In a crisis, do the math

Ok I am sick of the federal response, or lack there of. This situation will be far worse after Congress and the White House finish their BBQ’s next week. 5,000 will die waiting for help just in the next 5 days.

Here is the base math. From this, one must do some math to determine the need. Just say in a disaster area, one needs an army that supports a ratio of 1 per 10. This is not news. So we need 150k in personnel in the area NOW. Not a week from now. NOW. That they are not there now helps explain the chaos.

Distressed people are probably around 1.5 MILLION. So the 25k national guard, plus 25 k private resources are about 100k short.

Yeah, watch the news to confirm, it is that bad.

This is now Thursday. This was known Monday and virtually nothing EXCEPT MAYBE additional National Guard resource have been moved into place.

The response, the recognition of what needs to be done is so sad, so pathetic, so tragic.

Base Math

Dead in LA , between 20,000 to 50,000. Ignore official reports. LSU has a standing study that says that this type of event kills 20% of non-evacuees. The current estimate is 120,000 evacuees in just New Orleans stayed behind, so 25k dead there. The rest of the Southeastern LA area has another 10k at least.

Dead in Miss and Ala, probably 2k, maybe 10k. The Mobile area is able to recover in 6 to 8 weeks, southern Miss will need until Halloween to get basic power to safe structures. New structures anywhere need 9 months. Homeless is 200k in this area, powerless is 500k for a month

How do I know that. Oakland and San Diego in the last few years lost 2500 homes each in structures due to fire each. The issue is that we need 6 to months to build and then enough contractors to rebuild. Both Oakland and San Diego were stretched beyond capacity to do that much new build, despite change in permit laws, new processes and so on. All that without flooding.

This issue is 20 times that and existing contractors cannot rebuild in less than a year, probably 2. No way contractors can do the rebuild, there are not enough in a year.

REBUILD is 2 YEARS

In the three states, 50 to 70k dead. Come on, this is the worst natural disaster to ever hit the US. Denial of that delays help to those that are in dire need.

This is bigger than Andrew, Camille and Galveston plus San Fran in 1906 COMBINED.

1 million homeless. 1 to 1.5 million jobless. 5 days later, 2 million without power and 1 million will be without power for a month. That ignores New Orleans and surrounding as they all will be moved out until Thanksgiving at the earliest

Do the math

We need an internet model to solve the issue. Texas has done tremendous service to solve the issue but really the best approach is many, many small places to go. Texas has offered so far 50k people of help. We need to make that 1 million. Many who did leave cannot come back now and are out of cash. We need to house a million new homeless. Those areas must exist for 6 to 9 months, until housing can be rebuilt. I live near Oakland and San Diego. I have seen it. This is so much worse.

Long term. I will just list the issues

Tax relief, bankruptcy relief, emergency money, aid and food, emergency law enforcement, new banking laws, new social security laws, long tern supply trains.

We need 2 million meals every day across the area. 5 million pints of water every day are needed. Currently deployed food and water will not feed people to Monday.

It is a math problem. The country needs to feed 1m every day for 60 days. The response is less than a week of supply.

The pictures are horrific. It will only get worse until the ramp up to the math gets solved.
Claiming we ordered and deployed enough to serve 20k of need is a joke. We have 1 million of need today, right now.

It is sad the administration is proud of what they have done. In the next 10 days, while they defend the structure, between 2 and 5 thousand people will die. No shelter, no meds, no contact, no food.

This requires 24-7 response. Poor George needs to suspend his fund raisers for a while. By the way, he only came back Wednesday because he would miss a huge fundraiser dinner Tuesday night in San Diego. So much for serving the needs of his people. Too bad all these people are dying while he dines on plastic chicken for 2008 and 2006 elections.

We need a leader NOW. We need to take everything we are doing and triple it. Hello George, step in and do endless conference calls to resolve the crisis. Or pass the buck to Chertoff, give him the Medal of Freedom later, fire him after and claim blamelessness. That worked for the head of the CIA in your last crisis.

Kind of like Iraq except now real, actual Americans die because of the process you love so much.

