The Real Chernobyl Diaries

The movie "Chernobyl Diaries" does have a grain of truth to it: the nearby city of Pripyat has been opened for tourism. No mutants though. (That they've admitted to, anyway.)

Photographer Gerd Ludwig's "'Long Shadow of Chernobyl" contains some moving photos of the area and the people affected. Unfortunately, it's only available as an iPad app, but some can be viewed at the Boston Globe's site.

Love Conquers All

Two nearby tornadoes didn't stop this couple's wedding. Normally, "until death do us part" isn't expected to be minutes away.

(They were unharmed.)

Image credit: Cate Eighmey Photography

Unprepared

I was re-reading "The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes -- and Why and I saw a mention of DC CERT that I'd forgotten about. The author said she "signed up online to participate and never got a response." Yep, par for the course.

Then I read "Answering 911: Life in the Hot Seat," by a 911 operator/dispatcher in Minnesota. After a raid on a meth lab, a guy led officers on a foot chase, running through 3 houses, then taking an old man hostage. It wasn't known whether he had a gun. The operators were going crazy trying to keep up with the calls and dispatching for that -- plus a separate incident with an armed perp; a cop who hasn't answered calls and might be hurt or dead; and a choking baby.

"There was no way to remember it all and no way to type it. Her backup guy was busy paging the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT)..."

A Pitt Too Far

There's a full search and rescue call-out for a missing 83-year-old man. I'm in the negative on leave, but technically I'm allowed to go another day or two in the hole. Except it's near Pittsburgh, a 9-hour round trip. With my luck, they'd find him by the time we got there. (Wouldn't be the first time.)
_______________________

Update: The missing 83-year old disappeared when he went to take out the trash and never came back. He has dementia, so it was thought he wandered off (as such people tend to do). But how far could he have gotten?

----- Original Message ------
Received: 09:23 AM EDT, 04/05/2012
From: ASRC Dispatch

Search suspended. Subject likely to have taken bus to other area.
Might restart if more information is found.

Tornado Alley: Chesapeake?

The Washington Post reports a "shocking" statistic, namely that Maryland has had the 3rd highest density of tornadoes over the past two decades, beaten out only by Kansas and Florida. How is it we have more than the other Great Plains states?

Key word: density. That is, the statistic is the number of tornadoes per 10,000 square miles. That's a bit misleading. In raw numbers, Texas has the highest number (155), followed by Kansas (96), and Florida (66). As you'd expect, the other large numbers are in the central U.S. -- the so-called "Tornado Alley" -- and the deep South (sometimes called "Dixie Alley").

Competition From Batman

The local blog Silver Spring Singular broke the story: police pulled over Batman in our area. For not having tags on his Batmobile.

Hey, I've got dibs here! When I'm lurking in the DisasterCave, and the Discovery Building lights start to pulse [http://youtu.be/M4K6uZInl-c], I want to be able to respond without this guy showing up to upstage me. In his black Lamborghini. Before I get there on foot.

Unfortunately, when the County Police tweeted a confirmation, the other tweeters' sympathies seemed to be with Die Fledermaus.

"LET HIM DO HIS JOB."

"Another case of DWB [Driving While Batman]"
_______________________

Police video of the traffic stop

Cat Food

A missing hiker was found after 42 days in the woods. Rescuers reported "she's alive. And she's got a cat."

"Authorities said Margaret Page, 41, took some food with her but ran out, and stayed alive by drinking water from a nearby creek. She fed her cat, Miya, with cat food she had packed."

Damn, I knew my survival kit was missing something.

I wonder if they really taste like chicken.

Bigfoot exercises

There's a series of emergency exercises going on this year entitled "Formidable Footprint" -- which sounds like euphemism for Bigfoot. Some individual exercise names are:

Operation Acorn Drop
Outbreak Anarchy
Pandemic Pandemonium
Accommodating Accommodations

Campus Whirlwind [reap it!]
Felonious Fog [arrest it!]
Extreme Exposure [Mountain Dew and skateboards?]
Mailstrom Mayhem [spam attack?]
Rumble In The Rubble [wrestling event?]