Cyclone Larry was either a Category 4 storm or a Category 5 storm at landfall, depending on which source you want to believe. In any event, it seems it was the worst Cyclone to hit Australia since 1918. It seems their cyclone problems are worsening at the same time as the United States's hurricane problems. Oh well, I'm sure it's not a trend.
Let me file an addendum to the above. It was the worst cyclone to hit the east coast of Australia since 1918, not the whole continent. Jeff Masters says it was a Category 3 storm at landfall, and notes:
Larry may be the strongest tropical cyclone in recorded history to hit the east coast of Australia. The north coast and west coast of Australia are more prone to major hurricanes.
Speaking of hurricanes, Accuweather.com is predicting that conditions are ripening for the NorthEast coast of America to get hit with a devastating storm. Here is the link:
Interesting. They think the northeast could be in the crosshairs this year.
Along with Texas:
Additionally, AccuWeather.com believes that the upper Texas coast is likely to be the target of higher than normal hurricane and tropical storm activity over the next 10 years. "Hurricane Rita was a warning shot," says AccuWeather.com's Bastardi, referring to the 2005 Category 5 storm that threatened the Houston area and made landfall near the Texas-Louisiana border last September. "The Texas coast is in for a long period of tropical activity, particularly the region from Corpus Christi to Sabine Pass at the Louisiana border."
I remember one guy from the NHC saying that for reasons they don't fully understand, hurricanes were shifting west. We had several years where the hurricanes were going up the east coast and hitting the Outer Banks of North Carolina, or Kennebunkport, Maine. Then we had that year where they all hit Florida. Last year, they went further west, to the Gulf Coast. Houston, here we come?
Some people think HAARP tech is now perfected for the Cull. I doubt it. Nature's forces are magnitudes stronger than any efforts of man to try to control.
Shifts in the jet stream flow over continental North America? Those same shifts, taking the jet stream further north, led Accu-Weather to comment in another article that we are seeing conditions in the central US similar to the 1930s "dust bowl" period developing. Further, we saw last year how high pressure systems coming down from Canada could deflect hurricanes in the Gulf either to the east or west.
And why is the jet stream shifting? Apparently global warming.
Those same shifts, taking the jet stream further north, led Accu-Weather to comment in another article that we are seeing conditions in the central US similar to the 1930s "dust bowl" period developing.
Did they really? I was just thinking that the current pattern of drought looks a lot like the dust bowl:
The thermal conversion process is probably the only practical large-scale method of dismantling prions, the proteins that cause mad cow disease.
A net gain, as far as I can tell.
solution to one of America's most vexing solid waste problems: the unholy mix of plastics and other leftovers from automobile metals recycling
As I understand the process, if you have some catlysts like platuinum in the waste stream, the catlyist under pressure/temp will cause an explosion. But perhaps my source material was wrong.
Kind of interesting to read it, then go back and read the earlier articles, and see how reality compared to theory.
So why has success been so long coming? Basically, Appel says, everything has been more complex and expensive than anyone guessed.
This, in one sentence, shows us why we should take statements like "Don't worry, technology will allow us to avoid the bad effects of peak oil!" with a pound of salt.
The energy efficiency of datacentres is becoming a big worry for some New Zealand companies, says the head of IBM's server business in Australasia, as they find they can't get enough power into their buildings to run and cool all the servers they need.
Traditionally companies have chosen servers that give the most bang for their buck, choosing faster processors without worrying much about energy efficiency.
But rising energy costs mean companies overseas are looking at a longer-term strategy to minimise rising energy costs with more efficient servers.
Information Week in the US has reported that companies are now spending more money powering and cooling servers than on acquiring the hardware in the first place.
I suspect the energy costs of the Internet are higher than most people realize.
There are stories that Intel is running into trouble because their processors are power hogs; this has opened a door for AMD, which makes more efficient processors, to steal market share. But more efficient processors may just mean you can install more servers.
Of course, the servers themselves aren't the whole story, maybe not even the most important part. Think of all the hard disk arrays and routers and ...?
I dunno. I think if the Internet survives, it will be as entertainment. pr0n was instrumental in the development of the Internet, and will probably be there till the end.
Robert McKee says in his book Story that his mother told him to become a screenwriter. Because, she said, that way he'd always have job security. No matter what, people always want entertainment.
