In Sputnik’s Orbit

A day ago, a fire drill led me to post the following:

No matter what your building says, the data says most fire fatalities occur because of delay, not evacuation route.

Those who move early, by whatever path is still working, survive.

I was annoyed because my building has instituted an interlock that disables the elevators once the fire alarm goes off. I understand why, but the reason has more to do with managing herd behavior and liability than wisdom–and from the perspective of a smart, fit person who wants to survive, it’s simply the wrong thing to do. Disabling the elevator is a change made after the 911 attacks, and reports that some people in the Twin Towers died when the elevators they were riding in stopped on or became disabled on burning or smoke filled floors. That’s  horrific, but the fact is, we do not know how many people that actually happened to, but we DO know that hundreds, probably thousands, escaped in working elevators while systems were still functioning. And that many who died were trapped in the building because of disabilities that made flight down the stairs infeasible. The sum of global experience tells us this is the rule. Typically, in any kind of high rise disaster but especially fire, those who get out quickest are most likely to survive, while those who wait like they are told are–should the worst happened–likely to be trapped and doomed.

I also posted this:

In 1988, 165 of 226 men aboard the Piper Alpha platform died waiting in quarters or at muster stations for help or orders that never came since communications were down.

All survivors ignored procedure and escaped however they could.

Be a survivor.

The lesson is clear. When the fire alarm goes off, get out of the building immediately by the quickest, surest, route–and in many cases that’s going to be the elevator, which is why modern building codes now require hardened, fire-resistant, pressurized shafts and lift cars with independent power. I don’t work in such a building.

And as it happens, my building just caught fire. I’m literally writing this in a Starbucks across the street, which I reached through tunnels after getting my ass out of the building. Here’s how it went down and what we all can learn from it:

• I had just arrived, logged in, put my phone on the charger, and walked to the break room for coffee when the lights started flashing. I was leaning around the coffee maker to reach the spigot and though the overheads lights were bad. A few seconds later, as I was moving to get the creamer, the alarm sounded.
• I immediately stopped what I was doing, walked back across the floor to my desk, logged out, and grabbed my bag–the little bag in which I carry this laptop. This was a mistake.
• By the time I returned to the central hallway where the elevators and stairs are, dozens of people were already crowding in–as per official procedire. I walked past directors, managers, and peers without a word and slipped into the nearest stairwell. This was likely another drill or someone’s burnt popcorn, but in case it wasn’t, I didn’t want to waste time on discussion, chit-chat or challenge with twenty floors below me. This was smart.
• It turns out, this was a real fire (as I write this line, fire trucks are pulling up) and a department was already evacuating into the stairwell two flights down. The stairs in our building are narrow, so I joined the ranks and climbed down with them, trying only to keep up and help everyone stay safe. We climbed down several floors, then they all exited onto another floor. I’m not going to say that was a mistake, but…
• I kept going. As it happens, I had climbed down the full 17 floors (about 21-22 floors in height) during the fire drill, so I knew I could do it safely and quickly, that I would not become trapped behind any locked doors, and on the other hand, that I definitely would become trapped if the building authorities called for a more general evacuation into the undersized stairs ahead.
• I continued down at a rapid but safe pace, exited into the basement, stopped in the restroom, walked through the largely empty tunnels, and emerged here, where I walked over to see the general evacuation I had fear just starting with a trickle of employees out onto the sidewalks.

I’m sure everything will be fine for all those who followed procedure, but I stand by my actions. The only things I did wrong were A) leaving my phone at my desk and walking away, and B) going back for this computer. I should have set my coffee down where I stood and headed for the elevator. Had I got in it, it would have carried me down even if disabled by the alarm. Had it been locked out before I reached it, I could have been in the stairwell ahead of anyone else. Don’t get me wrong. I would stop and help others if I was needed–say in a plane crash or if trapped together. But I knew people who died in the 911 attacks. I know people who survived. They’ll tell you the same thing I’m telling you here: job one is not to become trapped in the first place.

Everything’s fine. I’m headed back to work. Stay safe.

These days, I’m seeing a tsunani of social media posts about how the Trump administration is deporting illegals without due process. No it’s not! Yes it is! Stop it! You started it! No you did!

STOP!

Look, I don’t have a dog in this race. On the one hand, I have absolutely nothing against immigrants. I’m in a cheap, well-build house and enjoy cheap, healthy food largely thanks to illegal immigrants, and I admire the moxy of those who come here illegally to strive for a better life. I also know the main reason they do is that businesses are eager to hire them for their cheap labor, and that it’s more than a little disingenuous to come down like a load of bricks on immigrants while letting their employers off scott free.

I also know that illegal immigrants, contrary to Trump conservative rhetoric, pay into our public coffers vastly more than they take, and are about 5 times less likely to commit crimes than citizens. But I also know that immigration law is messed up, and has been for a long time, and is currently imposing a real and undue burden on certain communities. Fair enough.

The term “Bermuda Triangle” was first coined by writer Vincent Gaddis in a 1964 article for Argosy magazine, a pulp magazine dedicated to sensational tales of mystery, crime, and ghost fiction. Giddis described a triangular region in the North Atlantic Ocean bounded by Florida, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico, notorious for unexplained disappearances of ships and aircraft and wove a predictably sensational tale of woo sufficient to captivate the readership. The idea took hold, filtering (like spontaneous human combustion and numerous other silly ideas of the time) through subordinate pulps and books and infiltrated the broader culture.

