Friends in Need When Nature Hiccups, Natural Disasters forum Options

[belleraphon1]

Sincerely hope all you UMSFers on the West Coast are OK! Read Emily's blog....
http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001576/

Widfires and now an earthquake... scary...

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Craig

p.s. With global climate change this forum may get a few posts or two in this century!

[mcaplinger]

Concern from an Ohioan who only worries about getting snowed in once or twice a winter season.

Portions of Ohio are, of course, in the New Madrid Seismic Zone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Madrid_Seismic_Zone

[nprev]

Thanks for thinking of us, Belleraphon; no biggie, we're fine. It was one hell of a jolt (and lasted quite awhile!), but apparently no serious injuries or damage AFAIK. Emily said she's okay as well.

I was on the 5th floor near downtown, and it shook crazy; can't imagine what the people in the skyscrapers felt. Thinking I can get a fancy condo on the 60th floor or above somewhere here for cheap over the next week or so...

[belleraphon1]

"Portions of Ohio are, of course, in the New Madrid Seismic Zone."

Point well taken.....mcaplinger

Craig

[belleraphon1]

Thanks for thinking of us, Belleraphon; no biggie, we're fine. It was one hell of a jolt (and lasted quite awhile!), but apparently no serious injuries or damage AFAIK. Emily said she's okay as well.

I was on the 5th floor near downtown, and it shook crazy; can't imagine what the people in the skyscrapers felt. Thinking I can get a fancy condo on the 60th floor or above somewhere here for cheap over the next week or so...

Your quite welcome, nprev.... glad you and Emily are ok!!!!

As mcaplinger pointed out, we Ohioans are on a fault. Back in the 80's, I can actually remember a slight jolt, the floor kinda weaving for a moment, but no biggie.

Funny you should mention skyscrapers. I was talking about that with my office pal. We were trying to imagine what it is like to be on the 60th floor of a skyscraper gone weavy! VERY SCARY.

Craig

[nprev]

Well, I'll puff up my chest and act all brave here, but California doesn't have anything on Alaska when it comes to quakes. I felt at least two of this magnitude when I was there from 2001-2004 (one shook me out of bed), and there was a really bad one in 2003 right near the center of the state that shook Anchorage for a full two minutes...actually saw vehicles rocking back & forth on their wheels during that.

The good news story from all this bravado is that modern building codes really are pretty sound for dealing with these things. My house in Anchorage (built in 2001) suffered zero damage, nor did any of my neighbors. I can't imagine what sorts of things you have to do to a skyscraper to make it earthquake-survivable, but clearly whatever they are, they work. (With you on the 60th floor observation, though; not a happy feeling, for sure!)

Now, Ohio has tornadoes...MUCH scarier, IMHO! Went through one of those in New Jersey (of all places) in 1997, do not wish to repeat the experience.

[volcanopele]

Meh, I lived in Kansas for 13 years and saw a grand total of ONE tornado, and that was a puny EF-0. I think it blew some deck furniture around.

[belleraphon1]

Have lived in Ohio my entire life....

Only tornado I ever "experienced" missed me by a hair.... if that is what it really was, and I did not know it until fterwards. Was living in an apartment complex at the time, third floor, corner bedroom. Had the window open during what I thought was going to be an intense thunderstorm (black cloud effect), and the air suddenly whoosed out......sounded like a wind tunnel being sucked through a vaccuum. Afterwards a friend said they saw a small funnel cloud lift up just before it would have nipped by corner bedroom...

I have seen plenty of awesome black clouds and thunderstorms wrack with hail and bluster. And I actually LOVE a good winter blizzard... my daughter and I would get all wrapped up cozy and walk around the block as the snow wailed....

But to have the ground dance under my feet... well... THAT SCARS ME!

Craig

[nprev]

Ah, ground-dancing ain't so bad...

Here's my tornado story. Out on the flightline @ McGuire AFB on an early June evening. 10-12 C-141s lined up & chained at the nose gears to the ground in anticipation of bad weather. I looked over to the West, to the edge of the base where there was a line of trees. The sky above them was black, red, yellow, green...(no direct sunlight! Electrostatic/flourescent effects?) Oh, crap.

The expediter truck came roaring up & picked me up, because there was a tornado warning. I jumped in with my toolbox, along with 20 or so other people & their tools, just riding on top of them (little bumpy). We blasted back to the squadron building just as the rain began.

Once there, me & a couple of other people who were stupid (okay...we wanted to smoke) stuck our heads out of one of the side doors to do so. It was pitch black out, and there were these things that looked like small black dust devils whirling around outside. There was a small tree about 10 ft. (3m) in front of the doorway, and as I watched one of the "dust devils" hit the tree...and broke it in half!!!! I said "TORNADO!!!!", and dived back inside.

Once the all-clear was given, we went back out to the flightline. All the nose gear chains had broken. Some of the planes looked normal, still facing forward, but their nose gears were sideways: they'd been blown one way, then blown back. Several aircraft weren't so lucky; their noses (radomes) had crashed into the wingtips of adjacent planes. A transient C-5 had a #1 engine that was flat on the bottom and a bent left wing; the tornado had rocked the plane so hard that it had impacted the ground. Spookiest of all, the treeline at the edge of the base had a neat cutout about 300m wide where the damn thing came through and hit the base. All told, it missed us being out there by about 2 minutes at the most.

Are tornadoes scarier then earthquakes? To me, oh, hell, yes!!!!!!

[belleraphon1]

nprev... good story...

Nature is awesome and impressive...... and I think that is one of the reasons we all love planetary astronomy.
It hits us somewhere at our core. We cannot help ourselves but be scared and love it at the same time.

Don't know if any of the above makes sense ... but I am constantly impressed by nature's power....

Actually probably just had one too many beers... long day (but not as long as you folks in CA) and I have one cat with her tail wrapped over my wrist while another is doing the keyboard shuffle....

You all take care and know we UMSFers are here for each other.

Craig

[ElkGroveDan]

Oh come on Nick. I disagree. Do I have to tell my earthquake story?

[nprev]

Yes, you do!!! Give it up, big guy!

[Juramike]

I was in my lab on the 6th floor of the UC Berkeley chemistry building when the Loma Prieta Earthquake hit (7.1 on the Richter scale) back in 1989. We had boiling solvent stills and gas cylinders rattling back and forth. The doorjamb I was standing in cracked away from the wall about an inch and a half. I still remember the look of the woman across the hall as her frozen smile transformed into scream. Our floor's balcony had a chilling view of the Marina district fires across the bay flaring in San Francisco when the gas mains went up. We didn't find out about the Cypress Structure collapse until much later.

