popular logistics

From James R. Chiles, Inviting Disaster:

Too often we just go through the motions of preparing for bad situations, assuming that the oly contingencies that might happen are simple or convenient ones. One of the missed opportunities at Babcock & Wilcox’s simulator training center before the TMI-2 [Three Mile Island] crisis was that the company only lobbed easy softballs to their reactor operator trainees, meaning they presented them only with textbook problems, signaled clearly by the instruments. When much more vexing multiple problems came up in the real world, operators were not ready.

We need to accept that on really bad days, more than one thing is going to go wrong. It will be maddening and frightening. There is no law of the universe that says one bad thing cannot be followed immediately by  several more, and even worse, things.

STF’s developed by Professor Norman Wagner of the University of Delaware, as - if I’ve got the names right a joint project between Delaware Center for Composite Materials and the Army Research Lab. are already in use. (Professor Wagner seems a bit shy, but very proud of his students. The website for his research group is filled with photos of his colleagues, graduate students and undergraduates - but what should be his personal page on the University of Delaware site is a dead link). STFs are added to Kevlar, making ballistic armor more effective;

D30 Labs has been making STF’s available to the civilian market. The Swiss Company RibCap has been making what look like normal knit caps - soft until subjected to a sudden force - at which time they behave like crash helmets:

At the moment not, apparently, available in the United States - but they’re available via some Canadian and British stores - and an American web outlet is apparently underway - for the meantime, that website directs customers to sales at ribcap dash usa dot com.

We’d like to know more - and see test data - but if effective, these soft hats should be in every go-bag - and worn by every emergency responder who’s not already wearing protective headgear.

Via Wired (body armor) and CoolTools (RibCap).

This essay, “Prepare for Disaster,” by Tom LaTourrette and Ed Chan of the RAND Corporation, was written in 2005 following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But it could have been written yesterday or ten years ago. Weighing in at 812 words, it’s a concise statement of a reasonable framework for discussing disaster planning and response. With Stuart Brand’s account of the San Francisco earthquake, this essay would be an ideal starting point.

Reducing risk entails long-term investment in planning, prevention, and protection. Emergency response is the last resort and should never be relied on as a primary strategy for preventing disasters.

- snip -

As with local response, there is a point beyond which the cost of maintaining standby resources exceeds their benefit. Although it is not clear where this point is, if we accept that this point exists we need to look to alternative approaches. The better prepared a community is to deal with a disaster, the lower the emergency response needs.

Popular Logistics thanks everyone for their words of praise about our predictions - on line and in the neighborhood - about trouble with New York’s petroleum fuel pipelines. Which run, incidentally, more or less directly underneath our editorial offices (and bedroom). Those messages were occasioned by news reports of arrests in a terrorist plot to blow up Kennedy Airport (JFK), its fuel depots, and the Buckeye Pipelines.

In any case, our concern is that we don’t need terrorists for these pipelines to be an alarming risk. Negligence and accident will do just fine.

Plus there’s  the question of what appears to be an alarming incidence of premenopausal breast cancer cases along the pipeline. More as we learn it.

The short version: Marine Corps officers in the field requested 1,000 additional bomb-proof vehicles in February of 2005. No substantial action was taken until November of 2006. 

Please note - we’re talking about additional production of an existing technology - not the development of anything new.

Wired’s Danger Room has the story. See Noah Schachtman and Sharon Weinberger’s important and disturbing piece  here.

An excerpt:

According to a Marine Corps document provided to DANGER ROOM, the request for over 1,000 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles came in February, 2005.  A formal call to fulfill that order did not emerge until November, 2006.   ”There is an immediate need for an MRAP vehicle capability to increase survivability and mobility of Marines operating in a hazardous fire area against known threats,” the 2005 “universal need statement” notes.

Medgadget reports on a new portable water purifier.   At 50 liters per duty cycle, given a 30-day supply problem, 1 liter per day per person - this might be ideal in a go-bag - but we’d like to see larger non-electric filtration devices - gravity-fed would be nice - that could handle the water needs of small apartment buildings, perhaps.

FC AA 31 82 19 1C 34 8E 79 C8 74 B3 0C 7D D9 8E

We got this courtesy of Professor Ed Felten  of Princeton, which is a school in New Jersey.

Professor Felten has been up late, making unique character strings just like this one. You can have your own, but you can’t have ours.

Get one here.

We learned about it from this post in BoingBoing, which will explain it all to you.

A digression about Cornel West 

We hope that Professor West of Princeton gets his own 128-bit number; in our household, he’s regarded as the greatest living American orator. We’re still disappointed he didn’t end up in the open United States Senate seat for New Jersey a while back, to which Robert Menendez was appointed. Don’t get us wrong - we like Senator Menendez, and worked on his campaign. But we were hoping for Cornel West. Unfortunately, appointing Cornel West would have quadrupled the mean intelligence of the Capitol , and apparently the security people decided the Senate chamber isn’t able to handle the stress.

Popular Logistics promises that if we can, we’ll post a recording of Professor West reading his own number - or ours - he has our permission.

From Tyler Cowen’s post at Marginal Revolution.

Which cites a May 4, 2007 article in The Wall Street Journal:

According to a voluntary survey cited in the report, 48% of Caribbean adolescent girls surveyed described their own “sexual initiation” as forced.

