Think of the Pets
This is a depressing but important article.
I’m glad they discussed the consequences people face when not complying with evacuation orders due to not wanting to leave their pets and that it stressed the importance of having plans and provisions for evacuating and rescuing pets for the sake of not only the pets (of course) but of people who don’t want to leave their animals and the evacuation crews put at risk.
I couldn’t imagine leaving Pepper behind in an emergency. Before Nate started working from home, I’d always worry that an unforeseeable incident (like a fire in our condo building) would happen and we’d both be too far away from home to get the animals to safety.
Scary stuff.
Disaster!
Apparently Roku Live TV has a DISASTER CHANNEL and half the time it’s showing episodes from my “Mayday” YouTube channel that I love so much (the one about the airline disasters).
Anyway, today I caught the end of an episode about a 1985 accident involving a British Airways plane. There was a fire on it before it even took off and the big question surrounding the whole thing was that while the fire was major, it was not major enough to cause as many casualties as there were. So why were there so many casualties?
The documentary went into a very interesting discussion about human psychology, human factors, and the effect of panic when trying to exit a plane in an emergency. Helen Muir, basically the expert on airplane and airplane passenger human factors and psychology, talked about how they tried to reenact everyone getting off the plane to try and determine why so many died. This reenactment resulted in some major changes to plane cabins (track lighting to find exits in the dark/smoke, wider entryways to help prevent bottlenecking at exits) to make them safer.
I highly recommend watching this.
Scare
Kind of going off from yesterday’s post (kind of), I’ve been super into reading about (and watching videos/documentaries on) disasters. Especially structural collapse disasters, but we’re not limited to that.
So if you like to be horrified like I do, here are some fun YouTube channels that cover all sorts of disasters.
He does a good job objectively describing what leads up to an event, the event itself, and the aftermath.
They have a good number of non-disaster documentaries, but their disaster ones are good. The “Mayday” series will make you never want to fly again.
HAVE FUN!
Disasters
Uh oh, I found a YouTube channel called “Mega Disasters” and now I’m hooked.
I like learning about past human disasters. I suppose it’s a morbid curiosity that a lot of people have (hence channels like these) – almost like a guilty pleasure kind of thing.
I think one of the biggest disasters that has stuck with me ever since I first learned about it is the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City. Until the World Trade Center towers fell in 2001, the collapse was the deadliest structural collapse in US history.
I originally learned about it from my Advanced Fiction class in 2013, actually. Someone in the class wrote a story from the perspective of someone involved in the incident, and it sounded so incredibly horrific and terrible that I had to look it up and read about it.
The Mega Disasters channel has a video on it, but here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 of a longer documentary on it. It’s terrifying but really interesting as well.
If you watch it, be prepared to never feel safe in a building again.
Eigenblogger 