I think it's JoDee Messina, the country star, who sang the song this thread brings to mind: My Give-a-danm's Busted."
I'm old enough to mremember a US Flag with 48 stars- and we had hurricanes, tornadoes, wild fires, earthquakes, and sundry power outages even back then. The "civil defense" sort were preaching prepartion and self-reliance even then- though the 'excuse' is now largely forgotten.
Half a century of code changes and the biggest building boom in the worlds' history, and we're still getting all FUBAR'ed over a little disaster? Just what have we been doing all this time?
Instead, we get folks who have anxiety attacks because you kill the power to work on things safely- all because their oxygen concentrator will be off. I guess switching to bottles -with the help of the live-in nurse- is too stressful.
Now I've got an industrial facility that was built in 1992 with a distribution network slavaged from WW2 surplus ... and plant management cries about power quality issues.
Finally, I remember all the 'sky is falling' hysteria on the sundry media outlets for every little thing. From the storms that never arrive to Y2K. My personal favorite was 18 months ago where, across the mid-South, came the clarion call :get in your shelters NOW! Tornadoes!" I wonder how many of the drownings in Nashville that night were because folks heeded the warnings; the area flooded instead. Oops.
With a Home Depot on every corner for the past 25 years, anyone in hurricane country who does not have pre-cut plywood deserves to have their windows blown in. The carpet probably needs a good wash, anyway.