That whole experience kinda sucked. I was a tad jittery for a few years after that.

[Later the 1991 Oakland Firestorm came within few miles of campus and torched my old neighborhood. I remember racing in to campus to back up multiple copies of my graduate thesis. Yeah, I been through the "shake and bake".]

-Mike

[nprev]

Ye gods, Mike! That had to be beyond terrifying for everyone. (Chilling image: woman with a fixed smile morphing into a scream. You could write an entire novel around that image...and should.)

It really isn't the quake itself that's scary,IMHO; it's the aftermath. You just don't know what the hell might have happened until it's over; you're quite powerless to do much at all when it's in progress, because priority #1 is to make sure that your own head, limbs, etc. don't get shmushed during the event itself.

In retrospect, the lack of power to control your own fate is the worst aspect. Get in a doorway, sure, but THEN what?

[Juramike]

In retrospect, the lack of power to control your own fate is the worst aspect. Get in a doorway, sure, but THEN what?

I think the most frightening part was not knowing when the shaking was going to stop intensifying.

The thought "OK, that was fun. We can stop this now...." went through my head after the wall cracked.

The other thought of "Uh oh, is this going to be the big 'Game Over'?" also started to run through my head (right about when the woman started screaming).


The entire quake lasted only 15 seconds, but it seemed much, much longer. I distinctly remember feeling the two waves. The initial up and down motion of (ha, ha, another earthquake!) to the side-to-side swaying-on-a-train wave of (Oh crap! This is IT!!).

I think at some point the primal subbrain was starting to run the show and allowing my higher brain functions free reign of paranoia and fear (or just recording the moments for later playback).

[dvandorn]

We're talking the October 17, 1989 World Series quake, correct, Mike?

I thought I heard that the quake lasted about 36 seconds, at least at Candlestick Park (as it was named then). I was safe and sound in Chicago at the time, but I took a keen interest in what happened at Candlestick. I was (and still am, poor me) a Cubs fan, and that year the Cubs had lost the NLCS to the Giants. So, World Series Game One was happening not in my beloved Wrigley Field, but at Candlestick. (And on my 34th birthday, no less.)

I was so immersed in baseball at the time that I made sure I got home in time to watch the game coverage as it began. I was watching while the picture broke up and you heard the announcer call out, rather excitedly, "I think we're having an earthqua..." That sudden cut to the feed, not only mid-word but mid-IMPORTANT-word, was one of the more chilling things I can recall witnessing.

Anyway, over the next couple of days the Commissioner's Office and the Giants hired engineers to determine if Candlestick was safe for the upcoming Series games. They determined that the upper deck had flexed back and forth longitudinally, and that while the supports were still solid and reliable, another 15 to 20 seconds of additional flexing would have brought the upper deck down -- right onto the lower deck. A full minute's worth of shaking would definitely have done it. (At least, that's how I recall the reports at the time.)

There were something like 60,000 people at the stadium right then. I still get a really dense hot thing in the pit of my stomach when I think about *that* possibility...

-the other Doug

[ElkGroveDan]

Yes, you do!!! Give it up, big guy!

My wife and I had just moved into a new rental house in Northridge, California in 1994 right before our first baby was due. She was due Tuesday January 18th, but since she was breach the doctor decided to due a C-section the Wednesday before at the hospital near my wife's work, Glendale/Verdugo just 15 minutes down the 118 Freeway. So they finally kicked us out of the hospital Friday night and I was terrified that this fragile little baby was now our responsibility. I spent the weekend fussing around the two of them until Sunday night Allison finally told me to get lost and get some fresh air. So I went over to the Northridge Mall a few blocks from our home and browsed new baby cribs since we were just borrowing one to get started. I wandered around a department store called Bullocks and at closing time I was the last one out as they locked the doors behind me - in fact it would later turn out that I was the last customer to ever shop in that store. Monday was a holiday for me so I stayed up late with Allison watching TV and trying to get used to this whole idea of being a parent. We went to bed around midnight.

Around 2:00 she woke us up crying and Allison nursed her back to sleep. Then again around 4:00. Shortly after that, (I still remember the clock said 4:26) she woke up crying again. Allison said "She can't be hungry I just fed her. So I said, "well maybe its the diaper. Now is as good a time as any for me to figure this out. You stay in bed". So we were among the very few who had the lights on at that hour. There was nothing wrong with the diaper so I began to discuss with Allison whether or not to put a new one on. As I was standing there (4:31) I felt a really smooth rocking swell cross the house the way a small wave goes under a boat on a calm lake. I can still hear my words to this day. I said out loud "Funny that kind of felt like an earth...." and I never finished the sentence. It felt like a truck hit the house. I saw everything twist and fall and fly through the air and the lights went out as I reached down and scooped up the baby off the bed. As I took three giant steps to the bathroom doorway I could feel my knees hit the floor between bounces. The roar and the noise was deafening as everything in the house that could break broke at once. I held onto the doorway with one arm and the baby with the other as that house rocked back and forth like a martini shaker. I was only five or six feet away from Allison who was screaming "Where's the baby!!?" and the roar was so loud she couldn't hear my shout back that I had her. Allison landed knee first into a picture frame and sliced open her knee. When the first round of shaking stopped I let go of the wall and pulled her up next to me and then the shaking began again.

When the shaking seemed to stop we stood there in the pitch black half naked and in bare feet with devastation all around us. Then all of a sudden BANG! and crash, a window had popped out of its twisted aluminum frame and fallen out into the back yard, then bang, bang bang more windows kept popping out. I told her to stay put while I went to get a flashlight. Three times I started down the hall and three times the shaking resumed and I would go running back to hold them. When I finally did make it to the kitchen to find the flashlight I stepped on broken glass that darn near sliced my toe off. When I finally made it back to Allison we started looking for clothing so we could get outside - it was really cold even for Los Angeles that morning, like the low 40s or so. A neighbor came pounding on our door since by then everyone on the street was outside except for us. I grabbed a dozen or so blankets and we finally went out to the car and I started it up and put on the heater. The rocking back and forth in the car continued until sunup and then for the next several days. I tried to take Allison to the hospital to get her knee stitched (and my toe) later that morning but the place was a zoo and we were worried about having a newborn baby around all those crowds and confusion. So we spent the next night in our Ford Bronco SUV with the dog and the cat. The next morning it took something like three hours to make the normally 20 minute drive to Burbank airport. I put Allison and the baby on a plane to San Francisco where her mother lived and I didn't see them for the next three weeks as I worked to make the house livable again. In hindsight I think of how lucky we were that the baby was delivered when she was. That morning the 118 freeway that I would have taken to the maternity hospital collapsed about 20 feet. Several people drove over the edge in the dark, one was killed. The department store I had been in the night before crumpled completely in half and a custodian was crushed under a parking structure there. An apartment building a half mile down the street from us collapsed and 17 people were killed. I think ultimately 57 people were killed that morning by the Northridge earthquake. Everything we owned that could break, did break with the exception of our wedding china which was still packed in boxes from our recent move.

