Disasters, Severe Weather, Old and New

Memo to Self and musings in light of windstorms, Katrina Anniversariy...

--RantWoman has been reading a very cool book called Full Rip 9.0. It is about geology, seismicity and aborted nuclear power plants,  subduction zone earthquakes, building codes and lots of topics that do not intrinsically qualify as FUN. Yet is a fun well-written book and a great read, a great science story.  Order Full Rip 9.0 via Sasquatch

Since RantWoman also found and this item includes a link to a certain NewYorker article....
Dan Savage: 9 questions for Sandy Daughton, Authror of Full Rip 9.0

--RantWoman needs to nudge the person officially convening the committee about a disaster plan at RantWoman's faith community.

--Rantwoman has in fact NOT waited around to nudge a couple peoplle about small, :brush your teeth regularly" things that occur cyclically because of various kinds of turnover.

--RantWoman's life is beset right now by all sorts of electronic lacunae and RantWoman only saw post-windstorm power outage map on her phone. RantWoman looked at the map blobs in her Tweet stream and thought of calling to see whether Faith Community had power. RantWoman decided she personally would be glad to see others from faith community even if Sunday sit-down with God happened without electricity.  No power outage at Faith Community.

--RantWoman reminds the world of the peculiar benefits of working with RantWoman's next-door neighbor Mr. Accessible Restrooms. Mr. Accessible Restrooms is SO, um, forward constantly unrelentingly forward about his eternal need for accessible restrooms that RantWoman for one when doing any kind of disaster planning is going to make DARN SURE there is an accessible restroom around.

--Speaking of Mr. Accessible Restrooms, RantWoman and Mr. Accessible Restrooms one time were part of a light search and rescue exercise. Those participating were divided into okay, injured, and dead. Mr. Accessible Restrooms drew one of the Dead cards. He complained mightily assuming this somehow had something to do with his need for a wheelchair. RantWoman the PR goddess (cough, cough) thinks it MIGHT be pad PR to make people in wheelchairs automatically dead in such exercises. On the other hand if the overall message people are supposed to get is plan on being alone and on your own for 3-7 days after a major disaster anyway, PERHAPS for the first pass it does not matter whether the exercise thinks one is alive or dead: regardless, one might not get help for a few days and that is plenty of time to make one's existence known insistently!

--And speaking of making one's insistence known insistently, this week RantWoman's life is overflowing with other circumstances that make people like Mr. Accessible Restrooms DARNED hard to communicate with even in normal times, never mind during disasters. Severe hearing loss and desire to get up close to lipread inspite of also vision loss.   Better TRY TO get SOME communications norms down BEFORE the disaster!

--Adding to riffs, a friend's meditations about the 10-year anniversary of Katrina and hos RantWoman's friend was able to help.

Meditations on doing what one can in a disaster

And experiences
Femchat: Forward to Get to the Bricks Report about Women in Public Housing Before and after Katrina