Sometime early this morning, while thinking about my goals for this trip, I came to the conclusion that my probability of success was pretty low in doing cold approaches on strangers whose language I didn’t speak and who likely didn’t speak my language in turn. So instead I went to a nearby store, bought some large (A3) drawing papar and a large marker, and made two signs that read:

American writer wants
to interview you about
Eurozone/EU crisis.

(Il ne parle pas français.)

There was an area with low polished stone walls (surrounding three sides of a car ramp doing down to an underground garage) near the entrance to our hotel. I planned to tape the two signs to that wall, set up my camcorder on a tripod, take out my clipboard and notebook, and wait for the interviews to roll in.

Now, before you laugh too hard, stop and think about it. If a French reporter set him(or her)self up in Times Square — and the Champs-Elysees is a cross between Times Square (sans billboards) and the biggest upscale mall you can imagine — and put up a sign saying that he wanted to talk about America’s economics problems, he’d probably have a line a mile long. Of course, if he limited it to those who could speak French, it would be much, much shorter, but given (as we are told) how English is a universal language in Europe (and, indeed, most of the world), that shouldn’t be as much of an issue.

Anyway, the first problem I ran into was the one mentioned in my last post: there was a serious police sweep, with serious-looking police, going on pretty much right where I had planned to set up. After watching them for a little while and realizing they weren’t going to be done any time soon, we moved about half a block up towards the Arc de Triomphe, where there are a similar stone wall around a pedestrian subway. I set up the signs, set up the camera, took out my nootbook, and waited.

And waited. And waited.

Lots of people walked by, reading the sign, glancing surripitously at me, then avoiding any further eye contact. Then, after about 15 minutes of this, four young men set up some audio equipment on the sidewalk about 25-30 yards away from me, turned on some hip-hop music, and began to breakdance. I kid you not: within 30 seconds, a crowd of 100+ people had formed a square around them. They performed (loudly) for about 20 minutes, took a 10-minute break, then started all over again. This continued the whole time I was out there.

[Continuing to write the next morning] I really was lagged last night. Sat down this morning to finish this post and had to un-check several of the categories I had set (Credit Backlash, Holidays, Intelligence, Japan).

Anyway, yesterday I did end up with the two interviews (and the walk-by cursing) I posted about below. I also had two groups of youth — one all female, the other a mix — come up to practice their English on me, giggle, then move on. I had a few people (again, teens/20s) take photos of me (“Yeah, there was the crazy old American out on the Champs-Elysees…”).

I’m going to word the sign differently today, partly as a linguistic experiment, partly because I’m not sure my wording yesterday was felicitous. It struck me afterwards that — given the stakes for France and for all of Europe — it was a bit like setting a sign up outside of an oncology ward saying, “I want to interview you about your relative with cancer.”

More police sirens during the night, though I don’t know whether that’s typical on the Champs-Elysees or not.

On tap for today: a guided tour of the Eiffel Tower (avoiding the enormous, slow lines), and then an attempt to gather more interviews. Stay tuned. ..bruce..

As I’ve posted here before, I have a background in emergency preparedness, as well having been through my own experiences with both natural disasters and economic hard times (and, by the way, I’ve used food storage far more during the latter than the former). Some years back, I prepared a one-page checklist for getting started on personal and family preparedness. I recently updated that sheet (PDF, 23KB); feel free to download and distribute it.

UPDATE: Subterranean Instalanche™ in progress; Glenn linked directly to the one-page sheet (instead of this post), so my server is feeling the load even though the hits aren’t showing up over on my Sitemeter gauge; Glenn’s now linked directly to this post. If the site and/or the sheet takes a while to download, that’s why.

UPDATE: Typo in sheet corrected, thanks to feedback from Tim Elliott.  ..bruce w..

…ponder the state we’re in, and what’s likely to hit the fan over the remaining seven months of 2010.

Then start working on your emergency preparedness.  ..bruce w..

This is a perfect example of how then nanny state that is America sees itself and its people.

Firstly, anyone who is waiting for the federal or state government to save them in this situation would be well served to just go dig their grave. The government may get around to helping you eventually. But the first line of defense would always be you, your family, your friends and your neighbors.

If you think help will arrive in 72 hours, guess again. Using Katrina and the Haitian earthquake as examples, don’t expect much to happen until at least one week or more after the attack.

