You should be fine, except for getting a bunch of rain. You live in a former pond bottom, right?
You yankees are wusses about tiny little earthquakes and hurricanes. I moved from New Orleans to San Francisco just so I could have some variety in my large-scale natural disasters.
John
And you work in a building that could be quite scary if da big one hits :-)
Once in Puerto Rico some of the engineers from El Norte became a bit scared when the wind started howling outside and some stuff was flying by horizontally at high speed. Pieces of palm trees, the occasional chair, things like that. Lightning everywhere. _Then_ a big old DC-3 lumbered in for landing and all the jaws dropped.
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Hey, I was in the Bay Area for the Morgan Hill quake, just not for the Loma Prieta one.
The pond bottom issue may become important again, because Irene is moving very slowly, so we're liable to get a _lot_ of rain. Of course Floyd dropped 24 inches on us in 1999--we had about 8 feet of water in the bottom of the garden, and about 10 inches in the basement.
Hopefully we won't get more than a foot or so this time.
There are a lot of very large deciduous trees here, and that's what will cause the havoc, at least for folks far from the coast. They've ordered about a quarter million people to evacuate.
I haven't decided about plywood, but I'll probably get some if I can.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
But a DC-3 is a real airplane. Eastern Airlines was flying those when I first flew commercally, 53 years ago. ...Jim Thompson
[On the Road, in New York]
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Trees can be good or bad in a storm. If they are strong they 'break' the wind. OTOH if the trees are old they might fall...
Well, good luck then. Is it a concrete building or wood? It always surprises me that so many houses in the US are made from wood. Concrete + bricks are much more likely to stand up against the strongest winds and flooding.
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
It is sitting on sand, at the edge of an official liquefaction zone. The side walls are 1930s concrete, with horizontal wood floors. It would have pancaked in a good shake. We gutted it, poured three huge concrete footings, and put in big steel frames front, middle and back. Then structural plywood on all the floors and ceilings, and a zillion bolts epoxied into the side walls to attach the floors. I figure it will be totalled in The Big One, but we might survive.
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Footing.jpg
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/Frames.jpg
The footing holes were dug with hand shovels, and the steel was erected by hand, with chain hoists, and welded in place, in sections. We have a bus stop in front, so the city wouldn't allow us to use cranes to drop the beams in from above.
I always enjoyed hurricanes. It was exciting, refreshing, and we got off school for a week (or for Betsy, more like three weeks.)
John
We have lots of wood!
But bricks are killers in earthquakes. And concrete tilt-ups are usually fairly fragile. Wood structures do pretty well, except for "soft-story" apartments whose ground floors are all windows and garage doors... the ground floor can collapse if there's a lot of sideways force. Our house is wood with big concrete foundations, steel frames, and lots of seismic-grade plywood, good for earthquakes and hurricanes.
In the '89 quake here, most of the deaths in San Francisco were from "unreinforced masonry", namely bricks. The larger numbers of deaths in Oakland were from the collapse of a concrete elevated freeway.
John
Impressive. I'd probably have looked for a building outside the city that didn't need such major financial investment :-)
They didn't even let you drive a little Kubota in there? That would have made digging a lot less painful.
Betsy was major. Maybe yuo got three weeks off because the school was gone or under water?
-- Regards, Joerg http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Well, we have a lot of trees, so it's cheaper. And we like to remodel our houses a lot, which is hard if they're made of concrete.
Anyway, it's usually the roofs that fail in storms, and even the Dutch aren't stubborn enough to make roofs out of brick. ;) Anyway, you don't have real weather over there.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 845-480-2058 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
You should watch the tests where they shoot a 2X4 through a wall. Bricks and concrete don't do too well.
-- You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.
As you go through life, eventually you learn what is really important, the only thing that truly is worthwhile and endures. Namely, real estate.
Skinny Mexican guys with shovels, moving many cubic yards of dirt. The same guys placed the steel beams, with just muscle power.
The school was OK, uptown, but there was no power and the streets were impassible, from maybe 6 feet of downed tree limbs. The first thing they cleared was a footpath down the middle of the street, and I got around on my little Honda S90 motorbike.
The eye passed over our house about midnight. It was strange, like calling an intermission in the middle of a war.
Good HBO series, Treme, about New Orleans after Katrina. Some alums from my high school did it, and they got New Orleans down.
John
Bricks and concrete are fun in an earthquake ;-) ...Jim Thompson
[On the Road, in New York]
--
| James E.Thompson, CTO | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
If you don't mind breathing the concrete dust from cracking mortar. The strongest is a compsite, built of multiple materials to give support and strength.
-- You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.
