Earthquakes and Nevada - Is There Fault to be Found in the Truckee Meadows?

My neighbor and friend, Peg O’Malley sent this to me toay in an email, saying “Remember when we did this?  Maybe it’s time to redistribute the info?” Yup. She and I put this together for the South Hills homeowners association, back in the day. Thanks for finding this and reminding me, Peg!

This is exactly what I was talking about in my recent Friday Fish Wrap when I suggested that folks use the Japan earthquake as a damn good reason to initiate conversations among their own families -  in addition to their schools, work places and neighborhoods. I’m going to work on distributing this to folks around here in the neighborhood again.

Peg’s seimic information is timeless. Some of the contact and reference information - especially in the sections I authored - needed updating, and I have done that.

Please, take the time to sit down with your familes, friends and co-workers. Don’t wait for somebody else. Be the person who initiates the conversation to prepare!

- Lt Col Cynthia S. Ryan, Nevada Wing, Civil Air Patrol

AKA maven

EARTHQUAKE AWARENESS

Is There Fault to be Found in the Truckee Meadows?

By Peg O’Malley

The recent earthquake in the Pacific Northwest finally prodded me to write about an issue that I’ve been meaning to address for years. A number of neighbors have asked whether South Hills is in an “earthquake zone”; what the chances of an earthquake occurring in this area might be; and if they should be concerned about this possibility. These are difficult questions to answer given the nature of earthquake faults and how the probability of their future movement is estimated.

Western Nevada is one of the more active areas in the United States when it comes to earthquakes. Everyone knows about California and the San Andreas Fault because of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and, more recently, the Loma Prieta and San Fernando Earthquakes of the 1980s and 1990s, among others. Washington State has also been the site of several very large earthquakes in the past 50+ years; the Olympia Earthquake of 1949, Seattle Earthquake of 1965, and now the Nisqually Event of 2001. But what about Nevada? Nevada and adjacent areas of east-central California have experienced a number of very large earthquakes (around magnitude 7.0).

1845 Stillwater area of Nevada, magnitude unknown. In 1845 Nevada was sparsely populated. Reporting is limited.

1872 Owens Valley, California - the Lone Pine Earthquake,

Click to read more ...

Friday Fish Wrap: March 11, 2011

Whatever I’d planned to lead off about in this blog post was shaken, not stirred, last night as the largest earthquake in Japan’s recorded history struck. Needless to say, perhaps, but the Twitter/Facebook feeds are busy. I happen to know a couple people who were raised in Japan, and still have family there, and they are trying to track down information.

When events like this occur, the emergency responder/critical incident Lt. Col. Ryan comes back into play, and I begin thinking about what my own response plan would/should be if the unexpected were to happen right here. Nevada - I hope everybody understands this - is a seismically active area. That’s an understatement. And, it’s only a matter of time until we have a really large ‘event’.

This is a perfect time to stop and take stock of our personal circumstances, and think about an emergency plan for ourselves, our families and neighbors/co-workers.

Next week, why not initiate a family crisis planning evening? Talk about what the first and then fall-back plans might be - and how they would affect the various family members during a typical day. How would you communicate? What if all cell service was down? Where would you go first? Second? Those kinds of scenarios are critical to discuss.

Planning is your first step to survival. Coordinating your planning - integrating it within your family, neighborhood and community is the second step to survival.

I would even suggest that you bring this up at your place of employment. A lot of our time is spent at our jobs, so what does everybody do if something happens there? Each forward thinking employer should have an emergency/crisis plan in place. If they haven’t already thought about it, you should bring it up. Who knows, maybe it will earn you some ‘Brownie Points’, and show the boss you care. Offer to craft the plan if there isn’t one. Facilitate a company wide meeting. Bring in local Emergency Planners from the state, city or county. They can be a great deal of help, and will be eager to participate.

In Japan, schools and workplaces are being used as safe havens for folks until they can safely return to homes - if they have homes left. If you have a Home Owners Association, why not dedicate one meeting to emergency planning? How would/could/should your HOA react during a crisis? What could you offer and how?

Although you make not be able to help Japan during its’ crisis, you can do a lot to help yourself, your family and community right now - before an event happens.

You can get more information from the following sites:

USGS Earthquake preparedness,  and locally, the UNR Mackey School of Mines Earthquake Preparedness site (hoping it will still be there after Gov. Sandoval gets done gutting UNR’s budget), FEMA ‘Are You Ready’ Guide to Emergency Preparedness (Uh, another way those pesky government agencies, public employees and tax dollars are working hard for you!) and perhaps the most comprehensive site is Ready.gov.

