DRT Disaster Relief Trials

[PedalUma]

We are running what is called a pre-trial run of a DRT (disaster relief trial) next month using non-networked bikes.

Disaster Relief Trials

Tern Bicycles presents Disaster Relief Trials Portland 2022 schedule. It’s a disaster relief drill in the form of a cargo bike competition simulating a day 4 supply run for neighbors in need.

disasterrelieftrials.com

Several agencies are involved and will collect and analyze data to do a larger trial next year. Part of the scenario is that all electronic communications networks are down. We will be transferring messages, medical supplies, and relief supplies with bikes. If the bikes circle what is something like a cell that touches six others, information and packages can flow anywhere. It is also assumed that cars will be rendered inoperable. Several things could do this and none of them is good. Bikes can also get around obstacles. In a disaster 95% of rescues are preformed by regular citizens. FEMA: https://community.fema.gov/story/disaster-relief-trials-pedal-toward-community-resilience

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

Uhh, wouldn't the same things that make cars inoperable also make ebikes inoperable? I'm guessing you mean something like an EMP or something like the Carrington Event. Either one of those have the potential of taking out the electronics in Ebikes, and even if they don't, you won't be able to charge them again. A flare similar to the Carrington Event will be far worse in the modern world and has the potential to take out the electric grid for years.

 

[PedalUma]

The 'plain people' are those in best position to be of greatest service to their families and communities in such scenarios. I do not know why eBikes are allowed. Is it network com failure or EMP? Or natural?

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

We've often joked that if an EMP were to hit, the amish wouldn't really notice. Cows would still get milked, crops tended and bread made.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

I think people should keep in mind that just because some measure might not be very useful during a very bad (but bluntly low-probability) event like an EMP or Carrington event doesn't mean there aren't other situations where they might be useful. An e-cargo bike would still be useful for moving supplies over short distances (like two or three miles) and could in theory still move even when the batteries are depleted. So they'd still often be useful after a storm or earthquake had rendered roads impassible for larger vehicles.

Honestly the attitude that something like this isn't valuable because it won't be in all scenarios is what leads people to purchase $75000 pickup tricks that they use to tow something once a year.

And speaking from some experience with being in natural disaster, just practicing for any natural disaster helps your communities' resiliency when a natural disaster inevitably comes along. People who show up for practice events are more likely to be reliable and positive contributors during a real emergency, and knowing who will be a reliable and positive contributor during a disaster is often one of the hardest challenges folks are faced with.

 

[PedalUma]

just practicing for any natural disaster helps your communities' resiliency when a natural disaster inevitably comes along.

In hindsight specific disasters often seem inevitable. The Carrington event happened in 1859 and burned some telegraph equipment. We know these things happen. The likely hood of another Carrington level solar flare is 12% any given decade. It has been 164 years. But that is something we know and expect. It is the events we don't know and don't expect that we should prepare to be generally resilient for, such as knowing other reliable and positive contributors and being a creative problem solver with general skills and resources. The ones we don't know are called Black Swans.

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

In hindsight specific disasters often seem inevitable. The Carrington event happened in 1859 and burned some telegraph equipment. We know these things happen. The likely hood of another Carrington level solar flare is 12% any given decade. It has been 164 years. But that is something we know and expect. It is the events we don't know and don't expect that we should prepare to be generally resilient for, such as knowing other reliable and positive contributors and being a creative problem solver with general skills and resources. The ones we don't know are called Black Swans.

Too be clear, I'm not against the idea of prepping. My family and I have been doing it for years, we've taught seminars on it. I was just pointing out that if you're preparing for an event where the cars and other electronics are destroyed by an event, Ebikes won't work either. Using Ebikes for such events are actually a good idea exactly for the reasons you stated before. They can get somewhere quickly when the roads would normally be impassable. They're able to haul more supplies than regular bikes.

My personal feeling on events like a targeted EMP, or a flare like the carrington event, is that they will not have that much of an effect on devices that aren't connected to the grid at the time. An EMP will have less of an affect over a wide area than a solar flare due to the duration of the pulse. A flare will have the ability to induce large amounts of current into the grid over and extended period of time. That causes transformers to become saturated and overload. Radio receivers, including cell phones will probably be damaged by a flare. Cell phone towers will probably be knocked out fairly easily. But I'm actually failing to see the downside of the cell network going down.

 

[Mr. Coffee]

The likely hood of another Carrington level solar flare is 12% any given decade. It has been 164 years...

Sources?

