Tornado season again-plus significant 4/11 UPDATE!

The following paragraph gets a 4/11 update as follows:

We have it every year, and every time Oklahoma gets a "big one", it's Moore that gets hit. People who live there love to live dangerously, clearly.  There was another outbreak near Tulsa, and I thank my friends for being concerned about my well-being, but I'm fine and am likely to remain so even if there are tornadoes sighted around Enid.  I've got a hidey-hole to go to, and I've been emergency trained ever since I was in grade school working with what used to be known as Civil Defense.  Earlier in my days as a ham radio operator, I was also trained as a severe storm spotter by an official from the Paducah KY NOAA facility who was giving classes to members of SARA (and I'm still on their newsletter mailing list, by the way).

I'm good, and I don't mind being out in it, either.  The only drawback in the Enid area is ARES, so I'm automatically at odds with Hoenigsberg--I'm SkyWarn.
I recently found out that an Enid Ham Club repeater does now have a SkyWarn link. I also talked in person with Hoenigsberg and have a sort-of appointment to talk with him in depth in about 2 weeks about updating certifications. This communication difficulty remains an issue with the club, clearly, but it does look like my re-activation is more imminent than it would have been otherwise. WOOT!

Nope--Garfield County's emergency management czar is back on my shit list because he lied to me about ARES just like EARC lies about being not bigoted.  When that asshole retires, I'll be throwing a celebration party.

I also managed to locate a rather ancient radio artifact, but you'll need to scroll to the bottom to see it. HINT: it's a Chicken Band license. Yeah, the FCC used to issue licenses for that band, once upon a time.

73s DE KC7LJG SK

Real plate. IL let me keep it when I re-licensed.

IL let me keep this one, too. It make sense--nobody else can run with it.

You guessed it--I designed my own QSL cards.

This shelter is also on a public registry list kept by the city.

Besides a 2 meter transceiver handy-talkie, there's also a Part 15 FM transmitter, obtained via a 75% off Christmas clearance sale, antenna for which also passes through the feed thru.

Yeah, I know that's a rather old repeater directory. :P

Oh, I know--if I lose the roof, I lose the spotlight charging unit. But if I don't, I won't, and besides--there are other battery-operated illumination devices down there as contingency. And if I lose the spotlight, it's not a big loss either. I got the thing at a yard sale for a pittance.

You can bet your sweet bippy that I also have a solar charger for the auto battery. Plus the thing can be used to run the handy-talkies on.

Because of poor conditions in storage area, I had to toss out a lot of important stuff in transit, and the originals of my certifications were part of what got ruined and then tossed out.  The following are the remaining old school Xerox copies:

Train wrecks and smaller government: workplace safety, cost cutting issues.

Fuel train in Quebec went boom, it's employee's fault. According to any company, all safety failures are employee's fault and never faulty equipment fault or company negligence. Ever.

This situation is the case no matter where you go--when something goes wrong even in a circular coal-feed rail yard, it's the employee's fault and the violation can be found in the safety book, if you're working in a union shop.  And if you don't violate safety procedures at the direction of the company, you get a poor performance review and fail to get promoted.  This is tradition, and was even the case in non-union Motorola's factories where OSHA, not union contract, held sway. And we know how under-funded OSHA has been since our small governmental small minds have had anything to do about it.

Let's review some railroad history: in its earliest days, trains would careen down steep slopes and jump the tracks, or run clean off of a drop-off caused by a bridge getting washed out or sabotaged.  That's why the Deadman's Stick got invented.  Yeah--it's an arrangement where the brake is applied to the train as default, released only in the presence of a live man to keep it held off.  Man dies by, say, train robber or Indian, train stops dead on its tracks.  Man dies, train's dead too. Locomotive engines have been manufactured with the brakes always on ever since.

Corker question: who defeated the train's Deadman's Stick?  Negligence doesn't explain the fact that it takes an action, not an inaction, for taking the brake off.

Part of my job at the power plant included railroad controls out in the coal yard.  That train wasn't manned either, and brakes weren't an issue because it's the radio control that actively kept the brakes off when the train was in motion.  When the radio control was off,  the brake was always engaged as default position.

That wasn't the only railroad involved with the power plant, either. On another track, we had tanker car full of chlorine gas used for water treatment while turning the lake water into boiler circulation water, for steam generation.  While the coal yard train, with engine, went around in circles (delivering coal from the point where it was railed in to the point where it was fed to a crusher and then fed, on conveyor belts, to the generating plant), the rails that brought in the chlorine tanks that were left with no engines and therefore the cars had their wheels chocked.  The brakes on any train engine are always on unless they're deliberately taken off by human or by remote.

Blaming the employee for failure to engage brakes is BS.

(I used to have this tune on a rather old 78 rpm platter; don't remember the artist)

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I'm adding this sidebar in order to add a link to a site where I found historic railroad jargon, so that I can find it again more easily than I could if I bookmarked it.  And in the event anyone else may be interested in such things. Catskill Archive