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Wednesday, February 02, 2011

It could be worse
Posted by Jill | 6:50 PM
If you thought you were going to go insane during the storm of the last two days, think of it this way: you could live in Australia:
Australia's Cyclone Yasi, with winds of up to 300 km (186 miles) per hour, is so powerful it could blow apart even "cyclone proof" houses, engineers said on Wednesday.

Yasi is headed for major towns and cities along the northeast coast. It is believed to be the strongest ever to hit Australia, surpassing Cyclone Tracy which largely destroyed the northern city of Darwin in 1974.

"Once you get to extreme cases, you are in uncharted ground and the test data I have got I would not trust it if I had to live there myself," said Dr Robert Leicester, a researcher with the government's national scientific research body.

Leicester, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, has studied the impact of Australia's two previous worst cyclones, Tracy and Cyclone Larry in 2006.

"Of the cyclones up to now since Tracy, you have not really had a direct hit on places with a lot of housing," he said.

Building standards have been tightened significantly since Tracy killed 71 people and destroyed about 70 percent of the northern city of Darwin.

But they may be no match for cyclones the size of Yasi. Standards are already being reviewed because of worries that cyclones are getting stronger and moving further south.

Engineers said that while most modern homes were designed to withstand high wind-speeds, pressures were different during a severe cyclone which could suck walls out and blow roofs off buildings.

Structures in the region built before 2002 were designed to withstand winds of 252 kph and those built since then for winds of 265 kph, according to Professor Mark Bradford, of the University of New South Wales' School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Smaller building are particularly vulnerable. "It doesn't look particularly good, it is quite scary."

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This about sums it up.
Posted by Jill | 4:54 AM

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Sunday, December 12, 2010

Karma's a bitch, bitchez!
Posted by Jill | 10:18 AM
Not to get all John Cole on you with football posts on a Sunday, but this has to be karmic payback for the Giants, who made an agreement this week with the Miami Dolphins to allow the Dolphins to come in a day early and use the Giants' training facility so that they could become acclimated to the colder weather (presumably reducing the Jets' so-called "weather advantage":
The roof of the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome in Minneapolis deflated early Sunday morning, leaving the scheduled football game between the Minnesota Vikings and Giants – which had already been postponed from Sunday to Monday because of the weekend blizzard – in further limbo.

The National Football League scrambled Sunday morning to determine where the game would be played. Late Saturday night, the game was delayed because of concerns that the snow on the dome roof could not safely be cleared by workers in high winds.

Metrodome officials said they found tears in the roof on Sunday and that it was unlikely they could prepare the dome in time for a game on Monday.

Bill Lester, the executive director of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, said the dome suffered damage to two of its triangle-shaped Teflon panels and that his crew was still assessing the situation.

The N.F.L. could move the football game to someplace like the University of Minnesota’s outdoor football stadium, although it too would have to be cleared of 17 inches of snow.

That could present further problems for the Giants, whose flight was diverted Saturday to Kansas City when snow closed the Minneapolis airport. Anticipating an indoor game, they likely did not bring cold weather gear to Minneapolis.

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Monday, November 12, 2007

Nope...there's no climate change...none at all
Posted by Jill | 10:05 PM


Yup...thunderstorms at 9:30 at night in November when it's 45 degrees out are perfectly normal...

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Thursday, April 19, 2007

Mildew, mildew everywhere
Posted by Jill | 5:46 AM
After three days of unsuccessful attempts to get a cleaning service out to deal with our soaked basement carpet, it's time to resort to desperate measures. So this morning before work it's going to be just me, a utility knife, and a strong back as I move furniture and hack up what used to be an old but still in excellent condition carpet into manageable pieces so that the mildew smell doesn't extend any more to the main floor of the house than it is already and turn into toxic mold.

Note to cleaning services: If you're not going to be able to come out in a reasonable period of time, at least have the decency to say so. One of them "put me on the list" and they're "working their way up" to my area but "can't say when" they'll get here, another "put me into the system and you'll get a call within 24-48 hours", a third and fourth don't even pick up the phone but instead have voice mail take the calls -- and then don't respond, and the fifth guy said he could come out on Friday but said I should just remove the carpet and get it out of the house.

And as the mildew smell gets stronger, I've come to the conclusion that this is the only thing to do. I have a local flooring guy coming out tomorrow who would remove it, but how many more days will it be till he gets here? And how much mold might develop in the meantime? So this morning my blogging time will be taken up hacking up this poor, defenseless wall-to-wall carpeting that has done nothing to me but cushion my feet during step aerobics for ten years and is guilty of nothing other than being a 1970's rust color and having the misfortune to have a foam pad underneath it during a storm that brought 9" of rain in 24 hours. And while doing it I shall cry at the injustice and futility of it all.

But meanwhile, if you don't have Times Select, go read Bob Herbert's column about Cho Seung-Hui today over at Welcome to Pottersville. As Republicans continue to insist that gay marriage somehow threatens them and solidify their control over women's bodies with the new conservative Supreme Court, Herbert's discussion of Cho's hostility towards women and psychosexual issues and how such issues are common threads in this sort of mass murderer is food for thought.

