Prepare_For_The_Worst
Posted: September 20, 2008 10:32 pmFiled under: WOW!, amateur radio, internet, rant, space, weather
I’m sure the residents of Galveston Texas are wondering how, not to mention why… something like this chose them. It was bad.
But Hurricane Ike could have been much much worse.
Likely not many of us were up at 4:15 to check on things, or you could have seen this live image of the NWS radar from the Texas coast. I was up, and grabbed this at the time. So many things helped keep this storm from being even more devastating than it was. If it had been a little slower moving across the gulf, it would have had more time over the warm water and likely become a category 3 hurricane. If it had been a little faster, it would have made landfall a little further west, allowing the more significant off-shore winds of that north-east quadrant to have pushed the surge even further up into Galveston Bay - and brought even stronger winds into downtown Houston. It was bad enough in Houston, but it sure could have been worse. Fortunately with hurricanes there is some time to prepare. As they say “Failure to plan can have the same results as planning to fail…”
Plan for a category 3 or cat 4 - and a cat 2 will seem like a walk in the park. I know that makes it sound easy - it never is. Whether it is hurricane, tornado, earthquake, tsunami, whatever - we seriously owe our lives to those that make the plans, and prepare for the worst. My hats are off to those who work day in and day out in Emergency Management, and live, sleep, and breath about the everyday planning and organization of how to deal with ‘everything and anything’. I try to do my part in supporting their efforts with my Amateur Radio activities, and lending communications support for whatever their circumstances require. See if you can find a way to offer your expertise towards that preparedness effort. You never know when your community will be affected by some unplanned catastrophe.
In my line of work, we were actually just finishing up a project to provide a Backup Control Center, for NASA’s International Space Station. The need for such a BCC would exist, even without hurricanes, but storms like Ike are without a doubt - a good opportunity to put it into action. We started engineering and assembling the network infrastructure after hurricane Rita threatened Houston and the JSC Mission Control Center a few years back. Fortunately we had just successfully completed an Operational Readiness Review when Gustav came around, so we prepared to activate some of this new capability. Gustav passed without any need to do much here at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), but we had some folks from Houston already on site in case that activation had become necessary. It seems that they had just left when they started coming back, but this time with a bigger storm on their heels.
This alternate Flight Control Team has the capability to basically fly the ISS ‘remote-control’ by using portable laptop type computers connecting over the network back to the systems in Houston. By the time the storm was hitting the coast, we had brought up the BCC and the FCT could actually run the show from Huntsville - still using the systems at JSC..!.. In Houston the ‘Hurricane Ride-Out Team‘ (about 65 people) kept the generators running and some equipment powered up, but had no real control over the systems for nearly the whole week. If things had been worse for MCC we could have switched the entire command uplink to go directly to White Sands from MSFC, but that will remain for another event… This was enough of a ‘live-fire‘ check-out for NASA to officially consider our BCC “operational”. Our facility had ramped up to full 24×7 support of the additional networks, servers, and personnel needed to operate as BCC (almost as tho we had prepared for such a situation.. Imagine that.), and quite successfully I might add.!.
Everyone was thoroughly pleased. It is always rewarding to see a plan come together so well.
My remaining hats are off to the FCT members who came to MSFC to support their mission, leaving behind their property and family members to ‘secure the home front‘. It must have been a real challenge at times to focus on the task at hand, and not have much time to worry about what was going on in Houston & Galveston. Our thoughts and prayers are still with them as they return home, to another long and difficult job.
Good job NASA - Bravo Zulu ! This is the kind of success that makes us proud.
I’m still glad tho, that it wasn’t any worse.
/;^)
September 20th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
Did you realize that next month is the Space Station’s 10th birthday !
Here is a link to the ISS home page : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/main/index.html
If you are interested, you can follow along the daily activities onboard the International Space Station via the NASA website : http://www.hq.nasa.gov/osf/iss_reports/archive_reports.htm
Here is a page, indicating how little impact this hurricane had on the ISS daily routine : http://www.hq.nasa.gov/osf/iss_reports/reports2008/09-15-2008.htm
- You can see that they have plenty to do up there to stay busy.
What fun that must be . . . /;^)