Latest coverage from L.A. Times.

Latest forecast on western storms from Weather Channel.

It’s been raining for six days in Southern California and while there haven’t been any major mudslide yet, things are creeping toward ground saturation. Plus, another storm system is on the way. The LA Times is flooding the zone with their storm coverage, and they’re reporting that several motorists have been rescued in flooded waters in Orange County, another woman was swept away in her truck near the San Bernadino National Forest but was saved after a four-hour rescue effort, and thousands are without power in the region.

FLOOD RULE NUMBER ONE: Don’t drive through water. Just a few inches can sweep away a decent-sized sedan, and a foot can easily take away a pick-up.

Know what to do in a flood: GettingPrepared’s Flooding Safety Tips.

Be Aware: Road Conditions from CalTrans

The latest from the Los Angeles Times.

Blimey!

London has essentially ground to a standstill after a major storm that dumped…4 to 5 inches of snow. Yesterday, Heathrow airport was essentially locked down, and passengers with boarding passes for Monday weren’t even allowed in the terminal. And lucky them, because inside the trash is piling up and food is apparently running out. According to the BBC only one-third of the regularly scheduled flights will leave Heathrow until at least Wednesday.

At London’s St. Pancras train station people reportedly waited in line for seven hours for a chance to board a Eurostar train to mainland Europe. The problem is that England doesn’t usually get a lot of snow, they don’t have the planning to deal with it (apparently), which means it’s time to keep the upper lips stiffer than usual.

Read the  latest from The BBC, Reuters, and the Daily Telegraph.

Check local Euro weather from the BBC weather page, and also severe weather updates from the U.K.’s Met Office.

Four inches of rain have fallen near L.A. so far, with more forecast. In parts of the Sierra Mountains, they’ve seen 10 feet of snow. Skiing is great, but travel on the passes is perilous.

More from the L.A. Times.

Forecast from the Weather Channel.

California Highway Conditions.

Winter Driving Tips.

As the winter-storm season gets into full swing it can bring downed power lines, lightning strikes, and power-grid switching. When that happens you can get a powerful surge of electricity coursing through the electric lines and right into your home. If you’re on the phone, in the tub, or standing near electric appliances you can get zapped.

Not to mention any appliances, electronics, or computers that aren’t protected by surge protectors can get zapped into destruction and have to be replaced.  Perhaps that’s why the home-insurance giant State Farm recently send out some Home Electrical Safety Tips. From State Farm:

Surge Protection Devices

Properly installed surge protection devices (SPDs), combined with a good grounding system, should protect your electronic and electrical appliances from all but the most severe electrical surges. An SPD does not suppress or arrest a surge; it actually diverts the surge to the ground.

Each time a surge occurs, the damage to the electronic or electrical appliance accumulates, weakening the appliance components until they finally fail.

Things to consider when looking for SPDs:

• The surge protector should be listed to UL Standard 1449.
• The surge protector must be capable of protecting all power and signal lines that are connected to the protected equipment.
• Examples of signal lines: phone lines and coaxial cable from satellite, cable TV or external antenna.
• Select a surge protector that has an indicating light and/or audible alarm to show when it needs replacement.
• Look for SPDs that come with a manufacturer’s warranty. Some warranties cover only the device; others also cover the damaged equipment and electrical wire insulation chewed by rodents.

Read more.

One of the Good Guys

It’s winter time, and that means that drivers all over the country’s snow belt will find themselves stranded in extreme conditions. See my post earlier today about 100 drivers stranded for 12 hours on Indiana’s highways. It’s in this environment where tow-truck scammers thrive. I’m not not talking about the guys who show up after you’ve called AAA. No, these are the guys (well, they’re usually guys, after all) that patrol the snow-covered highways in search of stranded vehicles. In one sense it’s a god send because you’re getting rescued, but that’s until you find out they’re going to charge you $500 to $1,000 bucks to release your car.

The insurance company Allstate recently issued a set of tips to avoid being scammed. Yes, there’s a shameless pitch for their on-demand towing service, but the advice is still pretty sound.

