The Thomas Chronicles

This is a story about the town that was.

Its path of destruction snaked 43 miles long and it touched ground for over one hour. It was one tornado. It was 1.2 miles wide.

In just a few second, hardly more than an eye-blink, the town of Parkersburg, Iowa was obliterated into pieces of confetti. The County Sheriff Jason Johnson said, “This town is not just torn up. It’s gone.”

Foxnews reported today:

Johnson’s home was one of more than 400 damaged here. Another 220 buildings were destroyed including the town’s high school, its sole grocery store and its only gas station. “It’s catastrophic,” Johnson told me as he reflected on the damage. “It’s amazing how much energy this storm had.”

Even more incredible is that there were only four fatalities in Parkersburg and two more in the neighboring town of New Hartford. In a town of roughly two thousand people, four seems like a remarkably small number of people. It looked like the town’s been sandblasted out of existence by Mother Nature.

Unlike China and other areas of the world afflicted with natural disasters where people die in the hundreds and thousands, we have been remarkably blessed.

Have you ever heard of a tornado in Denver, Colorado? Me neither…

Update 5/22/08:

Commenter, Pete (Alois), wrote that apparently tornadoes in Eastern Colorado are fairly common. Here’s a fantastic image of a tornado in Eastern Colorado last year.

We’ve been having a peculiar spasm of bizarre natural events lately, and I thought it would be interesting to recount just a few of them.

– We have the ongoing problem of the Mississippi River swelling to uncomfortable levels due to the rain and snowfall earlier this month.

– There was an unprecedented swarm of earthquakes off the coast of Oregon. The strange location of the earthquakes prompted one geologist, Robert Dziak, to note:

“In the 17 years we’ve been monitoring the ocean through hydrophone recordings, we’ve never seen a swarm of earthquakes in an area such as this,” Dziak said. “We’re not certain what it means. But we hope to have a ship divert to the site and take some water samples that may help us learn more.”

– Last week, Illinois was treated to a wake up call. A 5.2 earthquake rocked St. Louis and southern Illinois.

– Wild fires are raging in New Mexico around Mountainaire earlier this week. It’s still going on last I checked.

– Today, a 4.4 earthquake struck Reno.

With the exception of the ongoing flood and potential flood situation along the Mississippi, all these other events have happened around 10 days of each other. This is pretty astonishing when you stop and think about it. The sheer density of events is incredible.

In very short order, I wonder if the human psyche can cope with the pace of events. I’m willing to venture a guess that a sizable portion of the people in the United States and the world have already gone mad from the rate of change in our world.

And if you have doubts on this, imagine yourself as a Chinese peasant around thirty-five years old. Roughly twenty-five years ago, when you were ten, your nation was a predominately agrarian society. Now, it’s become a high-tech industrial society. Everything you’ve known in your whole life keeps changing every few years.

To bring the point on home, there are certain towns out in Arizona that only just five or six years ago only housed five hundred to one thousand people. Now, many of those small towns are suddenly called cities as the thousands poured in from outside the state from California and the Northeast. I know of one such town that was strangely dubbed the fastest growing city in America. From 500 to the expected 350,000 by 2025.

Even my hometown, Houston, Texas, has changed radically in the five years since I left. Roughly 800,000 people have poured into the city from California and New Orleans and the Northeast (Ain’t it funny how people are doing a mass exodus from California? The problem is, the newcomers usually maintain their adherence to the same mentality that created the dysfunctions of California.) On my visits home, I almost feel alien there.

I know this was a total segue from my initial topic of natural phenomenon but it felt relevant at the time.

This past Tuesday millions of cellphones across Mexico fell silent. Reuters reported that omni-present ringtones and conversations conducted by solitary people on the side of the roads were suddenly treated to the golden silence that once pervaded all American movie theaters.

No, this was not due to a rediscovered sense of manners and propriety, but because of a “technical problem” with the cellular phone network.

According to the link provided by ZDNet News, they implied that these “technical problems” derive from vulnerabilities in the Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems on mobile devices. Because many cell phones, PDA’s and blackberries et al have internet access, particularly malicious websites or jpegs can potentially carry out DOS attacks, or Denial-of-Service attacks, aimed to render computer/internet resources unavailable to the user.