Congress should be in session by Friday AM. It seems maybe they will react. But we will use the existing plan, NOT DO THE MATH and thousands of people will die and needlessly suffer.

That may be more saddening than the event itself.

We have:
20k Army, National Guard, law enforcement somewhere in the area
5 million meals somewhere in the area
Ability to evacuate 3,000 people a day
Water to support 50,000 people a day
Housing in the area to support 25 thousand people, not everyone can go to Texas.

We need

100 thousand combined Army, Air Force, Navy, National Guard and local law enforcement. Suspend the normal laws, this is a crisis.

2 million meals a DAY in the area, distributed to established staging areas

Ability to evacuate 15 thousand people a day. We have 100,000 people in LA alone that have no way to get out and we are using school buses. Federalize some airplanes, use the HUGE airlift capacity at Travis in Cal and Wright-Patterson in Ohio. Did we not put those resources in place to be available just in times like now?


Clean water is the huge need right now. We will eventually plug the dikes and canals. We have 200 thousand people that need daily water in the area. Mobilize resources to move that much resource

Housing is huge long term but really the big need to now for shelter. 300 thousand people will run out of money by October 31st to pay hotel bills. That is probably low, like to be close to 1 million. Do you have enough cash and credit to live outside your house for 60 days at a hotel or family member?

The pieces needed are understood. The problem is the math. We need to increase what is required by somewhere a factor or 3 to 20.

The current response is DONATE TO THE RED CROSS. From Commander George the second himself, at least three times.

Are we serious here? He seems to be. What kind of leadership is that?

We knew all this Monday or Tuesday. Defending the original plan only kills and bankrupts people.

It is time to do the math and IMMEDIATELY scale the issue.

Anything less is just tragic as we know better, can do better but refuse to face the scope.

Do more than that, scream at your elected representatives and demand immediate Federal help on the scale needed.

The local response cannot solve the need. Sadly, it seems they can do the math on what they need. It is the Federal Government that has the resources needed and they seem to want to imitate Ostriches at the National Zoo.

So what is the Fourth of July?

Mr. B is fine, so is everyone else.

My posts have really sucked lately, my head is somewhere else. I am leaving now for a week vacation, to Boy Scout camp, to renew myself, to set the compass properly.

I promise some decent posts from that or at least that is my goal.

But I sit here, on the eve of the fourth of July and I think about how lucky I am. How much I have depended on the sacrifices of my ancestors and people I do not even pretend to know.

Soldiers, martyrs, heroes, patriots, civil rights advocates. People who in small ways and in large ways, chose to make a difference.

Is that not one of the legacies of our country?

So, my next post will be written by you. I will combine all your comments into one large post, to be written in a week upon my return.

Here is what you can comment about.

Whose shoulders do you stand on? Who made a difference in your life? Who is it that you only dream to impress or show what you are made of?

Use only people you actually know. No using Martin Luther King or JFK or Abe Lincoln.

For your grandmother is just as vital as any of those people.

I return on my birthday, July the 9th. Let’s see what we can make of the challenge.

What would Buddha do?

First off, my practice is consuming more of my time, that is a good thing. So I will only post once a week for now.

To catch you up on Mr. B., well he got a nasty foxtail in his eye last week and scratched his eyeball up nicely. He is on meds that require him to leave his pupil almost wide open in his right eye. But his eye has healed and now we have the consequence of the treatment.

One pupil is wide open, so the other has been forced to compensate, it remains almost shut. His ability to see depth is non existent and he can only see close to him in one eye and only therefore can see far in the other.

This causes him to be dis-orinented. As he swings his head, his vision blurs and it makes him uncomfortable. He sleeps less than he did, is cranky and confused.

The US Supreme Cout ruled on some religious issues today. They ruled quite wisely. In one case, in Tennessee, they ruled that a Ten Commandments display, in a field of other secular objects was improper.

In the Texas case, (how weird is that), they ruled that the Commandments in a field of other religious displays was ok.

Right wing Christians find this unheard of. Some extreme liberals find it confusing. How can we allow In God We Trust on the money, yet allow religion in any way.

The answer is simple. The Constitution allows religion, just not the active practice of one form to influence the government. We are not a Christian nation, but a religious nation of which Christianity is just one form

To all those that disagree, most founding fathers were Deists, go look up their principles.