I suspect McKee's mom was right. Hollywood did fine during the Great Depression. Even now, in some developing nations, people spend their grocery money and sell their blood to get movie tickets.
That may seem crazy. If you're a poor laborer, it seems self-defeating to sell your blood, sometimes repeatedly, for a movie ticket. And where is the sense in letting your children starve at home while you watch movies with money that could buy them food?
Anthropologists believe that it's our Stone Age brains at work. Keeping track of what the neighbors were doing was an essential survival skill in the Stone Age. And of course, so was chasing after beautiful people. We are now in the electronic age, but our Stone Age brains don't really know those images on the screen are not real people. We respond to them as if they are real, often to our own detriment.
This is why I think if people continue to pay for the Internet, it won't be in order to get plain text weather reports.
Oh come now. Yes this internet uses lots of energy -- while energy is cheap, why not. But seriously, you can interlink cities with parabolic dishes on poles and discarded hardware that runs on a couple hundred watts total. I do NOT think we will have a problem keeping a global internetwork (or several) running in useful ways - we will just be smarter about it and may not have such a bandwidth bonanza. We may also in future repurpose the old analog TV and Radio EM bands for UWB internetworking.
I believe fiber optic is a better solution energy-wise.
In any case, it's not the transmission or really even the switches that are the big power hogs: it's the servers. The processors run HOT. Hards drives are spinning constantly and generating heat as well. It's HARD to keep even a small server room cool (and I know -- I'm a systems administrator).
I have some 1U (single unit height == 1.5-2.0 inches) PowerEdge servers from Dell that have SEVEN fans in them to move enough air through them to keep them cool. Even when it's 25 degrees outside our server room AC is running to keep 20 servers from pushing the temp above 74 degrees.
LCD screens have been a big help for us: we have to keep monitors running on some servers to see problems in real-time. The old CRT's were space heaters in their own right!
looking around i would think any servers based on via's low power mini-itx boards, intel's ulv cpus, or amd's geode cpu will be more attractive despite the performance hit because of how little power they consume.
That is why i am trying to get my hands on one of via's mini-itx boards.
Not simply the internet, but PC use in general. Lots of people leave their Computer on all day, up to bedtime. ..their DSL running all day. That's like leaving your HairDryer running for like 2-4 hours, in many cases. (250-500 watt units being common)
I attended an energy conference at a local public school, where a guy who has done energy audits for various district schools said a Superintendant complained that all the Compact Fluorescents and T-15's didn't bring their electric bill down that year. Of course, it was the year they added this computer lab that had dozens of machines, all running all daylong. It's a lot of power for what is usually web-research and word-processing. It does at least offer support for the argument that there are just Myriad ways that we can make our energy usage MUCH more effective than we've been doing, here in the Rich-countries. I'd love to know more about the measures that helped California dig into their power-usage a couple years back, with the Rolling B-0's, etc
I've got a Kill-A-Watt monitor and have checked out a few PCs. The typical home PC draws about 75w, and the monitor ... veries widely with brand, type, and size. A 17-19" CRT may be about 75w if it is a good brand. Small LCDs may be better than that, but large LCDs (perhaps because they need a lot of backlighting) can have very large draws.
So I don't think you have to fear 250-500 (unless you have a dual CPU PowerMac (G5) with a big Apple LCD). Otherwise, 150-200 is probably typical.
A notebook is of course the easy way to buy efficient computing.
FWIW, here are my actual results. I have a cable modem on all the time, a hub on all the time, and a couple Dell PCs switched on as I use them (typically one on at a time, a fair number of (4-6?) hours each day):
running 165 hours and 0 minutes consumes 4.54 kwh
average consumption 27.515 watts
KWH per year = 241.03
$22.60 per year at 0.09375 cents min charge
$41.08 per year at 0.17042 cents max charge
$1.88 per month at 0.09375 cents min charge
$3.42 per month at 0.17042 cents max charge
That's a relief, in one sense. I was, of course, looking at the CAPACITY of the PowerSupplies on so many PC's now, and had made the fatal assumption (!!) that it was what they would draw, regardless of the config of peripherals, drives, etc.
I'm hankering for a Kill-a-Watt meter myself. Actually, I would like a 'Smart Service Box', to continue my own Technology Expansion Program, which regularly monitors your power usage throughout your electrical system, to catch phantoms and loads that are left on needlessly.. (like the watt-meter itself?) It would just be a window on the Home AutomationPC that manages the Home, Solar, Furnace, etc..
