way
2. Buy some good survival books
3. You could download useful topics to your PC or flash drive and when the internet and power is down use an UPS (backup power supply) to access the topics (warning - the UPS won't last long).
4. For those technically inclined, it's possible for a bicycle to create power to run a laptop (but not enough for a PC) http://science.howstuffworks.com/question658.htm
Here's one product that claims it can charge batteries via bike: http://www.econvergence.net/electro.htm

Espionage & Passwords

“Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody” - Mark Twain

Here is an unsettling story published in the Wall Street Journal, Electricity Grid in U.S. Penetrated By Spies.

Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and
former national-security officials. The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war.

As a computer programmer I understand that hackers would try to break into our infrastructure systems. But what concerns me is that they succeeded and could leave behind sleeping programs waiting for activation. “Many of the intrusions were detected not by the companies in charge of the infrastructure but by U.S. intelligence agencies, officials said.”

The WSJ reports, “Intelligence officials worry about cyber attackers taking control of electrical facilities, a nuclear power plant or financial networks via the Internet.” I cannot for the life of me understand why a nuclear power plant should be accessible via the Internet. Perhaps workers want to push buttons from far away in case the plant starts to meltdown? I’ve worked at several companies with restricted Internet access. At one, there was no access, period. At two others they used VPN (Virtual Private Networks) to restrict access. VPN uses a token that displays a new “random” number every minute. To login I need my password and the current number on the token registered to me.

Sadly in many secure systems the weakest link is the human element. At one of my internships, the top executives (with the most data access) hated to memorize long passwords and asked for an exception so they could use two letter passwords. One hacker trick I’ve read about includes getting inside a company and then sitting down at computers where workers have left for lunch but left the PC logged on and connected to the company network. (Screen savers with passwords help protect against this). Another clever hacker passed out a survey to workers asking for names of pets, children, spouse, etc. He then checked to see if any worker had used a family name as their password; very common unfortunately. (A solution to this is requiring numbers and or special symbols in the password.)

Now it would be nice to think espionage would never happened but the WSJ describes two recent cases outside the US:

• In 2000, a disgruntled employee rigged a computerized control system at a water-treatment plant in Australia, releasing more than 200,000 gallons of sewage into parks and rivers.
• Last year the CIA told utility company representatives that a cyberattack had taken out power equipment in multiple regions outside the U.S. The outage was followed with extortion demands.

Bottom LineTwo points I’d like to emphasize here.
1. Water or electricity could fail at a moments notice with a hostile attack. Do you have backup water and a power generator or means to cook/light without electricity? ABC News did a follow-up story called What if Russia or China Cut Off Your Electricity? It goes through a typical day showing how pervasive electricity is...

• Your alarm clock
• Your laptop (when the batter dies) & wireless router
• Your landline phone perhaps work but not VOIP
• Your hot water heater (if not gas)
• Your gas oven (most have an electric starter instead of a pilot light)
• Traffic lights
• Gas station pumps
• Frozen/refrigerated food at the grocery store
• Cash Registers, Credit Cards

2. Always use a strong password. Studies have shown that longer is better. Password hackers are well aware of L33T, the trick of substituting letters with symbols like 9ary or G@ry for Gary. So don’t think you are safe with a short but clever password. One easy password method is to use the letters from a favorite hymn, bible verse, poem, etc. For example “tbontbtitq” for “To be or not to be, that is the question” (but please choose something less obvious). You can strengthen this by creating a personal pattern where you always capitalize the same letters (say 2nd and 3rd) “tBOntbtitq”