The second part of this is even more insane. Your town just got nuked, but you and your family are not severely impacted. Are you going to hang out there, where you know there is radiation or are you going to load everyone and the dog into the SUV and head for some place less deadly?

I strongly encourage the DHS to come up with a more realistic plan, and the American public to consider self-reliance.

We were just to the left of that star marking the epicenter

Yeah, I should have written and posted this yesterday, but I didn’t realize it was the 20th anniversary until today (thanks to this post).

Sandra and I, with seven of our nine kids, had moved to Soquel, California in early 1988. Actually, we were five miles outside of Soquel; we bought a home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a long ranch-style house on five acres of land covered with redwood trees. Then we hit the Tech Crash of 1988-89 and worked hard to keep things going, while I was continuing to do contract work at Apple and Sun, as well as writing both articles (mostly Macworld) and books (The NeXT Book, Addison-Wesley, 1989).

At 5:04 pm on October 17, 1989, I had just gotten home about an hour or so earlier from a drive up to San Francisco, most likely to the Macworld offices. I was in my home office, using my NeXT cube and a modem to be on-line on BIX (BYTE Information eXchange). Sandra and most of the kids were home, though Jacqui and Heather (both 13) were over at a friend’s house some miles away making poodle skirts for a school ‘sock hop’. The quake started, that in itself not a big surprise; I was a Californian, and we’d lived here in the Bay Area for nearly 2 years, so we were all quite used to minor shakers. But then it got very strong, very fast. I jumped up and braced myself in the doorway that led from my office to the master bedroom. The shaking was very hard and very long, and all I could think about were the very tall redwood trees all around the house, any one of which could fall over and slice the house into two parts.

Sandra, in the meantime, was near the kitchen, in the middle of the house. She grabbed the kids who were home and tried to get them all into a doorway while the quake was going on. At one point during the quake, our daughter Crystal (age 6) looked up at Sandra and said, “I don’t want to live here anymore.”

The quake finally died down, and I went out through the office’s sliding glass door to the outside deck and saw a glorious, once-in-several-lifetimes sight: dozens of giant redwood trees all swaying in unison in big sweeping arcs, while millions of tiny golden redwood leaves drifted down. None of the trees had fallen over, so I ran back into the house to check on everyone and to see what damage had been done to the house.

The home phone rang almost immediately. It was Sandra’s mother, Nora, calling from Orem, Utah. Sandra’s dad, Andy, had been watching the World Series game, and when the earthquake struck, Nora immediately called us to see if we were OK. It was the last incoming phone call we’d get for several days, as attempts by most of the rest of the country to call into the Bay Area would jam up the incoming phone lines. Sandra assured her mom that we were all OK, and then we set about taking inventory. The kids, while a bit terrified, were all unhurt, so we did a quick assessment on the house itself.

The house actually came through the quake very well. There were a few small cracks in one wall, and a few bookshelves had fallen over, but that was about it. We quickly started filling up sinks and tubs with water; we were on a well and had a holding tank (gravity feed), but we didn’t want to take chances. A smart move, as it turned out — the quake cracked the line from the well to the holding tank. Power was out, so the well was no longer pumping water up to the tank; instead, the tank emptied itself through that cracked line over the next several hours.

We had two water heaters, one in the garage and one in the basement. The one in the garage was tucked into a closet and came through the quake just fine. The other one  in the basement was somewhat freestanding and so had “walked around” a bit, snapping one of the water feeds. I shut things down and walked the tank back into place.  (Lesson #1: if you live in earthquake country, always be sure that your water heater is strapped down quite securely.)

By now, the aftershocks had started. Since (as it turned out) we were only 3-4 miles from the epicenter of the quake, we felt all the aftershocks — and there would be literally dozens of them (“Fifty-one aftershocks of magnitude 3.0 and larger occurred during the first day after the main shock, and 16 occurred during the second day. After 3 weeks, 87 magnitude 3.0 and larger aftershocks had occurred.”) We felt all those aftershocks and many smaller ones as well.

While power was out, we did have a battery-powered radio, as well as the car radio in our minivan. However, we could only find a few stations on the air, and most of them were local stations trying to cope with the aftermath of the quake themselves. (We didn’t have great reception of anything where we lived.)