Regardless, even that 75 watts is a draw that can be shut off, or set to smarter Power Management, if it's not being used. There's a community NonProfit nearby that does Tutoring and PC classes, and they have something like 25 PC's with CRT's which are running all the time, not going to sleep, monitors just on.. This is the setup at countless Libraries, Offices. There's just a TON of power that we use needlessly in all this. If that was 25, 75-watt bulbs, that would be a pretty bright room..
I have two 2.4Ghz Dell P4s on a power strip. One has 1G ram, one has 768M. One has two HDs 40/80G, one has one HD 60G.
The first PCs I've had in 20 years that haven't seemed "slow" a few years later. (I launch "top" under Linux and see myself 96% to 98% idle now, shortly after boot.)
ok i stand corrected.
those numbers do fit asuming both have a single optical drive and are using intergrated sound, intergrated video or a geforce 2 class or lower video card, and a intergrated nic. as long as it's idle.
The one that is typically off has an All-In-Wonder Radeon 9000 Pro TV tuner/graphcis card. The one that is typically on has something just described as a 64MB, NiVidia 18, Dimension. I don't play games and those are fine for me.
The one typically on does have two optical drives (cd-rw, dvd-rom), and the one off just has the dvd burner.
Full load is an interesting question ... because it of course depends on who's load. I just do light office use and web surfing these days. Both the machines keep up with the cable modem and that's all I need. In the old days I did thing like Java development under Eclipse. That I did measure, and it was off-again on-again enough in demand that it kept the 75 watt figure. Before that I used to do Oracle database work, and I didn't measure that. Obviously if you do an app that keeps the disk running ...
FWIW, the best computer I ever measured under load was an IBM Thinkcentre 2.4GHz, 768M, 60G. While I was doing the Eclipse/Java work, it was only drawing 40w. Pretty cool.
BTW, that Thinkcentre was "Energy Star" compliant. In my opinion all PCs could be as efficient, and given the way economy of scale drives prices down ... if we passed a law that all PCs had to be Energy Star, within 6 months the extra cost would have disappeared from the equation.
If Dell just decided to make its line Energy Star, it would be a done deal for the whole PC ecosystem.
Savinsg from LED traffic lights can balance efficient internet & computer use.
Telephone access is low power, laptop technology in a desktop, etc. can keep power use down. And is it cheaper to build more fiber optic lines and place many server farms in places with cheap, renewable electrcity (Iceland, Siberia, etc.) ?
I thought I would repost this here as the Phx exurb thread was getting too long. It is more Googled evidence of my speculation that postPeak: many cities will suffer terrible fire damage. Recall my earlier posts on how difficult it will be in Phx to fight fires without modern fire-fighting equipment, communications, and hydrant infrastructure.
Hello Three Blind Mice, Leanan, and R W Reactionary, Don in Colorado:
Thanks for responding. FIRE TORNADOES have happened before, they will happen again. Consider this link:
Excerpt:
-------------------
Everyone's heard of the Chicago Fire, back in the 1800s. According to folklore, it was started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow. It incinerated the city in a single night, and killed 300 people. But another fire -- on the same night -- was much worse. It wiped out the booming mill town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, just north of Green Bay. More than 2,000 people died.
The town was at the center of a tornado of flame. The fire was coming from all directions at once, and the winds were roaring at 100 mph.
Some people in Peshtigo managed to struggle to the river. They stood in the water for hours. Some of them survived.
Leschak says at the center of the fire, the vortex of wind sucked the smoke up into the sky, so the air was clear and bright with flame. He says the people in the river experienced "something that very few people have ever witnessed, and lived to tell the tale. They're at the center of this hurricane of flame. Small wonder their hair was bursting into flame if they didn't keep ducking their heads into the water. And to have survived that is just amazing, just amazing," Leschak says.