• When possible, use a towing operator pre-screened by your motor club or roadside assistance program. Allstate offers a new pay-as-you go program, Allstate Good Hands® Roadside, which will allow drivers to opt-in to the program only when they need it and gives them access to pre-screened, legitimate tow truck operators countrywide.
• Never give a tow truck operator permission to take your car if they weren’t called by you or by law enforcement personnel.
• Do not provide a tow truck operator your insurance information.
• Make sure all signage on the truck and documentation provided is identical and consistent.
• Whenever possible, have your car towed either to your home or a repair shop of your choice to avoid any storage fees or additional fees.
• Make sure you receive a printed price list that includes daily storage fees and miscellaneous charges as well as printed documentation of where the vehicle will be towed.
• Make sure you sign below the dollar amount quoted, not necessarily the bottom of the document.
• Always remove personal items and valuables before having your car towed.

Click here to read the complete Allstate announcement.

If you’re a fan of AMC’s zombie drama, The Walking Dead, you’re not alone. It’s apparently the most successful cable drama in history. According to my friend and former 60 Minutes producer John Marks the show is just as much about the human struggle for survival as it is about zombies. On his highly popular centrist website, Purple State of Mind, he has recently written a piece, The Walking Dead: Have You Identified Your Zombie Exits Yet? John writes:

Six episodes into one of the most popular shows in cable television history, AMC’s The Walking Dead, and the hardy survivors of a deeply American apocalypse have already made their way to a classified government facility. That’s impressively quick work.

In stories of this kind, zombie holocaust stories, I mean, finding the closest classified government facility used to take longer. Ten years ago, in Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, the living took two-thirds of the movie to locate a functioning military outpost. Forty years ago, around the time of George Romero’s game-changing Night Of The Living Dead, those same soldiers would have seemed a happy luxury indeed. Nobody in the movie had seen anything like an infestation of flesh-eating zombies before, and the best bet for survivors seemed to be to stay put until hillbillies showed up with shotguns and an improbable sense of cadaver-killing know-how.

Three decades down the road, huge numbers of the audience appear to be much better equipped to face this disaster than they are to balance their own checkbooks. Survivalism, once the province of nuts and neo-nuts, has gone mainstream, and zombie stories are the most obvious pop cultural statement of the phenomenon. They tell us that our private fantasies about having to make due when our neighbor comes at us with bared teeth or our water supply runs out or the news can no longer be trusted aren’t the onset of incipient paranoid delusion. They are shared national fantasies and powerful ones at that. How else to explain why 5 million people turned into the first episode of the series on Halloween?

Some of them are bound to be regulars over at the website GettingPrepared, where generators and scanners turn out to be sexier than models in thongs (who would have a rough time surviving the undead onslaught, let’s face it.)

These days, it’s not uncommon to hear folks on call-in radio shows talk about identifying their zombie exits in multi-tiered parking lots (one of those places you really don’t want to find yourself in case of an outbreak, for all kinds of reasons that I won’t go into here). Friends have confessed to me that they are more frightened of encountering undead cannibals than serial killers, even though they know serial killers are real and zombies aren’t. Something about the horror feels real just the same, tricking our minds into making preparations. Maybe it’s a presentiment of dark days to come, or maybe it’s a working out of the terrifying images of mass violence that we see on television.

To read the full story, click here.

The snow storm that crashed through the Midwest yesterday left over 100 vehicles stuck on Indiana’s highways. The storm dropped some 16 inches of the white fluffy stuff, and the intense wind made it nearly impossible for people to see. In Valparaiso a jackknifed semi-truck brought traffic grinding to a halt from 7pm to nearly 7am the next day.

From the AP: “People would get into a snowdrift and couldn’t go anywhere so they’d just leave the vehicle to get out of the weather,” said Indiana state police Lt. Lou Brown. “It just plugs things up and then snow plows can’t get around them.” Also, people who get out of their cars risk being hit by other vehicles or plows. The best thing for people to do, Brown said, is stay home.