As mentioned, we had two daughters over visiting friends several miles away. I got into the minivan and drove off to get them. The effects of the quake were  quite visible; there were actual landslides in several places, and obvious structural damage to both houses and buildings. When I got to the house where Jacqui and Heather were supposed to be, it turned out that the family there had already left with them (and the other girls who were there) to drive them all home.

If I recall correctly — it has been 20 years after all — I stopped at one small hardware store on the way home. The large front window of the store was completely smashed out, and the owner was selling stuff (batteries, mostly) directly through the window. I bought some batteries and headed home.

The eerie part at this point is that we had no idea what other damage had occurred or how widespread it was. For all we knew, we were on the outskirts of the damage zone, and much of the Bay Area could be in ruins. Even if we had had electricity, we only got one TV station back in the mountains, and that one pretty poorly. As I mentioned, the local radio stations were either off the air (with power problems of their own) or were mostly just coming up to the mike periodically and saying, “There’s been a large earthquake — as soon as we have information, we’ll let you know more.”

Our house ran entirely on electricity (which was gone and would be for about 24 hours), so I fired up the BBQ grill out back to cook dinner. Afterwards, we gathered all the kids in the living room with sleeping bags and pillows, built a fire in the fireplace, and spent the night there. By now, some of the radio stations were back on the air, so Sandra and I used the battery-powered radio, with each using one earpiece of a standard pair. We spent most of the night listening to live reports of the devastation around the Bay Area, including the fires in the Marina district, the damage to the Bay Bridge, and the collapse on the Nimitz Freeway, all while aftershocks were hitting every few minutes. It truly felt apocalyptic.

Chase’s recollection (age 16 at the time of the quake)

It was an afternoon that I did not have much homework, and I took advantage because I was tired from early morning seminary.  I woke to the violent shaking and watching the windows in my bedroom dance back and forth, as they bounced up and down with the tremors.

I quickly got into the doorway and waited for what honestly seemed like an eternity until the calm finally set in.  Rushing to the kitchen, mom was there heading out the back sliding door onto the deck.  The fear from the earthquake was only the first of many fears that crossed my path.  The next was being outside, watching the giant redwood trees swaying in unison with the only sounds made were from the falling debris, and creaking sounds from the trees themselves.  There were always birds making ruckous and just other sounds of nature, but at that moment, the trees were the lords of the dance.

At that moment, one of the many aftershocks hit and I just remember feeling as if I was strapped into a horrible carnival ride that I was not able to see what might be coming around the next turn.

Over the next few hours, there were many assessments made of the interior and exterior of the home.  For me, the sight of cracked walls and topled bookshelves was beyond what I could grasp.  I knew we were in earthquake country, but no one ever explained the feeling of standing in a doorway as the house groaned all around you.  Or, the many aftershocks that made sleeping close to an impossiblity.

As we all gathered in the living room in sleeping bags and flashlights, there was a little bit of chatter, but no topics could outdo the tenseness we all felt.  Unexpectedly, another tremor would hit, some were huge and felt like the original, some were just enough to break your calm all over again.

What is funny is that all these years later, I still remember that the high school was supposed to have a day off on Wednesday, and I was so excited to go to seminary in my pijamas.  To say the least, we did not have seminary the next morning, and we had several days off from school as repairs needed to be made on classrooms and even the swimming pool on campus.

There are moments, even 20 years later that I cringe or my heart skips a beat when I feel the floor shake from someone walking across or sitting on an overpass when a large truck passes.

Crystal’s recollection (age 6 at the time of the quake)

Right after the earthquake had hit and we were all gathering outside on the deck, when you came out and Mom (I think it was mom) freaked out because a bottle of ketchup had spilled on your birkenstocked foot and she thought you’d been injured.

Wes, Jon and I sleeping outside your bedroom door (after you callously told us we could no longer sleep in your bedroom). I remember being woken up by Mom tearing open the door after an aftershock that I had apparently slept through.

Wes refusing to leave the couch against the wall because of the aftershocks. One night the entire family was sitting at the dinner table, trying to persuade him to finally leave the couch, and just as he gets up, another shock hits and he dives back onto the couch.