----------------
Wisconsin is cool and green compared to Phx, and the potential fuel concentration inside the city of Phx is quite dense [wood, plastics, furnishings--you get the picture]. The summer monsoon is similar to supercells-- incredible wind & energy-- the temperature can drop from 115 to 85 degrees or more in mere minutes. Please check out the six pictures in this link:
AZ has had F1 to F3 tornados, primarily during our monsoon season. So, as I mentioned in my earlier post: a postPeak summer monsoon urban fire, combined with insufficient water and fire equipment could cause a fire escalation to a 'critical mass' firestorm. Here is a link to a story & photo of a 150 ft fire tornado east of Abilene, and this is just sparse grassland [It totally destroyed the community of Kokomo!]:
excerpt:
-------------
He visited Cross Plains first and photographed slab after slab where houses had recently stood. "It took everybody by surprise. The fire broke out four miles outside town and, driven by winds up to forty-five miles per hour, roared to the northeast, simply demolishing everything in its path, but the territory was rural, with few buildings. Everybody in town thought they were safe.
--------------
Finally, a link to Wikipedia to add more evidence to my scenario. Never, never underestimate what fire can do. Historically, more people have died from earthquake caused fires, than from the earthquakes themselves.
A few more sentences & links for you to consider. I wonder how much worse Global Warming will make future scenarios:
By the time it was over 1,875 square miles (4,850 km² or 1.2 million acres) of forest were consumed, an area approximately twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. Some sources list 1.5 million acres (6,000 km²) burned. Twelve towns were destroyed.
The fire was so intense that it jumped over the waters of Green Bay and burned parts of the Door Peninsula as well as jumping the Peshtigo River itself to burn on both sides of the inlet town.
Don't forget Slaughterhouse Five (Schlachthaus Funf).
Kurt Vonnegut survived the Dresden firestorm in WWII. He was. obviously, a prisoner of war and survived ironically because of that status.
The main thing I remember about what I read is that fire storms suck the oxygen from its surroundings causing people to suffocate long before they succumb to other causes traditionally ascribed to fire. Rescue workers entering the burnt region were distressed to find people who lay dead in the streets not
Speaking of hurricanes, Accuweather.com is predicting that conditions are ripening for the NorthEast coast of America to get hit with a devastating storm. Here is the link:
http://wwwa.accuweather.com/promo-ad.asp?dir=aw&page=nehurr
Also, Texas is moving into the hurricane bullseye. Watch out Houston--YOU WERE WARNED!
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Along with Texas:
I remember one guy from the NHC saying that for reasons they don't fully understand, hurricanes were shifting west. We had several years where the hurricanes were going up the east coast and hitting the Outer Banks of North Carolina, or Kennebunkport, Maine. Then we had that year where they all hit Florida. Last year, they went further west, to the Gulf Coast. Houston, here we come?
A 'Divine Wind' is trying to get them? :-)
Some people think HAARP tech is now perfected for the Cull. I doubt it. Nature's forces are magnitudes stronger than any efforts of man to try to control.
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast
And why is the jet stream shifting? Apparently global warming.
Did they really? I was just thinking that the current pattern of drought looks a lot like the dust bowl:
According to your Graphic--the driest area is around Houston! For all our sakes, I hope they do not get my firestorm scenario!
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Anything Into Oil, Part 3
Kind of interesting to read it, then go back and read the earlier articles, and see how reality compared to theory.
Anything Into Oil, Part 1
Anything Into Oil, Part 2
A net gain, as far as I can tell.
solution to one of America's most vexing solid waste problems: the unholy mix of plastics and other leftovers from automobile metals recycling
As I understand the process, if you have some catlysts like platuinum in the waste stream, the catlyist under pressure/temp will cause an explosion. But perhaps my source material was wrong.
Kind of interesting to read it, then go back and read the earlier articles, and see how reality compared to theory.
The Stirling engine of Kamen and Energy Innovations would fare better in such a 'lets go back and see if the claims are being delivered' than Mr. Mills blacklight power battery....
http://www.evworld.com/archives/interviews2/mallove1.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20020214113534/blacklightpower.com/battery.shtml
From the article:
This, in one sentence, shows us why we should take statements like "Don't worry, technology will allow us to avoid the bad effects of peak oil!" with a pound of salt.
Soylent Green.
Servers' energy efficiency becoming issue
I suspect the energy costs of the Internet are higher than most people realize.
Of course, the servers themselves aren't the whole story, maybe not even the most important part. Think of all the hard disk arrays and routers and ...?
Coming soon to a server farm near you: Peak Data!
I'm all pro-1994-internet-quality if it needs to be done.
Robert McKee says in his book Story that his mother told him to become a screenwriter. Because, she said, that way he'd always have job security. No matter what, people always want entertainment.