To read the full account from the AP, click here.

Leave it to science to confirm what we already knew, but at least this time it’s interesting.

First, here’s what we already knew. People lost in the wilderness tend to walk around in circles, and just to confirm that we already knew this I offer as evidence a now-60-year-old  Tintin story, the Land of the Black Gold, that I was reading to my sons the other night. In it the two bumbling detectives Thompson and Thomson were lost in the desert and they kept driving around and around in, you guessed it, circles. Every time they inadvertently circled back around they’d see a set of tire tracks. Eureka! They assumed they were joining others on a well-trodden path. By the time they looped around seven times or so they were really excited. “We’re obviously getting near a big town…”

Now for the scientific confirmation. At the behest of a TV program a German scientist, Jan Souman, at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, took a one group of people to a German forest, and another group to the Sahara dessert. Then Jouman pointed in a direction for the hapless adventurers and told them to walk for four hours.

First the good news. Those that were dropped off forest, and had the sun as a guide were pretty much able to walk straight. But once they lost the sun as a guiding light they still thought they were walking straight but, of course, they started walking in circles.

In the Sahara, it was even worse. Without any large geographic features like, say, a mountain, the walkers started walking in circles almost immediately, and one subject supposedly almost did an about face once he started walking.

Souman’s advice if you’re lost? Get a GPS. “Don’t trust your senses because even though you might think you are walking in a straight line when you’re not,” he told Australia’s ABC news.

Read more from Australia’s ABC.

Vancouver Storm Zone

There’s something exciting (terrifying) about being in the midst of a great storm, and a while now I’ve been hearing things about a tourism industry in Vancouver, British Columbia, based around ferocious winter storms pound its western coastline from November to March (peak season is December to February).

The beauty of this location is that you can see the storms approaching, and when they arrive they bring pounding waves, vertical rain, sleet and snow, plus general stormy terror in a wilderness environment.

I filed it away as something to research at some point, but now Fodors.com has done some of the legwork with a recent travel blog on Vancouver’s storm tourism. Click here to learn more and find out about places to stay.

If you do end up stranded this winter, State Farm has some advice for you. This morning they sent out their monthly newsletter, including a section on Worst-Case Winter Driving Survival. Like much of the information on disaster planning, this bulletin focuses on the obvious, but it never hurts to cover the basics.

If you are stranded
If a winter storm strands you with your vehicle, stay calm and follow these tips:

• Pull off the highway (if possible), turn on your hazard lights and hang a distress flag from an antenna or window.
• If you have a phone, call 911 and describe your location as precisely as possible. Follow any instructions from the dispatcher.
• Remain in your vehicle so help can find you.
• Run your vehicle’s engine and heater about 10 minutes each hour to keep warm. Open a downwind window slightly for ventilation and clear snow from the exhaust pipe to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning.
• Exercise a little to maintain body heat, but avoid overexertion and sweating.
• Drink fluids to avoid dehydration.
• Don’t waste your vehicle’s battery power. Balance electrical energy needs—lights, heat and radio—with supply.
• At night, turn on an inside light when you run the engine so help can see you.

To read the rest of State Farm’s advice, click here.

Minneapolis/St. Paul got a foot of snow on Saturday, leaving at least 60,000 people without power for a time, although local news reports are saying that power has been restored to most everybody, and the entire grid should be back up by this evening. More curious were the 400 traffic accidents. You would think that in Minnesota you would avoid the usual auto-cluster-screw that happens after major storms in other parts of the county. But no, even Minnesotans need a reminder of how dangerous it is to drive in bad weather.

The latest from NPR.

If the idea of being without power for a long time makes you a little nervous, take heed, it made me nervous too. After a powerful ice storm in Massachusetts I rigged up by house and home-heating system to a small portable generator, and I did it for less than $1,200 including the electrician.

If you’re looking for a primer on hooking up your house to back-up power, Read The Long Quest For the Right Generator.