Heather’s recollection (age 13 at the time of the quake)

Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 20 years! I remember being at the friend’s house (I can’t remember their names, unfortunately) and I believe we were cutting the fabric out for the skirts when the house started shaking. At first I thought that someone was jumping up and down upstairs until I remembered that they didn’t have a second floor. Once we realized what was happening, we all ran to the door that lead to the garage. It seemed like 5 or so of us tried to fit in the door frame together. We could hear stuff falling out of the kitchen cupboards and breaking. It seemed to go on forever. Once the main quake was over, I remember we all went outside. Most of the houses were actually okay, except for the chimneys. Once we got home, I remember all of us staying in the living room together. I didn’t realize how many aftershocks there would be, and how strong many of them would be. I have other random little bits I remember too, mostly visual: the concrete stage broken and partially fallen (I believe it was on the beach at the boardwalk), tree debris (leaves, pinecones, small branches) all over the driveway and road by our house, and some pub in Soquel that had a chimney covering part of one wall that had completely fallen down (we drove by it all the time). And of course, how very easy it was to scare Mom. Even well into our time in San Diego, you’d start shaking the window behind Mom and she’d start to freak out and get mad at you. I’m sure it still works to this day.

And the ride won't even be this much fun

Does the phrase “going to Hell in a handbasket” mean anything to you?

I’m starting this post on Tuesday evening, with “American Idol” on the background. I can hardly keep up with the gaffes, mendacity, and sheer idiocy coming from the Obama Administration and the Democratic Congress on a daily basis. And trust me when I tell you that it’s not (just) my partisan point of view (after all, I was a registered Democrat for 37 years until last fall).

ITEM: ACORN, a criminal enterprise (voter fraud) in many states, is going to be involved in the 2010 US Census (more information at Gateway Pundit). Can you imagine if the (hypothetical) McCain Adminstration had proposed using, say, the Blackwater Corporation for the 2010 Census?

ITEM: Another “can you imagine if Bush/McCain did this?” item: the White House may be using the Situation Room for politicial strategizing.

ITEM: Obama’s proposed health care reform may cost $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Cha-ching!

ITEM: And while we’re at it, Obama’s proposed climate change plan may cost $2 trillion over the next eight years. Cha-cha-ching!

ITEM: The White House claims that they didn’t know about the AIG bonuses until this month. However, Glenn Greenwald claims that (contra my post yesterday) it was actually Tim Geithner and Larry Summers who insisted that the bailout bill not affect existing payouts but only future payouts, and that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) fought against it.  He also claims that it was the White House that leaked the idea that Dodd (a big AIG recipient) put this clause in on his own. (Hat tip to Instapundit for that item.) Meanwhile, the Associated Press (!) calls bull$#!+ on both sides. Oh, and guess who else got lots of money from AIG? (Hint: his initials are BHO.)

ITEM: The White House and Congressional chest-beating outrage over AIG is scaring away private investors from taking a stake in other financial institutions that the US is bailing out. After all, if the White House and Congress can seek to reverse valid contracts and payment agreements after the fact, then what guarantees do investors have? It also appears that this outrage is scaring away the people the government needs to run these firms.  In the meantime, Larry Kudrow sees this all as evidence why the government shouldn’t run anything, and it’s hard to argue with him, while the Economist – no right-wing, free market publication, that — views the Obama outrage as ineffective (if politically necessary) grandstanding.

ITEM: Obama appears to be losing Atrios, who asks the question, “Which senator will be the first to ask Timmeh [i.e., Tim Geithner] to resign?” Plus, when Atrios and Steve Forbes agree on something, you know there’s a profound problem. Finally, here’s a sign that Geithner is in real trouble: “White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama had confidence in Geithner and the Treasury Department’s oversight.” When they bring out the C-word, you know your days are numbered.

ITEM: Obama is losing Maureen Dowd: “Barack Obama even needs a teleprompter to get mad.” Ouch, ouch, and ouch. That’s gotta leave a mark. And speaking of leaving a mark — these comments by Andrew Malcolm over at the excellent “Top of the Ticket” political blog about Obama skipping out on the Gridiron Club roast probably raised a welt or two, particularly since they are about Obama’s thin skin.

ITEM: Meanwhile, speaking of Obama’s ubiquitous teleprompter:  “Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration at the White House when he realized something sounded way too familiar. Turns out, he was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just given.” Heh.