A single rape is a great evil; assuming that this number is even remotely accurate - I’ve no reason to think otherwise - this suggests a widespread tolerance - or endorsement of forcible sex among men. And resignation to it among women. From MacBeth: 

when sorrows come, they come

not single spies, but in battalions.

On further reflection - I’m not sure what the other layers of meaning are here - only that rape - like torture, hunger, homelessness - it’s within our collective power to end them. Had we the wit and will among us to do it.

Independently powered - no wiring; indifferent to grid failures. This technology, we’d think, would be an urban planning no-brainer. Here’s one example, from a piece by Lloyd Alter in TreeHugger:

And here’s a whole street of them:

According to the manufacturer’s website, these photographs are of the system installed in Entebbe, Uganda.

It would seem that in the short run - it would be useful to have these in likely places of emergency assembly - school parking lots, parks, near government buildings. There’s also the question of portable configurations, which might be a good thing for FEMA to forward-cache. They don’t require generators - or fuel - and satisfy a primary objective - lighting - taking the load from emergency generators to power other things (blow dryers for ranking government officials?).

We’re sorry that it took Bob Levinson’s misfortune for us to find out about Stories That Matter  - especially their columnist Joe Trento.

With respect to the Levinson matter - now trying to reconstruct the path of coverage - but for Stories That Matter  - some of the pieces are bylined “National Security News Service” - one of their trade names - it looks like there might not have been much coverage at all.

We’re aware that Popular Logistics has recently acquired a small audience - a fraction of the large population of Levinson loyalists - but working backwards - we think that our third- and fourth-hand “reports of reports” originated largely with Mr. Trento. To whom many thanks are due.

A link to the NSNS/Trento/Stories That Matter coverage of l’affaire Levinson.

According to www.hindu.com - we understand it to be the on-line version of a large English-language Indian daily paper:

…. Iranian media is reporting behind the scenes activity that could encourage the release of some of the detained Iranians. According to the Iranian website Baztab, detained American Robert Levinson was turned over to American officials within the last 24-hours.

The entire Hindu piece here.

However, the Baztab piece cites back to the earlier “National Security News Service” piece of May 2nd.

According to Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) , Baztab is

close to the former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rezai, highly critical of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, was banned by the State Council on 29 March. Iranian news agency ISNA, reported that supporters of the president had taken out 15 law suits against it. It was previously blocked on 12 February and 19 March for posting “false” news which “violated the Constitution”, “damaging private life” or the “unity of the country” [Criticizing Ahmadinejad)

[A piece on the same page, reports that the ban has been lifted]:

The Iranian authorities yesterday lifted a ban on the conservative website Baztab.com, one of the most visited sites in Iran. The ban was imposed on 12 February under regulations adopted on 27 November 2006 forbidding the publication of “false” information, “violating the constitution” and attacking “personal privacy” or “the country’s unity.” The site had published reports on Iran’s nuclear industry and on corruption in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was criticised.

Reporters San Frontieres piece here.

The National Security News Service - is a division of Stories That Matter - a group of journalists with impressive investigative and journalistic resumes - Popular Logistics is familiar with some of the players - but not the group. However, our reading is that this sourcing - via NSNS/Stories That Matter - makes it more likely that accounts of Bobby Levinson’s release are accurate.

Probably about 25 more than necessary, one would think.

Two NYC Transit Authority track workers have been killed, and one critically injured, within the last month, in two incidents. Basic reporting here via NY1.

What track workers have are flashlights, reflective vests and helmets.

What they don’t have includes:

• radios to speak with each other and supervisors
• any sort of automated system to allow dispatchers and train operators to know they’re there (they depend on “flaggers,” colleagues with hand-held flags

Twenty-five have been killed since 1980, according to Newsday

A good 2003 piece from the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH)

Gothamist’s coverage, with a lovely photograph.

I’m quite certain that I heard a WNYC report this morning that there had been reports that in one of the incidents - a supervisor had attempted to engage an electrical safety system - to turn off the third rail which had failed. Thus far, am not able to find a reference.  JS

Firefighters removing dead  from the rubble of a 7th Ave. subway cavein in 1915. The uniforms are clearly pre-Nomex - fire- and-heat-resistant textiles.  The equipment may be better now - perhaps staffing levels as well. They’ve gained some with better resources; but we’ve allowed the city and their jobs -  to become  more dangerous, too.

We don’t know much about the 1915 NYFD; we’ve never met a current NYFD firefighter who failed to impress. We’re not always confident of the decisions made at the political level. The men and the women in New York’s firehouses embody New York’s best qualities: fast, strong, and quick-witted. Not necessarily the best-equipped. We don’t get nearly enough invitations to dinner in firehouses, so we’re not prepared to comment on persistent rumors that certain New York City firehouses serve better meals than some of our better restaurants.

We’re not saying it isn’t true, mind you.

From old-picture.com. Via Gothamist.

Have nearly completed Inviting Disaster by James R. Chiles. I’m certain that this book, like Redlener’s, joins Henry Petroski’s How Buildings Fail, will become one of a number of books that will be widely read by people well-informed about risk - and that has the possibility, if read widely enough, to be powerful influence on policy. We’ll be posting more about it - but this is on the short list - given the opportunity, I’d distribute copies to our legislators and community leaders.

Chiles also has a website at www.invitingdisaster.com

Fox news has reported that Bobby Levinson may have been released by the Iranians. We hope this is true. Eds.