Apparently, the network was “saturated” with such errors and crashed yesterday for hours. The Telcel cell phone network, owned by America Movil, has 40 million people attached to it’s network, most of whom reside in an around Mexico City.

This is just another recent example of how dependent and, thus, how vulnerable we are to technological failures. We seem so impressed with our internet, TiVo, and digital cameras that we don’t realize we are a hiccup away from calamity, and the fact that this occurred in Mexico this time and not the United States shouldn’t offer any consolation. If anything such a potential disaster makes us more vulnerable than Mexico because of our utter dependence on this technology.

As the world races toward erecting wireless towers, busily plugging parts of the world’s cranium together with invisible cables, our concrete infrastructure deteriorates under a mindless negligence and an utter disregard of reality.

As wonderful and magical as wireless technology is, it cannot replace the physical infrastructure upon which it is built. A wireless capable laptop or blackberry is fundamentally useless without the energy required to send and receive the signals, from towers, from hotspots. What’s more, cell phone towers are inherently much more vulnerable to the whims of chance and nature than “land-lines”.

In the ongoing winter freeze sweeping across America, first in the West, then the South, and now the Midwest to New England, we have seen power lines and telecommunication lines bend and crack under the weight of hard ice. Hundreds are still without power. (Heck, I don’t even know if people in Colorado have electricity yet— and they lost it in December!)

If weather can do this to physical structures, it is not hard to imagine what would happen to wireless communications in such an eventuality, since wireless connections are, by nature, fickle and tenuous and very much at the mercy of its environment.

Like our aging power grid, most of our telecommunications infrastructure was also constructed about half a century ago and is in terrible need of an overhaul. Even at this late date, it is still within our ability to remedy this sad state of affairs and do it rather painlessly, if we would be willing to be inconvenienced by road detours and noise from all the digging.

Is that such a heavy price to pay if such an inconvenience would ultimately save lives and keep people warm?

If you have doubts at our vulnerability and the very likely chance of calamity, look to our already failing power grids in the Northeast and West, as well as Mexico’s temporary cell phone outage.

Mexico’s cell phone network fiasco didn’t even require severe weather, just a little sip of human sinfulness.

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Attention: This is not New England.

It’s Oklahoma!

For the past several weeks, we have seen strange and portentous weather raging across most of the United States. Foxnews reported 65 storm related deaths as of this morning, and this number will likely increase as another blast of arctic storms approach the Southern states. Another 8 inches of snow is expected…

South Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, even Southern California and other Southern and Western states are in the icy grip of winter. In fact, some parts of Colorado have been without electricity for over a month!

What pricks my incredulity is the nonchalance and laissez-faire complacency of most of our countrymen. To simply say that this is odious weather does not quite capture ominous tone of the weather changes we are seeing.

For instance, if these weather patterns are part of a wider shift in climate, the L.A. Basin will be in for a shock. From top to bottom, this basin was designed for an arid desert climate, not for overnight freezes and rainstorms, which are increasing yearly. Who knows what this shift would do to buildings, pipes, bridges, sewage– all the infrastructure?

I also find it unbelievable that parts of Colorado have been without electricity for over a month– this is America not some backwater Chinese province. I have a friend who just returned from a skiing trip to Colorado and she reported that the parts of Colorado she visited worked just fine, but other parts of still without electricity since the snowstorm back in December of 2006.

Perhaps in our arrogance and willfulness we think that electricity and infrastructure just happens without direct action on our part. We don’t like the power lines and towers near our homes. We don’t like living near power plants and oil refineries. No one likes power stations near them. A ghastly sight, isn’t it?

As a consequence to this infantile belief that the world will continue to generate energy and electricity to our PC’s and TV’s and DVD’s just because we say it will, we may live to see the day when the roof will come down on us. We are living off the infrastructure built back in the 1950’s, when entire extended families owned one car, when the population of America was about 160 million people, and when affluent homes had one 15 inch TV– We live off the backs of our ancestors (and think ourselves superior) and we refuse to invest time and energy and money for our descendants. We’d rather plug into an iPod and piously proclaim “family values” and meaningless slogans, like “Do it for the children!”.