I can't seem to find any scanned pictures from that week (I have them somewhere but its mostly a memory I try to forget), but here's what the baby and I looked like the day before.

Attached thumbnail(s)

 

[dmuller]

Just out of curiosity ... does the JPL have backup mission control centers somewhere in the US?

Otherwise I've been lucky with disasters. Felt a few Earthquakes in Switzerland, typhoons in HK and Taiwan & was in Malaysia during the boxing day tsunami but well away from the coast, and of course still remember the big chemical fire in Basel, Switzerland (not really a natural disaster)

[mchan]

Like Juramike, I was also in school, but in San Franciso, during the 1989 quake. I was in the basement instead of on the upper floors. (Come to think of it, I don't know if one place would be much more survivable than the other if the building collapsed.) It was briefly scary, but nothing like EGD's experience.

I also felt the 1994 quake EGD described, but from San Jose which is about 600 km north. Woke me up with a gentle rocking, and I was prepared to jump out of bed. Then it subsided, and after a few minutes, I said ho-hum (after having gone thru the 1989 quake) and went back to sleep. It was not until much later that morning that I turned on the radio and heard the news.

[nprev]

...Dan, I stand corrected. Earthquakes are indeed scary!!! God, that was one hell of a harrowing experience for you & your family, and you're sure right about the lucky timing of your daughter's birth!

[jasedm]

Glad to hear all ok over there. We're very lucky here in the UK as far as earthquakes go - the biggest one in the last quarter century was a 5.2 Richter shock centered near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire in February this year - enough to knock over a few Victorian chimneys.....The strongest ever officially recorded was 6.1 on the Richter scale, recorded in 1931.
I've lived in the UK all my life and never personally felt any tremors (mind you I do sleep like a log).
Below just for interest is the record of all fatalities (11) attributed to earthquakes in the UK since 1580:

Date Epicentre Magnitude Number of deaths, Place, Cause
6 Apr 1580 Dover Straits >6 2, London, falling masonry
15 Jul 1757 Penzance 4.5 1, Penryn, fell out of window
7 Sep 1801 Comrie 4.5 2, near Edinburgh, falling masonry
18 Sep 1833 Chichester 3 1, Cocking, falling rock
22 Apr 1884 Colchester 4.5 1, Wivenhoe, shock, (uncertain)
1, Manningtree, suicide
1 Feb 1915 Conisbrough <3 1, Conisbrough, Falling rock
7 Jun 1931 North Sea 5.6 1, Hull, Shock?
12 Dec 1940 Porthmadog 4.7 1, Criccieth, Fell downstairs

Of these, five were arguably caused by panic at the tremors, leaving only 6 certifiable deaths due to earthquake damage in the last four centuries.

[djellison]

I felt the Market Rasen one - it woke Helen and I up!

Doug

[ilbasso]

I was born during an earthquake on Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. My mom said that the OR room lights were swinging back and forth over her and the doctors were trying to decide whether to lean over her to protect her or finish getting me out! The doctors told her afterward that this was a portent that I was destined to move the world. Obviously that has not happened. Yet. I'm biding my time.

The biggest earthquake I remember was also in Japan, in Okinawa, when I was 10. It was pretty violent. I felt like I was on roller skates and someone was sliding the floor randomly under my feet. My dad, as he had been trained, ran over to and stood in a doorframe. The rest of us kids were just standing there in the living room, thinking "WTF????"

[dvandorn]

I was born and raised in central Illinois, not far from where the New Madrid fault passes through that state. Back when I was in my early teens, there was a fairly minor tremblor (something like 5 or less on the Richter scale). I was on the lower floor of our split-level house, and didn't notice a thing. My parents, upstairs, felt the house move a tiny bit. But I felt nothing.

I've been close to disasters and never had them actually impact me in any way. About a year ago, a major highway bridge over the Mississippi River here in Minneapolis collapsed into the river. It was a stretch of the highway I've driven over hundreds of times, had driven over it the day before. But I was a good 15 miles away when it happened.

I've had tornados pass within five miles of my location, in conditions where nothing beyond a wall of black churning cloud was visible from where I was standing.

The apartment building in which I lived for two years at the end of my college career burned to the ground -- seven months after I graduated and moved out.

I've been driving down the highway at 100 km/hr in an old beater car, pulled off to get gas, and had an entire wheel decide to break off the car... after I had slowed down to a crawl.

Some, I'm sure, would say Providence keeps its hand over me, shielding me from danger. As for myself -- I have a vague sense of always being cheated out of seeing and experiencing really exciting things that seem to happen all around me, but never *to* me.

I ought to be glad, I suppose. But I'm not... the more fool, I.

-the other Doug

[tedstryk]

Scariest natural disaster I have experienced was a tornado a few years ago. We lived on the side of a small hill at the time, and it totally leveled the forest at t e top of the hill. Then, thanks to the topography, it jumped directly over our house (The upper limbs of some of the trees were ripped off but nothing on farther down was damaged, with the exception of the mailbox that got hit by a falling limb). It touched down again about a block away and ripped the roof of several houses.

[TheChemist]

I live in one of the most seismogenic places on Earth, southern Greece, so I can totally relate to the experiences of our Californian friends. My hometown was totally destroyed by a series of earthquakes in the mid 50s and rebuilt from scratch. Luckily (for me), I was not born then
Despite many experiences, I cannot get used to this phenomenon, and every time I get as scared as the first time I felt the earth move violently, which was in 1980. During the last few years we actually have a peak in seismic activity in the region, but what can you do ?

If you look at this graph of regional seismicity since 1963, you can actually trace the European and African tectonic plates as they meet and push each other just south of Crete.

[ilbasso]

Some, I'm sure, would say Providence keeps its hand over me, shielding me from danger. As for myself -- I have a vague sense of always being cheated out of seeing and experiencing really exciting things that seem to happen all around me, but never *to* me.

-the other Doug

One of my coworkers has had to give CPR to three people during meetings, two of whom died in his arms. Another of my coworkers has - on two separate occasions - been in the back seat of a limo when the driver had a heart attack and collapsed while driving down the highway.

I do feel extraordinarily lucky never to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I'm glad to let other people experience that kind of "character building"!!