Bernie Madoff's Disaster Gear

This weekend in NYC the U.S. Marshall’s service is auctioning off various baubles, watches, slippers, and TVs of convicted ponzi schemer and supreme con-man, Bernard Madoff.

What’s this got to do with disaster preparedness, you ask? Ahh, well, it wasn’t all just $25,000 watches for Bernie. No, the man must have had a (small) penchant for preparing for bad things to happen. Now you can own a little bit of Bernie’s financial disaster AND stock your supply chest with two fire extinguishers, a first aid kit, and an AED defibrilator. It’s lot number 272.

If you’re serious about it, there’s a web simulcast, so you don’t actually have to be in NYC this weekend to buy anything, but you’ll need a $1,000 deposit on file, and you’ll have to pick up your tainted merchandise in Brooklyn next week.

Learn more about the auction here.

Anyone living in the west over the past decade knows first hand about water shortages because of an extended drought. This is part of the western experience, and people have adapted. Grass lawns are becoming a thing of the past. In El Paso, Texas, where I grew up, lush water-fed lawns are gradually giving way to front and backyards landscape with rock and cacti. Showers get shorter, and “water police” patrol the streets for sprinkler violators. Even in Northampton, Massachusetts, where it’s raining as I write these, we had water restrictions kick in during this dry summer.

All of this is with a country that has, according to the U.S. census, 310 million people. Now imaging adding another 100 million people into the mix. It won’t take long. According to the U.S. census we’ll top out over 400 million in the U.S. by 2039 (never mind, for the moment, our bordering neighbors in Mexico and Canada).

It was with this in mind that some writers and analysts at a website called 24/7 Wall Street decided to look at water resources in and come up with their list of The Ten Biggest American Cities That Are Running Out of Water. The report aggregated two recent studies by Ceres and the National Resources Defense Council, but they also added their own spin.

You won’t be surprised to find Los Angeles  topping the list, but coming in at no. 2 is Houston, followed by Phoenix, San Antonio, San Francisco/Bay Area, Fort Worth, Las Vegas, Tucson, Atlanta, and Orlando.

Live in L.A.? Here’s what’s in store according to 24/7 Wall Street:

“Major Water Supply: Colorado River Basin
Population (U.S. rank): 3,831,868 (2nd)
Population Growth Rate: 3.7% since 2000
Average annual rainfall: 14.77 in.

In the 1980’s, Los Angeles suffered a major crisis when the city was forced to stop using 40% of its drinking water due to industrial runoff contamination. Like Las Vegas, the city now relies on importing water from the Colorado River via hundreds of miles of aqueducts. The Colorado may only be a temporary solution, however, as the city continues to increase its demand at an unsustainable rate. In its utility risk rating, Ceres gave the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power the highest likelihood of risk among the cities it assessed. That list included Atlanta and the Forth Worth area. On top of this, the Hoover Dam, which is the main source of electricity for L.A. and much of the greater Southwest, is also producing at a lower rate than it has historically. Some scientists suspect this drop-off will continue to a point where its electricity production is too small to sustain the dam economically. Los Angeles, even if the dam doesn’t cease production in 2013, as some predict, still faces serious water shortages.

Read the rest of the article.

The Joints Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Military recently issued a 61-page booklet to their service men and women. It’s called a “Self-Help Guide to Antiterrorism” and was recently unearthed and posted for the world to see on the website Public Intelligence.

Don’t worry, Al Qaeda isn’t going to get a leg up by reading this. It’s hardly a confidential look at terrorism. In fact, much of the information was culled from other public U.S. Government websites. Those looking for tips and tricks on how to knock out a plane hijacker with a swift blow to the Adam’s Apple will be disappointed.

After going through the whole document it reminded me (again) just how basic most emergency preparedness is. The key, which isn’t really discussed, is that it’s important think about these basic things so that if something does happen you are mentally prepared. Pay attention to your surroundings, because you’re more likely to notice something wrong or out of place. Watching the news and keeping tabs on the weather is a good idea too. It’s not brain science.

