Misc. Ramblings

There are at least two lessons that still need to be learned from Earthquake Sunday.

The first is why was shutting down all the electrical generators is seen as the only way to prevent damage to the system (or as HECO, our local electric company, repeatedly put it: to prevent "further damage" to the system. Further damage? What damage was there to begin with?).

Yes, I know, at first HECO said the computers were programed to do the shutdown but that begs the question of who programs the computers? I guess that's why they are now saying it was the "heroic" efforts of its employees who shut down the system. Well, which is it?

In order to prevent this happening again, surely there must be other options short of building totally redundant systems (which is the straw man argument that the electric company trotted out this week). Heck, if I wanted to spend thousands of dollars to "guild" the system I could better use it to buy solar panels and batteries.

The second lesson relates to communications - or the lack there of. There is an old saying that the first casualty in war is the truth. One could say the same thing in a disaster.

In a communication vacuum where accurate and timely information is lacking, rumors will abound. And in a rumor rich environment, people may react in non-productive ways. People need information to make informed decisions. But if they can't get information, they will sometimes make it up.

I wasn't listening to the radio during the entire Sunday morning but from what I understand, the first government official on the air was a couple of hours into the blackout.

In the mean time, we had people from all over calling in to the one operating radio station and saying all kinds of things. Now, most of this was, I'm sure, accurate information, but who knows if all of it was.

In fact, some of what was said over the radio was from foreign speaking individuals supposedly telling non-English speaking people what was going on. Or was it? Who knows.

But as far as I know, at no time did anyone from any government agency speak to foreign language individuals (of which there are many since visitors from Asia and Europe make up a large percentage of the population at any one time).

Now, as to whether Civil Defense should have sounded the emergency sirens. In this case I agree with the Civil Defense folks that since no tsunami was generated it would have been inappropriate to sound the sirens. I mean, the sirens are I think intended to warn people of the high probability of an impending disaster. Clearly, in this case, nothing was impending once the earthquakes occurred.

However, I do think it would have been appropriate to use the TV and radio system emergency broadcast system, within minutes rather than hours of the earthquake, to let everyone know what was known at the time (e.g., the location of the epicenter, the magnitude, and whether a tsunami was generated).

I'm no expert on any of the above, but the explanations given so far just don't pass the BS test.

Have a Great Weekend, Everyone - Aloha!