[AndyG]

We're very lucky here in the UK as far as earthquakes go

We certainly are. The first of the three I've felt - and the biggest - was on Boxing Day, 1979. It happened in the early hours, and it was an odd experience walking up to something like that - both the novelty of the event and the semi-conscious state I was in made it all feel very unreal.

Andy

[Greg Hullender]

I was on the 14th floor of the Metro Tower in Foster City, CA during the Loma Prieta quake in 1989. I was in an interior hallway, so when the lights went out, I was in darkness. The building was swaying so much that it kept tossing me against either side of the hallway -- while making the kind of noise a subway train does when it comes into a station. I remember thinking "this is what it feels like the moment before you die."

The shaking stopped. The emergency lights came on. We scrambled down the stairs to the exits, where guards were telling us "run away from the building -- glass may be falling." So we paired up at the exits and sprinted away, like students in some fraternity initiation event. From the middle of a grassy plaza a hundred yards away, I turned and looked back to see the Tower was completely unscathed. It didn't even lose a window.

But the brick walkway around it was jumbled in places. Apparently when the shock wave rippled through, some of the bricks didn't come back down quite where they went up.

It was a long walk home.

--Greg

[elakdawalla]

Wow, Dan, that's a harrowing story. I wasn't here for the Northridge quake, but the stories I've heard from friends and relations all have that common theme of babies. My babysitter and her 6-month-old son were staying at a pregnant friend's apartment in the west valley; her son missed being crushed by a falling piece of furniture by two inches, she said, and after it was over they couldn't get the door to their apartment open -- they had to yell for help to get out a window. My nephew was born on the night of the earthquake, far away in Dallas, but my in-laws, who live in Valenica, didn't find out they were grandparents until two days later, becuase it was impossible to get in touch. They had had a dinner party the night before, and all of their English china had been carefully washed and left on the dining table to dry. No more china. No more chimney, either, but at least my in-laws were themselves unharmed.

Yesterday's quake wasn't a biggie. As long as they're not too big, they're more fascinating than terrifying (though this one did have me running for the closet). I distinctly felt the three different types of earthquake waves -- the first rapid sharp vibration of the P waves, the larger-amplitude rocking and rolling of the S waves, and then the ocean-swell-like Rayleigh waves petering off at the end. Some readers have pointed out that the fact that the shaking lasted so long and that I felt those three different phases should have told me that the quake wasn't very close to me -- if I'd been closer they would have piled on top of each other, but at 50 miles away their different speeds had caused them to spread out in time by the time they got to me.

My babysitter told me that they were watching TV, and Anahita looked up at her at the first shaking, then when it got heavier she stood up and grabbed her blanket and stared at the babysitter as if to say "what the heck is going on?" They were sufficiently far from any topply furniture so the babysitter figured they were safest where they were unless things got really violent.

My tornado story is: throughout the time I lived in Fort Worth, Texas, there were only warnings, no funnels anywhere close. Then, in 2000, I was visiting Fort Worth to scope out a site for my wedding. I'd visited several locations including one downtown. I was in a bar in Dallas with some friends when someone said, "hey, on TV they're saying there was a tornado in Fort Worth." It had ripped right across the west side of downtown -- it just barely missed hitting the museum district, plowed into a 7-story office building (the headquarters of the Cash America pawn shop chain), blasted off all its glass and sucked out all the contents of the offices (it was one of those open-floor-plan office buildings, with offices made with cubicle partitions), which dispersed the funnel just a bit so it leapt over a few more things, then it ran straight into one of the tallest buildings downtown, a 30-story glass-walled skyscraper with a restaurant at the top. It destroyed most of the windows in that too and did a lot of other major damage downtown, but the BankOne building seemed to have robbed it of most of its strength. Amazingly, only two people were killed. The site I had favored for my wedding was half a block away from the BankOne building. I called them the next morning and they said they'd not had any significant damage. I figured if they could survive a tornado they could survive my wedding, so I put the deposit down that day! The BankOne building was condemned for a while, with plywood covering its facade for more than a year, but someone eventually bought it and it's recently been renovated and turned into condos. The Cash America building was also, amazingly, renovated. The funniest news I heard after the tornado was that the FBI had had a local office on one floor of the Cash America building. So the morning after the earthquake there were several city blocks around the Cash America building that were crawling with people wearing "FBI" baseball caps, picking up wet pieces of paper on the ground, examining them to see if they were sensitive material, and either dropping them or putting them into shoulderbags. Here's some pictures.

Here's more pictures and a series of hilarious updates on the slow pace of the renovation of the BankOne building.

--Emily

[stevesliva]

I didn't see them for the next three weeks as I worked to make the house livable again.

Eek... terrifying. I hate to ask as it probably doesn't make anyone thrilled to recall, but was anything covered by insurance? I've heard that it is prohibitively expensive, so generally houses are uninsured against quake damage.

[elakdawalla]

Very few private insurance companies write earthquake coverage, but some do. You have to buy it separately from your regular homeowner's insurance policy. Also there is earthquake insurance underwritten by the state, but I think that has coverage limits, I'm not sure though. You can get insurance, you just have to pay extra for earthquake coverage, just as you have to look hard and pay extra for flood coverage in Louisiana. I would argue that if you can't afford to insure your California house against earthquakes, then you can't afford that house!

--Emily

[stevesliva]

I would argue that if you can't afford to insure your California house against earthquakes, then you can't afford that house!

Why do you hate America?

[Del Palmer]

Just out of curiosity ... does the JPL have backup mission control centers somewhere in the US?

I don't believe they do, but it sounds like all mission teams have a contingency plan for earthquakes. Here's the Cassini plan (extract taken from the Cassini website in 1999):

A Major Earthquake in California. Yes, we even have plans for this goblin! If a major earthquake were to strike, communication lines between JPL and the remote Deep Space Network, which we use to communicate to the spacecraft, might be broken for hours to possibly days. And with a probability of about 2 percent per year of a "major" earthquake, we'd better be ready for it if it happens. Our strength in this area is Cassini's distributed network, with scientists planning observations all over the country. The spacecraft sequence files, not to mention the science observations, will be stored in more than one location. Of course, after an earthquake we'd have to make sure our operations team can get somewhere secure to continue to plan spacecraft events, but with sequences being 28 days long, it's likely we'll have some time to recover and get a team to develop the next 28-day sequence before the current sequence ends.

[nprev]

Yesterday's quake wasn't a biggie. As long as they're not too big, they're more fascinating than terrifying

True. The frequency of earthquakes in Alaska is far higher then it is here in SCal, and I used to feel at least one little one per week; first thing I'd do is go check the quake info site for the juicy details.

