H/t Emptywheel.
Category: Disaster
Apart from that Mrs. Lincoln, How Was the Play
We just had an earthquake, in Maryland.
A little shaking, and nothing fell down.
According to the USGS, the preliminary number was 5.9 (!) on the Richter Scale, centered at 37.875°N, 77.908°W, near Mineral, VA.
The epicenter was about 250km (150 miles) from me, so it felt like a semi driving by here.
I’m glad that I’ve given up caffein, or I might not have noticed.
Posted via mobile.
I Made a 911 Funny Today
Things are in flux at work. The US Army has cancelled itsMulti-Function Utility/Logistics and Equipment Vehicle (MULE), and the MULE is supposed to be the lead platform for the Autonomous Navigation System (ANS) that I am working on.
So, the future path for our program is not clear, and rumors are running rampant.
With the end of the fiscal year coming up, we got an update on the current state of the rumor mill from our boss at our department’s weekly meeting, which is a rather humane, and intelligent way of handling things.
He noted that there was still plenty to do in either case, so we shouldn’t slack off:
Boss: We need statuses on progress, so we don’t go into airplane mode.
Me: Airplane mode?
Boss: (Makes throwing motion) Throwing paper airplanes as you get to the end. (instead of working)
Me: Oh, I thought that you meant 911.
You know, I think that this is the first actually funny joke about 911* that I’ve heard, and I was the one who made it.
And BTW, as the meeting was breaking up, the boss’s de facto number 2 threw a paper airplane.
It’s a nice group of people there.
Needless to say, posting is likely to be light for a while, I have work to wrap up, and a resume to update.
*Yes, I know all the jokes about “Hijackers surprised to find themselves in hell” stuff, but that is not a 911 joke, it’s a hijacker joke.
An Outbreak of Common Sense in California
It looks like California will start levying a tax on people who choose to live in fire prone areas:
As Californians have crowded the state’s bucolic foothills and scenic mountains with subdivisions and cabin retreats, pushing further into the combustible wild, state firefighting has become a billion-dollar enterprise.
Now, with the state continuing to lurch from one fiscal crisis to another, Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature are pushing back.
They are requiring rural homeowners who rely on state firefighters to pay a $150 annual fee for fire-prevention services. Lawmakers are mulling over whether to revive proposed land-use restrictions that were killed just three years ago, after fierce objections from developers and local officials. And, Brown has directed the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection to study how the state manages and pays for fires in those zones — and whether local governments should shoulder more of that responsibility.
Brown has said that the cash-strapped state can no longer afford the entire cost of battling blazes in fire-prone areas. The new fee could raise as much as $200 million a year from the more than 846,000 homeowners who live within more than 31 million acres of “state responsibility areas,” where Cal Fire is the primary responder.
A spokesman for the governor said the levy will “ensure that landowners in these areas that receive a disproportionate benefit from Cal Fire’s services pay an appropriate portion of the state’s wildland firefighting costs.”
This is something that should be implemented nation wide, and not just to burn prone areas.
Pot, Kettle, Black
Michael “Heck of a Job, Brownie” Brown, the FEMA chair who botched the Hurricane Katrina disaster, just called George W. Bush an inattentive fratboy.
Heh.
A Really Bad Day at the Office
The vid is mis-titled
Stephen Trimble found this video of an Iranian Il-76 MD AWACS crash.
They had an engine fire, declared an inflight emergency, and the radome came off, and took off the tail.
Woah.
Great Googly Moogly!
Click for full size
H/t Wall Street Pit for the graph Pr0n
It’s jobless Thursday, and the numbers are brutal.
It’s back in the 450-485K sweet spot that it hung about for most of last year.
They expected it to fall by about 30K to around 400K, but it rose by 43,000 to 473,000, and the less volatile 4-week moving average rose by 22,250 to 431,250.
Continuing claims rose by 74,000 to 3.73 million, though emergency and extended claims fell by 42,900 to 4.12 million, though in the case of the latter, I do not know how much of this is just the “99ers” exhausting their benefits.
