Author Archives: Jon

Russell Adam Burnham: U.S. Army NCO of the year

Staff Sgt. Russell Adam Burnham. Check out this Wikipedia entry – – which made it to Wikipedia’s English-language front page today. Burnham’s great-grandfather taught scouting skills to the guy who started the International Scouting Movement. Sgt. Burnham himself is an Eagle Scout. In 2004 – presumably before he became an NCO – he was soldier of the year.The first member of his family got to North America in 1617 – and there’s been a direct ancestor fighting for the United States in every war since the Revolution.

Somewhere in there – transferred to the Medical Corps – two years at Walter Reed.

Compare this to other Wasp-aristo resumes of recent vintage: no prep school, no Ivy League, no secret-handshake fraternities, jobs with investment banks.

Hats off, then, to Sgt. Burnham!

London Topological –

Here’s a 2005 piece from Building Blog called “London Topological.” Not to quibble – bu t perhaps more correctly London Infralogical – or Infra-Topo-

logical? We recommend it for the following reasons:

  1. Every piece on  Building Blog perhaps more properly, BLDG BLOG – is worth reading, whether or not you think that you care about architecture.
  2. Read a couple of pieces, and you’ll realize that of course

    you care about architecture.

  3. This particular piece has implications for anyone who thinks about (relatively) modern history
  4. and even more so for people who care about emergency planning. Although the author, Geoff Manaugh, doesn’t address those issues directly.

We’ll try to directly address the implications of underground system for emergency planners in upcoming posts.

Sherpa Guided Parachute Cargo System

Sherpa – metaphorically, as in trade name of Mist Mobility Integrated Systems Technology , Inc.in Ottawa, Canada, not “Sherpa” as high-altitude Nepalese ethnic group, famous as guides on Everest and other climbs.

(Photos via Military.Com, credit USMC Staff Sgt. Bill Lisbon)

s-sgt-bill-lisbon-usmc-8-9-04-soldiertech_sherpa1.jpg

Military.Com has adapted articles by Maj. John M. O’Regan and Benjamin Rooney for the Army Soldier Systems Center, and Staff Sgt. Bill Lisbon for the USMC 1st Force Service Support Group for this piece about the Sherpa, which is followed by an explanatory piece by Eric Daniel (no internal link; scroll to bottom of the page.

s-sgt-bill-lisbon-usmc-8-9-04-soldiertech_sherpa2.jpg

Link to Military.Com article.

NB:  This particular system is new – and, frankly, we don’t know much about the entire subject of dropping packages by air, which (1) is a critical capability in war and in civilian disaster, (2) has risks and costs, and (3) you’d rather avoid by having the logistical situation in hand beforehand – having said all that, this system uses GPS and probably reduces the risks attendant with dropping things out of planes. There’s a reason that kids like throwing things out of high windows – and reasons they get in trouble for it. More on JPADS and airborne cargo drops as we learn it.

Whole-Plane parachutes

In 1975, Boris Popov was in a glider accident.

“As I fell, I became most angry at my inability to do something,” Popov explained. “I had time to throw a parachute. I knew they existed but they hadn’t yet been introduced to the hang gliding community.” This event led Popov to invent the whole-aircraft parachute system and to found Ballistic Recovery Systems (BRS) in 1980.

The firm claims “BRS has sold more than 25

,000 of its parachute systems and has saved more than 199 lives. In 2004, the FAA and EASA both certified a BRS parachute system for the Cessna 182 to go along with the 172 certification

. The companies’ products are sold worldwide.”

Here’s a series of stills taken by NASA of Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS):

caps_deploy.jpg

Ballistic Recovery Systems

.

What we don’t know much about is the details of dropping cargo by parachute: accuracy, limits, safety to personnel on the ground.

Frank Shorter’s advice on avoiding injuries running in the heat

From Frank Shorter’s October 12th Op-Ed, “Running Into Trouble,”

in the Times:

AT the 16-mile mark of a very hot and humid marathon at the Pan American Games in Cali, Colombia, in 1971, I looked over at my good friend and teammate Kenny Moore and noticed something. “You’ve stopped sweating,” I said, trying to sound calm. Kenny looked at his dry forearms, and then his eyes got very big. Ten minutes later he was in an ambulance, incoherent with heat stroke.

• Make salt packets available at the start of races that are dangerously hot. In this context, salt is a good thing.

• Strip down. At the expo before the Chicago race, I advised men to go shirtless and women to wear as little as possible in order to maximize the refrigeration effect of wind against sweaty skin. (Unfortunately, this time there would be no wind.) The elite runners have learned this. In Chicago, I would have gone shirtless, and explained to my sponsors later.

• Have showers and misters at every aid station. In Chicago, drinking water ran out after runners poured hundreds of thousands of cups over their heads.

•  Change the standard ambulance procedures so that only those truly in danger are transported. Doctors will tell you that dehydration can often be initially handled on the scene, but many ambulance protocols call for sufferers to be transported automatically to the hospital.