This 7.9 beast in 2002 was scary, though. I was pulling AF Reserve duty, and all of a sudden I heard a corner-mounted heater banging against the wall of the shop. We all ran outside; the light poles for the flightline were swaying, vehicles rocking back & forth on their wheels...went on for at least two minutes, thought it'd never stop.

My house was just fine, though. You have to bolt them to a concrete foundation there with that in turn bonded to some deep anchors down to the bedrock. Even the water heater has to be strapped to a wall.

There are no extremely tall buildings in Anchorage for a very good reason!

[edstrick]

It's not a safe universe to live in.
I don't know anybody who's gotten out alive.

[nprev]

True enough...but I have a vision of myself at age 175 or thereabouts with at least one functional eye & arm, still able to surf & watch the latest news from the Moonbases, the Mars Colony, and of course the progress of the Titan Expedition...then I get hit in the head by an exceedingly rare meteor, which my descendants will subsequently sell for tickets offworld.

Not seeing any room at all for quakes & tornadoes there!

[dvandorn]

Gee, Nick, it sounds like you're a good candidate for "upgrade"!

Cybermen of the world, unite!

-the other Doug

[ilbasso]

Funny, was just re-reading Ray Kurzweil's paper on "The Singularity" the other night. I'm waiting for the internet experience enhanced with nanobots in my synapses to make me think I'm actually on Mars!

[nprev]

Gee, Nick, it sounds like you're a good candidate for "upgrade"!

<Sigh>...I got a laundry list now, and it's only gonna get longer. Amazing how your body's warranty seems to expire the moment you turn 40...

[belleraphon1]

To all our UMSF friends (and everyone else) in the Gulf Coast...

Best Speed to a safe land of call.... north and east my friends...

Craig

[CosmicRocker]

Luckily, Gustav's bark was worst than his bite, at least for those of us in SE Texas. As soon as I learned that Gustav made landfall in Louisiana, and not near our house, we hurried back to become some of the first to return to our neighborhood on Labor day. I was hoping to at least experience some tropical storm weather when we returned, but was disappointed as the passing fringes of the storm only gave us some long-lasting breezes and maybe 1/4" of rain. Currently Gustav's remnant is drenching the area we originally escaped to, so my plan to evacuate inland and sneak back in behind it worked perfectly.

Gee, Nick, it sounds like you're a good candidate for "upgrade"! ...

Perhaps, but remember what happened the last time he tried to upgrade?

[nprev]

Yeah...I'm old-fashioned. I haven't even installed a USB port in my head yet...

Glad to hear that all is well, CR! Gonna be a long hurricane season, it seems; sure hope that you guys stay dry throughout!

[imipak]

It sounds like it's going to get rather hairy in southern Texas over the next 48h or so.

Ike is [...] poised to become one of the most damaging hurricanes of all time.

Hope that's hyperbole. To the Houston-area umsf's - take care, y'all, wishing you dry heads (and feet!)

[belleraphon1]

For all in Ike's path... heart is with you.

Craig

[volcanopele]

hmm, well, I guess it is a good thing they moved next year's LPSC from South Shore Harbor...

The storm surge potential looks particularly bad, more typical of a Cat 4 than a high Cat 2. Add the size and the fact that it looks like it making landfall just southwest of Galveston...

[Tman]

Now this picture from the partly flooded Galveston Island looks strange http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/ap_fire_ike_080912_ssh.jpg
There's a map that shows spots in and around Houston where flooding and damage have been reported.

[CosmicRocker]

... Hope that's hyperbole. To the Houston-area umsf's - take care, y'all, wishing you dry heads (and feet!)

I was hoping it was hyperbole, too, but it really is pretty bad down here. We evacuated, but returned as soon as the storm moved inland enough that the winds we would be driving through were less than 40 mph. I wanted to get home as quickly as possible to begin any necessary repairs that might be needed.

So far, we haven't been able to get home, because all of the roads in our area are still flooded. Today we were able to get within a few miles of our home. Yesterday, we couldn't get within 15 miles, so things are apparently improving. We have second-hand reports that the rising water came up to the street in front of our house and stopped, so I think we avoided water damage. I don't know about wind damage. The people who live across the street from us probably had 6 feet of water in their house. A city nearby with a population near 10,000 was completely flooded. Every home there suffered flood damage. There are probably many similar coastal communities.

I think our subdivision was built over 50 years ago, and no homes here had ever been flooded until this hurricane. Reportedly, quite a few homes were flooded this time. Supposedly, two large barges are laying across the highway going out to our neighborhood. They would have to have been blown more than ten miles over surge flooded land to beach on that elevated roadway. I'd love to get some pictures of them. I am trying to capture pics of the devastation, and plan to post them to a Picasa web album after I get home. I'll post a link here.

We're living in an RV, and luckily we have a generator and a Verizon aircard for an Internet connection, as well as other amenities some around here lack (like satellite TV and AC). We are fortunate, so far. Gasoline is in short supply, because electrical power is nonexistent in all of the Beaumont-Port Arthur area and most of Houston. Some businesses have generators, and are open for business.

Many thanks to those of you wishing us the best. I'm trying to look at this as just another adventure, but I am getting too old for many more adventures of this kind.

Tman: That was a great picture of fire, water, and wind.

[hendric]

Some pictures from Ike
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/t...ul_life_of.html
Also, that house in picture 11 is visible in this overhead view, at the left middle.
http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/storms/ike/geo-C25883958.jpg
More overhead photos
http://ngs.woc.noaa.gov/ike/

[CosmicRocker]

We finally made it back home tonight. The county road was passable all day, but we had to wait until evening while the road was used by ranchers trying to round up and evacuate 3000 head of cattle from pastures that had been flooded with salt water. We were extremely fortunate in that our house had only minor damage that I can easily repair. Two large Yellow Pines fell away from the house. I wish the four remaining ones had fallen, too. They are a significant threat if they fall on the house in the next hurricane.

I'll be pretty busy tomorrow helping some of my less fortunate neighbors, but I'll try to get an album of pictures up when I have time. In the meantime, our local radio station has a page up with links to a lot of local pictures and video. Of course, you could also do this.

Oh yeah, here's a little surprise we found on our front porch as we drove up. The poor thing didn't look very well, but I kept our little dog in the vehicle until I could assess the situation. I was sorry to note that when I walked up to it and tapped it's tail with my foot, it did not move. I wonder what did the little fellow in. I was thinking of skinning it out. Anyone here know anything about curing gator hides?

I guess I had better start googling...

[djellison]

We were extremely fortunate in that our house had only minor damage that I can easily repair.

That's good news - seeing some of the devastation out there just breaks my heart. I can't even begin to imagine what I would think or do if our house just washed away.

