Cop Car's Beat

Closing out the weekend

Emergency Crews

There was some excitement on our street, Christmas Eve. I still don't know what was happening. I had peered out our dining room window to see where the fire truck, whose siren I heard, had stopped. The two fire trucks were there for an hour, the two police cars were there for another 30 minutes, and I lost track of what was going on with the ambulance and whatever the other ambulance-sized truck was when I closed the front blinds for the day at about 5:30pm. The action was two doors west of us.

Hunky Husband and I had asked our local family to excuse us from participating in plans they might make for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Dudette and Wichidude dropped Christmas cards off to us early in the day, Saturday.

Old Friend Found

Back in the days during which I was just getting started with volunteering with the American Red Cross, one of the up-and-comers in our 4-state region was Jono Anzalone - a super guy who helped me get the training I needed and saw to it that I quickly advanced to being a manager in providing liaison with FEMA and other governmental agencies. As the years went by, Jono went down to Panama with the International Red Cross, served a stint as a FEMA person in our 4-state region, and came back to the Red Cross in increasingly lofty positions. Once Hunky Husband and I retired from Red Cross work (HH served with them for 20 years - mostly directing disaster responses - while I had served about 14 years in various liaison roles) we rather lost track of some of our fast-moving friends, such as Jono.

On Christmas day, I happened to think of Jono and being otherwise unbusy looked him up on my iPhone. Imagine my delight in finding that Jono is now with another non-profit organization, The Climate Initiative. Jono had participated in a recent conference in Boulder, Colorado, the website from which the following is excerpted.

Jono Anzalone is the executive director of The Climate Initiative (TCI), a nonpartisan organization that aims to inspire, educate and empower 10 million youth around climate action by 2025. He joined TCI after a long tenure at the Red Cross, where he started as a youth volunteer in 1994 in Omaha, Nebraska.

Most recently, Anzalone served as the head of disaster and crisis preparedness, response, and recovery for the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) and Red Crescent Societies for the Americas and Caribbean region, based in Panama. He also served as the vice president of international services at the American Red Cross based out of Washington, D.C. Anzalone’s hundreds of national and international disaster assignments with the American Red Cross, IFRC and International Committee of the Red Cross have led him to serve in places such as Mexico, Belize, Suriname, Jamaica, the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos, Liberia (for the Ebola crisis) and Haiti, to aid the United States Agency on International Development (USAID) after the 2010 Haiti earthquake and lead donation management activity. Anzalone served as the advocacy committee chair for the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster (National VOAD) from 2012 to 2015 and is the vice chair of the Craft Emergency Relief Fund (CERF+).

Anzalone graduated from Creighton University with a BA in political science; the University of Nebraska with an MS in economics and a doctorate in educational leadership and higher education; and completed the National Preparedness Leadership Initiative program at Harvard University. He has earned the International Association of Emergency Management Certified Emergency Manager (CEM) credential and, in 2017, was named the Meta-Leader of the Year by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Kennedy School of Government National Preparedness Leadership Initiative. Since 2003, Anzalone has held teaching appointments in economics, disaster management and leadership at colleges and universities across the country.

Most amazing, for those of us who met Jono, later, was the fact that Jono had spent his first 5-8 years out of college, in banking. Well...his MS is in economics.

Jigsaw Puzzle from The Chef

Once HH and I completed the C-17 aircraft part of the puzzle, we rather lost interest. Now, if we add two or three pieces of sky in a day, we are satisfied.

Christmas Dinner

Hunky Husband and I shared a fillet mignon and baked potato, topping it off (after HH's nap) with a piece of pecan pie. Please note that 1) I took the photo of the meat and potato before cooking. (While cooking I don't have time to worry about photos.) and 2) I used Marie Calendar's frozen pie crusts. She does so much better with pie crusts than do I - and it's so much easier. She makes the rim of the crust quite thick, not only adding to its strength, but keeping it from burning or requiring shielding during part of the baking process. I did wet the rim of the crusts, just to ensure no burning.

You may subtract points from my photo presentations for lack of better composition - lol.

We heard from everybody! Texts from the local family and phone calls from Bogie, The Chef, and Elder Brother. Having begged off from getting together with the local family this once, we hope to see them this coming weekend.