Obama should be running around like his hair is on fire over this report, but he should have been doing that over much of the past year with real unemployment (U-6) staying well over 15%, but because the Banksters are back to paying themselves big bonuses, no one in DC seems to give a damn.
Much more of this, and Sarah Palin will be sworn in as president the day that I make aliyah to Israel.
Oh Crap!
The Japanese have just raised the nuclear alert level of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to 7, the highest possible level, and only reached once before, at Chernobyl:
Japan is to raise the nuclear alert level at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to a maximum seven, putting the emergency on a par with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
Nuclear safety officials had insisted they had no plans to raise the severity of the crisis from five – the same level as the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 – according to the international nuclear and radiological event scale.
But the government came under pressure to raise the level at the plant after Japan’s nuclear safety commission estimated the amount of radioactive material released from its stricken reactors reached 10,000 terabecquerels per hour for several hours following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the country’s northeast coast on 11 March. That level of radiation constitutes a major accident, according to the INES scale.
This ain’t an attempt to corner the market on glow in the dark watches, this is serious.
Someone Needs to Open Up a Can of Whup Ass on the Krauts
The periphery in Europe is experience contracting GDP and a debt crisis. The most recent case is that of Portugal, which is now asking for an EU bailout.
Unfortunately the conditions of the bailout are always the same Teutonic prescription:
- Austerity budgets, which hike taxes and cut spending.
- Paying off the banks that lent the money to the governments at 100¢ on the dollar.
The problem that this creates is:
- Social instability.
- Further GDP contraction, which increases debt load relative to the GDP.
- Declining tax revenues.
The prescription for these problems is:
- Austerity budgets, which hike taxes and cut spending.
- Paying off the banks that lent the money to the governments at 100 ¢ on the dollar.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
The problem here is two-fold, and they are both of German origin:
- The Germans have never gotten over their bout with hyperinflation in the 1920s, and so feel that inflation is the only battle to fight.
- This also, at German insistence, got baked into both the Euro and the European Central Bank (ECB), which has no mandate to do anything by keep inflation low. Unlike the Fed it has no mission to minimize unemployment as well.
- There is a complete unwillingness by the EU and the ECB to allow for hearcuts on the bondholders, which (surprise) appear to largely be the German banks.
This is why, on the basis of spiking commodity prices, driven largely by the Libya conflict, the ECB has just raised its benchmark rate.
The thing here is that there is an awful lot of pain being inflicted to support German philosophy*, as well as supporting the bad debts of their banks, which would be insolvent by any realistic evaluation of this debt.
When someone big enough† finally tells the German banks to go pound sand, things should get interesting.
*Which, according to my physicist brother, is also why quantum mechanics such a pain, the the formative texts were written by Germans, who felt an obligation to be obscure and confusing.
†And I don’t mean Spain big. If the new government in Ireland gives a 50¢ haircut to the bond holders, the Germans will have a banking experience to rival our S&L crisis of the 1980s.
100 Years Ago
What Republicans Call the “Good Old Days”Correction on Power Plant
It appears that the any removal of all the workers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuke plant was only temporary:
Correction: March 16, 2011
A news alert associated with an earlier version of this article, relying on an English translation of remarks by Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, incorrectly stated that workers had been evacuated from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. A core group of workers remained at the plant.
They had a radiation spike, and removed them for the duration.
Additionally, it appears that electric power may be run to the plant shortly, which would allow for the normal coolant pumps to operate.
Why they didn’t bring in a boat with a genset and anchor it offshore at the start of this is beyond me.
Oh Crap
In a news conference, the Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary said that they were pulling everyone out of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, though it appears that a small number of workers have elected to stay on:
11:13 P.M. |Core Group of Workers Remain at Plant
The Times’s Hiroko Tabuchi reports that a small group of workers remains at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, contrary to what an English translation of the chief cabinet secretary’s remarks had implied.
10:22 P.M. |Chief Cabinet Secretary’s News Conference
Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, is holding a news conference that is being broadcast live on Japanese television. Mr. Edano said radiation readings started rising rapidly Wednesday morning outside the front gate of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. “All the workers there have suspended their operations. We have urged them to evacuate, and they have,” he said, according to a translation by NHK television.