Continue reading →

Alleged German terrorists apparently unable to improvise detonation mechanisms

In Suspect Denies Ties to German Bomb Plot, Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish report in the New York Times, dated 12 October, report on the case of a young GermanT man of Turkish extraction who

Atilla Selek, a young German man with Turkish parents, stands at the heart of the investigation here into the reports of a terrorist plot that shocked this nation last month. He is in Turkey, a free man for now, though he says he is under constant surveillance.

Intelligence officials say that Mr. Selek, 22, trained at a terrorist camp in Pakistan and was part of the inner circle of plotters, including the three who were arrested last month and accused of planning what the authorities say would have been a series of deadly bombings. Mr. Selek vehemently denies the accusations.

– snip –

This stood out:

German investigators are working to build a case against the three men under arrest and seven other people they say were associates in the suspected plot, which increasingly appears to have a Turkish connection. In the German federal court in Karlsruhe last week, a 15-year-old German boy of Tunisian descent testified that he had unwittingly carried the detonators from Istanbul to Germany, a security official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing a closed-door hearing.

The German magazine Spiegel reported that the boy had carried a package that included a pair of shoes and that the detonators had been hidden inside the soles of the shoes, to Fritz Gelowicz, one of the men in custody and a friend of Mr. Selek in Ulm. They attended the same religious centers, the Multi-Kultur-Haus and the Islamic Information Center, both of which German authorities say were sources of extreme Islamist teaching. The Multi-Kultur-Haus was closed by state authorities in December 2005.

If accurate, this group – or “cell” – didn’t have the sophistication to manage detonation by themselves. Detonation doesn’t necessarily call for sophisticated technology:

The explosive train, also called an initiation sequence or firing train, is the sequence of charges that progresses from relatively low levels of energy to initiate the final explosive material or main charge. There are low- and high-explosive trains. Low-explosive trains are as simple as a rifle cartridge, including a primer and a propellant charge. High-explosives trains can be more complex, either two-step (e.g., detonator and dynamite) or three-step (e.g., detonator, booster of primary explosive, and main charge of secondary explosive). Detonators are often made from tetryl and fulminates.  Source .

It’s not, in my view, bad news.

Kityakushu dramatic success in reducing welfare rolls; healthy adults die of starvation

New York Times reporter Norimitsu Onishi reports that Kityakushu, a city in Western Japan, has been a national model for limiting welfare payments even as unemployment and poverty increase. The downside is that at least three men have died of starvation, one in each of the last three years.

[singlepic=146,320,240,,left]   In reading Death Reveals Harsh Side of a ‘Model’ in Japan, it’s hard to avoid a causal inference: unemployment is up, there are budget pressures, few reservations about shaming the unfortunate, or blaming them – it’s hard to imagine that in a system in which 80% of applicants weren’t allowed to have a copy of the [singlepic=144,320,240,,right] application for assistance, those policies couldn’t have been foreseen to lead to more hunger. That hunger leads to illness and eventually death, one would think, would be a medical proposition with which welfare officials would be familiar.

“The man reportedly told neighbors that he had been denied benefits even though he had prostrated himself before a city official. At his death, he had lost about a third of his body weight and had only a few dollars.”

Continue reading →

Project Disaster: Primer on IEDs

Paul Rega at Project Disaster has posted a primer on IEDs – anyone and everyone involved in emergency response – especially those who are not in law enforcement or the military – if you know nothing about explosives, know this much:

Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, are booby traps–disguised or hidden devices–activated by victims or detonated remotely or on command. IEDs have been used since World War II and more recently in Chechnya, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

IEDs are intended to incapacitate or kill and to create intimidation and terror. They are used in unconventional warfare and by definition can be made with almost any type of material and initiator. These “homemade” devices employ pyrotechnic or incendiary chemicals and can be made in combination with toxic chemicals, biological toxins, or radiological material. Although IEDs can be found in varying sizes, functioning methods, containers, and delivery methods, they share a common set of components: some type of explosive fill, an initiation mechanism, a detonator, a power supply for the detonator, and a container. Although the press sometimes refers to them as roadside bombs, IEDs can be in packages, carried in vehicles (“car bombs”), or worn by suicide bombers.

Two or more IEDs may be detonated by coupling, linking one mine or explosive to another so that when one is detonated, the other goes off; rolling, setting off an unfuzed explosive after a mine-clearing roller has passed over it, by means of a second, fuzed device, which detonates the first one when it is underneath the clearing vehicle; boosting, stacking buried mines atop one another, with the deepest device being fuzed, helping reduce metal detection and increasing the force of the blast; sensitizing antitank mines, removing the pressure plate or spring to reduce the pressure required to set them off; and daisy chaining, linking mines to other explosives with trip wire or detonating cord.

IED configuration affects the velocity of explosion and the type of damage: low explosives must burn in a confined space so that the gas formed causes an explosion; high explosives generally must be detonated by a shock wave of considerable force, usually from a detonator or blasting cap.