More to the point, if we believe in diversity, if America is the global melting pot, must all that meld here be Christian?

Lastly, I must speak out on the insurgency. It seems we want Syria to close their borders. That they alone promote the conflict.

Yet, we in the US have essentially open borders and we seem to really suck at managing them.

And even stranger, 55% of insurgents come from Saudi Arabia, not Syria, Syria and what goes through there accounts for less than 20%.

But is there any conversation about closing the Saudi-Iraqi border? Why no.

Because just like Mr. B., we have lost our ability to see in stereo, that we can see both sides of a coin.

That just because most of us are Christian does not mean that we all are or that we all should be. Or that our government should be Christian as well.

Or that our issues in Iraq could be caused by an ally, the one with the longest, might as well most unguarded border. So we send the focus somewhere else, rather than look at the whole picture.

I find it humorous that Mr. B injured his right eye and his left eye must be squeezed almost shut to balance the damage. It means his right eye cannot see what is right in front of him and the vet cautioned me about his inability to judge his environment properly and that he puts himself in danger.

Our whole nation is split in half and each half sees the other side this way. Neither side is correct, to see a whole picture requires both eyes to work. That it is the other side whose eye on the world is stuck wide open and cannot see the danger right in front of them is a dangerous position and surely invites conflict and confusion.

I don’t know what the solution is. My vet said that Mr. B’s eye will only heal in time. I guess that is the same for us.

I hope we just see we have a problem and agree to do more in balance. For what would Buddha do is just a valid a mantra as would Jesus do. Is that not what the strength of diversity all about?

Lucky young Mr. Hawkins

That young Utah scout was found alive today. He was damn lucky. Most folks HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO IN AN EMERGENCY.

Let me help. I have 20 years in Scouting and teach survival skills, both basic and high country. They apply to being lost on a hike to what happens after a tornado, hurricane or earthquake.

First, check for injuries.

Common ones like broken bones etc are easy but watch to see if you balance is off or anything else unusual. You may have internal injuries and not be aware, sleepiness out of hand or intestinal discomfort need immediate medical attention.

Second find shelter. Exposure is deadly. You may be in shock and not know. Look at the pupils and see if they react. If not, keep very warm.

Third is FRESH water. If not sure, boil it for 5 minutes and let cool. You can go 30 days without food but 10 days or so without water.

Clean lavatory area, make sure it is downhill from you. Fecal contamination can kill in 72 hours. If not, you will feel just awful. Urine is relatively safe but do that also downhill from you.

NOW plan what to do. IF you can, stay put, searchers only search an area once. You can easily get lost and wander back to an area searched and never be found in time.

If you must travel, go downhill. Find a stream if you can, they always flow downhill. Civilization is usually downhill. Plus you will be close to fresh water and the warmest temps in the area. But be very careful on getting wet, that leads to exposure.

That is it. I have watched some of the coverage on the rescue of the young scout today and I just had to fire off an email to MSNBC. Their coverage was off base, inaccurate and easily correctable.

By the way, it is highly unlikely this 11 year old knew what to do. He wasn’t in Boy Scouts it seems, so he would have never been shown the skills I just mentioned.

He was just lucky. And that area is not remote, I’ve been in that area, it is combed with trails and campsites.

From: mega801@comcast.net [Add to Address Book] [View Source]

To: connected@msnbc.com
Subject: Lucky Mr. Hawkins
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 21:44:43 +0000

I am a 13 scout leader as well as a former scout. Young Mr. Hawkins made several fundemental errors as well as some clarity is required on some of your stated issues like entry requirements and the remoteness of the area..

He was eligible at age 11 to be a Boy Scout. In fact, he could have been one at age 10 and a half, under certain conditions. Why was he not one by the time he was going to a Boy Scout camp in June, I cannot say. The Great Salt Lake Council is better positioned to answer that. But he was old enough to be a Boy Scout, not a Webelos or a Cub Scout.

It is also fair to say that a brand new scout or a Cub Scout would not have anywhere near the survival skills that a First Class Scout would have. Only because they are not officially taught them at that stage in their progress.