On July 8th of this year, Hurricane Beryl swept directly over Houston, leaving two and a half million people without power. The eye passed over my house, and our power and Internet was knocked out for 80 hours, in large part because of trees downed across lines strung along a heavily wooded and somewhat overgrown road. Houstonians love their trees (I do too) and with the weather this close to the gulf, the generator I installed last summer has already been pressed into service five times, including the May 16 derecho that also left a million people in the dark. But Beryl was the first prolonged outage that forced us to really put the new emergency power system to the test, and so I thought it appropriate to post a little report, in case anyone cares to learn from my experience.

I’ve posted before about the generator installation and the isolated emergency circuits through which it connects to the house. The short version is, I didn’t want to spend the cost of a small car on a whole-house generator, but I didn’t want to leave my family with a complex, potentially hazardous system when I’m not around. So no hauling a generator out onto the patio and running heavy cabling through a window, and no connection through the house breaker box and confusing cutover and circuit allocation. The generator plugs into the house as if it were an RV, and has its own circuits and breakers. The family only has to plug it in, fuel it, start it, and make use of the four red emergency power outlets in the house.

Observations

So how does it work in practice? Very well. It takes only a few minutes to start up, even in the midst of a storm, and just a few minutes inside to switch over the frig, internet, and my office computer if so desired. What takes longer, and what Beryl gave us the first test of, is pulling the portable AC out of storage and creating a single-room family “storm home” around it. I’ll leave the details of that to the imagination and share the lessons and observations:

• First, always keep gasoline on hand. I had 15 gallons worth of gas can storage, but I’d gotten lax and let my stores dwindle to only 2.5 gallons in one can plus about that much in the generator. That was dumb. It should come as no surprise that after a hurricane passes over your city, you can expect essentially all gas stations to be out of operation for days. They might be open, but most are not pumping gas, and those that are are not taking credit cards. So…
  • Keep on hand enough gasoline to run the generator for at least 48 hours. Make sure you have at least one can you can use to safely dump unused gasoline into a car, because you’ll want to keep stores gas on a rotation so that it doesn’t get too old, break down, absorbe moisture, etc. and the obvious way to do this is to keep one or two cans full of gas that can be burned in a car and replaced every few months, only filling any additional cans before a forecast storm—just get off your butt and go fill them when the time comes!
  • UPDATE: And use gas stabilizer so you can keep much more gas one hand longer, provided you can store it safely.
• Second, you probably don’t need as much power as you may think. Having a working frig, one lamp, and one fan makes a HUGE difference. Add in a little electronic entertainment and the odd small appliance, and days of sweltering misery have become a minor inconvenience. You might need the fan to sleep, and you might not be as comfy as you’d like, but you’ll be fine.
• My little generator can produce 3,500 watts continuously or 4,000 peak, and it’s an inverter generator completely safe for electronics. It has an economy mode that causes it to throttle to meet the load.
  • Powering only the refrigerator, the home Internet equipment, my office computer, and a couple of fans and lights, it can run 12-15 hours on 2.5 gallons of gasoline.
  • Powering all this, plus a small portable room AC, the TV and disk player and assorted video games, the same fuel only lasted 8-10 hours. Still, that’s 88 hours on my current storage capacity (5 cans plus the tank) or 56 on what I normally keep on hand (3 cans plus the tank, all with stabilizer).
• We put the AC in our family room, open to the kitchen and surrounded by old, leaky windows and ran it in its default mode with the thermostat set to 78. It held that temperature over night, and with daytime temperatures in the upper 90’s, kept the room below 81 and the humidity level comfortable at all times.
• We did not activate the AC’s “turbo mode” that basically makes it just run flat out all the time and cool at much as it can. We could have, and I did test is after the mains came back on and the generator seemed to have no problem with it, but it would have burned through a lot more gasoline.
• That’s important, because as some of my coworkers learned the hard way, larger generators can be impractical or even impossible to keep fueled during a major area-wide recovery. With the AC running, we were comfortable and using a hair over 5 gallons of gas per day, which after the first two days was easily replaced and could have been maintained indefinitely.
• The AC extracted almost exactly 10 gallons of water per day from the air. If we had to, we could have run it through a filter for drinking.
• I did run into a problem during the previous storm that I finally figured out this time: like most modern generators, this one have a fuel tank vent designed to equalize the air pressure inside the tank. Mine doesn’t work, so as the generator burns gasoline, the air pressure inside the tank can drop enough to kill the engine. Leaving the gas can loose solved the problem, but the valve needs to be replaced. I’m not 100% certain there is really a good reason to have that valve instead of the little breath hole that small engine gas caps had for a century, but whatever–technology marches on, right?

Lessons

On June 5th, 2024, Boeing’s new Starliner crew capsule blasted into space — fours years behind Space-X and at twice the cost.

In this heady age of space commercialism, “historic” space firsts have come so frequently, commentators seems to have become so glossy-eyed as to forget what the word means, and you can hardly find a blog post that doesn’t describe it as “historic.”

Balderdash.

Basic rules of book design:

• Don’t end a page with the first line of a new paragraph.
• Don’t begin a page with the last line of a paragraph.
• Don’t begin or end a page with a line that ends in a hyphen.
• Don’t end a page with a one-word line.
• Don’t use more than two hyphenations in a row on two consecutive lines (and if you can at all help it, don’t use more than one in a row).
• When you start a chapter on a recto page and the facing verso page is blank, do not put a header or a page number on the blank verso page.
• Front matter of a book is numbered with Roman numbers. The first page of the first chapter is page 1.
• Table of Contents pages do not get page numbers or headers.