The “Summer” is over and as always it went way too fast. Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene caused a lot of havoc in the country, including CT. For a hurricane it moved way slower than the summer, I would say. Until Sunday morning 7 AM, we were able to watch the incessant coverage of Irene on TV as well as multitude of websites. Then the power went out and in our CT home, it is yet to come. The predictions are that our small town may not get it back until Thursday. A couple of hours later, cell signals from AT&T also vanished. Sunday night was an interesting night, no electricity and absolutely no communication and truly, we all felt lost and did not sleep well, hoping for the lights to come back on.

Wellesley, like many other Colleges and Universities, had emergency planning in effect and we helped wherever we can, by posting messages in the appropriate channels encouraging everyone to update their Emergency contact information. Overall, NY, CT and MA were spared by the wrath of Irene with the exception of a few areas such as Western MA. Events like these expose our dependence/addiction to technology. Granted that my dependence is on one extreme, but as I discuss below, the dependence is far more than some are willing to admit.

Communication about Irene started way before it hit us. With excellent modeling technologies available these days, predictions tend to be very good, not perfect. I remember that my very first seminar as a Chemistry grad student at CUNY was in early 1979 on Weather prediction. We needed to talk about a topic related to what we are interested in doing but not in Chemistry. Since I wanted to be a theoretical physical chemist, this interested me the most. It was pretty interesting how they did it.

Weather modeling those days involved dividing up the atmosphere into cubes and solving partial differential equations using finite difference methods. You needed to initiate the model with good initial guesses of several variables such as density, wind speed etc. to get good results and also, the smaller the cubes, the more accurate the results you got. In the 70’s both of these were problems – measurements were not very accurate and the compute power was not as great as it is today, so the cubes were of such a size that the results were not too good. With all the supercomputing power they had, by the time a reasonably reliable solution was arrived, it was 5 days late!

Now, of course, things are very different. Frankly, I doubt very much that the fundamental methods have changed over time. It is the accuracy of initial seed values and the compute power that is making a difference (I have not followed this up to actually know this!). Predictions have gotten pretty good when weather is good that we all want the predictions to be perfect even when hurricanes or snow storms happen. Unfortunately, the dynamic nature of all of these events make it next to impossible to provide exact forecasts.

With the ill informed Cable News ‘operators’ such as Wolf Blitzer (my favorite after Carl Sagan in using the highest number of adjectives) sensationalizing everything, the “American People” expect nothing less than a perfect prediction. They ignore all details such as probabilities for various paths.

So, to start with, weather prediction is very technology dependent. Then comes all the communication we rely on – we are glued to TV and the internet for information. Many complain that the TVs cover way too much. My answer to them is, please switch to million other channels. If they are not enough, get some Indian channels or Al Jazeera both of which provide you a very different view of the world and at least the Indian channels provide a lot of Soap operas and Bollywoord music and dance.

Secondly, many TV channels let you know that they have apps on iPhones and iPads. Great that they do. Unfortunately, when destruction strikes, cell towers are affected as well. If they are still standing, everyone in the neighborhood wants to use them too. Forget about the apps.

It is so funny that the social networks are very active during disasters except that those who are in the middle of a disaster are completely disconnected from it all. It is a really funny feeling.

For a country as advanced as us, we still are totally underprepared for disasters when it comes to electricity and communication. Overhead wires are a serious problem and no plans in sight to fix them because it is extremely complicated to do anything like underground wiring (think about the nightmare of easement clearance from homeowners!). Then the utilities complain that our love of trees has meant increased forestation (at least in CT). We say “What is wrong with that?”. Well, trees do fall during these times and yes, they do cause damage to overhead electrical wiring. We just need to choose between the everlasting beauty of trees vs an occasional inconvenience of power outage.

Many of us still have telephone devices in the house that are electricity dependent. Kiss them goodbye. When the electricity goes, everything goes – network connection, running water, refrigerator etc. etc. Many ( I must confess, that I fall in that category) have no clue how to live under these conditions beyond a few hours. Thankfully, we had three propane tanks to keep my family and friends who had to leave mandatory evacuation areas in NY happy with hot meals for two days.

Many gas stations did not function because the pumps wouldn’t work. Thank goodness that I found one gas station 20 miles from our home with my Avalon threatening me that I had enough gas for just 5 miles (I know it lies and there is a bit more capacity left, but who wants to take that chance).

I can go on with several other things on which we are dependent on, but I think the point is clear.  I am sure that we will face many other natural disasters such as these, will lose electricity, curse the utilities (and the utilities will pray for the disasters to pass), some will go and buy a generator, and then life will go on and we will forget.

But what is scary is that we don’t need a natural disaster to cripple us like this anymore.  As Richard Clarke discusses in his book on Cyberterrorism, our power grid can be compromised with relative ease by cyber terrorists (and he argues that it may have already been!) If that were to happen, we will be discussing a different Bob or Gloria or Irene causing the problems.