Neil Hopcroft

“I’m going to go and press the panic button now, sir, because you are getting abusive”

Lessons learned from the aftermath of Katrina…there are, I’m sure, many lessons to be learned. But one thought in particular struck me, and I figured it was worth a little more exploration. It is really an extension of my concern about the continuing viability of cities.

By living in a city, in the kind of civilisation we live in, we are handing over responsibility for a lot of aspects of our lives to other people. I cannot grow enough food to survive in my garden, I have to pay someone else to provide food for me. The same with the many services that keep a city running, electricity, water, garbage collection, even clothing and education, all of them benefit from economies of scale to the extent that it isn’t viable for anyone who lives in a town or city to provide for themselves.

Thats all OK while the basic fabric of society holds everything together – the capital system we have supports this kind living with market forces pushing up prices of things that are scarce or need a lot of manpower to produce and bringing them back down to the point where people are prepared to pay for them. We’re all used to this system no matter how much we consider it inequitable.

What holds this system together? There are distribution mechanisms for physical things, like food, which rely upon a common infrastructure. This infrastructure, in Britain at least, and I suspect most places around the world, is provided by the government. We are reliant upon their ability to maintain that infrastructure in working order.

One of the things that happened in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago was that the infrastructure was incapacitated en masse, across the entire city. That caused the distribution mechanisms to fail.

The people of the city are reliant on the infrastructure, without it they cannot obtain the things they need, they have to find a way to obtain those things. One way, in the NO example, would be to leave the city, go and stay elsewhere. Another would be to stock up beforehand, though that may be less practical in the those particular circumstances. There will always be those who cannot, for whatever reason, provide for themselves in these situations, they must be helped somehow, by reinstating the infrastructure upon which they (indirectly) rely, or by delivering the things that would normally be delivered via the infrastructure. If they don’t receive that help they become desperate – if its a matter of survival what happens to your morals?

There are two significant factors contributing to the rapid decivilisation of NO. Drugs and governmental inpreparedness. If you’ve got a city full of addicts looking for their next hit and a government that is unable to get the city back to its normal functioning quickly you’re going to end up with problems.

What are the consequences? There are a number of ways it could play out – one suggestion has been that Bush is not going to loose any sleep over the dead, since they’re mostly voting for the opposition anyway. But what if FEMA was upset at its underfunding? Why not use this as a means of highlighting just how badly things have been handled over the last few years by making sure the relief efforts are disorganised?

But its probably worse than that – the world is looking on, asking itself “is this the freedom we want here?”, increasingly the answer to that question is going to be no, its a freedom that places the values of business higher than the values of people. This is comes from being run by economists – its much easier to measure money than suffering, concern, happiness or any of the other kinds of things people feel.

What have we learned?
Lesson 1 – civilisation falls apart very quickly given the right circumstances
Lesson 2 – it is possible to insulate yourself to some extent from this kind of disaster
Lesson 3 – none of this happens in isolation

I’m only being philosophical ‘cos I couldn’t install Settlers 3 on XP

More untidy suicides

Should I be worried or happy that Clint Mansells Requiem for a Dream soundtrack seems to have leaked into Radio 4s daytime schedule? I thought I heard it a couple of weeks back, and this morning it was backing music for a very sensible program about comprehensive education.

I never did write up my day at the Little Gransden Airshow, did I? It started with me wishing I’d paid more attention to the map before leaving home – I figured I’d see what happened when I got out the other side of Little Gransden itself, since I’d hardly expected to find an airfield in the village, and suddenly there were ‘no parking’ cones everywhere and an obvious way to head.

Then they’d found some spare spaces at the far end of the car park and I was ordered to follow the car in front and park next to him…this was a grassy field that had been turned over to being car park for the day, and there were a surprisingly large number of 4x4s there creeping along really slowly in case they broke anything – these conditions are fine for family cars doing 30mph as long as you don’t try to stop too suddenly, if you’re gonna drive those monsters at least drive ’em properly.

Just as I was entering the main arena there was the disturbing sound of the engines of the plane overhead cutting out. I looked up to see a freefall, thinking “I hope that was part of the show”.

There were a good number of people there, with many stalls close to the entrance, then an area with a good view of the runway and taxiway – they’d both been taken over as flying areas for the day, they can’t fly over the public areas these days. Then beyond that was a vintage car rally, where I found lark_ascending and crazyscot hiding in the shade of a Hummer.