ITEM: It was amateur hour again at the State Department, this time in advance of Obama’s meeting with Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva this weekend (hat tip to Drew at Ace of Spades):

. . . the White House made several moves interpreted as snubs by the Brazilian media.

Silva aides said the trip was pushed forward from Tuesday because of the St. Patrick’s Day holiday — making Latin America once again look like an afterthought. Then, the White House announcement misspelled his name as “Luis Ignacio” and put “Lula” — a nickname that decades ago became a legal part of the Brazilian leader’s name — in quotes.

ITEM: It’s also amateur hour at the White House with regards to provocations from China:

. . . we have emboldened our adversaries. The Obama administration has filed a protest over the Impeccable incident, but the Chinese know the United States is not serious. If we were, we would have canceled the meeting with Yang Jiechi or even sent the Chinese ambassador in Washington packing, putting him on the first flight from Dulles to Beijing.

ITEM: I lived through (and entered the workforce during) the Carter Administration.  The parallels between Carter and Obama are not at all comforting.

ITEM: The Obama Administration and the Democrats want to use the ‘nuclear option’ and eliminate the filibuster in the Senate. When the Republicans threaten to do this a few years back, due to Democratic blocking of judicial nominees, the Democrats screamed that it was unholy, unethical, and wrong. Now that the shoe’s on the other foot, there’s nothing wrong with doing this at all. Of course. In the meantime, and contrary to campaign promises, the Obama Administration is proving to be vastly more partisan than its predecessor.

ITEM: The Obama Administration has ended the program that allows pilots to carry guns on planes that they’re flying.  Oh, and they did so secretly. (Hat tip to Ace of Spades again.)

ITEM: The US National Debt just hit a record $11 trillion, and the Obama Adminstration and Congress have trillions in debt that they plan to add over the next several years.  Remember this diagram from last week? Each column shows how much the National Debt will grow from now until 2019 — and this is the official White House projection, which means that’s it’s probably optimistic.

Here a trillion, there a trillion...

ITEM: For those of you feeling truly masochistic, here’s a slide show that demonstrates in painful visual clarity just how the White House and Congress have wreaked havoc with the future US economy (hat tip to Red State):

ITEM: The Obama nominee for Sec’y of Commerce, Gary Locke, has represented (as a lawyer) several China-owned corporations and “was forced to refund several political donations that he received in the 1990s from key figures in a Chinese influence-buying investigation.”  As Commerce Secretary, Locke’s duties will include — wait for it — approving sensitive exports to China. Nope, no conflict there.

ITEM: Remember the collapse of Citigroup?  Guess where Citigroup’s Chief Economist ended up? Yep, the Obama Commerce Department.

ITEM: Obama’s idiotic proposal to force veterans to use their private insurance to pay for medical treatment for combant injuries made the front page of the Washington Post. I predict that this proposal will be scuttled by Friday. The strip “Day by Day” weighs in:

ITEM: Some (rare) good news for the Obama Administration as Vivek Kundra is reinstated at White House CIO.

ITEM: Some reasons for economic optimism. It’s good to remember that unemployment is under 10% and there aren’t people selling apples on the street. Oh, wait — there are, at least over in England (clever lad, that; note the Depression-era photo on his sign).

ITEM: Some more economic good news: lobbyists are prospering in Washington DC. Wait? Weren’t lobbyists supposed to magically go away under the Obama Administration?

ITEM: The Democratic Stimulus Bill will reverse a decade’s progress in welfare reform by encouraging states to increase their welfare rolls.

ITEM: Former President George W. Bush demonstrates (again) why he has more class than the White House and Congress put together. Also, he demonstrates that he understands the current geopolitical situation better than the White House and Congress put together. And I’ll bet he spoke without a teleprompter.

ITEM: Unfortunately, Michelle Obama demonstrates a distinct lack of class by implying that military families are just now being noticed by the White House.

ITEM: Republicans take a small lead on the generic Congressional ballot. Only 20 months until the next Congressional elections!

ITEM: A few Democratic governors up for re-election next year are having problems of their own.

ITEM: Yet more positive fallout from the Obama debacles: fervent Obama supporters are, well, a little less fervent.

ITEM: Unions are pledging to register as Republicans and help Sen. Arlen Spector (R[allegedly]-PA) win his primary fight next year in exchange for voting for the Throw-Out-Secret-Ballots Act. Fortunately, Spector seems disinclined to play along. For now.