Skinning Cats

Elder Brother was considered the brightest of us three siblings, regardless of the fact that he completed the least amount of formal education - a year of graduate school in Chemical Engineering. Thus, I am always confident in asking advice from him. It is bound to be great - right? Ah, yes. Sometimes we agree on the approach to solving a problem; there are times when we are far apart. A few days ago, during a phone call, EB gave me input that was somewhere in-between. 

Trying to get more junk out of our house, Hunky Husband had allowed me to relieve his den/workout rooms of 8-9 empty cardboard boxes. While I was at it, he threw in a couple of boxes full of junk. Among the junk was an external ZIP drive, about which I was ignorant. I had known he had, some years ago, used an external hard drive: I had not known that it was a ZIP drive, nor would I have known what that was. I'm still not clear on the concept, but it is obvious that the 3.5" floppy disks that the drive uses are slightly different from the standard 3.5" floppy disk (see photo, below.)

Problem? I intend to box up the drive and the unused floppies and take them to the electronic recycle people in Wichita. I wanted to destroy the floppies on which HH had backed up his hard drive. What's the easy way to destroy floppies? It's having been at least 10-15 years since last I destroyed floppies; I don't recall what I did at that time. I do recall that we shredded floppies with an industrial shredder on classified programs, then burned the bits of confetto. HH suggested that I remove the sliding metal closeout of each floppy and put the medium through our cross-cut shredder. Hmmm...I don't know. That leaves the metal disk at the center. I don't wish to put our residential shredder to that task. I'll go with the brute force method of getting at the medium.

First disk: Insert screwdriver through the central hole, pry up at each corner to separate the two plastic halves, and shred the medium.

 

 

 

Second Disk: Insert screwdriver through central hole, pry up, insert long needle-nose plier through the central hole, pull out medium and shred it.

Third Disk: Insert screwdriver through central hole, pry up at the two corners away from the sliding metal to break attachments, insert needle-nose plier into gap in the side, pull out medium and shred it.

I've one more disk to shred* but have yet to come up with another way of brute forcing the medium out of the case. (Perhaps use a hammer?) Mom always assured me that there were multiple ways of skinning cats. Unfortunately, she's not around to see me apply her adage.

The photo, below, shows what will be taken to the e-cycle people.

There was a price for all of the fun I had devising different ways of destroying stuff: my unattended spaghetti sauce made a mess in the kitchen.

___________________________________

*ADDITION of 1/24/2022 - OMG

One box among those HH gave me for disposal, the innocent looking box in the photo below, contained a surprise: more disks.

These disks are just regular 3.5" floppy disks, rather than ZIP disks. Fortunately, only four of them need to be shredded. Some were blank. Most were used by HH for benign information concerning his volunteer service with an NGO providing disaster response. [HH served on over 50 disasters, including the responses to several hurricanes, among them Hurricane Katrina and to even more tornados, among them EF-5 tornados in Greensburg KS (1.7 miles wide, wiping out 95% of the town of nearly 1600 people - 2007) and Joplin MO (ranked as deadliest tornado in US history at the time - 2011- with 158 direct deaths and 8 more related deaths). HH was supposed to have been the originating director at Greensburg KS but came down with a virus just a couple of hours before he was to leave home - not before he had dispatched me to Topeka KS to provide liaison in the State Emergency Operation Center - my first large disaster. HH did, indeed, work in Joplin directing the operation - just not as the originating director. When the original call came, he was tied up in Reading KS on a small disaster training a new director of operations. OTOH, I was sent to Kansas City MO to provide liaison with FEMA.]

But, wait...there's more! That thin, long, black "thing" is the battery to a laptop. At first, I assumed it was the "lost" spare battery to the Toshiba that I shipped off to Elder Brother a few months ago; but, no, it is to HH's HP Envy laptop. That made me give the box another look. It was the box in which HH's Envy had arrived - back in 2015. The battery is now appropriately bagged in its anti-static sleeve, labeled, and ensconced in a storage compartment above the said laptop.

Residential electrical service entrance

Earlier this month, a comment string on the posting, More from News for Nerds - Heat pumps, led to another posting, Determining electrical service requirements - for the non-professional, with an abundance of comments. I do not intend to extend (I like that phrase; ) the discussion in this posting, but merely wish to provide a place to document some of the information and sources that I ran across during the earlier exchange. In no particular order, I include the following items.

City of Derby, Kansas, Underground Wiring in Residential Subdivisions 

I've made previous mention of utility supply lines of various sorts' being delivered to our homes by underground installations, and below is an excerpt pertaining to electrical and telephone service supply from our city's Subdivision Regulation, Article 7 Installation of Required Improvements (Download Article 7__201304041240165680).

