Random thoughts about the aftermath of Sandy.
Buildings with elevators should have a mandatory back up generator power to run those elevators at least long enough to get people trapped inside of them to get out, if need be.
Listening to the multiple rescue calls to extricate people trapped in elevators was bad enough .. .. stories of thousands of elderly and disabled people trapped 10's of stories or more up w/o electricity or food for days now is a moral crime. "We built that"? Well, we can fix that, too. We've got to.
http://www.motherjones.com/...
VIDEO: Sandy Leaves Elderly New Yorkers Trapped in Dark High-Rises
http://www.bloomberg.com/...
Skyscrapers Trap New York’s Shut-Ins in Sandy Blackout
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
.. blackout from superstorm Sandy left an untold number of elderly and disabled folks stranded in high-rise apartments
Power is going to be out for a week, or longer for some people?
http://tarrytown.patch.com/...
.. expects to restore the vast majority of customers who lost power by the weekend of Nov. 10 and 11.
Hospitals and nursing homes should be subjected to mandatory inspections by fire departments to ensure that their generators are in working order, and designed to handle more than this 'no one could have imagined' BS excuse after the fact.
Think about emergency power requirements for any type of critical industrial operation that could suffer catastrophic failure if electricity fails: like nuclear power plants, for instance. How good is your local nuke plant at handling loss of electricity? Can they rapidly switch to back up power, even under unusual conditions? Can they maintain that power for long periods of time, long enough to stabilize reactor cores? Are they capable of running pumps continuously to keep storage polls cool?
Finally: it's about time America seriously considered taking itself off the reliance of this 'centralized grid' we've grown so accustomed to, at least partially. If every home and business in America had an ability to generate just one or two KW a day off-grid in an emergency, some of the massive economic disruption would be dramatically lessened. Enough to run refrigerators a few minutes every few hours, run lights at minimum levels, get a radio going for news and information and yes, power control circuits for [ugh] oil and gas heat which most folks still have .. it would lessen the overall financial strain on everyone in the long run. This technology is relatively cheap - planning for the 'inconvenience' of post disasters is some of the best money one can spend. If you spend a little more, you can even use the off-grid capability on a daily basis to lessen your reliance on grid based electricity.
Side notes: Nothing is more bizarre than seeing gas stations unable to pump gas, because they don't have backup generators, and grocery stores that don't make the investment in minimal back up power generation to keep refrigeration operational [especially around here, where we lose power ].
I'm just covering some of the more obvious points here. Our society revolves around the need for electricity - things we take for granted just become impossible without it. Everything comes to a screeching halt. Public safety, public health, economic stability, national security are all part of this equation. The ability to have reliable sources of electricity in cases of emergencies is going to become more obvious as extremes of weather increase; and any 'grid' is vulnerable to earthquakes, accidents, extreme solar flares, and sabotage as well.
Get people implementing these changes with the help of Federal loans, and specify American made sources for all the equipment required to get those loans, and we'd have unemployment to near zero in no time.
What are we waiting for? Another disaster to strike?