When I dig around I find numbers like 0.7% per year and 3% per decade, which given the peculiar way probabilities accumulate is actually pretty consistent.

| EarthSky

New research shows that "severe" space super-storms occurred in 42 of the last 150 years. "Great" super-storms happened in 6 out of the last 150 years. The new work sheds light on the famous Carrington event of 1859, the largest super-storm in recorded history.

earthsky.org

Probability estimation of a Carrington-like geomagnetic storm - Scientific Reports

Intense geomagnetic storms can cause severe damage to electrical systems and communications. This work proposes a counting process with Weibull inter-occurrence times in order to estimate the probability of extreme geomagnetic events. It is found that the scale parameter of the inter-occurrence...

www.nature.com

Keep in mind that there are a lot of variables and all of these are likely estimates with pretty large error bars. The fact that we haven't had a solar storm that severe in 164 years is an important data point, and if the probability of such a solar flare hitting us was 12 percent per decade lasting this long without one is pretty darned unlikely.

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

There have been flares in recent years that have caused problems for some satellites, but the main effect from them has missed us so far. I used to keep up with them, but haven't for a while. I think it's pretty difficult to quantify how often an event such as Carrington happens. All we know with any certainty is that they happen at least once every 164+ years and event that isn't a good data point because they do happen more often but they actually hit the at least that often. It wasn't until a few years ago that we knew what was happening on the "dark side of the sun". It could be sending storms away from us towards Planet 10.

 

[PedalUma]

We know somewhat about rare Carrington events, but what about when we are blindsided? I am not doom and gloom, but having some community cargo bikes around with trained people could be a good thing in any given situation. I will ask for a meeting place as a base of operations in any emergency. It could be the fairgrounds.

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

There are theories about protecting vital electronics from such events. One of the best ways is ground Job Box. Those big metal tool boxes used to store tools on job sites. Make sure there's a good connection between the lid and the bottom, then ground the whole thing. Keep your vital electronics inside, mainly spares of what you feel are vital. If an event hits, it will function as a faraday cage directing any induced energy to ground. If a solar storm is heading our way, we'd have a few hours notice before it hits, so there's time to prepare. There's a website out there, I don't recall the name, that tracks the storms. They can't just sneak up on us the way asteroids can.

 

[sc00ter]

Years back we had a terrible hurricane. Power out for a week for some people and terrible flooding. Trees down everywhere. Once the flooding died down my wife and I headed out of the motor scooter to look for a place with gasoline for the generator. We found a open gas station around 30 miles away. From that day forward a small scooter will always be in my garage! I think my ebike could serve as a emergency back-up vehicle as well.

And if we ever get a EMP I think my current scooter will still run. It's super simple. Good old fashioned carb with no annoying computers.

That is a interesting thing though PedalUma. Only thing I see missing is mace/pepper spray. If it gets that bad people will try and rob the ebike riders. People tend to suck when things get bad. When my wife and I went out to get the gas after the hurricane you bet we were both armed with Dog the Bounty Hunter mace containers! Ten gallons of gas on the floorboard had some people looking hard as we made our way back home.

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

Years back we had a terrible hurricane. Power out for a week for some people and terrible flooding. Trees down everywhere. Once the flooding died down my wife and I headed out of the motor scooter to look for a place with gasoline for the generator. We found a open gas station around 30 miles away. From that day forward a small scooter will always be in my garage! I think my ebike could serve as a emergency back-up vehicle as well.

And if we ever get a EMP I think my current scooter will still run. It's super simple. Good old fashioned carb with no annoying computers.

That is a interesting thing though PedalUma. Only thing I see missing is mace/pepper spray. If it gets that bad people will try and rob the ebike riders. People tend to suck when things get bad. When my wife and I went out to get the gas after the hurricane you bet we were both armed with Dog the Bounty Hunter mace containers! Ten gallons of gas on the floorboard had some people looking hard as we made our way back home.

Part of your plan should be to keep some fuel on hand, or at least have a supply before the storm hits. The fable of the ant and the grasshopper has some good points to it, and covid brought that out. People, that prepare like me, were demonized during covid for having supplies on hand. We were accused of "hoarding", but it wasn't us that emptied the shelves like locusts, because we already had our supplies. It was the unprepared that emptied those shelves without really have a clue as to what to do. I saw people buying 12lbs of yeast with the idea they'd make their own bread without even giving a thought that your average bread recipe requires 1tbsp. They bought enough yeast to last about 10 years. I'm sure much of it went to waste, nor did they buy an appropriate amount of flour to go with all that yeast. One 50lb bag isn't enough, a pallet probably wouldn't be enough for that much yeast. People panicked, and that lead to anger while those of us that were prepared sat back and were relatively relaxed. There were cries to the government that it wasn't fair that people like me had supplies while they didn't. Maybe they should consider spending less time dancing on tiktok and posting to twitter or instagram and they'd find there's more time for what's actually important.