There's a picture of a guy who's had a yacht land on his car. I think an dead Alligator might beat that.

You didn't try CPR on it did you?

[Tman]

Good to hear that! The devastation around the coast looks frightening. Something between tsunami and tornado. Can't imagine from my experiences to be exposed for hours in such a strom. Here their attacks last at most few minutes or seconds in "such" high level.
I just wonder how long it will take to get all electrical power installations waterless or at least partly operative.

What do you think, what was the reason for the Alligator's death?

[paxdan]

Yikes

[imipak]

Glad you and your family and house are OK, Mr Rocker. Looking on the bright side... if you fell the remaining trees, you'll have a better view of the night sky

Some of the images at the links Hendric posted are incredible; reminiscent of the aftermath of a nuclear blast. The scale of the destruction doesn't really come home until you look at the satellite imagery. It also seems that Galveston in particular had a narrow escape from something worse, which boggles my imagination in unpleasant ways.

[CosmicRocker]

... What do you think, what was the reason for the Alligator's death?

I didn't want to admit it at first, but the poor thing died after I tried to administer CPR to it.

I got some great pictures today of the two barges stranded across the four-lane highway near our home. I thought it might be fun to make a Photsynth with them.

[CosmicRocker]

I've had people wanting more images of our home and it's environs after Hurricane Ike. I have posted some of the more interesting ones in this web album. I'll add images to the album as I am able. In some ways, this hurricane has been surreal...
---Link deleted, now that it is no longer needed---

We are doing well, and it appears that our electrical power may return sooner than predicted.

[belleraphon1]

From Emily's blog...

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001692/

"Meanwhile, it's October and therefore fire season here in Los Angeles. Neither of the two rapidly developing wildfires in northern Los Angeles County threatens The Planetary Society, but one is uncomfortably close to my neighborhood, in an apparent repeat of the fire fun we enjoyed three years ago (though this time, I must say, the wind is much worse). I just checked and didn't find any satellite imagery of the fires yet -- neither TERRA nor AQUA has passed over Los Angeles since these fires started. I'm not sure how much more DPS coverage I'll be able to do today! "

Wish everyone well ....

Craig

[nprev]

Thanks, Craig. It's much closer to Emily than any other member I know of (NE of downtown LA proper;. I can see the smoke from down in Torrance, though), but it shouldn't make it into Pasadena...still a lot of geographic separation there.

On a personal note: Gotta go under the knife this Fri for a hernia, and the damned thing apparently hemorrhaged over the weekend; without being too graphic, trips to the loo have been disproportionately frightening. Going to the doc tomorrow, might be going in for surgery sooner. (Note: Noticed the stupid thing like six months ago, was too busy to take care of it...NOW it hurts, NOW it's scary...you got one of these, don't wait, just go get it fixed!!!)

[Shaka]

OK, Tinman! We won't expect many coherent posts out of you on Saturday. But we expect you back in swing by Sunday PM. *
Can't let Doug build up too great a margin.
You're our only hope to catch up with him.

* Demand a recovery room with wide-band Net access.

[ustrax]

Nicholas, Be Brave!
We'll be here crossing our fingers!

[djellison]

Youch
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...ERONET_La_Jolla

(and good luck with the Hernia np - you might come out bionic with the weave matting they use to hold them in place!)

Doug

[nprev]

Thanks for the good wishes, guys; it's much appreciated!

Re bionic: I've been asking them to replace my existing plumbing with dolomite-enhanced PVC for years, but do they listen? Nooo...damn cheap contractors!!!

[belleraphon1]

Yes, nprev... best wishes...

Craig

[elakdawalla]

Youch
http://rapidfire.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/subsets...ERONET_La_Jolla

*cough cough cough* The fire's a bad one, but fortunately it's keeping several miles away from me. There are even blue skies overhead today. But everything smells like smoke. I have friends who live in one of the canyon communities to the west of me, who were evacuated yesterday and are now inhabiting my guest room indefinitely.

Every year there are fires somewhere in the Southland (that's what they call southern California in the local media), and every year I'm amazed and impressed with the preparedness and performance of the firefighters and all the other organizations who support them, from the police to animal control (the latter sends out armies of trailers to go into evacuated communities and grab horses and other large animals and take them to shelters -- the same canyon communities that are prone to wildfire are usually ones with lots of horse owners). These fires have the potential to be a huge and costly disaster, burning hundreds or thousands of homes. But because of year-round preparedness, enforcement of brush clearance ordinances, rules about roof materials and the proximity of large trees, even what species of trees, and the readiness of more than a thousand firefighters, they can let the fire do what it wants with the brushland while protecting nearly every home and outbuilding from being burned. In the areas that are actively burning right now, the TV helicopters reveal that nearly every driveway has a police car parked in it, and a fire truck on the street; tactical teams of firefighters march into the backyard of each house, one by one, defending it as the fire burns past. Spotters on the ground call in the aerial troops, skycranes and super scoopers dumping water on hot spots. If you drive through burned areas in the days after a fire you'll see acre after blackened acre, abruptly bordering lush green backyards and untouched Mission-style homes with bright red clay tile roofs. It's amazing.

--Emily

[nprev]

The response really is amazing as Emily described. The coordination alone is marvelous, considering that you're dealing with city, county & state government agencies; these guys are on the spot in MINUTES if something breaks out, and this is a huge area (maybe 2500 square miles) we're talking about. There's a lot to be learned here about organizational management.

[dvandorn]

Gotta go under the knife this Fri for a hernia... <snip>... Going to the doc tomorrow, might be going in for surgery sooner.

As someone who survived hernia repair 20 years ago, I can tell you that it's not all that uncomfortable -- they work through a relatively small incision, and depending on the location of the hernia, the healing repair is often (and was for me) less painful than the hernia itself is.

Have you heard if the surgery has been moved up? I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to know when you're going under the old knife.

I've had two full-on operations in my adult life, where I was put completely out with drugs. One was the hernia repair 20 years ago, the other was the emergency removal of my appendix about five years ago. My one best memory from both is the completely relaxed and relief-drenched feeling of waking up in the recovery room, in no pain and with a drug-supplied sense of self-satisfaction at surviving the pain and coming out the other side.

Vaya con dios, my friend...

-the other Doug

[CosmicRocker]

Well, all I can hope for would be the best for all of you who are potentially in harm's way, whether it be by fire or knife. As has been noted, it truly is nice to see how well most modern-day emergency responders perform when called upon. Take care.

[nprev]

Have you heard if the surgery has been moved up? I'm sure I'm not the only one who wants to know when you're going under the old knife.

