Month: April 2020

Actual Essential Personnel

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Yesterday was an interesting day.  Earlier I was commenting somewhat ironically on the essential, critical, crucial nature of the work I was able to accomplish on my dining room table.  The industry I work in is considered important because the products are critical to some individuals.  But I think it’s important to consider the circumstances under which certain work is done before throwing around words like critical.  Let me elaborate.

Yesterday was a bizarre weather day in my neck of the woods.  We had rain that varied from sprinkles to torrents without any rhyme or reason as to when.  There was also a wind advisory that quoted a range of wind speeds from 20 mph to 65 mph.  When I see a range that broad, I usually take it with a grain of salt.  To me that sounds a little like someone not knowing very much but employing a CYA strategy in case things do get out of hand.

Around noon yesterday I hear a loud cracking noise and then thesound of a high voltage line grounding itself through normal unprotected materials like trees, guardrails and the road.  We got one last loud bang and then the lights went out.  Luckily, we have a large emergency generator on an automated transfer switch that cuts in after a few seconds so life went on.  But looking out the window I could see a very large old tree hanging across the road and suspended in the trees on my side of the road.  This looked like a big problem.

I called 911 and the fellow there took the information and said someone was on the way.  And he was right.  Emergency vehicles of all description showed up.  There was a fire engine, a state trooper, some non-descript pick up truck with flashers, two power company cherry pickers and a big highway vehicle with a heavy-duty bucket on a big arm.

They were out there for a couple of hours without any indication that much was going on.  The fire engine and the statie left.  Eventually the highway guys started walking around and assembling some gear.  Now meanwhile the storm hadn’t abated much at all.  The wind was truly impressive as it shot horizontal rain in all directions with remarkable force.  Areas of my home that almost never even get wet were flowing rivers from time to time.  I even had to sojourn out into this mess when the sump in the lower driveway starting backing up.  Leaves in the sump that hadn’t caused any problem when normal rainfall was involved blocked the outlet line enough that about six inches of water was standing on the lower driveway and advancing to the house.  I freed the clog and that pool emptied into that six-inch pipe in an impressive way.  Luckily this was April and not February so the worst I got was wet.  But when I got inside, I was convinced that the highway guys would wait until morning to work on that tree.  After all nobody would freeze to death without power in 60 degree weather and working with chain saws on hanging trees in that wind and rain seemed foolish to me.

But about an hour later I saw the highway truck change position and the two power company bucket trucks moved over to the next two telephone poles beyond where the tree was located.  And then I could hear the chainsaws and see the trees pitching around as they took it apart.  Well those guys must know their stuff.  It took about an hour to down the tree and clear the road.  After that it took a couple of more hours for the linemen to rework the wires and restore power.  By then the wind was starting to die down.

Today I went out and checked out the aftermath.

 

Interestingly the wind didn’t crack that tree it pulled it out by the roots.  I’m not sure if that made clearing the road easier or harder.  But looking at the size and estimating the weight of the tree sections that the crew was working with in that lousy weather I have to admit I’m impressed.

So, to put an end to this post, I guess I’m just saying that there’s work and then there’s real work.  If we’re going to have a world where power flows through wires across the countryside, we’ll need some men who don’t shelter in place when things go wrong.  They go out in the wind and rain and snow and do hard work so everyone else can stay warm and safe inside.  Hopefully one day soon a lot more people will remember that and once again make it part of the way we address the world we live in.  Not everyone can do essential work from the dining room table or the local Starbuck’s.

Some Progress on the Lockdown

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Now you folks may not know this but I am essential. Maybe not in respect to my blogging activities (although individuals of truly discerning taste could convince me otherwise if they tried) but relative to my other qualifications. I work in an essential industry that provides critical stuff. For the last three weeks or so I’ve only gone into work one day. But somehow, working from home I’ve been able to critically impact the essence of something or other. Or so I’m told.