Overhead Power Line Service

If the electrical service is delivered via overhead power lines, as has been the case in about half of the homes in which I've lived, the electrical service entrance is through the roof or through an exterior wall - above grade. 

The graphics, below, are from a simplified presentation at Electrical Academia, and illustrate some of the routing and terminology having to do with conducting overhead power line electrical service into a residential dwelling. The graphic on the left shows a "mast service drop"; on the right, a "clevis service drop".

 

 

 

 

 

Dealing with restoration of electrical service following damage due to a disaster

It is a sticky wicket, figuring out whom to call when disaster strikes a home, damaging the electrical service entrance. During my volunteer disaster relief work, in coordinating with governmental agencies, I have been party to several conversations concerning what various levels of government can/cannot do, what utility companies can/cannot do, and the responsibility of the home owner (who may engage a qualified electrician) in restoring electrical service following a disaster. It got very frustrating for the stressed home owners.

The following table of responsibility is from Basics of Residential Electric Service Drops (thespruce.com). 

How [sic - should be Who] Is Responsible For Fixing the Service Drop?
	Power Company	Qualified Electrician
Overhead wires running from pole to house	X
Service bracket attaching service wires to house	X
Electric meter	X
Weather head that attaches to service cable		X
Service cable from weather head to meter box, then to service panel (circuit breakers)		X
Meter socket		X

Clever

Most small cities in our area have fire departments that are "manned" by volunteers, rather than employees. One of the challenges of a volunteer fire department is getting equipment to a fire, quickly. When the call goes out, one of the fire fighters must go to the fire house (or wherever their trucks are kept), then drive it to the fire. (Bogie can tell you more about how that works since she was married to a man who was a volunteer fire fighter for a while.)

TV station KWCH had a report about Liberal, Kansas, (AKA the Emerald City - with a yellow brick road, yet!) The local community college has instituted a program whereby they provide room and board for a select few students of the local community college, plus tuition, who then live at the fire house. They are trained to get the equipment out the door toward the fire within about three minutes, rather than the 10-15 minutes that it had previously taken to do so. Great concept!

The Seward County Community College has this website, from which the following is taken.

 

Pilot Program to Begin in Fall 2018

 

Six SCCC students will be selected to live and work at Fire Rescue Station 2, next to the SCCC campus. Uniforms and Gear will be provided with housing and tuition costs covered. Come and gain experience, training, and certification while earning your Associate Degree at SCCC!

 

 

Application materials can be found by visiting our admissions office or by downloading the forms below. Submit all application materials to Dr. Todd Carter, Vice President of Academic Affairs ([email protected]). Priority deadline for applications is July 20, 2018.

 

Way to start the week, Hunky Husband!

HH just came up from his lair to show me a couple of things he had found while continuing his review of old paperwork in his quest to rid himself of excess stuff (so the kids won't have to worry about it when we go.)

1) A glowing evaluation for his work for the American Red Cross many years ago - how his statistical analysis and unique systems of control led to superior performance of tasks assigned him and how he took responsibility for tasking that he passed on to his workers.

2) Five crisp, new $20 bills in a bank's bill sleeve - obviously part of the advance money that had been given him during his preparation to go out on assignment with the Red Cross. 

Oh! Did I mention? HH retired from volunteering with the Red Cross at the end of November. At the annual volunteer recognition dinner, he was awarded not only his 20-year service pin, but also the Clara Barton Honor Award for Meritorious Volunteer Leadership – a very big deal! In the 13 years of my own volunteering, I remember only one or two instances of our chapter's having conferred the award. The certificate of award is with my favored framer being matted and framed (under museum glass) for display.

Clara Barton Award

The Clara Barton Honor Award is the highest award the American Red Cross bestows on volunteers. It recognizes meritorious service in volunteer leadership positions held over a period of years. Recipients of the award are inducted into the Clara Barton Honor Society.

From an email received this morning

“Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

They trained for the disaster Saturday and some will be in Florida Monday

[Cop Car’s Hunky Husband], a Red Cross volunteer for 20 years, talks to future volunteers about what it’s like helping during a major natural disaster.

Nichole Manna The Wichita Eagle

By Nichole Manna [email protected]

September 09, 2017 2:04 PM

As Hurricane Irma pounded Northern Cuba and made its way closer to Southern Florida on Saturday, about 30 Wichitans trained with the Red Cross to go into areas affected by the disaster.

