Something to think about...

You might be too young to remember Three Mile Island, one of the worst nuclear accidents in recent memory. Permit me to give you a capsule history:

Basically, something went seriously wrong with a major nuclear power plant’s reactor cooling system, resulting in a partial meltdown. A meltdown is when the enriched-uranium nuclear fuel in a reactor gets too hot to be contained in the form of fuel rods, a form which allows the reaction to be controlled, and literally melts down like candle wax into a giant mass whose criticality, that is, rate of reaction, can no longer be controlled. (That’s how the word “meltdown” got into our vocabulary by the way, because of Three Mile Island).

Company and government officials told us that it wasn’t a serious accident. It turned out that it was.

Company and government officials told us that no significant amount of radiation had leaked into the atmosphere. It turned out that it had.

Company and government officials told us that there was no reason to panic. We panicked, silly us.

Company and government officials told us the reactor site would be cleaned up, the reactor fixed and placed back on-line as soon as possible.

That reactor is still off-line.

Do you see any parallels between Three Mile Island, and what’s now going down on Wall Street?

Good News and Bad News

Photo creative-commons Wikimedia.

My friend Niles is a railroad buff. He’s constantly collecting books and magazine articles about railroading history, and is a co-author of this post.

Recently, he found an issue of Trains magazine from May 1972 that had an interesting article by George W.Hilton called "The view of the viaduct from in front of the diner", recounting a rather odd incident on the Erie-Lackawanna Railroad in 1961.

According to Hilton's account, a westbound Erie-Lackawanna train from New York to Chicago, which he was on at the time, stopped at Hornell, NY, about an hour west of Corning, where things got interesting. Not even half a minute had passed since the train left the station to continue on its way when the engineer suddenly saw that just ahead was an eastbound freight train about to enter the main line at a nearby junction, which meant that his passenger train would be right in its path. Not a happy situation, to be sure. The engineer realized that if he jammed on his brakes right away, the freight would hit one of his head-end cars (the closed cars up at the front, for baggage or freight) and miss his single passenger coach, which was the last car on the train. As it turned out, one of the head-end cars was in fact hit by the freight locomotive, and the other cars derailed, but the passenger car stayed on the rails, apparently safe and sound. When the dust cleared, Hilton got up and jumped from the rear doorway of the coach.

Here’s where the story gets interesting. Hilton writes:

"What seemed odd to me was that two soldiers were running around,
obviously in some agitation, with their rifles over their shoulders
and otherwise ready for action. I hadn't seen them previously... From
where had these soldiers come, and why did they appear in such distress?”

It turned out that the freight car which had been hit had been carrying nuclear weapons. The soldiers were responsible for guarding them. The railroad very wisely called up the Atomic Energy Commission (or AEC, forerunner of the present-day Nuclear Regulatory Commission), who had good news and bad news for them. The good news was that no nuclear components were on board. Those were shipped separately through other channels. The bad news was that since all nuclear weapons contain a fairly powerful conventional-explosive detonator, there was some risk of a fairly big bang. The AEC cautioned the railroad against building a temporary bypass or “shoo-fly” track around the wreck to let other trains pass until a safety engineer could be flown in from Washington to oversee the safe removal of the detonators.

I think that the incident depicted in this article is a great metaphor for the fiscal train wreck we’re now witnessing on Wall Street. The safety engineers, Mr. Bernanke and Mr Paulson are recommending a taxpayer-financed three-quarters-of-a-trillion-dollar “shoofly” (the much-talked-about bailout which as of this writing is still not a done deal) for the criminally-mismanaged firms which ran the train off the track in the first place. The porter, Mr. Bush, is trying to reassure the passengers that everything is under control and there’s no reason to panic. Meanwhile, no one knows, or will say how big the explosion from the damaged lead freight car will be, a recessionary fizzle or a 1929-style Armageddon.

Don't worry, it's only a liberal myth.

I originally posted the following play-by-play account to a USENET newsgroup back in 1998 in response to a rather nasty spate of tornadoes, not often seen in upstate NY.

