& if you’re told to evac, don’t be shy about noise. Waking your neighbours could save them.
Evac orders are expanding FAST (another set just went out). Assume anything RT’d is already old news.
Check you local officials for current danger zones.
If you have ANY special circumstances & capacity to leave early, please do. Check on your neighbours if you can.
If you’re nearby-outside evac zones but anxious to DO SOMETHING, prep for warnings to hit you next.
Pack a Go Bag of what you need most to rebuild, what you need tomorrow, what brings you comfort, & what you hold dear. Extra time? Video & photo document what you’ll leave behind.
If you’re not impacted, I don’t want to see any of you on the BoysenFire GrassFire or ShadyFire hashtags. You know better.
It’s very likely people will die tonight. Your thoughts, prayers, commentary, & tardy RTs of stale alerts clog their route to info that can save them.
If you have kin (friends, family, colleagues) in Napa/Sonoma, it’s not a bad idea to give them a quick nudge to make sure they’re aware of the fires.
After months of pandemic, a lot of people are taking a step back from the barrage of news. Unfortunately, disasters don’t care.
Far away & frustrated by helplessness? Other things you can do: 1. Review your own emergency prep. 2. Vote out the fuckers who are enabling climate change to wrap us in an ever-worsening apocalypse. 3. Act as info tracker & relay for impacted kin to update them on evac routes.
I spent my teenage years in Marin, Sonoma, Napa, & Contra Costa. I have a lot of friends I’ve checked on tonight, too many now reliving the 2017 fires.
I have exactly zero chill or tolerance. Too much of this current hellscape was preventable.
It doesn’t need to be this way.
If you need help getting out, here’s the numbers to call. Don’t be shy; the earlier you call the easier it is to accommodate your needs.
Doing a carpool/group evac? Mask up!
(Stierch is a local journalist doing fantastic work compiling and tracking rapidly changing conditions.)
I’m reading a lot of well-intentioned articles that make it clear how many scicomm peeps have no idea disaster risk reduction is a deep field with a lot of research into effective communication.
ProTip: Using fear & shame as motivation backfires when applied to public health.
I can’t write this article (or even thread!) right now as I’m under medical orders to drop my stress levels (ahahahahasob), but...
If you’re writing well-intentioned pieces trying to influence pandemic behaviour, please take some cues from disaster sociology research. It exists!
Fundamental premise:
Vanishingly few people make active choices they believe will endanger themselves or the people they love.
If they’re making “bad” choices, it’s a fundamentally different risk perception. Until you understand how & why, your argument will miss its audience.
Even if you don’t pay much attention to ground-based astronomy, you know this telescope from pop culture & movies. It’s somewhere special. nature.com/articles/d4158…
This article from just before the closing announcement is fantastic for the context of why Arecibo is so unique: space.com/arecibo-observ…
I just...
I know we’ve got a lot going on, especially with the mass casualty event scheduled shortly after US Thanksgiving.
But take some time to read the Arecibo tributes as they come out. They won’t be cheerful. But they’ll be heartfelt.
But technically landslide are fluid-like, not fluids.
Why?
Because they’re a mixed mess of materials that act differently when moving than when still. You can’t just sample a tree trunk, some peat, and water to figure out the rheologic properties (how it flows).