State of Nevada, Dept of Public Safety, Office of Emergency Mangement

National Preparedness Month Planning Toolkit

Think about it all this way - this is a great reason to get your whole family involved in a project that will benefit the everybody. It’s also a great learning opportunity for the kids and will help them feel safer and more empowered in the event of an emergency!

With all the GOP/TeaPary deficit cutting sound and fury back in Washington D. C., in addition to the political theater right here in Nevada, I think this is a perfect time to remember that emergency preparedness and national crisis management don’t come for free or for cheap.

It’s one thing to walk around with a puffed out chest and an axe, calling for budget cutting here, there and everywhere. But where will these same assholes be when the big 8.9 or other ‘event’ calls somewhere here in the United States - and we coulda/shoulda/woulda been ready except we cut the budget and couldn’t afford to be?

I’ve spent more than a decade in and around the emergency management field on the local, state and national levels, and it takes money - along with a lot of dedicated (as in ‘not there for the money’) public employees to ensure that American lives and property are saved. I never noticed too many Teabaggers  out in the muck, doing the dirty work, deriding government and public employees as they passed out bottles of clean water.

Keep that in mind when you hear them crying for more and more budget cutting.

Finally, I saw the orthopedic surgeon this morning, with MRI images in hand. Yes, my ACL is cleanly snapped, but he was fairly amazed that there was no other damage, say to the Meniscus. The only other thing he could see was some fairly substantial bruising to the bone. Testament to the impact of the fall. So, the bottom line is physical therapy and a custom fitted ACL brace. I know too many people who - if they had to do it over - wouldn’t have opted for ACL surgery, and are skiing and performing just fine.

Have a good weekend.  

-maven

Baptist nitwits damage Haitian orphan efforts

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — “God wanted us to come here to help children, we are convinced of that,” Laura Silsby, one of 10 Americans accused of trafficking Haitian children, said Monday through the bars of a jail cell here. “Our hearts were in the right place.”

Unfortunately, their brains were somewhere else - south and in back. Where it’s really dark. So to speak. You’d think that this group had heard about what the road to Hell was paved with.

This bunch tried to smuggle 33 children out of the country, but were detained at the Dominican Republic-Haitian border. Now they’re in a Haitian jail cell - which can’t be nice - and people are understandably upset.

The 10 missionaries are mostly from Idaho. Sorta figures.

Click to read more ...

Haitian relief and Lori Carpenter

Ed Pearce of KOLO-TV, the ABC affiliate in Reno, Nevada has this interview:

These days Lori Carpenter’s thoughts rarely stray from people she knows thousands of miles away in Haiti.

Work continues at her hydrology consulting firm in south Reno, but she works the phone and computer keeping an eye on an orphanage outside Port Au Prince.

Carpenter is on the board of directors of God’s Littlest Angels orphanage and she’s been trying to get some of its children out of the country and trying to get supplies in.

Today’s news is good. Seventy eight children left for new homes in the U-S, making room for a few of the hundreds of thousands of new orphans created by the earthquake.

Click to read more ...

You can help Haiti's newest orphans

My employer, Lori Carpenter and her husband, Clay Cooper, have had a long association with the God’s Littlest Angels (GLA) ophanage outside the village of Fermanthe, in the mountains above Pétion-Ville, Haiti.

In May, 2007, they traveled again to the GLA orphanage with a team of eleven engineers and architects, to locate a clean water well, and design new facilities to better serve the needs of Haitian orphans.

Lori and Clay are parents to two lovely Haitian orphans, brother and sister, Shedy and Kendy.

Here is a great film detailing the week long efforts at Fermanthe in 2007 (use the hyperlink).

Meanwhile. the need is growing exponentially at GLA, as the loss of human life - parents and caregivers - will swell the ranks of GLA’s ability to provide without help from us.

Here is an interview with GLA co-founder, Dixie Bickel with Today Show host Matt Lauer, speaking about the night of terror at the orphanage:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

You can go directly to the GLA website and donate, but as things are, the website is busy, and you may have to check back in. Don’t let that deter you. Please come back and give what you can.

Haiti: Pushing the limits of human misery even further

Back in 2008 I posted pictures and story of the devastation from a hurricane in Haiti, sent by friends of my employer who has two adopted children from Haiti, and who has also worked building clean water systems down there.

At that time, I posed the question of what are the limits of human misery:

http://www.mavenandmeddler.com/purely-maven/2008/9/10/post-hurricane-dispatch-from-haiti-what-are-limits-of-human.html

Unfortunately, this abject nation once again tests those limits, and their population of poor continue to demonstrate how both terribly fragile and resilient the human animal is.

I’m just not sure whether Haiti will be capable of coming back from this most recent blow.

If there was ever a time for the world community to drop the fighting that consumes much of their time, energy and resources - and redirect it to Haiti in a positive manner - this is it.

maven