Hey, oDoug, and thanks for your concern. Nope, ain't been moved up; surgical theatre availability is tight in this quite populous city, and apparently this isn't life threatening for several weeks (still scares me, though.)

On the lighter side, I was able to watch the last season of The Sopranos finally as well as season 5 of Aqua Teen Hunger Force on DVD; dunno what I'm gonna watch after the freakin' surgery now, but that was fun!

[dvandorn]

Hey, Nick -- tried to leave you a PM and your mailbox is full!

Here's a brief precis of what I wrote (and will send to you once you clean out your mailbox a bit):

Good luck! I'm sure everything will turn out fine!

And avoid watching really funny things for the first week or so after the surgery. You don't want to indulge in a lot of energetic laughter. Trust me, I know...

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Thanks, Doug; cleaning on inbox accomplished!

Just now got back from the hospital; it's done, flyin' on Vikodin now, but it still hurts like hell. I'm thinkin' the the classic gangster movie gutshot might be the most painful thing imaginable; the doc told me that intestines do NOT like to be handled, I believe it!

Thanks again to all for your kind wishes; it's great to have friends!:)

[nprev]

Sorry to resurrect this, but seems appropriate. Are all our UK friends weathering this sudden snowstorm all right? Looked pretty miserable on the news over here in the States!

[helvick]

Don't know about the UK but here in this part of Ireland (just west of Dublin) we've had the first proper fall of snow since January 2001. Now that's only about 10cm which I'm sure anyone used to proper winters would laugh at but we really aren't kitted out for this here, roads are treacherous and we have no snow plows, nobody has adequate tyres for icy conditions and the airports\trains\buses are all grinding to a halt. It's not actually all that cold - -2 to -5C, we had a couple of much colder snaps just before Christmas but they were dry so provided folks have made it home it's not really all that bad. Things are a lot worse in the UK though to be fair.

My main worry is that I'm supposed to be heading off to sunny Madrid later today for a few days teaching the folks in Dell about some of their cool new toys and I was really looking forward to it but it seems there is a risk that Dublin airport is likely to be shut down and I may not escape.

[stevesliva]

A little ribbing...

London, the city that survived the Blitz, crumbles under a little snow

[Stu]

Sorry to resurrect this, but seems appropriate. Are all our UK friends weathering this sudden snowstorm all right? Looked pretty miserable on the news over here in the States!

Fine here in Kendal... we had about 3"/4" in the end, but you'd have thought we were in the middle of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW the way some people were whining and panicking. Makes me wonder how people in Siberia and Norway etc cope - oh hang on, no it doesn't, I know their secret - THEY'RE NOT WUSSES!!!!!

[ngunn]

Well I'm snowed in here in Wales, but that's not particularly unusual. You won't hear any more of it on the international news once it's cleared up in London.

[Tesheiner]

<snip>
My main worry is that I'm supposed to be heading off to sunny Madrid later today for a few days teaching the folks in Dell about some of their cool new toys and I was really looking forward to it but it seems there is a risk that Dublin airport is likely to be shut down and I may not escape.

Sunny Madrid eh?!? Here're a few pictures.

The first one is from sunday morning and the remaining ones are from the 9th of January. It's not uncommon to see some snow falling in the Madrid area at least once in the winter. But THAT amount is really out of the scale, specially the storm on the 9th. Madrid's airport was closed for hours, schools closed too, and the traffic jams on the main highways were really huge. I was in Germany part of the week and that day we were supposed to fly back to Madrid but the chances were slim due to the delays and finally no way once Barajas (Madrid's airport) was closed. We would have to spend the night in Frankfurt but finally decided to take a flight to Zaragoza (300km east of Madrid) and make the final leg by train because the railway network was fine. In a normal situation a would be at home at 7pm but that time I was back at 4am.

[imipak]

Getting snowed in can be inconvenient, and I guess that a bump does show up in the mortality rates when they come to collate the stats at the end of the year (due mainly to falls), but it doesn't really compare to proper weather, like what you have over yonder - hurricanes, earthquakes, rains of fish, etc. It makes a nice traditional news event for a few days, particularly if there's nothing much else going on.

I live on top of a hill right on the Welsh border at the southern end. The Atlantic western approaches / Bristol Channel (with prevailing westerly winds) is just down the road, so one of the main weather patterns that produces snow (wet Westerly wind meets cold easterly) tends to dump snow on us more heavily than the relatively flat / low-lying, and apparently more news-worthy, parts of the country. I was driving an unfamiliar loan car home from work on Monday (a heavy diesel Skoda estate car) vs my normal somewhat nippier car*. By the time I got a few miles from home and left the heavily gritted main roads, there was a fair bit of snow lying on the carriageway. As I drove (cautiously! carefully! slowly! Honestly, officer!) down a snowy hill 3 miles from home, without any warning or provocation the thing span 60* or so anti-clockwise, then all the way back to 60* the other way, somehow missing both a row of parked cars and the lorry coming up the hill the other way, before slithering to a halt at a comical angle across the middle of the road. $ABS++ . ...which was nice, although I could almost see the "thinks" bubble above the lorry driver's head :> ) Got home with no further excitement, but around 8pm the power went out. So for the rest of the evening, it was reading stuff called "paper", by oil and candlelight. Power returned overnight, but the DSL didn't! It's finally started working tonight (Trillian: "Did you manage to make some sense of the controls?" Ford: "No, we just stopped fiddling with them.") Electricity I can live without, but the net?! Not so much.

(* '97 Celica, a less boy-racer looking one of these, which I {} BTW!)

Apparently we're due another pasting tonight. Never mind, our Anderson shelter's quite cheerful and homely, and we will drown out the noise with a jolly singsong. Stiff upper lip, chaps!

[dmuller]

Though I am not directly affected, we have major bush fires in SE Australia. News just out (http://www.abc.net.au/news/) report that 14 people perished (maybe up to 40) in bush fires near Melbourne, Victoria. It's a beautiful country side were it happened, been there a couple of times. Scorching heat (Melbourne 47, Western Sydney 42, my place 40) and strong winds didnt help the situation. Lets hope it doesnt get any worse, NSW's having a hottie tomorrow.

Edit: not to forget, two states up in Northern Queensland they have a massive flooding event there

[ustrax]

Lets hope it doesnt get any worse...

It did, in a terrible way...just terrible...
Hope all you UMSFers downunder are OK and let's pray for this to have an end.

[dmuller]

It did, in a terrible way...just terrible...

It has indeed turned into the worst natural disaster in Australia, and sickest of it all is that some fires were deliberately lit. 108 have perished (there are fears that this number could go to 170) and some towns are still threatened by fires. It's a real tragedy.