This is not good, that if the situation is as reported, those men remaining at the plant have to know that they are at very real risk of death.
We also have a report that a fire has restarted at the power plant, though it is unclear where this fire might be.
If this is the zirconium cladding of the spend fuel rods in the cooling pools, this could get very ugly very quickly.
If interested, you can see satellite and U-2 imagery here.
Oh S%$@!
In Japan, they are pumping seawater through the cores of 2 units at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, and plans are being made to distribute iodine pills, which prevent the thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine from a radiation leak.
I don’t know how bad it is, but lordy, this ain’t good.
Busy Day, But I Am Relieved
That a friend of mine who lives in Japan is fine, as is his wife, and the earthquake did no damage to his home.
A word of note, if this hit anywhere in the US, we would not have the infrastructure of personnel to handle this, and we would already be seeing private profiteers cheating people.
Also note that the Republican budget cuts include cuts to the Tsunami warning system.
Bad Day at the Office
Thankfully, no injuries
A crop-duster modified as a close support aircraft, the AT-802U, caught its tail wheel on a berm at landing, and the rest is in the video.
Thankfully, no injuries, except, perhaps, to the manufacturer’s, Air Tractor’s, investors.
I Have Had It With These Motherf%$#ing Crocks On This Motherf%$#ing Plane!
We see yet another senseless crocodile disaster:
A stowaway crocodile on a flight escaped from its carrier bag and sparked an onboard stampede that caused the flight to crash, killing 19 passengers and crew.
The croc had been hidden in a passenger’s sports bag – allegedly with plans to sell it – but it tore loose and ran amok, sparking panic.
A stampede of terrified passengers caused the small aircraft to lose balance and tip over in mid-air during an internal flight in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The unbalanced load caused the aircraft, on a routine flight from the capital, Kinshasa, to the regional airport at Bandundu, to go into a spin and crash into a house.
A lone survivor from the Let 410 plane told the astonishing tale to investigators.
Ironically the crocodile also survived the crash but was later killed with a machete by rescuers sifting through the wreckage.
We live in a very strange world.
Deja Vu
Yet another oil rig explodes in the Gulf of Mexico.
Thankfully no fatalities.
The Term is Ethnic Cleansing
2 Words Left Unsaid
Rachel Maddow talks about the housing situation in New Orleans, and makes the point that the elimination of much of the subsidized housing for the poor was intended to reduce the availability of housing for the poor, and generally black, residents of the Crescent City.
John Aravosis references Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” but there is a far uglier term for this: Ethnic cleansing.
Cement Successfully Injected into Spewing Hole
Unfortunately, it wasn’t Rush Limbaugh.*
Still, the people of the Gulf coast can expect a few more years of pre-oiled shrimp.
*I considered another prominent right winger *cough*Sarah Palin*cough*, but decided that the sexist overtones were a bit much.
Not Enough Bullets
BP has given their CEO, Tony Hayward, his waking papers.
Only, he gets to stay on until October, at full pay, and he still has his millions in stock options, and in 2 years, he is eligible for a pension of £600,000 a year.
On the brighter side, he is literally being sent to Siberia, as, BP is, “Planning to nominate him as a non-executive director of its Russian joint venture, TNK-BP.”
If you are one of the hyper-rich, you are safe from the consequences of your actions, which is why these f%$#s act the way they do.
If they win, they make a sh%$ load of money, and if they lose, they are still set for life.
One note here, he will be replaced by Bob Dudley, who is an American, which just goes to show that the BP board does not get the USA.
I think that they think that an American CEO will defuse American anger at them.
They are wrong. Americans are suckers for a British accent, we love being conned by people with British accents, just look at the success that lying charlatans like Niall Ferguson, Christopher Hitchens, and Andrew Sullivan have done selling their crap as gold.
The problem here is that something bad happened, and the more people looked at BP, they saw that it is a corrupt criminal psychopathic organization, even by the standards of the oil industry.