He broke the buddy system. He wandered away from known encampments, showing he was not well oriented with the camp area.

He made two other judgments that complicated things. He wandered away and kept going rather than stay put. Many people are never found as they wander in circles, entering areas already searched. Hopefully that was not the case here.

It seems instead that the young man wandered straight up and over a ridge. This is also bad judgment.

Civilization is usually found downhill. Find a stream edge and follow it down to the source. It can become a source of fresh water ( lake water is not nearly as safe to drink usually as stream water) as well as a trail.

Buddy system, know your surroundings, stay on a trail, head downhill, if you find a stream, do not cross it but use it as fresh water. Simple rules.

No disrespect to the young man, he was more lucky than good this time.

By the way, that area of Utah is crawling with trails, 4 wheeling, hiking and camping. While in a forest, it is a well camped forest area, ESPECIALLY in the lake area he was found in. He was only a few miles from a decent highway that connects to Wyoming.

It is apparent to me that he had not been very well trained in Scout skills. I will use this example as a refresher to my own troop.

We all can get lost and started making bad decisions, even if we knew better.

Thank goodness he was found safe.

Mike North Sr.
Troop 801
Hayward Ca

Buy the premise

My brother’s favorite phrase is:

Buy the premise, buy the punchline.

The more I think about that, the more I think that is true.

I was forced to blog about it when the other day while watching Newt Gingrich on Fox (yeah, I watch Fox, know your enemy).

He was proclaiming how he and Hillary had developed this bill that would improve record keeping therefore saving 100,000 lives a year. It ticked me off.

Premise number 1, medicine saves lives, as do fireman, policeman and so on. No they don’t, occasionally, they extend lives. They defer one form of death until another pops up. As Jim Morrison said, no one gets out of here alive.

I think the conversation needs to be on quality of life, not just how long you live.

Premise number 2, Ethics. We should do this or that. My grandfather taught me this. Mankind cannot do should before can.

We try everything. No matter how bad, no matter the potential consequence. We knew nuclear weapons were bad, we dropped two anyway.

Ethics comes from experience, direct experience. If you haven’t done it, haven’t experienced it, do tell people they shouldn’t, because they will.

Premise number 3, progress can be stopped. I am making this political but it doesn’t have to be. On every issue, there are people that want fast progress, fast progression and those that want slow progression.

Those that want slow progression, if they add value by tempering the issue by stating the issues that arise during the progress, are ok with me. If they turn and say progression is bad or should never happen, well the road of history is littered with bodies of people who did that, even if they are remembered at all.

History is favored by progress. Sorry, but liberalism works. Jesse Helms now looks like a fool. Can you find anyone left who is pro-slavery or against a woman’s’ right to vote? Segregation still ok?

The new progressive issues of the day, abortion, gay rights and marriage, smoking, self-determination, even prisoner rights and sentencing laws will be dealt with. The only issue is how long they take.

The angst some of us feel now on these issues is the same angst our ancestors felt on previous issues. It took courage to adopt progressive ideas and turn them into ideals. Martin Luther King is dead from his personal courage. But it is easier that that. Those that supported progress in the past eventually saw their positions upheld. The same will be required of us. To turn away is to invoke cowardice and support denial.

If you want to temper progress, I will listen. If you want to deny it, stand aside, the tide of humanity will eventually wash you out to sea.

Last premise, evil can be stopped or contained. Life is a duality, we all have good and bad. The nature of civilization is that bad people emerge from time to time. There is no end to the war on terror. It is convenient to call it that, the war on terror but the war on terror therefore goes back, what 1000 years to the invasion of England by Rome, or to the Huns in Europe or maybe to the Vikings descent into France or to Christian invasion of the holy land during the crusades.

Life creates bad guys. This really isn’t a war, it is using the name of war, the concept of war to attack bad guys. And not surprisingly, it isn’t working. Some history and facts may help

War means state against state. Diplomacy sucked and away we go. Vietnam was a kind of a war. Ever since then, any military action we have taken is really to topple regimes we do not like. Kuwait was really a disaster as all we did was force Saddam to retreat. Now, that was our mandate but a war, no.