But now word has come down that in a very few weeks I’ll be heading back to the salt mines. Not full time. We’ll be staggering our days at the plant on an every-other day basis (three days one week, two days the next week) which will allow us to stagger our seating arrangement and maintain enough space to prevent us from bumping into each other in the aisles. Also, we’ll be masked and bathed in hand sanitizer. It sounds wonderful until we bump into someone that’s not wearing a mask. People at this point shouldn’t be getting away with not wearing a mask, as there are lots of options to choose from and it benefits everyone’s safety.

Anyway, I take this as a sign that reality is starting to temper the paranoid risk aversion that has become like a mystery cult in most corporations. Apparently, productivity has plummeted to such an extent that corporate survival has finally overcome the fear of being sued for COVID-19 deaths in the workplace.

This is the first sign that normalcy is returning. Big corporations are the first to hear from the bureaucracy when things are about to happen. I take this to mean that we’ll start hearing about changes at the end of April. And it makes sense. Places like New York City will be the last places to end the quarantine. The density of the population and the high infection rates ensures that hospital cases will continue for months to come. But outside of the Northeast and the West Coast we can expect gradual easing on the quarantine requirements in May.

I fully expect nursing homes and assisted living facilities will maintain strict isolation to prevent the kind of deaths that occurred in Washington State at the nursing homes that were affected. And any other guidelines that the doctors can provide for truly at-risk people would be useful. But if you’re thirty-five years old and don’t have a chronic heart or lung condition or weigh three hundred pounds why do they have you sitting at home without a pay check to feed your family?

You can depend on the New York Times and CNN to declare President Trump a war criminal for letting us out of lockdown before the complete collapse of the economy and thereby threatening their election narrative. But he’s smart enough to do what needs doing. I expect he’ll run on restoring the economy to high performance and locking down the borders. And included in the border lockdown will be shutting down the air routes to China. It’s the smart thing to do and it will sell very well at election time. It will reinforce Biden’s crony links to China and resonate with anyone who has suffered because of the COVID-19 shutdowns.

So, hang in there my fellow prisoners. The jail break is coming soon so hurry up sharpening that shiv.

Finally Some Useful Data on COVID-19

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An article in the Spectator gives us quantitative information on the infection and mortality rates for this virus.  Anti-body testing in a hard hit town in Germany has some useful results:

“A team at the University of Bonn has tested a randomized sample of 1,000 residents of the town of Gangelt in the north-west of the country, one of the epicenters of the outbreak in Germany. The study found that two percent of the population currently had the virus and that 14 percent were carrying antibodies suggesting that they had already been infected — whether or not they experienced any symptoms. Eliminating an overlap between the two groups, the team concluded that 15 percent of the town have been infected with the virus.”

“Data from coronavirus deaths in Gangelt suggests an infection mortality rate of 0.37 percent, significantly below the 0.9 percent which Imperial College has estimated, or the 0.66 percent found in a revised study last week.”

Applying my patented back of the envelope calculation method that equals an expected death total for the United States of 183,000 people.  If a normal flu death total for the United States is between thirty and fifty thousand lives a year then this thing is about five times deadlier than the flu.

But here’s the rub, eighty percent (80%) of those deaths are people over seventy years of age.  By only isolating the retired population and the seriously ill and letting everyone else go back to work, we can reduce the number of deaths to a handful and still let the country get back to normal.

Let’s hope cooler heads prevail and the Health-Nazis don’t sentence us and our way of life to oblivion.

12APR2020 – OCF Update – Happy Easter

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Good Morning to everyone out there.  It’s a bright sunny day and the wind has died down, although not completely so some of my focus stack pictures I took today of some flowers are probably a mess.  There was frost on the flowers this morning which is to be expected in this weird little stretch of the world I live in.

Camera Girl and I are going to have a video family gathering later and that should somewhat assuage the isolation and she’s making a few treats to make up for the ham or lamb or turkey that could have been.

I hope all of you will have a good day and enjoy whatever company, real or virtual you may have.  And for the Christians have a very Happy Easter.