Or Winair's STOL Otter flies without a hitch from Saba to St. Maarten, but all the big planes (737, 747) claim they can't take off from St. Maarten "because the wind wasn't lined up with the runway." Regardless of how true or false the claims that wind direction mattered more to the big planes, I have to say that the Otter landings (including "the shortest commercial runway in the world") beat the heck out of all the
737 landings on that trip.We are a bit further up the path from Phil, but expecting 8+ inches of rain and major tree and powerline damage. We haven't had a serious wide-scale storm come though in decades, so I expect some roads will be impassable for a goodly while, and power/phone/internet may be out for a good bit longer, depending exactly what happens. We normally lose a few trees when a small scale storm with that sort of wind goes through, but that makes isolated pockets of damage that can be got to and fixed. Expand it a good bit and the process slows down exponentially as the need to get through all that to get to all that blows up.
I'd better go get my chainsaw tomorrow. There may be need for backwoods citizenship drills (aka, you cut the downed trees off your part of the road, if there isn't a powerline connected to them...) And it may be a big non-event - we really hope for the latter, but it's not a good planning assumption. OTOH, not going crazy on the non-applicable stuff - town water system is underground with a large gravity tank (on a hill, underground) supplying pressure, and backups on the pumps. It won't be cut off by the storm, nor for a good long while after that even if the storm causes major power outages. Heck, if I want to boil it I have water coming out of the ground...
-- Cats, coffee, chocolate...vices to live by Please don't feed the trolls. Killfile and ignore them so they will go away.
I've got a MK. 8 somewheres that I liberated from the junk pile at work one time, had one of the later ones I gave away. I prefer my Simpson 360 though :).
Also got an AVO "Valve Charteristic Meter Mk. 4", got more knobs & dials on it the a 50's B movie SciFi set :).
H.
John,
I took a quick look at your links
but must admit that I quickly went a level deeper, into your Truckee directory, which caught my eye, and looked at a couple of the jpgs there whose titles caught my attention. I think we might have some potential mutual interests in the Donner Pass region, and fiber optics. Relevant links include:
(If you don't already know about this organization, their newsletters are superb, and a funky little museum they've set up on Old Hiway 40 in Norden is fascinating.)
(This page is six or seven years out of date, but I'm still at it.)
("Science in the snow" -- these directories are somewhat messed up, however, and need work.)
You're welcome to email me if you like.
--AES
You mean a concrete house can resist a storm so you can't claim a new one from the insurance :-)
Every now and then it gets stormy over here with wind speeds reaching
65 to 75mp/h. With such strong winds I can hear the concrete(!) roof tiles start to resonate a little every now and then. But they are well interlinked so there is little chance they'll be blown off the roof.-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks; I'll look into all that.
Where do you live? We'll be in Truckee over Labor Day.
The fiber stuff we do is pretty dinky, mostly multimode DC-coupled on/off digital links, pretty much logic extenders.
Looks nice for summer hiking, but I only ski downhill. Fast.
The snow was insane last winter. There was a continuous pile of snow from our roof to the roof of the place next to ours, maybe 100' away. Sugar Bowl got over 800 inches, and I skiied there on the 4th of July. Places near us (in Tahoe Donner) had decks ripped off the sides of houses.
Will do.
John
At Stanford; the joys of retirement let us spend all winter at Carnelian Woods.
Reason for my query is that for centuries Donner Pass has been a major route across the Sierras and into California for:
--Native American hunters and migrants; --Explorers and emigrants on the California Trail (early 1840s) (including the Donner party); --Gold Rush fortune seekers in the later 1840s; --First transcontinental railroad in the 1860s; --First transcontinental highway in 1915-1925 (Lincoln Highway, later Hiway 40); --First transcontinental phone call in (I forget); --First transcontinental airline routes (and beacons) in the 1920s; --First transcontinental microwave relay link; --Interstate 80, built for the Winter Olympics (1960); --First trans-Sierra petroleum pipelines (19??);
and today a major fiber optic route connecting the Eastern U.S. to California and on across the Pacific (first transcontinental fiber link? -- I'm not sure).
The broad outline of how this fiber route came out of the SP RR, then Sprint, then Qwest, is generally known. Just out of historical curiosity, I'd like to know more about when and how it was built, just where it runs, who operates it, and so on. The DSHS people would be interested also.
I guess you've been in the old tunnels and snow sheds, around the China Wall. Very cool. The history of the railroad, Judah and Stanford and McGlashan and the Chinese and all, is really ripping.
Now Donner Pass Road. Spectacular drive up around the Rainbow Bridge.
Maybe get E Clampus Vitus to put up a plaque?
John
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