ITEM: Here’s one of the reasons why unions are working desperately with Democrats to implement unfair and unreasonable advantages. Here’s another (which  I linked to yesterday).

And now for some non-political items:

What it’s like to (almost) freeze to death.

Needle-free vaccines — why didn’t they have this when I was a kid?

Yet again, some real science and correlation shows that it’s the Sun that drives Earth’s climate, not man’s minimal CO2 contribution:

What part of this graph don't you understand?

In the meantime, some climate explorers trekking to the North Pole to measure how much the ice is melting have discovered, well, that it’s pretty cold up there.

Finally, to bright up your day (hat tip to the Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys):

That’s it for today; you’re on your own.  ..bruce w..

Something to keep an eye on…

Seems that there has been a stream of small quakes underneath the lake at Yellowstone.

Quakes under Yellowstone are nothing new. Yellowstone is the shell of a super-volcano, a caldera as it is called. It has erupted massively in the past and will do so again at some future date that we don’t know.

These quakes are all fairly shallow and in more or less the same spot. In addition they are in the area of the new magma dome under the lake. Last but not least, the traces from the seismic monitors have begun to take on the tell tale signs of harmonic tremors according to some folks on the web. This is an indication that magma is moving within the plumbing under the earth.

This likely means that a bit of normal volcano house keeping is going on, in fact many volcanos go through periods like this and no eruption ever takes place. Likewise there is an non-zero chance that the Yellowstone caldera could be starting to build up magma for an eruption several weeks or several centuries from now.

If you are feeling geo-nerdy, you can head over to the web siesmic monitoring page here, and look for the one labeled LKWY_SHZ_US

Map of where the quakes are popping below, click on image for the most recent map from the USGS.

Update – US News has a post on the subject here.

One of the most powerful earthquakes known of in continental North America since European settlement was the New Madrid earthquake in 1811. Damage occurred over an area of nearly 240,000 mi², and the quake itself was felt over an area of nearly 2 million mi². Here’s a partial description of the impact:

At the onset of the earthquake the ground rose and fell – bending the trees until their branches intertwined and opening deep cracks in the ground. Landslides swept down the steeper bluffs and hillslides; large areas of land were uplifted; and still larger areas sank and were covered with water that emerged through fissures or craterlets. Huge waves on the Mississippi River overwhelmed many boats and washed others high on the shore. High banks caved and collapsed into the river; sand bars and points of islands gave way; whole islands disappeared. Surface rupturing did not occur, however. The region most seriously affected was characterized by raised or sunken lands, fissures, sinks, sand blows, and large landslides that covered an area of 78,000 – 129,000 square kilometers, extending from Cairo, Illinois, to Memphis, Tennessee, and from Crowleys Ridge to Chickasaw Bluffs, Tennessee.

Although the motion during the first shock was violent at New Madrid, Missouri, it was not as heavy and destructive as that caused by two aftershocks about 6 hours later. Only one life was lost in falling buildings at New Madrid, but chimneys were toppled and log cabins were thrown down as far distant as Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Missouri; and in many places in Kentucky, Missouri, and Tennessee.

The map above shows the estimated epicenter of the 1811 New Madrid quake. The Midwest is not an area we tend to associate with major earthquakes — we tend to think of the Pacific Rim (California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska) instead. And the truth is, things have been pretty quiet in the Midwest since the New Madrid quake.

However, a 5.2 earthquake hit Illlinois this morning and was felt over a wide area. Here’s the epicenter [NOTE: the map is updating itself; it now appears there have been several aftershocks, including one at magnitude 4.5; click on the map below to go to the USGS web site]:

Not an area where you want to see increased seismic activity. Hopefully this is just a stress-reliever for the New Madrid fault system and not a harbinger of quakes to come. ..bruce w..

[Henderson - Update]

As fate would have it, I am in Central Illinois at the moment, and the quake is the subject of quite a bit of conversation here. Most folks in the rural area around Bloomington Illinois did not feel the quake, but it did crack the ceiling at my mother’s house.

What is interesting about the location is it is outside the normal New Madrid activity area, and I am sure it will cause scientist to reconsider the geometry of the midwest fault system.

Most of the people in this part of the US are vaguely familiar with the fact that there is an active seismic zone under foot, but they do not take it seriously.