To detect a victim-activated IED requires recognition of the initiating object as a booby trap. The enemy wants the unwary or distracted person to interfere with the object to set it off by touching or picking it up. IEDs have been found in tires, garbage bags, fire extinguishers, barrels, and dead animals.

Threat indicators include the theft of explosives or of chemicals used in making explosives; the rental of self-storage space to store explosive apparatus; deliveries of chemicals to residences; the purchase, rental, or theft of a large van or truck; or the addition of heavy-duty springs to a large vehicle to handle heavier loads. Continue reading →

What’s the rating system – the “metric” – for preparedness?

Hospitals have the Joint Commission on Accreditation on Hospital Organizations

; and there are many othes that certify other things: MAGNET certification , which means that the nurses are well-cared for, well-trained and well-equipped (inside tip: if nurse moral is bad – that’s not a hospital you want to be in.

NB: as of this writing, the JCAHO (Joint Commission) website is entirely down. Not even a 404 error. 

So who sets standards for evaluating preparedness? Nobody. But, as the NIUSR has pointed out -last year, Reader’s Digest took a shot. From the NIUSR Blog:

Reader’s Digest Preparedness Chart

Jamie Imus, writing on the NIUSR blog, makes this case:

How is Reader’s Digest qualified to measure the preparedness of our urban areas?

The answer is simple. They aren’t, but no one else was doing it, so they took it upon themselves.

This reveals three opportunities for NIUSR:

  1. Support RD for their initiative and recognition of the issues, and use this as an opportunity to critically review their work, offer our expertise, endorse the study (if appropriate) and potentially join them in this effort (they may want us to lead, as experts).
  2. RD is about to give this issue a spotlight and I think NIUSR should take advantage of that to talk about our “imperatives” and our progress, to date.
  3. Standards! What are they? Where are they? RD suggests that they don’t exist, so they did their best to come up with some. This is a gap that NIUSR needs to fill, until someone with more authority, expertise or resources wants to fill it.

Not only is this critical for the general public – and for professionals – but exceptionally important for the planners in citizen-response groups and NGO’s – especially those with less money – because accurately knowing weaknesses and strengths will make for better resource-allocation decisions.

Subterranea Britannica

Subbterranea Britannica

documenta underground structures – from WW II and the Cold War.  Here are images from various shelters in London:

Nick Catford wrote, in August of 2004,

After nearly eight years and thousands of miles the survey of 1563 ROC underground monitoring posts finally came to an end on Monday 16th August when the last post site was visited at Port Ellen on the Island of Islay off the Scottish west coast.

The folowing set are of disused Royal Observer Corps posts – they’re all  artifacts of the Cold War, acording to Subterranea Britannica – none has a construction date early than 1957; they were all closed in September of 1991:

Note that none appears hidden – at least not based on these relatively recent images. Nor does any have a gun port – or multiple gun ports, which could create a field of fire.

Subterranea Britannica: the  study and investigation of all man-made and man used underground places.

I’d like to see the tunnel that Sherlock Holmes discovered in the “The Red-Headed League.”

Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA)

  makes the case that military activities have had a profound environmental effect on Southern California:

Southern California’s health and environment has been profoundly transformed by military activity.   Did you know that the entire San Gabriel Valley is an EPA Superfund site – and the eastern half of the San Fernando Valley is similarly a Superfund site due to military pollution?

[singlepic=136,320,240,,left]  PSR-LA is working to ensure the cleanup of the Rocketdyne Laboratory in the Santa Susana Hills above Chatsworth

Military, intelligence, and to some extent, law-enforcement agencies, not without some reason , are exempt from many regulatory schemes. In the first place – there are often no civilian analogues – making regulations less relevant. Even more powerfully, they’re charged with critical and specialized tasks  [singlepic=137,320,240,,right] that might well, in an individual case, or in wartime, outweigh other concerns.

However, as Lord Acton observed, “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and the power – especially when masked by official government secrecy – tends to aggregate these decisions.

Fewer than 300 people were killed in the planes on September 11, 2001. The two planes which hit the World Trade Center hit buildings which were owned by the Port Authority of New York  and New Jersey – a bi-state agency. Because they were government-owned – even though most of the tenants were commercial tenants who might have rented from a regular commercial landlord – all sorts of building and fire codes were waived.

via Critical Spacial Practice

Damage Prevention Conference & Expo – December 5 and 6 in Las Vegas

According to a press release from Cygnus Business Media, which arranges the conference,

With the support and confidence of leading industry organizations, the highly regarded Damage Prevention Conference & Expo will celebrate its 10th anniversary this December 5 & 6 at the Las Vegas Hilton. The conference and exhibit floor responds to the demand for innovative products, services and training related to preventing damage to the nation’s underground infrastructure and serves professionals from municipalities; oil & gas facilities; telecom, CATV, and power companies; One-Call centers; excavation companies; utility contractors; and SUE firms. This year, show organizers are especially pleased to announce exclusive package pricing developed to offer the most productive and economical options available for companies sending teams of damage prevention professionals.

For those of you who aren’t following this – what you need to know is that the “one-call centers,” which are mandated by federal law, are Continue reading →