 

[sc00ter]

When that hurricane hit everyone, me included, assumed 2 days max without power. When the 4th day passed and fuel was getting low that's when we decided to get more. I now have a much better generator and will keep around 30 gallons on hand if the threat of a major storm (hurricane or blizzard) is coming our way. Longest time without power is 6 days, but we have a natural gas hot water heater so I could at least take hot showers! Loosing power for more than 2 days really makes you appreciate power when it comes back on. I almost cried after the 6 day blackout!

 

[PedalUma]

Now days there are weird extreme events such a tornados and fire storms in for example the mild Garden State of New Jersey.

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

When that hurricane hit everyone, me included, assumed 2 days max without power. When the 4th day passed and fuel was getting low that's when we decided to get more. I now have a much better generator and will keep around 30 gallons on hand if the threat of a major storm (hurricane or blizzard) is coming our way. Longest time without power is 6 days, but we have a natural gas hot water heater so I could at least take hot showers! Loosing power for more than 2 days really makes you appreciate power when it comes back on. I almost cried after the 6 day blackout!

Just a tip, as you know, it's difficult to store gas for long periods. Your generator, most likely, can be converted to run on propane. LP stores forever. Many years ago I converted my first generator to run on LP, there's a company called US Carburation that sells kits to convert almost any generator. Kit runs about $250 for everything you need. The installation takes under an hour. If you have natural gas it can run off of that too. It can run off of 20lb bottles, I run mine off of 100lb bottes. LP is nice because it doesn't foul the carbs the way modern gas does.

 

[JedidiahStolzfus]

We just had a nasty storm roll through and it's rather uncommon for us to lose power, but it went out today. I figured I'd let it go to see how long before I got the generator out and started power up the sump pumps and fridges/freezers. Power company said it wouldn't be restored until 3am, then I figured I'd better get stuff going starting with the sump pump. That was when I realized that someone raided my power outage bin and the cords I use were scattered. Most of my family went to NJ for the day, and I'm here with the two youngest boys. The 12yr old helped a lot, climbing through through the window of the shop so we could get the door open from the inside. We gathered up cords and started getting stuff connected. I didn't have any extra fuel on hand as I had just used it a day ago, we were getting into the truck to head up and get some and the power came on.

Obviously I need to have a talk with the family about raiding the power outage bin. But the good news is, my second hand big generator started fine on it's battery. I just it off by turn off the fuel. Keeps it from jelling up the carb.

 

[Art Deco]

We've often joked that if an EMP were to hit, the amish wouldn't really notice. Cows would still get milked, crops tended and bread made.

Their homes would still be warm, and their water wells would still work. And folks could still make it to the church, market, doctor`s office and school. For a good long while, anyway.
Cash would dry up after a while, and it might be tough getting seeds and fertilizer, but the community would survive.

 

[6zfshdb]

Just a tip, as you know, it's difficult to store gas for long periods.

Diesel is another possible fuel for long term storage. I use it to power all my generators except one small gasoline unit. As a supplement to my electric heat, I use a fuel oil furnace and have a 1000 gal storage tank. I never let it fall below half and 500 gallons will power our needs for over a month. ULS Fuel oil can even be used legally for local transportation since I can always get around on one of my diesel tractors. I suppose fuel oil could be used in diesel vehicles as well in an emergency. I don't know what the legal ramifications would be though.

We've only had one extended outage in the 50 years I've lived here. It was during hurricane Ivan and lasted 7 days. Never came close to running out of fuel.

I'll have to give some thought as to what effect an EMP would have on my setup. I power a 12 KW PTO generator with an older diesel tractor with no electronics so I assume it would be immune. My well grounded steel barn should also offer some Faraday effect protection.

This interesting thread has outlined many possibilities.

 

[Art Deco]

Too be clear, I'm not against the idea of prepping. My family and I have been doing it for years, we've taught seminars on it. I was just pointing out that if you're preparing for an event where the cars and other electronics are destroyed by an event, Ebikes won't work either. Using Ebikes for such events are actually a good idea exactly for the reasons you stated before. They can get somewhere quickly when the roads would normally be impassable. They're able to haul more supplies than regular bikes.

My personal feeling on events like a targeted EMP, or a flare like the carrington event, is that they will not have that much of an effect on devices that aren't connected to the grid at the time. An EMP will have less of an affect over a wide area than a solar flare due to the duration of the pulse. A flare will have the ability to induce large amounts of current into the grid over and extended period of time. That causes transformers to become saturated and overload. Radio receivers, including cell phones will probably be damaged by a flare. Cell phone towers will probably be knocked out fairly easily. But I'm actually failing to see the downside of the cell network going down.

Yeah, it might be worth having a land line (that would probably still work) and would certainly get less spammy calls and texts than my ( not so smart? ) cell phone does now. And I rarely use my phone for anything except phone calls. I think most battery operated devices would work, but IDK about that. Old time lead acid flashlights were supposed to work but lithium? IDK.