Treat Y2K preparations just like you would for a hurricane or bad winter storm?? Interesting [if pretty gruesome] story in today's Washington Post ...
99 YEARS AGO A HURRICANE DESTROYED GALVESTON AND OUR ILLUSIONS
Thursday, August 5, 1999; Page C01
GALVESTON, Tex.—All you really need to know about the deadliest hurricane in U.S. history is that they burned so many bodies for so long afterward that sailors were gagging from the smell 50 miles out at sea.
"There's no way of telling how many the storm actually killed," says author Erik Larson as he Jeeps his way along Galveston Island's beautifully desolate western end, where the water appears higher than the sand. "The generally accepted figure is 6,000, but it could just as well be 10,000 because so many were never found. We may be driving over their bones right now."
That's a reasonable guess. The people of Galveston unearthed skeletons for years after the storm hit 99 years ago Sept. 8. And if that thought of what the Big One can do makes you a little uncomfortable right now on the beach at Hatteras or Hyannis or Ocean City, that's all right with Larson. His gripping new book, "Isaac's Storm," which tells the story of the Galveston hurricane in excruciating, Grand Guignol detail, threatens to become the "Jaws" of hurricane yarns. Except that it's all true.
And just because the same climatological factors present in 1900 -- prolonged nationwide heat wave, unusually calm, overheated Gulf of Mexico -- are present this summer, you shouldn't draw too many conclusions.
Even though scientists say we face a more severe than normal hurricane season. Even though there's a 54 percent probability that at least one "major" hurricane will strike the East Coast this year.
By late afternoon, the barge contained seven hundred corpses. A steam tugboat towed the barge to the designated burial ground eighteen miles out in the Gulf, but it arrived well after nightfall and the darkness made it impossible for the crew to work. They spent the night among arms and legs brought back to life by the gentle rocking of the sea. Dead hands clawed for the moon.
At dawn the men began attaching weights to the bodies--anything that would sink. . . . They worked quickly. Too quickly, apparently, for by the end of the day bodies began returning to Galveston. The sea drove scores of them back onto the city's beaches.
--From "Isaac's Storm"
It's tempting to think that a hurricane disaster the scope of Galveston's couldn't happen today, even though plenty of densely populated island beach towns, like Ocean City, Md., are narrower than Galveston was then and just as flat. We have weather satellites now, and hurricane-hunter airplanes, not to mention radio and television. And much more scientific knowledge.
But the lesson of Larson's book is that Galvestonians had plenty of obvious warning that a big storm was coming. They knew what hurricanes could do. Like passengers on a sand-spit Titanic, they just refused to believe they could be in any danger. They caught streetcars to the beach to thrill at the sight of pier-perched bath houses the size of hotels being consumed by enormous waves. They could hear--and even feel--the stunning impact of those waves all the way across town. Boys and girls sailed washtubs delightedly in the wind-whipped streets as they flooded. The first intimation of what the storm would do, one survivor wrote, "came when the body of a child floated into the [railroad] station."
By then it was too late to leave ...
For some reason, Larson's publisher, Crown Books, has chosen not to release "Isaac's Storm" formally until the Sept. 8 anniversary of the Galveston hurricane, thereby eliminating the season's most obvious beach book this month ... MORE
washingtonpost.com
Thought this observation, by the author of this article, about the delayed release date was pretty interesting. Especially in line with several Y2K TV commercials being pulled and Warner Brothers cancelling their Y2K movie.
Government recommendation to prepare for 72-hr disruptions ... "just like would for a hurricane", sure wouldn't work well in conjunction with a book promotion tour for this particular hurricane book.
BTW - Nationwide Y2K test of the U.S. electrical grid will be day after release day of this book.
NATIONWIDE TEST OF ENTIRE NORTH AMERICAN ELECTRICAL SYSTEM
"The September 9, 1999 drill is expected to be a dress rehearsal for rollover from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000. This drill may include reducing planned outages, modified committment of resources, redispatch of generation and transmission loading, cooperation with electric market participants, and staffing of all critical facilities. The goal would be to simulate system conditions and operating plans for the Y2K transition as closely as possible without increasing risks to personnel and equipment safety or system operating security."
NERC: ftp://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/y2k/drills.pdf
I still can't figure out these claims of utilities being 100% compliant - especially since a number of nukes aren't going to be doing Y2K remediation until November. How can you claim you're 100% compliant before you fix something? How can you claim you're compliant before you test something? None of this makes sense.
Cheryl
148 Days until 2000
89 Federal work days until rollover |