Going after the Serbs was to topple them, not take over the country. Panama was about doing what?

No, so sadly, we have allowed our moral fiber to become such that we use our limited military options to aggressively topple dictators we hate. We used to be subtle, now we do it in the open, whether we have the permission of the UN or not.

In WWII we were losing more soldiers in a month, sometimes in a week than we lost in this whole Iraqi overthrow. Imagine 2 million US soldiers killed for the sanctity of Iraq.
Bad guys exist but going and declaring it a war is laughable in the long run.

It may actually work but I doubt it in the next 5 years. Forcing self determination has never worked in history. They will have to be left alone to grow it themselves. They will have a civil war on more evident terms that exist today.

And then, we will deal with the next bad guy. We have been doing this since 6,000 BC.

So what premise do you not buy off on?

The man and the Moon

Thanks to all that wrote. I am fine, just REALLY busy. It should slow down for next week, after that, who knows.

I have always loved the moon. It really got going when my dad bought me a 50x telescope. Now this bad boy had one lens, 2 power settings. No drive motor, no tracking device. The lens really sucked for 50 power, so it was only really good for one thing, looking at the moon.

The first big day err night, was watching a lunar eclipse. It happened in 1967, I think, and it was SO COOL seeing the shadow creep across the face of the moon. Lots of neighbors came over to look through. I was the only one in the neighborhood who had a telescope (hey, this is 1967, people). The moon was orange that night and you could really see it in the telescope.

I was all of 10 but I was the man that night.

In 1968, Apollo 8 went behind the moon on Christmas Eve, came back around and showed that unbelievable scene of the Earth rising. I was out in the backyard that night looking at the moon, hoping MAYBE I could see a glint off their ship. I learned later that it would have taken the telescope at Mt. Wilson, the largest in the world at that time, to see them but I was out there.

I heard the astronauts speaking on TV and came in. They were reading from the book of Genesis. It was just a stunning moment. The Earth was so BLUE, with white puffy clouds and they were describing the start of the universe. I’ll never forget that. We all cried after they signed off and I went back outside to see if I could see them, like they had looked at us. No luck.

About a year later I read that the nursery rhyme about Jack and Jill was about the shape of the dark spaces on the moon. Out comes the telescope and damned if they weren’t right. The shape on the left, Jack, is better defined than Jill, so that is why she carries a pail of water, to account for the shapes.

Damn I thought, most nursery rhymes are myths to explain real things. Joseph Campbell wrote about that and became my hero when I went to college and I found his works. But one November night, I SAW Jack and Jill and just smiled. I discovered the power of wisdom that night.

Later, Carl Sagan came to prominence. He helped us understand how large the universe really is. How many stars there really are. I took some astronomy classes in college to learn more. They were all about math. I would have taught the about everything but the math. If they really love it, let them learn about the speed of the Doppler red shift as a Junior, not as a Freshman. Hubble and his constant could wait.

Hand a Freshman a telescope, a decent one and let them gaze back in time. Do enough of that, seeing Andromeda, the Pleiades and so on and that would hook them. Or study crater shadows on the moon, like I did. If you look at a crater enough times, you detect changes in shadow size. That tells you, with some simple math, how high a crater wall is. You feel proud and then, you picture that crater in your mind and the moon becomes real to you. Damn, a crater wall 3,000 feet high, as high as that mountain near my house, all around me. Living in that crater would be wild.

So I was reading a NASA brief on return to flight for the Shuttle. It said, in a side note that the shuttle program will end in almost exactly five years and then we change and will go back to the moon. That is right, no more shuttle launches after 2010.

Instead, and god help me for saying this, thanks to George Bush, we return to a main feature of our species, exploring space. Shuttles were fun and we learned a few things but they did not challenge us. The moon and the next target will.

With any luck, by 2012, we will be back on the moon. I am sure Richard Branson and his 3 minute flights in zero G will also be available then. Virgin Space flights, what a loser. He is not bold, he cannibalizes the work of great men, Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz and the astronauts, all of them. Branson has no vision, only gall.