Jerry also pointed out a National Academies report chaired by Calit2′s Director, Ramesh Rao, entitled Improving Disaster Management: The Role of IT in Mitigation, Preparedness, Response, and Recovery (you can order it at the link just given).

Jerry and Calit2 are putting together a site with copies of web-based content (such as ours) that provided information during the fires. If some of the rest of you who were running sites during the fire would be willing to have copies of your fire-related posts on that site, drop me a line, and I’ll give you Jerry’s contact information.

On a vaguely related note, I’ve moved the San Diego Fires blogroll below the regular blogroll, since the fires appear to be good and out. I’ll leave on the blog for the time being.  ..bruce w..

My biggest gaffe in all this was not anticipating the bandwidth issues — or, more precisely, expecting our web hosting firm to contact me before shutting the blog down completely, as they did at around 11 am PDT on Tuesday, October 23rd. At that point, we had over 1,400 people online simultaneously and had had over 3,000 hits the previous hour. Once the firm took us off-line, I called up with a credit card, let them know the critical nature of the information we were trying to get out, and asked them to get us moved up to a dedicated server ASAP. That took a little longer than they originally projected — about 3 hours instead of 2 — but that’s where the problems left my control.

Around the end of those three hours, the web hosting firm sent me the updated domain name server (DNS) information for the domain registrar. This DNS info clearly had problems with it (the IP addresses of both DNSs were identical, which Network Solutions promptly rejected), and I immediately replied (via e-mail) to the tech support group — but it would be another five (5) hours (and additional e-mails, plus at least one phone call) later before I got an “oops” e-mail from them with the correct DNS information. Even after I updated my domain name with the new DNS information, the blog still wouldn’t come up. I thought it might have to do with DNS propagation, but after a few more phone calls, it turned out the web hosting firm never re-enabled the PHP script that they had disabled to shut down the blog in the first place. Once they did that, the blog magically reappeared — at around 9 pm PDT, some ten hours after being shut down during the most critical day of the entire fire. In short, a good 7+ hours of our downtime was due to errors on the part of the web hosting firm.

I’m still hacked about this, in case you can’t tell, all the more so because at least one kind soul with plenty of bandwidth contacted us and offered to host our blog shortly after we went down on Tuesday. I considered it, but relied instead on the 2-hour estimate from my web hosting firm. Sigh.

Tremendous credit has to go to all the other web sites that were likewise doing their best to post information. The CalFire and San Diego County Emergency websites were struggling with the load on Monday and Tuesday, but had scaled up by Wednesday. The Sign On San Diego Fire Blog (run by the San Diego Union-Tribune) was my single best source of  timely information about fires, and I cited and liked to them in most of my fire-related posts. Bruce Henderson has already discussed at length the sources and methods he relied upon, particularly in doing his spectacular 3-D visualizations of the various fires. And, of course, there were the various blogs (bonbonio.org, Cat Dirt Sez, My Simple Life, and The Scratching Post, among others) also covering the fires, to whom we linked and who linked to us.

Most of the feedback we’ve received from readers has been positive to the point of embarrassment. You can see a lot of it in the public comments left on the SD Fires posts, but we’ve received e-mails as well. I’ve gone through and tried to extract comments that show why the blog was of use during the fires, particularly in comparison to other sources of information.

Now that you have the attention of so many of us, I would hope that you use your forum to educate people.  Different building and terrain conditions create different fire conditions. It would also be great to see more specific information on the “shelter in place” construction, vegetation and landscaping standards that Bruce H posted about.  The article referenced does not really give specifics.

I am from the Jesmond Dene area of Escondido but I have recently graduated college and moved to Texas…I found your website to be the most effective in keeping up to date with recent information on the fires and direction and there path of travel. I even let my parents know about your site even thought they are there they need to be in tune with info.

Your site has been an amazing resource for those of us who live in SD County.  Fortunately for me, the fire was never alarmingly close to my home (in Vista), but I didn’t know that until I saw your site.  You are doing something truly useful, and I admire that, partly because I aspire to do something truly useful myself, and know how much goes into it (both the direct effort, and the time it takes to cultivate the required skills to do something useful.)