I suspect McKee's mom was right. Hollywood did fine during the Great Depression. Even now, in some developing nations, people spend their grocery money and sell their blood to get movie tickets.
That may seem crazy. If you're a poor laborer, it seems self-defeating to sell your blood, sometimes repeatedly, for a movie ticket. And where is the sense in letting your children starve at home while you watch movies with money that could buy them food?
Anthropologists believe that it's our Stone Age brains at work. Keeping track of what the neighbors were doing was an essential survival skill in the Stone Age. And of course, so was chasing after beautiful people. We are now in the electronic age, but our Stone Age brains don't really know those images on the screen are not real people. We respond to them as if they are real, often to our own detriment.
This is why I think if people continue to pay for the Internet, it won't be in order to get plain text weather reports.
In any case, it's not the transmission or really even the switches that are the big power hogs: it's the servers. The processors run HOT. Hards drives are spinning constantly and generating heat as well. It's HARD to keep even a small server room cool (and I know -- I'm a systems administrator).
I have some 1U (single unit height == 1.5-2.0 inches) PowerEdge servers from Dell that have SEVEN fans in them to move enough air through them to keep them cool. Even when it's 25 degrees outside our server room AC is running to keep 20 servers from pushing the temp above 74 degrees.
LCD screens have been a big help for us: we have to keep monitors running on some servers to see problems in real-time. The old CRT's were space heaters in their own right!
That is why i am trying to get my hands on one of via's mini-itx boards.
I attended an energy conference at a local public school, where a guy who has done energy audits for various district schools said a Superintendant complained that all the Compact Fluorescents and T-15's didn't bring their electric bill down that year. Of course, it was the year they added this computer lab that had dozens of machines, all running all daylong. It's a lot of power for what is usually web-research and word-processing. It does at least offer support for the argument that there are just Myriad ways that we can make our energy usage MUCH more effective than we've been doing, here in the Rich-countries. I'd love to know more about the measures that helped California dig into their power-usage a couple years back, with the Rolling B-0's, etc
So I don't think you have to fear 250-500 (unless you have a dual CPU PowerMac (G5) with a big Apple LCD). Otherwise, 150-200 is probably typical.
A notebook is of course the easy way to buy efficient computing.
I Stand Corrected.
That's a relief, in one sense. I was, of course, looking at the CAPACITY of the PowerSupplies on so many PC's now, and had made the fatal assumption (!!) that it was what they would draw, regardless of the config of peripherals, drives, etc.
I'm hankering for a Kill-a-Watt meter myself. Actually, I would like a 'Smart Service Box', to continue my own Technology Expansion Program, which regularly monitors your power usage throughout your electrical system, to catch phantoms and loads that are left on needlessly.. (like the watt-meter itself?) It would just be a window on the Home AutomationPC that manages the Home, Solar, Furnace, etc..
Regardless, even that 75 watts is a draw that can be shut off, or set to smarter Power Management, if it's not being used. There's a community NonProfit nearby that does Tutoring and PC classes, and they have something like 25 PC's with CRT's which are running all the time, not going to sleep, monitors just on.. This is the setup at countless Libraries, Offices. There's just a TON of power that we use needlessly in all this. If that was 25, 75-watt bulbs, that would be a pretty bright room..
Bob
The first PCs I've had in 20 years that haven't seemed "slow" a few years later. (I launch "top" under Linux and see myself 96% to 98% idle now, shortly after boot.)
those numbers do fit asuming both have a single optical drive and are using intergrated sound, intergrated video or a geforce 2 class or lower video card, and a intergrated nic. as long as it's idle.
whats their draw under full load though?
The one typically on does have two optical drives (cd-rw, dvd-rom), and the one off just has the dvd burner.
Full load is an interesting question ... because it of course depends on who's load. I just do light office use and web surfing these days. Both the machines keep up with the cable modem and that's all I need. In the old days I did thing like Java development under Eclipse. That I did measure, and it was off-again on-again enough in demand that it kept the 75 watt figure. Before that I used to do Oracle database work, and I didn't measure that. Obviously if you do an app that keeps the disk running ...
FWIW, the best computer I ever measured under load was an IBM Thinkcentre 2.4GHz, 768M, 60G. While I was doing the Eclipse/Java work, it was only drawing 40w. Pretty cool.
If Dell just decided to make its line Energy Star, it would be a done deal for the whole PC ecosystem.