After the moon, at some vague point in the future, we will go to Mars. I have been to the telescope that first studied Mars, in Flagstaff AZ, home to the eccentric Percival Lowell. They eventually named a planet, Pluto after this guy. But he was convinced Mars had life. The term he used was Canali. It was Italian and meant canals. And that intelligent beings built them. We now know that he was way off but the canals mean water and probably life at some point. We will go there by 2040 at the latest, too late for me.

So I go back to the moon. There are trillions of moons in our universe. There must be billions of beings looking at their own moon right now. They are so far from us, we will never meet.

They must know we probably exist just like we know, somewhere out there, they exist, in their own fashion. So a leap of faith is involved.

You must go from Jack and Jill to Neil Armstrong to going to Mars to understanding we cannot be alone, just apart.

That all starts at the Moon, our closest neighbor. Of course, we have no idea how to get there, we threw all the plans away. Honest. So we are at start over.

But we will go and we will get there. Maybe by then, I will own a CCD telescope, where I can see them as they get there. So I can live my dream.

To take my Jill up the hill, to fetch a pail of water.

And the view from up here is

I have a heart condition. It means I can no longer do strenuous hikes. That sucks because I used to like them. The view from the top of a mountain is wonderful. I have been on many, including the tallest in the lower 48, Mt. Whitney.

But those days are gone now. I was sad for awhile but no longer. I didn’t climb them for exercise. Sort of like the Bill Cosby line I love “I don’t understand cross country running, going three miles in the heat just to throw up at the end.”

It is the “peak experience” that I crave. Not the rush of reaching the top. And don’t kid yourself, there is quite the rush there.

It isn’t any longer for me about conquering yourself, driving yourself to the top of something. I’ve done that plenty, I get that one.

The tram in Palm Springs therefore was perfect. High enough to see far, 8,516 ft at the station at the top. And there were some real mountains after that, one over 11,000 ft.

I had no interest in that. No I wanted to first rush up the side of a mountain, not is days but in minutes. That tram climbs just about 6,000 in net elevation in less than 7 minutes. That is not in cable feet, that is net gain in altitude. You go from desert floor to alpine forest in about the time it takes to smoke a cigarette. That is wild.

Then you can either go out to look at forests and two higher peaks or face east and see 75 miles or more on a clear day for about 3/4ths of the way around you.

That is what I wanted. I climbed up and asked for a peak experience. What that means is you get very quiet and just look out, out as far as you can see and ask “what does my future bring, where I am headed?” And you wait and your spirit will answer.

Usually it is a quiet answer, sometimes a few sentences. And you say thank you and you leave. I am certain it is a major reason why people climb mountains, I have asked a few and they all do it, they ask questions at the top and wait for the answer to come.

So as I looked out, it was quite hazy and I could not see as far as was possible. I have looked out from mountains and been able to see 200 miles. Today was at best, maybe 40 miles and then the world disappeared.

And the answer came back.

“What did you expect, the future is not certain, plans are only that. You want certain, jump. Death is certain. Life is certain, rebirth is certain, all else is just a guess.

“What? “ I said quietly.

“Life means making choices. Don’t get hung up on plans. While everyone makes them, only fools believe they guarantee anything.”

“You came up here to learn that no matter what you do, you can only see so far ahead and it is all blur after that”. “You have something to do, so go do it and see where it leads. Go make your own trail and share the trail with others.”

“Huh, is there more?” I asked, almost hoping the answer was no.

“while you grow old, you realize that you can only look at but not really see your future, so live and love in the now, not in the whenever or in the maybe. You can go now.”

I walked silently down off the lookout point. The wifey was waiting patiently. “Learn anything dear?” she asked.

“oh, just that I know less and less all the time but in a weird way, that is a good thing. “

“Is that it?” she politely inquired

“Just that it is time to go, if we make a decision, we gain an experience, so let’s go back down the hill now and get some food” I replied softly.

We wandered into the tram car and it gently pulled out and then down the mountain. I looked up silently and said “Thank you.” A gentle “You’re welcome and drive safely”, then a small chuckle came back.

I nearly hit another car about 20 minutes later, on our way to dinner. Explain that one.

So off I go, in fact, off we all go, thanks for sharing the trail with me.