Divemedic

A Miss for Me, I think

It looks like we are not going to get anything close to what they were predicting. It appears as though the storm went in about 60 miles further south than originally predicted. That means that it is crossing the state that much further away than they were telling us. The local news is forecasting our peak winds to be in about an hour, and it just isn’t happening.

The strongest gust so far has been 27 mph. It hasn’t even rained in this area for about 2 hours. My Internet is even back up. The winds have gradually shifted from easterly to northeasterly, meaning that we are now on the left side of the storm. That is, since the winds of a hurricane rotate around the center in a counter clockwise direction, we are now on the western semicircle of the storm.

At its peak, Ian’s hurricane force winds extended out 40 miles from the center. A 60 mile miss makes for a huge difference. I also don’t think that the 155 mile per hour thing is very accurate. It looks like sustained winds of 100 miles per hour or so is what was actually felt by real people on the ground, with gusts a bit higher.

Combine those two factors and we will escape this with a breezy, rainy night.

My sister, who lives in Apopka, says her power is out. My mother in Altamonte tells me the weather there is just light rain, with my daughter and grandchildren in Winter Garden reporting the same.

The people down there in Port Charlotte and Naples are getting hammered, and I wish them the best. I have some friends down there, and I hope they dodge much of the damage.

Just remember: prep for the worst that you will probably face, and anything less is a walk in the park. If you do your preps correctly, things should be boring. If things are exciting, you didn’t properly prepare.

By Divemedic, ago

Landfall

I have long suspected that the strength of hurricanes has been overstated by the powers that be to generate scary headlines. Look at this picture of Ian making landfall.

Not a single personal weather station is reporting a wind speed of more than 50 miles per hour. Now in all fairness, large areas are without internet and power, so some reports may be missing.

My guess is that we won’t have winds over 40.

So far here, our highest wind speed has been 22 miles per hour and we have gotten right at 2 inches of rain. So far, so good.

EDITED TO ADD: I just found a station reporting 94 miles per hour.

Also, our entire area lost hardwire internet and cable television connectivity at 1547. I am making this update by cell phone.

By Divemedic, ago

So Far

Weather has been dreary, but no bad. Then again, we aren’t forecast for much until early tomorrow morning. It started raining yesterday at around 1415, and we wound up with 1.4 inches of rain for the day. Since midnight, it’s been a steady drizzle that barely registers on the rain gauge, 0.13 inches.

Since there was a question about that, my weather station is mounted almost 10 meters off the ground, on the peak of the roof. I measure it at almost exactly 30 feet. So call it 9 meters. No real wind yet to speak of, though.

I am working today until the hurricane crew relieves us at about 1500, if all goes to plan. If not, I have my BOB and a handgun locked in the vehicle safe. Worse comes to worse, I could walk home in just an hour or two, even if the streets are impassible to my 4WD pickup because of debris. I seriously doubt it gets that bad.

On a side note, there are those who don’t think that hurricanes like this can be destructive. I used to deploy to hurricanes and other disasters for a living. I have deployed to over a dozen disasters, including hurricane Katrina and Ivan. I rode out Charley, Frances, Jean, and others. There was an F4 tornado that I worked as well. Yes, most of the damage is within a mile or two of the coast with these storms, but there are pockets where it gets ugly, even far inland.

When I have more time, I will post some pictures from my time on the Mississippi coast. They are on the NAS that I shutdown for the storm, so later.

By Divemedic, ago

Idiots on Rails

Democrats are now blaming DeSantis because it is taking so long to evacuate Tampa, a city of 3 million people, in the face of Hurricane Ian, because Republicans think that a train costing $3 billion or perhaps even $7 billion between Orlando and Tampa is a waste of money.

Let’s look at the facts and do the math, because that is what we do here. Normally, Interstate 4 carries 150,000 people per day. The evacuation has more than 2.5 million under evacuation orders, many trying to leave the city along I-4 and I-75 within a 24 hour time frame.