“We’re still sending volunteers to (Hurricane) Harvey and will send to Irma with the first flight heading out this weekend,” said Dicie Nicklaus, disaster program manager for the South Central and Southeast Kansas Red Cross.

Kansas volunteers will begin as early as Monday setting up shelters for Floridians whose homes are destroyed.

“Our goal is to send teams to open shelters,” Nicklaus told the group. “I can’t tell you how it’s going to be when Irma hits because we’ve never seen anything like this. We’re looking at the entire state of Florida.”

Volunteers might also be sent to the U.S. Virgin Islands, which saw complete devastation when Hurricane Irma hit.

“You’re going to be sleeping outside and there’s no plumbing,” she told the group. “While it’s awful for us, you still have a dry bed to come home to. Most of those people don’t.”

This is the first time the local Red Cross chapter has held in-person training classes, said Jennifer Sands, executive director.

“With the urgent need for volunteers due to the two major disasters, we’re trying to get people prepared for short- and long-term recovery in Texas and Florida,” she said. “We’ve already seen fatigue in the volunteers who have already been deployed.”

The Red Cross expects to continue deploying volunteers to Houston through Christmas, she said. It’s unknown how long they’ll be needed in Florida – it depends on how severe the storms are.

The three-hour training covered areas of disaster relief from building shelters, working with local and government organizations and how to help people emotionally.

“The best thing the Red Cross can do is offer people compassion,” Nicklaus said.

[Cop Car’s Hunky Husband] led most of the training. He has been a Red Cross volunteer for two decades and has deployed to more than 50 disasters. He’s part of the Wichita team that covers 21 counties in Kansas. When needed, teams are sent out of state.

“At the heart of the disaster is people,” he said, explaining survivors will need food, water, clothing, shelter, emotional and financial help.

“Financially, in some cases, people don’t recover at all,” he said.

In Texas and Florida, volunteers will help connect affected residents with organizations that can help them in the long term, Sanders said.

Patricia Thompson has been a volunteer for more than 20 years.

“Once you do this, it’s a calling,” she said. “It’s in your heart.”

Three more training sessions will be held on Saturdays this month:

▪  Sept. 23 from 9 a.m. to noon at 707 N. Main in Wichita

▪  Sept. 16 from 9 a.m. to noon at 128 W. 8th in Coffeyville

▪  Sept. 30 from 9 a.m. to noon at 128 W. 8th in Coffeyville

Nicklaus said people who want to volunteer should think about their areas of interest, which will help determine how they’d be best suited to help, whether it’s organizing, public speaking, dealing with technology or driving trucks.

Volunteers wishing to deploy to Texas or Florida must be available for two weeks. Flights, lodging and food are provided by the Red Cross. If a volunteer cannot commit to at least 14 days, Sanders said, the local chapter needs help in Kansas to offset the volunteers who are now out of state.

 

Resuming

Kudos to those who were savvy enough to figure out that I've been AFK for about three weeks - with the blog rolling merrily along on autopilot. Three things conspired to produce what readers saw: My blog service expired (my credit card number had changed and I hadn't updated the info for TypePad), I was very, very, very busy with volunteer work (my butt and sciatic joint are giving me fits from sitting, pounding on the keyboard so much), and it is Women's History Month. Thus, I left a slew of "wise" quotes of women.

We held a disaster training institute in Salina KS. Originally, we had 150 people signed up to take from 1 to 11 of the 34 sessions that were offered. Unfortunately, Kansas was hit with multiple wildfires a few days before the institute started. The fires included the largest, single wildfire in the history of the state. Translation: many of the people who had signed up to teach or take classes at the institute had to withdraw in order to serve on the disaster relief operation. That did not keep me from being busy. I spent much time preparing for the institute. Having taken my laptop with me, I spent 12-hour days sitting over it for three days - not to mention the time spent sitting in my car driving up and back. (Hunky Husband was to have taught a two-day class, but so many of his students had to drop out that we cancelled the class; thus, he did not go.) Back at home, I had to finish crediting everyone with the training they had taken and get a report put together on our event.

In the end, we had 24 instructors, 110 students (filling a total of 493 seats in classes), and a handful of support staff in attendance.