[nprev]

The enormous magnitude of this disaster is becoming more and more apparent. I sincerely hope that our Australian friends are safe, and remain so.

[nprev]

Unfortunate to resurrect this thread yet again, but best wishes to and hopes for our fellow UMSFers in Italy after yesterday's terrible earthquake.

[MahFL]

My condolencies too.

I'd rather cope with hurricanes any day....at least you can see those coming.
From the pics it looked like a lot of new buildings were ok but the old ones crumbled badly.

[nprev]

Breaking news...We just had a 5.0 (prelim) quake in LA centered about 5 km NW of where I live...quite a sharp jolt! My wife is freaked!

[Astro0]

USGS is reporting it as a 5.0 with 3.1 aftershocks.
Hang tight nprev!

EDIT: A friend at JPL just replied saying "What earthquake?!".
He didn't even feel it

[nprev]

No sweat! That was a good one, though; all my neighbors were outside as well (we went to the front doorway immediately).

(Sigh)...My wife's not sleepin' tonight, I'll wager. She hates these things.

[brellis]

It was a mild rolling quake in Santa Monica. It did roll for quite a while, causing me to entertain the possibility that it would get stronger!

edit: I was in LA during the 1971 quake, watched my younger brother's crib bounce across the bedroom. He was all jacked up about it -- "do that again!"

[RoverDriver]

I am in La Crescenta and definitely felt it. Both the 5.0 and the 3.1.

Paolo

[nprev]

Should've mentioned I'm in Torrance. Real strong shake, whole building was creaking.

[dvandorn]

Hey, guys -- spent a good hour in the basement of my call center here in St. Paul, waiting out tornado warnings. (Actually, spent a half-hour downstairs, got back to my desk and another warning was issued, so trundled right back downstairs for another half hour.)

Nothing hit right near my workplace, but apparently there were tornado touchdowns within about a mile of my house in Minneapolis. I won't be home for another 90 minutes or so, but talking to a friend in the same area, it appears that there was not much damage in my neighborhood.

I'll let y'all know if my home is still where I left it... later. (I wish there was a smiley for the emotion "whew!")

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Oh, crap. Sure hope everything's alright, oDoug.

Tornadoes are scary. Would rather be in an earthquake instead any day.

[ElkGroveDan]

Hey, guys -- spent a good hour in the basement of my call center here in St. Paul, waiting out tornado warnings.

That was rather selfish of you Doug. Next time would you please lean out the door with a good camera and get some photos for your friends here? You have permission to return to the basement when the first cow flies past.

[dmuller]

when the first cow flies past.

Isn't St. Paul a city? You might want to make the first flying 4WD the trigger for going to the basement

(I wish there was a smiley for the emotion "whew!")

typical umsf suggestion:

[dvandorn]

Well, I'm home, everything is just fine here. No damage whatsoever right here. I did drive the mile or so down the road to where there were reported touchdowns, found a nice neat line of uprooted trees (a couple had dropped back down onto adjacent homes, breaking them up a bit), found a local record store closed for tornado damage where the owner reported to me that the roof had lifted off the building and then settled back down -- you could see the front wall of the building bowing out towards the street near the top. Tons of store windows blown out, glass all over the roadway, uprooted trees trees blocking streets, etc.

Apparently, observers in the top stories of the 70-some-story IDS Tower in downtown Mpls saw the funnel (by this time not on the ground) go by, with entrained debris *above* them at their 600-some-foot vantage point. As the funnel collapsed completely, they watched the debris fall out of the sky and onto the streets below. (Sorry, Dan, no cows -- just tree branches and such.)

Overall, the damage was limited to a few very small areas where the twisters actually touched down (on the ground or onto the roofs of buildings), and there have been no reported deaths or serious injuries. I even have power, the cable never went down, etc.

And Dan -- first off, if I thought there was *any* chance I could get a pic of a tornado, I'd be all over it, bosses or no bosses. I have been within a few miles of tornado touchdowns several times in my life, and have never, ever seen a funnel on the ground. It's one of the things I'd like to be able to do before I die. Unfortunately, the actual tornado activity was a good 10 miles away from my workplace, and there was just no way I could sneak out of the building and go looking for it. Especially since no one knew there were actually tornadoes touching down until a good half-hour after the event.

All in all, sort of a fun day!

-the other Doug

[nprev]

Uh...don't take this wrong, dude, but I hope you don't have this kind of fun again for a long, long time!

Glad everything's okay for you.

[CosmicRocker]

I too, am glad to hear that all was well, after all. Coincidentally, we had a tornado touch down near here yesterday. It caused some damage and injuries in Beaumont, TX. Curiously, my wife was on her way to do some shopping in the same area hit by the tornado when she decided to take an unusual detour to shop elsewhere. I'm glad she did. She might have ended up in the middle of the danger.

BTW, O'Doug...I was visiting your lovely state in July, and I must say it truly was a pleasant experience compared to the July's down here. I actually had to turn on the heat in our RV on some of the nights. We drove up to the Keweenaw peninsula of Michigan and then followed the shore of Lake Superior to Duluth and then around the north shore to Grand Marais, sightseeing and hunting for Lake Superior agates. Lake Superior and its shores are one of the geological wonders of this planet. We wrapped up the trip hunting for agates in some of the gravel pits near Moose Lake and then saw some amazing agates at Moose Lake's Agate Days event.

We passed through the twin cities rather quickly on our hasty trip back home. The next time I am up that way I'll try to contact you to see if we can get together for a beer or a coffee. There are still several Minnesota rock specimens that I want to collect.

[nprev]

It's fire time again here in SoCal. According to the LA Times, JPL is closed through Sunday night due to the nearby Station Fire; you can get updates from a generated Google map here.

Best wishes to everyone @ JPL, and to Emily & her family in Pasadena. It's gotta be noxious up there; you can see the smoke bank hanging over the foothills even from the South Bay area.

[ilbasso]

Maybe Spirit sent those fire clouds along...if Spirit's sky is going to be hazy, perhaps she's trying to evoke a sympathetic response in Earth's weather system at Home Base.

Best wishes, all. I was in Santa Cruz 2 weeks ago within a couple miles of a forest fire. Even if you don't feel in immediate danger of burning, the smoke makes even walking across a parking lot unbearable. I never unpacked my suitcase all week, just in case we were asked to get out quickly.

[nprev]

Fire approaching the Mt. Wilson Observatory (webcam from Emily's blog.)

...let's all hope for the best.

[djellison]

This one is nasty. I"m keeping track with friends on Facebook. Only one family I know has been evacuated, and they were pretty close to JPL. Keeping everything crossed - there are some proper heroes fighting this thing up there.