Posted on 11/01/2012 6:13:53 PM PDT by Kartographer
In darkened neighborhoods, people walked around with miner's lamps on their foreheads and bicycle lights clipped to shoulder bags and, in at least one case, to a dog's collar. A Manhattan handyman opened a fire hydrant so people could collect water to flush toilets. "You can clearly tell at the office, or even walking down the street, who has power and who doesn't," said Jordan Spiro, who lives in the blackout zone. "New Yorkers may not be known as the friendliest bunch, but take away their ability to shower and communicate and you'll see how disgruntled they can get."
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I do, too. Many of the people never anticipated the storm surge.
The water is going to be something else for a number of days. At least he has work!
I think he’d like to sleep. He’s only getting catnaps.
The brains of this country do know how to deal with the disasters. What in the Wide, Wide, World of Sports does that have to do with how the government or city folks deal with it?
The common theme is follow the 1950s government publications about preparing for trouble (of any kind), and figure on 3 days minimum response if you aren't hanging naked from a tree in the middle of a raging river.
Back in the day, Civil Defense did a good job of teaching and prepping. Then we became sophisticated, and didn't need it any more.
/johnny
True. And they would be dead.
Drop me (not too hard) in most of North America, and I can get by for 3 days. In a month I'll be living fairly comfortably.
No flush toilets, or stuff like that, but the basics, shelter, heat, water, food, clothing.
I like having stuff. I don't require stuff to survive. I have a mindset and the skillsets to survive. Wilderness is harder than urban, considering the concentration of resources.
I don't even require a knife. I can make one.
Can you identify the rocks that will make a suitable cutting edge?
/johnny
I went to CMU. I remember sitting in physics, bundled up, trying to take notes with gloves on. Like the class wasn’t challenging enough and it was “Physics for Humanities Majors.”
They may get hit again.
http://www.rsmas.miami.edu/blog/2012/11/01/potential-big-storm-for-northeast-u-s-next-week/
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OMG, not again......
Exactly.
What I find ironic in all this is how much time the media and people around NYC/NJ have sniffed and tut-tutted at those of us who are prepared for turd->turbine collisions as “hicks” and “nutjobs.....” and now they don’t understand even WHY they’re going to be without power for at least a week. They can’t even tell you how electrical power is generated or transmitted.
Every time there’s a big storm, we hear calls by uppity liberal arts majors to bury the power lines... and now we have a city with mostly buried power infrastructure that is royally screwed when water (and salt water at that) got into their oh-so-cleverly buried power infrastructure. Let’s leave that oh-so-brilliant dependency on public transportation out of the picture for right now - the subways will likely take a couple months to fully restore (at a great expense, I might add), just getting the power infrastructure back online is going to be a huge feat.
A city of mostly liberal arts majors and welfare dependents in this situation shows what the value of some hard asset skills are.
But they won’t learn. They’ll never bother learning that you can forge a nice knife out of the leaf springs of cars - and that they have lots of cars around them now that aren’t ever going to go anywhere again. Never mind that lots of those cars are filled with at least some fuel that can be decanted off the water in their tanks... never mind that someone could be pulling the alternators out of cars to make makeshift gensets to recharge batteries and such, or that someone could be making makeshift heaters. Nah. Much easier to complain very loudly.
BTW, in my area of Wyoming, I’d be looking for obsidian. Makes tools that are holy-crap sharp. There are recently discovered sites around Wyoming where it is thought that the Indians had “edge factories” - they had nice outcroppings of the rocks/stones that made nice edges and tools and they’d hang out there for weeks at a time, with skilled flintknappers just cranking out one arrow/spear point or knife after another. I’ve spent a little bit of time with a guy who can crank out a very serviceable arrow head in literally five minutes. He thinks that the Indians were at least as skilled as he is and that losing a stone knife for them was a fairly minor annoyance, since it took them only a hike to find the suitable rocks and in no more than 20 minutes after locating said rock(s), they had just about anything they wanted.
The stereotypical New Yorker is not going to have a lot of patience with this disaster.
It’s cold, the flood water is filthy and with the water not working, they will get sick. :(
I expected the surge because that storm looked like Ike that came into Texas. :(
This is going to become a bigger disaster than Katrina, because the lack of food, clean water, electricity and severely hampered transportation will comboine to produce a whopper of an epidemic...especially since another system looks to be coming through in a few days.
My mother has been in the hospital in central NJ for the last 30 or so hours - and hasn’t seen a single cardiologist because none of them can be reached. Luckily, the 23 docs are good, and she should get out tomorrow. She even enjoyed thw warmth and the TV, because there’s none at home.
The only positive here is that this is a big, in-your-face teachable moment. Millions, and not just in the Northeast, will take prepping more seriously and actually store a few days or couple weeks of food and water, plus have more batteries, camp stoves with propane, gas, tarps, blankets, etc. Even Bill O’Reilly was talking earlier today about not relying on the government in an emergency.
“Luckily, the 23 docs are good....”
Uh, ER docs.
Fat fingers and no preview will do that.
People burning candles in high-rises. I can't believe people aren't talking about the fire danger.
I've even used bamboo for a cutting edge/pointy thing, but you gotta be careful. It will bite you in a heartbeat.
I prefer to not try surviving in true wilderness like where you live (without preparation), because it's a heck of a lot harder. Even when I did the mountain man thing, you would run across old bottles, arrowheads, pieces of iron wire, etc...
Just takes a mindset and a game face.
/johnny
Can’t - no gas. Sucks. ;-)
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