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Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Flood update and elsewhere
Posted by Jill | 6:21 AM
Well, after about 14 hours of nearly continuous ritual of either vacuuming up water from the laundry room floor or tap dancing on towels in the family room in what I fear is a vain attempt to save the carpet, we finally collapsed in utter exhaustion last night as water continued to seep into the house.

Today more rain is predicted.

At least the morning paper offered an explanation as to why, with five inches less rain than was dumped on us in 1999 when Tropical Storm Floyd paid its unwanted visit, the flooding was so much worse. Back then, we were in a drought summer, the ground was parched, and reservoirs were nowhere near full. Last week we had 1.5 inches of rain on top of the big ice storm six weeks ago. So when an average of eight inches of rain fell on Sunday (9.3 inches the highest recorded total, in River Vale), there was nowhere for it to go except as unwanted guests in people's houses.

This morning I am hoping to go downstairs and find that perhaps the seepage by some miracle stopped during the night. I am not optimistic, given the wet sidewalks and driveways this morning indicating more rain during the night (and more predicted today and tomorrow). We do not have flood insurance because we do not live in a flood plain, not that it would have helped because flood insurance covers only structural damage and damage to operational things like furnaces and water heaters. My water heater is in a 2" deep tray, an overpriced-but-worth-it $60 add-on when we last had it replaced, along with a battery-operated alarm that goes off when there is water in the tray, thus giving us advance notice when it gives up the ghost. And my furnace, with barely 1/4" of water around it, was chugging along merrily last night.

But now some decisions have to be made and some money spent. Because the seepage is largely at the front of the house, it seems more productive to attack the source of the problem, however intermittent, and enhance the drainage, rather than paying some charlatan tens of thousands of dollars to dig up the basement and install God-knows what. So that means calling out a landscaper who does this sort of thing. It also means calling someone in to either extract the water from the carpet and de-mildew it or pull it up entirely and de-mildew it and then decide what to do about flooring. At any rate, it's going to be expensive, and while I had planned to put money into the house this year, it's not where I'd planned to put it.

It could have been worse. The Bergen Record has a photo this morning of a house in River Vale submerged nearly to the top of the garage. Yesterday people in New Milford were being rescued in boats. With a brook and two reservoirs on my way to work, and my route going through the aforementioned River Vale, it remains to be seen if I could have even gotten through. Today I'll head in, if only because there doesn't seem to be a point to be one of Mickey Mouse's brooms with buckets for a second day as water contineus to seep in.

And this is why I really don't have much to say about yesterday's shooting at Virginia Tech. I did have MSNBC on during my towel dancing on the carpet yesterday, but the "If it bleeds, it leads" coverage excluding all else seemed like just more Atrocity Droning, not unlike the nonstop coverage of last year's shooting at an Amish school. What stood out most frighteningly were the calls by talking heads for so-called bulletproof security on college campuses. Look, folks, this is a tragedy by any measure. But when the network that continually tries to pump up a failed president's ratings by casting him as a strong, resolute leader in the face of The Terrorism Of Which We Must Be Afraid All The Time calls the shooting "an act of evil on a scale that we've never seen in this country before", I think we've entered the realm of tabloid journalism hyperbole, and I'm not going to pay any more attention to that than I am to the continued attempts to flog the corpse of Anna Nicole Smith.

This sort of thing is nothing new. In 1966, ex-Marine Charles Whitman killed 15 people and wounded 31 before he was shot by police. In 1984, James Huberty killed 21 people and wounded 19 others in a McDonald's in San Ysidro, California. In 1991, George Hennard shot and killed 22 people in Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people and wounded 24 before committing suicide in the 1999 Columbine shootings that politicians are still flogging. When something like this happens, whether on a college campus or not, I don't think the relative body counts are what's important. Whitman was clearly nuts. Harris and Klebold were certainly extremely disturbed young men. And it's interesting how eight years later, the talk of the "bully culture" that spawned the Columbine massacre has fallen silent. I guess it's hard to rail against bully culture in the schools when a 67-year-old radio personality is calling a women's college basketball team "whores".

But what's most disheartening is the implication by the tablonews networks that the fact that the shooter, apparently a student at the University, may have been "a 24- year-old Chinese national who arrived in San Francisco on a United Airlines flight Aug. 7 last year on a student visa issued in Shanghai" is somehow significant. I suppose if we can chalk this up to some "damn fur'ner" we won't have to look at either the pressures on college students or accept the fact that there will always be people who go nuts and act out.

I'm not trying to belittle the horror and the loss for Virginia Tech students and the families of the dead and wounded. But the frenzy surrounding this incident seems to be more about cable news wanting to deliver eyeballs to advertisers than about any need to cover developments in the case.

By all means, let's ask questions about the response of campus security, and whether students should have been warned earlier. But it would be tragic if college campuses were turned into police states as a result of one tragic, horrific incident.

UPDATE: Perhaps the same cable news-bots who are flogging the Virginia Tech massacre might want to consider, as Larry Johnson has, that what happened in Virginia would be just another day in Iraq under the U.S. occupation.

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Monday, April 16, 2007

Water, water everywhere
Posted by Jill | 6:50 AM
No blogging today, folks. I have a basement full of water and half of it is carpeted family room. Today it's just me, the basement, and a wet/dry vac. See y'all tomorrow.

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