So let’s say we add a train to the mix. A train carries a maximum of 1,000 people. The distance between the two cities is about 70 miles. The train ride would take just over an hour on a high speed train. One hour there, one back. That works out to 12 trips per day at 1,000 passengers per trip- the MOST that a train would do is move 0.5% of the evacuation traffic, and that ignores the problem of congestion at both ends, the difficulty of where you park a million cars on the Tampa end, and what you do with 12,000 people milling around outside of the Orlando train station.

By Divemedic, ago

Food Deserts are Racist

So-called food deserts. The Democrat claim is that low income neighborhoods have few places to buy food, and this is because stores are racist. Of course, that is complete bullshit. The real problem looks just like this:

Higher income neighborhoods don’t do this. White neighborhoods largely don’t do this (exceptions being places like California and other liberal strongholds that have decriminalized theft). If you are stealing the food markets blind, they will have no choice but to close.

By Divemedic, ago

The Latest

The forecast seems to be changing every time there is another update, but this is what I know for now:

  • There is a 90 percent chance of 40 mile per hour sustained winds at my location.
  • Likewise, a 50 percent chance of 50 mile per hour winds
  • A 25% chance of 75 mile per hour winds
  • And a 10 percent chance of sustained winds of over 90 miles per hour
  • Gusts would be higher

Now all homes in Florida built in the past 25 years are supposed to be able to withstand winds of up to 110 miles per hour. I will say that I felt like the winds being reported by the NWS were grossly overstated, so I bought a personal weather station. I guess we will be getting a chance to test that out.

We are also being told to expect up to 14 inches of rain. We average 60 inches of rain in a year, so we are getting three months’ rain in three days. That means flooding. Our house is on high ground, so I think we should be OK.

My biggest concern is having the power be out for several days. I have an 8KW genny and a bunch of fuel, so I should be OK. We are working on building a new house about 30 minutes south of here, and it will have a 24KW propane or natural gas fueled backup, but for now 8KW gasoline is all I have.

The nasty weather is supposed to begin before lunchtime tomorrow. My checklist is complete with the exception of shutting down the NAS, buying some subs from Publix, and doing a final check on comms.

My mobile and handheld radios are all good, I just need to check the main radio set. It’s a nice one, a Yaesu FT-897 with an interface to allow digital and voice communication. I have two antennas mounted in the attic, a dual band for VHF, and the second is a G5RV wire antenna for HF. At 52 feet long, it stretches most of the way across the house, but this antenna allows me to transmit in all bands from 10 meters down to 40 meters.

As soon as the wife gets home from work, we will head out to dinner and Publix, then settle in for the night. I still don’t know for sure what my work schedule will be. For now, I am scheduled to work 9-9 tomorrow, but that may change.

It’s 1415 on 9/27, and it just began raining.

By Divemedic, ago

The Path

As of this morning, I am in the path of the storm. I need to get my 24 hour and preevent checklist completed today. Complicating things is that I am working some today and 12 hours tomorrow. The ride home from work tomorrow evening should be interesting.

By Divemedic, ago

Waiting and Watching

When you live in the hurricane prone areas of the US, one of the things that you learn quickly is that the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore has an uncanny skill in predicting where a hurricane will make its presence felt, then doing live broadcasts from that spot in the days leading up to the hurricane making landfall. The last thing you ever want to see is Cantore standing in front of a camera in your neighborhood.

It turns out that Jim Cantore is doing his reports from Clearwater Beach tonight. As for me, I usually have a lot of supplies and don’t need any. Still…

So keep an eye on the hurricane (now a tropical storm) as it approaches. The 1700 report just came out, and the storm has slowed its approach since I last posted. We should have been, based on Friday’s reports, been at 48 hours out from storm conditions this evening. Instead, we are now supposedly looking at the center coming in between Cedar Key and Horseshoe Beach sometime on Thursday night as a Major Hurricane upper end of Category 3, or the lower end of Category 4.

What is significant about this path is that it places northern Central Florida on the east side of the storm, which is the ‘dangerous’ side. This is the side of the storm where most of the wind field, rain, and tornadoes are found. At any rate, we are in a good spot for avoiding the worst of it, simply because we are dozens of miles from the Gulf of Mexico. That means we will avoid most of the bad parts of the storm, but will still be looking at hours of winds in the 40-60 miles per hour range, as well as rain of a foot or more.