The guide is pretty good as a primer on home safety, and the advice can be used for many areas of your life, not just looking out for terrorists.

From the document…

Safety at Home

• Restrict the possession of house keys. Change locks if keys are lost or stolen and when moving into a previously occupied residence.

• Lock all entrances at night, including the garage. Keep the house locked, even if you are at home.

• Destroy all envelopes or other items that show your name, rank, or other personal information. Remove names and rank from mailboxes.

• Maintain friendly relations with your neighbors.

• Do not draw attention to yourself; be considerate of neighbors.

• Keep yourself informed via media and internet regarding potential threats.

• Develop an emergency plan and an emergency kit, including a flashlight, batteryoperated radio, first-aid kit including latex gloves, and copies of important personal documents including key points of contact.

BE SUSPICIOUS

• Be alert to public works crews and other individuals requesting access to your residence; check their identities through a peephole or contact the parent company to verify employee status before allowing entry.

• Be cautious about peddlers and strangers, especially those offering free samples. Do not admit salespersons or poll takers into your home.

• Watch for unfamiliar vehicles cruising or parked frequently in the area, particularly if one or more occupants remain in the vehicle for extended periods.

• Write down license plate numbers, makes, models, and colors of suspicious vehicles. Note descriptions of occupants and take photographs if it can be done discreetly.

• Report any suspicious videotaping/photography or unusual accommodation requests.

• Report any unattended bags or objects

• Treat with suspicion any inquiries from strangers concerning the whereabouts or activities of family members.

• Report all suspicious activity to military police, security forces, or local law enforcement as appropriate.

Read the entire document here.

(image: popmech)

For those that missed the October issue of Popular Mechanics, I wrote the cover story: How to Disaster-Proof Your Life. It’s now available for free online. Here’s the beginning:

For the past few years, researchers at the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania have been running a computer simulation to study  how people choose to prepare for potential natural disasters. The simulation, called Quake, is a multiplayer game. All participants start out with a hypothetical $20,000 in cash and a house, and as the game progresses, they must make decisions about how to use their money. A player can leave that money in the bank, earning a Madoff-like guaranteed annual return of 10 percent, or pay for structural improvements to help the house withstand an earthquake. The winner is the player with the highest net worth—cash plus the value of the house—at the end of the game, usually 10 virtual years.

Nearly everyone chooses to keep the money in the bank. The strange thing about this result is that the researchers, Howard Kunreuther and Robert Meyer, warn the players that quakes are highly likely—the game, after all, is called Quake. But players cling doggedly to that promised 10 percent rate of return. On occasion, the lab team has even told one of the players that the only way to win was to put the money into the house. Even then, he would typically delay for a couple of years, hoping to cash in before doing the home improvements. Then, predictably, an earthquake would come and wipe everyone out.

To keep reading at popularmechanics.com, click here.

It’s not organized that clearly on the website, but there’s also several small, very practical companion pieces I wrote for the package, including…

• How to Prepare Your Home For Fires
• How to Prepare Your Home For Blackouts
• How to Prepare Your Home For Blizzards
• How to Prepare Your Home For Hurricanes
• How to Prepare Your Home For Wildfires
• How to Prepare Your Home For Floods
• How to Prepare Your Home For Tornadoes
• How to Prepare Your Home For Earthquakes

New Orleans, August 2005

I was taking a look at my site visits today and we’ve had a great couple of months at GettingPrepared.info with some robust traffic.

That’s a good thing on many levels, but especially since it shows people’s awareness rising about preparedness.

Aside from people heading straight to the main page and reading down, the top story of for the last two months was the recap of Hurricane Katrina.

So for those of you who are new to GettingPrepared.info and who aren’t linking in directly to the Katrina story from a referral, I wanted to post it again. Send questions or comments to John@GettingPrepared.info. Thanks!

Originally Posted on August 27, 2010.

