This front piece was written by Steve Malone. His point is that the early warning systems are useless if there is no follow-through, and worse than useless if they are used as a phony excuse to engage in bad practice.
For earthquakes, these early warning systems are sucking up pork money, directly from the politicians. After all, the concept is extremely sexy: We don't have to do anything else, if we get 5 seconds warning! Tons of money is going into this.
He points out the general uselessness of other early warning systems. For example, Hurricane Katrina had the very best early warning system, days ahead, and timing to the minute. What good was it?
Volcanoes also have good early warning systems, but still a lot of nut-cases were caught by Mt. St. Helens, and he points out that now they want to build subdivisions on known volcanic lahar-freeways for Mt. Rainier, simply because they'll get early warning of a giant steaming mudslide bearing down on them at the speed of an express train!
4 comments:
ps. the blog is still dead, since I assume nobody reads it anymore. If a tree falls in the woods ......
Don't you have a hit meter/ sitemeter thingy so you can tell whether if you write it we will come?
P.S. consider this a dead comment, then, if this is a dead blog. ;)
I still read every post (your site is in my google reader feed).
I've noticed that my blog comments rate has dried up (with the noticeable exception of silver fox) yet the hit count is larger than ever.
Perhaps with the expanding geoblogosphere there is less inclination for 'mutual support' than there used to be.
Also, using a feed reader for the larger number of geoblogs, I don't tend to go back to posts as much as I used to - is this killing the 'conversation' we used to have?
Yes, I get quite a number of hits. I always assume they are going to blog robots who steal everything, munch it up, and use it as compost for other articles. As well, I suppose the Bruce Mob has an automatic feed that prints it out for their secretaries.
I find it difficult to sustain the blah-blah into outer space (or the compost pile). :)
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