Storm strength is in categories, which is set by wind speed. An increase of one category increases the pressure on your house by a factor of four. The good news is that the area of highest winds is near the center. The bad news is that tropical storm force winds extend out for hundreds of miles, as does the chance of tornadoes, and the large amounts of torrential rain.

So if you want to evacuate, do so now. If you wait too long, you can find yourself stuck in traffic. If you must evacuate after the rest of the thundering herd has taken to the roads, you might think about wanting to head the opposite way from the rest of them. For example, heading south. That is a mistake, because Florida will institute a plan called “contraflow” where both sides of the highways leading away from evacuation are used to move people in the same direction, making travel in the other direction impossible. I expect Hurricane Watches will go up in the southwestern parts of the state tomorrow, and evacuations will be announced at that time. Once that happens, people will start losing their shit.

Having worked as the shelter medic at multiple shelters during my earlier career days, I will tell you: don’t go to a shelter unless you’re told to evacuate and have no other options. Shelters aren’t fun, and they’ll be at capacity. They are packed with dirty, smelly, and sick people that are not pleasant to be around. Many of them are drug addicts. Avoid them unless you have no other choice.

While forecasts at day four or five are a coin toss, the accuracy begins climbing rapidly when we look at the 2-3 day timeframe.

If you are anywhere on the Gulf Coast between Biloxi and Miami, I would recommend keeping an eye on this for at least the next couple of days.

By Divemedic, ago

The Effect of Cost Cutting

Five days ago, I posted about the hospital where I work trying to save money by cutting out the shift bonuses that were being used to entice the staff to work 50 and 60 hour workweeks. Today was the first day where I worked and there were no overtime people. Where a 50 bed ED normally needs 14 nurses to operate? We had 10 for most of the day. Meaning that we should have 5 patients to each nurse.

Nope, we were too busy for that. We tried to tell EMS agencies that we couldn’t take any more patients (it’s called being “on divert”). It didn’t work. At one point, we had 90 patients. For ten nurses.

I work a swing shift, which is supposed to be 11am to 11pm. Most of the ED works 7-7. By 9pm, my patients were:

  • A 37 year old female who kept having seizures. She had 6 of them the first 2 hours she was my patient.
  • A 26 year old male fentanyl overdose.
  • A 76 year old with a bowel obstruction that is vomiting coffee grounds.
  • A 35 year old who came to our facility two weeks ago complaining of chest pain and went into cardiac arrest. He is complaining of chest pain and has elevated troponin levels.
  • A 78 year old woman with perforated diverticulitis.
  • A 56 year old intoxicated woman who is with us for altered mental status and is covered head to toe in her own feces.

For those of you who don’t know, most of those patients need to be in a unit that offers a higher level of acre than what we can provide in the ED. The problem is that all of those units are already full.

In the meantime, there are 22 people in the waiting room, waiting for us to have room to treat them. At one point, there were 7 ambulances lined up at the door, waiting to drop off patients. So I wound up ordering Wendy’s through DoorDash at around 8pm, and eating it at the nurses station while I wrote notes on patient’s charts.

Needless to say, everyone was getting testy, patients AND staff.

As 11 o’clock approached, the charge nurse asked me to hold over because we still had more than 60 patients, and three of us were scheduled to go home at 11, which would leave her with no techs and only 8 nurses. Because I like her and she always does me favors, I agreed to hold over for a couple of hours.

Right at 1, when I was planning to go home, all hell broke loose. An intoxicated woman was brought in by EMS, who claimed they were unable to get an IV. Ten minutes after they dropped her off, she vomited about a 1.5 liters of blood.

So a third of the remaining nurses spent the next 45 minutes trying to keep her alive. All of their patients were getting ignored in the meantime.

One nurse remarked, “As long as we keep doing this, they will keep making us do it, until it becomes the ‘way we have always done things.'”

I finally left the place at around 2 am, having worked a total of 15.5 hours. But think of all the money they are saving by not having to pay those bonuses.

By Divemedic, ago