Hurricane Katrina, which marks its fifth anniversary of making landfall on the Gulf Coast this weekend, was a wake up call. It signaled to people that they should start getting prepared, that disasters don’t just happen “somewhere else.” Revisiting the images and stories this week has brought back some frightening reminders, and five years later it’s worth remembering that the warnings were, in fact, there:

“DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED.” By the time the National Weather Service issued this ominous alert on the morning of Aug. 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina had morphed from a relatively weak Category 1 hurricane to a Category 5 tropical monster — and was spiraling straight toward New Orleans.

The city would be “uninhabitable for weeks … perhaps longer,” the weather service warned. Half the houses would lose their roofs. Commercial buildings would be unusable, and apartment buildings would be destroyed. Residents should expect long-term power outages and water shortages that would “make human suffering incredible by modern standards.”

In fact, the only outcome the 258-word alert didn’t specifically foretell was the massive flooding that would leave most of New Orleans submerged under a fetid stew of water and chemical runoff. But the likelihood of that happening has been well-known for years. The city sits as much as 10 ft. below sea level, between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, and is kept dry by a complicated system of canals, levees and pumping stations. Publications such as Scientific American, New Orleans’s Times-Picayune, National Geographic Magazine and Popular Mechanics have all reported on the city’s vulnerability in the event of a major hurricane.

Those three opening paragraphs come from a story I wrote for Popular Mechanics on the 10 Worst Disasters to strike America. Even now it’s important to remember that as colossal as the post-hurricane recover was, it could have been much worse. 80 percent of the people in New Orleans left, but that meant another 100,000 stayed behind, and many of those simply had no other option but to ride out the disaster. Many simply didn’t have the financial or vehicular means to get out, and buses, trains, and airplanes shut down service.

To take a look back at the disaster, including the days leading up to it, the disaster in New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf Coast, and the follow-up, click here to read the Popular Mechanics story.

Area Hit Hardest By Tsunami According to Early Reports

On Monday a 7.7-magnitude undersea earthquake triggered a local tsunami that flooded the Mentawai Islands of Indonesia. Rescue efforts are focused on finding survivors at sea, and at least of dozen people have been picked up. Early reports suggest that at least 100 have died, but the death toll is expected to rise.

“Ten villages have been swept away by the tsunami,” according Agolo Suparto, spokesmen for the National Disaster Management Agency. The island of South Pagai was the hardest hit and some reports suggest a 10-foot wave of water swept 2,000 feet inland.

The area is a haven for Australian surf tourists and some of the early survival stories are coming from the Australians.

From the newspaper, the Australian:

Earlier yesterday, a group of 15 Australians on the surf tour boat The Midas were hit by the 3m-high waves caused by the undersea quake while in a bay on the islands.

The wave initially hit the boat Freedom III, which was anchored next to The Midas.

“The wave picked that boat up and brought it towards us and ran straight into us and our boat exploded, caught on fire, we had a fireball on the back deck and right through the saloon within seconds,” said Midas skipper Rick Hallet said. [This may be the exploding boat referenced in the nytimes story linked below.]

“I ordered everyone up to the top deck to get as high as possible, then the boat exploded and we had to abandon ship,” he told the Nine Network.

“The bay we were in was several hundred metres across, and the wall of white water was from one side to the other – it was quite scary.”

The passengers and crew were swept up to 200m inland, then took shelter by climbing trees until the water surges passed and they were rescued about 20 minutes latter.

The latest from the New York Times, Reuters,  and the Jakarta Post (which has very little)

A squall line has been moving through the Midwest, spinning of tornadoes and leaving heavy winds in its wake. By 9am today the storm line was passing through Indianapolis with gusts of 60 mph. Early reports say that 30,000 people are without power.

Louisville, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Detroit are some of the cities likely to be affected by heavy storms. Some of the heaviest winds–up to 70 mph– will come once the squall line passes over. More from Accuweather.com.

I repeat. Tornadoes are no Fun. Get Prepared.

Tornado safety and preparedness tips from GettingPrepared.info.

And for more information, read my October 2010 Popular Mechanics piece on How to Prepare Your Home For Tornadoes