Telephone access is low power, laptop technology in a desktop, etc. can keep power use down. And is it cheaper to build more fiber optic lines and place many server farms in places with cheap, renewable electrcity (Iceland, Siberia, etc.) ?
I thought I would repost this here as the Phx exurb thread was getting too long. It is more Googled evidence of my speculation that postPeak: many cities will suffer terrible fire damage. Recall my earlier posts on how difficult it will be in Phx to fight fires without modern fire-fighting equipment, communications, and hydrant infrastructure.
Hello Three Blind Mice, Leanan, and R W Reactionary, Don in Colorado:
Thanks for responding. FIRE TORNADOES have happened before, they will happen again. Consider this link:
http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/200211/27_hemphills_peshtigofire/
Excerpt:
-------------------
Everyone's heard of the Chicago Fire, back in the 1800s. According to folklore, it was started by Mrs. O'Leary's cow. It incinerated the city in a single night, and killed 300 people. But another fire -- on the same night -- was much worse. It wiped out the booming mill town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin, just north of Green Bay. More than 2,000 people died.
The town was at the center of a tornado of flame. The fire was coming from all directions at once, and the winds were roaring at 100 mph.
Some people in Peshtigo managed to struggle to the river. They stood in the water for hours. Some of them survived.
Leschak says at the center of the fire, the vortex of wind sucked the smoke up into the sky, so the air was clear and bright with flame. He says the people in the river experienced "something that very few people have ever witnessed, and lived to tell the tale. They're at the center of this hurricane of flame. Small wonder their hair was bursting into flame if they didn't keep ducking their heads into the water. And to have survived that is just amazing, just amazing," Leschak says.
----------------
Wisconsin is cool and green compared to Phx, and the potential fuel concentration inside the city of Phx is quite dense [wood, plastics, furnishings--you get the picture]. The summer monsoon is similar to supercells-- incredible wind & energy-- the temperature can drop from 115 to 85 degrees or more in mere minutes. Please check out the six pictures in this link:
http://phoenix.about.com/library/blhistoricstorm02.htm
This next link charts AZ tornados:
http://www.tornadoproject.com/alltorns/aztorn.htm
AZ has had F1 to F3 tornados, primarily during our monsoon season. So, as I mentioned in my earlier post: a postPeak summer monsoon urban fire, combined with insufficient water and fire equipment could cause a fire escalation to a 'critical mass' firestorm. Here is a link to a story & photo of a 150 ft fire tornado east of Abilene, and this is just sparse grassland [It totally destroyed the community of Kokomo!]:
http://ftp.shsu.edu/~pin_www/T@S/2006/RuffinFireHurricane106.html
excerpt:
-------------
He visited Cross Plains first and photographed slab after slab where houses had recently stood. "It took everybody by surprise. The fire broke out four miles outside town and, driven by winds up to forty-five miles per hour, roared to the northeast, simply demolishing everything in its path, but the territory was rural, with few buildings. Everybody in town thought they were safe.
--------------
Finally, a link to Wikipedia to add more evidence to my scenario. Never, never underestimate what fire can do. Historically, more people have died from earthquake caused fires, than from the earthquakes themselves.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_storm
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
A few more sentences & links for you to consider. I wonder how much worse Global Warming will make future scenarios:
By the time it was over 1,875 square miles (4,850 km² or 1.2 million acres) of forest were consumed, an area approximately twice the size of the state of Rhode Island. Some sources list 1.5 million acres (6,000 km²) burned. Twelve towns were destroyed.
The fire was so intense that it jumped over the waters of Green Bay and burned parts of the Door Peninsula as well as jumping the Peshtigo River itself to burn on both sides of the inlet town.
http://www.peshtigofire.info/gallery/burntmap.htm
Surviving witnesses in Peshtigo reported that the firestorm generated an infernal tornado which threw rail cars and houses into the air.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Peshtigo_Fire
Does anyone still doubt that our postPeak future will be boring?
Bob Shaw in Phx,AZ Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
Kurt Vonnegut survived the Dresden firestorm in WWII. He was. obviously, a prisoner of war and survived ironically because of that status.
The main thing I remember about what I read is that fire storms suck the oxygen from its surroundings causing people to suffocate long before they succumb to other causes traditionally ascribed to fire. Rescue workers entering the burnt region were distressed to find people who lay dead in the streets not