Our children couldn’t be further from our minds. We barely raise them because we don’t want to be inconvenienced. It follows that we aren’t going to give up an inch of our many benefits and invest in better roads and secure energy supplies.

Maybe we should get used to rolling blackouts, fragile power grids, antiquated oil refineries, and cracked roads… for starters. We haven’t built a refinery for over forty years, and this issue doesn’t look very high on our agenda. It definitely isn’t on our witch doctors’ — I mean, environmentalists’ agenda. I don’t think people quite understand just how important energy is. It makes all aspects of our lives possible, and I am not just talking about luxury items like computers or TV’s. We’re talking about the energy to produce crops, energy to transport it from one end of the country to the other, the energy to refrigerate it while in transit, the energy to deliver it to your local grocery store, the energy to run the grocery store at all, and the energy for you to put it in the back of your car and drive home.

Here’s the bottom-line: Without reliable energy, people will die… in the thousands, if not millions.

If you think this an hyperbole, factor in the number of people who will starve from malnutrition, then the number of people who will surely die in the first winter without heat, then the number of riots and armed conflict for control of the remaining food supply, then the diseases that would accompany the unburied dead… the number would be in the hundreds of thousands at the least. Given the fact that about 80% of America lives in cities, things can go downhill and fast.

We all think we are above the level of basic necessities because we are a technologically advanced civilization, which, of course, only exists through an abundance of energy. But civilization is just a thin veneer that can unravel at any moment. After all the pressures that came to bear upon the United States in the past century with World War I, World War II, Korean War, Vietnam War, Cold War, urbanization, civil rights, women’s rights, environmental concerns, domestic gang violence, riots, burning embassies around the world, and on, and on — it is a wonder we are standing in as good a shape as we are in. But the barbarians are pounding on our gates daily…

So while most of the Republicans and the conservative bloggers swing at liberals and Democrats for their pomposity and mendacity, nothing gets done on Capitol Hill.

Our infrastructure deteriorates. We buy more than we produce. Perhaps mere anarchy has already been loosed upon the world…

… Or perhaps this is the dark moment before the miracle. America has been on the trajectory for a full-on Christian revival and renaissance for some time. May God awaken us and grant us His grace…

*** The picture above is from the Associated Press.

Update 1/19/07 3:19 p.m.

Victor Hanson’s blog titled Work and Days discussed the California freeze this past couple of week. Hanson is a farmer and scholar in the classics, and a couple of days ago, he spent most of his time fixing busted pipes and fixing the general damage of the freezing temperatures. He reported:

No global warming here. At Huntington Lake at 7200 feet last night it was about 5 degrees and had been below zero earlier. Here in rural California, it was around 22 this week and below. So I’ve been spending most of the day fixing frozen water pipes that have cracked or trying to unclear those up in the mountains. Most of the surrounding citrus orchards look ruined. There is not all that much sugar yet in the fruit, and the ground has been really dry—just the conditions to ruin the crop when the cold hits. Otherwise grape and deciduous tree-growers like the hard cold, since it gives good dormancy by ensuring sufficient collective hours (500 or so) below 50.

Other reports from the Leader predict that the price of citrus fruits will soar.

It’s all the result of temperatures that went as low as -6C last weekend in California, destroying up to three quarters of the harvest in the state, the second largest U.S. producer of oranges after Florida.

“The prices will go up because the product is just not available,” said Tony Singh, president of the Fruiticana chain of Greater Vancouver produce outlets.

“All the citrus, broccoli, cauliflower, strawberry and avocado has been totally wiped out with the freeze.”

Well, we’ve put our infrastructure on layaway and have absconded on payment. First, rolling black outs in California. Then entire regions of the Midwest shuts down because an electrical glitch. Every time a place freezes or floods people are without electricity and basic resources.

We have ZERO redundancy in our power grid.

All our plants are pumping out the maximum amount of energy they can year-round, and last year we held congressional hearings to accuse them of price gouging. I don’t doubt that was what occurred on some level, but wouldn’t it just make more sense to build more refineries? Most of the existing ones are pretty inefficient and antiquated, some even were retrofitted with updated technology to increase the productive capacity. IF we build a new refinery, it’ll burn cleaner and at least double the capacity we currently have per refinery. Our increase in technological know-how in this field makes producing energy more environmental safe, not less…