I was sitting on my friend Keith's front porch tonight, sipping a glass of water and chatting with him and a mutual friend when a thunderstorm rolled through. It looked a lot like a typical upstate NY summer squall. The sky darkened and there was thunder. LOTS of thunder and way more lightning than I'm used to seeing. The trees across the street started shaking, swaying and gyrating like weeds in the gusty winds which pummeled them. Rain came down in sheets. If I'd left the porch to get something out of my car, parked directly in front of Keith's house, I would have been soaked to the skin. A leak in the porch roof, which usually just dripped when it rained, poured like a bathroom shower. After about 5 minutes of that, hail anywhere from pea-size to cateye-marble size clattered down onto ground and the porch roof. The yard and the street went white in a matter of minutes.

After 20 minutes or so, the storm abated. It turned out that this was just the opening act. Another storm, almost identical to the one before it, only much stronger, cut loose. More rain, more hail, and a lightning bolt which struck less than 2000 feet away, which sounded like a rifle shot amplified 1,000 times. This all happened not once but 6 more times. I had to drive home, 8 miles, through all of this. I saw husky, almost perfectly straight bolts of lightning (no forking) hit the tops of area mountains as I drove by them. I saw clouds the likes of which I never saw before in this area. The sky looked like a grainy b&w photograph. I had to stop for gas on the way home. Fortunately, the gas station/convenience store I chose had sheltered pumps and a sheltered entrance. As I waited in line inside to pay for my fill-up, I heard a muffled roar, like when an air-conditioning unit starts up, except that this was much louder. I asked the cashier if it was in fact the store's A/C unit. She confirmed what I already instinctively knew - that what I was hearing was the sound of freakishly heavy rain hitting the roof of the gas station. It was so heavy that there was no way I could continue my drive home until it let up.

One thought I had was "God, these storms are intense. I hope we don't get a tornado". Well, I never saw a one myself, but I learned on that evening's news that not one but several tornadoes had hit the area and a lot of people in outlying areas just narrowly escaped injury. (Twisters do seem to hit in outlying areas here when they occur, though in 1992 one wrecked a steel warehouse building and snapped an 80-year-old maple tree clean in half.). One TV news program showed an amateur video of one twister passing within about 100 feet of their backyard. That's as close as I ever want to come to seeing a real twister. Our local newspaper (singular) showed pictures of several peoples' houses reduced to rubble. I can only thank whatever greater entity there is up there that my home, or those of anyone else I knew was not among them. It makes me violently ill to contemplate those people losing not only their homes, but family records, keepsakes of past events in their lives, and book, record or other collections, all literally blown away by this otherworldly force. One local tv station had its building partially demolished (while the news anchors were still on the air), all of its broadcast equipment ruined by the resulting rain damage, and its 600-foot antenna tower and satellite dishes trashed. It and 2 local radio stations which were renting space on the tower got knocked off the air.

Our county executive said in a press conference that evening that this was the worst spate of tornadoes we've had in this area since 1936; that we've had only 3 confirmed twisters here since then and yesterday. A friend of mine was visiting relatives in one of the worst-hit areas, but apparently the storms missed them. I was relieved to hear she was okay. Most people I knew only heard of the twisters on the news. I guess we were damn lucky.

I used to love thunderstorms. They were a part of summer for me. Now when they predict thunderstorms - as they're doing for tomorrow and Wednesday, I'm going to be looking over my shoulder...

This global climate change thing isn't funny anymore.

--

I drove through some of the areas hit by the storms several weeks afterward. The twisters weren't the F5 monsters that occur in the Midwest which devour whole towns in minutes, they were only F1's or F2's which lacked the power to reach into the valley I lived in and mostly hit surrounding hills. Even so, the damage they did was barely comprehensible. Several stands of trees looked as if Godzilla had stepped on them. In one spot, a twister had ripped the pavement off a road before tearing into a small house nearby, its facade gone and its interior exposed to the elements. Someone, presumably its owner, had spray-painted "There's always hope" on an interior wall.

Whenever someone makes the mistake of associating the current trend toward more extreme weather with global climate shift, he gets shouted down, she gets told that it's only a myth, and the factories and SUV's keep right on chugging along. Garbage-mouthed pundits and talk-show hosts hurl salvo after salvo of invective. Business-as-usual trumps common sense. Will it take wholesale environmental catastrophe to shake up the careless profiteers who prop up the status quo?