From the Wichita Eagle:

 2017 March 8 - 4:29 PM 

The Latest: 2-county Kansas wildfire sets new state record

 

As I recall, winds gusted into the 70s (miles/hour) during a couple of days of the fires. It was reported that about 2000 firefighters worked the blazes in about 23 counties (Kansas comprises 105 counties). In Kansas (Oklahoma, Texas, and Colorado had wildfires at the same time) thousands of cattle were lost, somewhat fewer than 100 structures were destroyed, and one person died as a result of the fires. The one death in Kansas was a semi-trailer truck driver who drove into smoke that covered a highway, tried to back out of the smoke, jack-knifed the tractor/trailer, and was overcome by the smoke when he exited his cab. A few cars plowed into the jack-knifed tractor/trailer, but occupants received minor injuries. Five died in Texas.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/nation-world/article137117388.html#storylink=cpy

Melted my heart

When we finished our stint at the fitness center, this morning, Elegant Friend and I stopped by the local nursing home (the one at which I served as long-term care ombudsman, and in which EF's husband had spent his last few months) to drop off some presents.  Each year we have purchased items that are useful to the residents (sweat pants, sweat shirts, dusters, slipper socks, toiletries, stationery & stamps, et cetera).  The staff gathers all of the donated items, figures out who most needs what, wraps, and has the gifts ready for the holiday gift exchange.  In addition, EF has a special friend to whom she was taking a fancy holiday vest, and I wished to check with one of the women to see if she would be available for a knitting/crocheting/chatting session tomorrow morning.  The woman was being wheeled out by a couple of relatives, for an outing, so I had a bit of time on my hands and sauntered down to the physical therapy area to say "hi" to the physical therapist.  As I walked in the door, a man who was there for therapy (having had a stroke that left him unable to speak or use his right hand, some months ago) saw me and broke into the brightest smile imaginable.  When I shook his left hand, he raised my hand to his lips and planted two or three kisses on it.  What a sweet gesture, and how touching.  I'm a big, bad engineer; but, it melted my heart.

December 11, 2006 at 07:58 PM

 

Comments

Glad to hear you have a soft spot. Who ever told you an engineer wouldn't?? *smile* As a former long term care ombudsman you certainly zeroed in on the kind of gifts that can be most appreciated and used in so many such facilities.

Posted by: joared | December 13, 2006 at 01:02 AM

Joared--The local newspaper provides space for non-profits to list their Christmas lists, each year. Elegant Friend and I have been gifting the nursing home residents for so many years that we no longer need to look: we know what it will say (besides, we know the staff well enough to just ask!) And, no one told me that engineers couldn't have a soft spot; but, the required course "Shell Integrity Assurance" was a pretty good indication. *grinning*

Posted by: Cop Car | December 13, 2006 at 07:41 AM

When we finished our stint at the fitness center, this morning, Elegant Friend and I stopped by the local nursing home (the one at which I served as long-term care ombudsman, and in which EF's husband had spent his last few months) to drop off some presents.  Each year we have purchased items that are useful to the residents (sweat pants, sweat shirts, dusters, slipper socks, toiletries, stationery & stamps, et cetera).  The staff gathers all of the donated items, figures out who most needs what, wraps, and has the gifts ready for the holiday gift exchange.  In addition, EF has a special friend to whom she was taking a fancy holiday vest, and I wished to check with one of the women to see if she would be available for a knitting/crocheting/chatting session tomorrow morning.  The woman was being wheeled out by a couple of relatives, for an outing, so I had a bit of time on my hands and sauntered down to the physical therapy area to say "hi" to the physical therapist.  As I walked in the door, a man who was there for therapy (having had a stroke that left him unable to speak or use his right hand, some months ago) saw me and broke into the brightest smile imaginable.  When I shook his left hand, he raised my hand to his lips and planted two or three kisses on it.  What a sweet gesture, and how touching.  I'm a big, bad engineer; but, it melted my heart.

Comments

[joared]

Glad to hear you have a soft spot. Who ever told you an engineer wouldn't?? *smile* As a former long term care ombudsman you certainly zeroed in on the kind of gifts that can be most appreciated and used in so many such facilities.

[Cop Car]

Joared--The local newspaper provides space for non-profits to list their Christmas lists, each year. Elegant Friend and I have been gifting the nursing home residents for so many years that we no longer need to look: we know what it will say (besides, we know the staff well enough to just ask!) And, no one told me that engineers couldn't have a soft spot; but, the required course "Shell Integrity Assurance" was a pretty good indication. *grinning*