The engineering on show was incredible, there were a few highlights of both automotive and aeronautic kinds – the crop dusters running with a stall speed of around 60mph, they shouldn’t fly, not that slow, but they did. The aerobatics, a team of four identical planes flying in formation, then bursting balloons and flying under a line held by some fearless assistants. The Merlin engine. The Hurricane, just like the airfix model I remember as a child, but with a much better sound to it.

And the cars – I found myself drawn to the sixties and seventies sports cars. And the Jags. There was a Jensen Interceptor, a Bond Bug, and a whole bunch of beautiful old Triumphs and Capris. There was a surprising absence of Rover SD1s, which is a shame, they’re such nice cars, but that was made up for by an over representation of Rollers and Marcos.

It was time to go home when the Hurricane finished and the commentator started talking about remembering the brave who fought in the war for us….while I think it is valuable to remember these things, I think we are better off spending our time and energy figuring out how to make sure it never happens again, rather than dwelling on things that have happened before. Annoying, but that I can deal with. It was when he started turning it into a chance to preach to us that I decided it was time to leave – I don’t want to hear about your God, hes not the gentle understanding person you think he is, he wouldn’t have asked you to go to war if he were. It was out of place and a sad end to an otherwise lovely day out.

“Windows has found new hardware….found clapped out land rover….searching for drivers….”
(complete with acceleration simulator)

“i like this little mosaic space invader tucked in beside the vibe bar, not graf zacly but an example of ambient art of which there are other examples to catch another time”

There are plans afoot…anyone Cambridge-ish interested in a trip to Woodchester Mansion, where there will be an incomplete mansion, a tea shop and killer robots in the bushes, or something. And its just down the road from another Cambridge, too, so its not like you’re really going far.

What about Oxford peoples? Its nearer for you lot…

Idiotisms and Proverbs…including:

“A horse baared don’t look him the tooth.
Take the occasion for the hairs.
To do a wink to some body.”

(with thanks to evilmattikinz)

The more I hear about the situation across the pond the less happy I am.

Let me introduce Hurricane Pam. That storm wasn’t real, but it was an exercise to help the authorities to deal with a storm like Katrina.

What amazes me about the summary of actions is the fact that communications is missing from the list. It is clear that communications infrastructure is vulnerable to disruption by such a storm, the first and most important thing to do is to allow the authorities to coordinate properly. Emergency comms infrastructure should be back up and running within hours of the storm receeding. If that means dangling a GSM base station from the bottom of a helicopter thats what you should be doing, at least until you can get a more permanent solution sorted out. The japanese have zeppelins armed with base stations ready to send up as soon as an earthquake strikes, they’ll be back online in a matter of mintues – true, the situation is different, the atmosphere isn’t hazardous in that scenario.

Without comms everything else falls apart, nobody knows what anyone else is up to, coordination disappears, its difficult enough to keep the city running at the best of times but when stuff like this is going on it is vital that all agencies involved are pulling in the same direction. Ideally there would be a single agency that takes the lead for all decisions being made across the disaster area, so theres no conflict of interest. Sure, there are problems about the integrity of that agency, but they’re going to be less of an issue than the troubles encountered by the kind of miscommunications that have been seen in the NO area.

Which brings me on to another thought. Do we need to reconsider our desire to live in cities? If, as the global warming I-told-you-so bunch would have it, we are going to be seeing more of these kinds of extreme conditions over the next few decades then we need to consider whether cities really are the right way to house our population growth. Cities are all well and good while everything behaves itself. But there is a risk that when such a disaster strikes it causes such an impact that the advantages of city living are outweighed by the problems when the infrastucture breaks.

I know you’ve probably all seen interdictor by now….I’m not sure I can add much to what he says.

Nice to see the internet is getting to be the kind of place where you can find out what is actually happening in the middle of such a disaster without the spin of mainstream media. Sure, this guy probably has a political bias, he’s from a military background (hence his work now as crisis management for an ISP), but you know where you stand with that and don’t have to try to see through the corporate message (particularly amused by his shortness with people who read his comments about the city being taken over by ‘animals’ as racist comments).

The video feed isn’t too bad either, considering its being relayed out of a city thats had no power for three days via New York and being viewed by upward of 4000 people at a time.

I’ll be interested to see how the situation develops, I’m hoping that things aren’t as bad out there as they seem right now, and that we can learn a lot about being prepared for this kind of disaster in the future and about how we organise our lives in cities in the future. But I’ll think some more about that once they’re out of the immediate problems.