I’m [from] a tiny town near Tacoma WA.  My sister lives in Coronado, CA, in San Diego Bay — she never appreciated the benefit of the sea-water moat around her island-town before this week.  I have a friend whose mom’s Rancho Bernardo home survived the fires by 1/2 mile.  And I love maps and was so frustrated at the lack of detail or map info from SD news sources early on (when signonsandiego.com wasn’t totally bogged down) and moreover from national TV:  all they showed was flames and more flames, no maps.  I’m absorbed and my heart is wrung by the unfolding story but I’m at work so haven’t had a lot of time to delve into every blogsite out there.  Yours put a human (and horse) face on the experience while providing so much map understanding!

I just want to say thank you for the hard work you all have done, the dedication and persistence, and for sharing it with all the rest of us.  This has been a valuable resource for keeping up from afar with developments down thataway for farflung folks like me, and I’m confident it was an anchor in the fog (smoke) for locals trying to parse out what their risk was and moves should be. So interesting to read references today to Bruce-the-map-guy’s intel outlook, and also the confirmation that’s what his training/experience at some point was.

By the way, it was an eerie experience when your website went black for all that time on … Tuesday?  The days muddle.  I’d found your great maps and site and was checking it every 4-5 hours;  sent links to a few folks for them to see too.  Then suddenly it wasn’t there, and I could only speculate that something bad had happened to wherever the server was — power outage, burnt up, something bad.  I thought that Horse Bruce might have had to evacuate but that wouldn’t have made the general site go down unless it was hosted at his house which was burning.  I was mystified and certainly was hoping for the best.  Had no idea it was the problem of pulling the plug because of overload of hits!  I had googled “San Diego fire map” and stumbled on your site.

First, I just want to express my gratitude toward you and the others; your efforts are deeply appreciated, much more so because it didn’t take a committee and a consensus; just expertise and good hearts.

For the future, there should be someone like you at the head of every disaster; an information specialist who sits at the top of the organization, but whose sole purpose is to gather and disseminate useful information.  Imagine if you had been sitting at the command center, hearing from the firefighters in the field, knowing where the hot spots were and able to disseminate the information almost in real time.

If there are legal and/or regulatory hurdles to such an effort, they should be analyzed and dealt with and proper legislation proposed.  E.g., you can’t be sued and taken for all you’re worth.

Perhaps you can market yourselves as consultants available in such an instance; start a professional organization for others of such ilk.  Consult with governmental agencies and get the structure set up ahead of time.  given the terrorist threat [ho-hum], this is a piece of the puzzle that would help a lot of people if it’s ever needed.

Thanks for your coverage of the SD wildfires.  I’m a San Diego native who’s currently in Nashville, TN.  My family is still in San Diego, so your blog has been a welcome source of information – especially with the flakiness of the CalFire website.  Thanks again for what you’re doing.  The coverage has been top notch.

You guys give the hard facts and info needed. Basically what the media is providing is pretty WEAK compared to you.

Your valiant efforts at ‘mashing’ fire info into concise statements and useful maps is greatly appreciated!

You guys could teach the emergency services a thing or six about coordinating and mashing – to the benefit of all.

Again… great work!  Be very proud of how much aid you provided to many worried folks!

Bruce, many thanks for your great website.   I live in NY and it’s been a tremendous relief to be able to follow breaking news, see evacuation areas and fire zones via your pictures and maps.  My sister and friends live in Encinitas/Rancho Santa Fe areas, some very close to edge of the fire.  I was distressed yesterday when you were down but happy now to be in touch again.  That list of homes sent chills down my spine this morning.  Good luck to all out there.

Thanks for the fire tracking on your blog.  Hard to get information better than this, even around here.

My mom is in PB at one of the hotels she owns.  She’s pretty certain that her house in Rancho Santa Fe is doomed based on what she’s seen on TV.  Do you know of any way to determine addresses or neighborhoods in specific areas that have burned?  Seems unlikely but, like Roseanne used to say, “You no ask, you no get!”

You get the idea.

It’s been quite an interesting run, but things are quickly returning to normal around here:

Still, if you go to Google and type in witch creek fires, our blog comes up at the top of the list. That is a credit to Bruce Henderson, who managed to create outstanding and useful visualizations of these fires while having to move his horse around and worry about possibly evacuating himself, his wife, and his cats.

We all hope nothing like this happens again any time soon.  ..bruce..