Flash Flooding and The PIC

Into the Mystic

It has been awhile since I have posted on the topic of the PIC. Truth be told there has been so many examples and many of them are repeats. Multiple power outages. Multiple data breaches. Many intensified storms and floods. Examples aging infrastructure failures. The list is extensive. 

My warnings and calls for implementing failure resistance never seem to reach the correct ears. 

Here and now I am writing about the massive flash flooding event of July 4 in Kerrville, Texas.  The rainfall total is a measure of magnitude in inches of rain. Beyond that number is several convergent factors which led to the tragedy of hundreds of people swept away in the currents and drown. 

My days of study was in hydrology in college and working with the Army Corps of Engineers, watershed computer model, called STORM. 

Two of the intensity factors for river flooding are how fast the rain falls (in inches per hour) and how all the tributaries combine to make peak flow. 

The Guadalupe River is a known flood hazard from many decades past. FEMA had produced flood hazard maps for the river reaches where the most life was lost. 30 years ago there was a major flooding incident in nearly the same locations. 

These maps are drawn based on topography and both upstream and down stream conditions. The maps do not consider existing or future land use. Those conditions are a matter of private property rights. Local authorities can permit or deny permits to build structures of various uses in the flood zone. 

These regulations are supposed to protect land owners from their short sighted plans. Likewise they are supposed to protect the public from unknowingly residing in the danger zones. 

During many decades of continuous occupation a Christian Girls Camp grew up next to the river. Camp Mystic, Guadalupe site was the one where 27 children died in the flood. Hundreds of others escaped the torrents because their sleeping quarters were further up the river bank. 

Other people who lost their lives were also residing in structures which were located in the flood plain. 

This rainfall event was labeled as a One Hundred Year event. That nomenclature is not a suggestion the flood only happens once a century but is a measure of rainfall. The flooding is related to those other factor mentioned above. The measure of how deadly a floor may be relates to what time of day it happens, the season and how many people choose to be in the flow channel when it does. 

The owners of Camp Mystic knew their camp location was dangerous. They even petitioned to FEMA to revise its flood maps to exclude some of its existing building from the constraints of the regulations. Additional flood insurance was thereby avoided. Buildings could be kept where they were. New construction could be added in areas known to be in peril of flooding. 

The claims some officials make that they did not know a flood of this magnitude could happen may indeed be true but they chose to ignore the possibilities. 

The town also chose to not foot the costs of a flood warning system. The proposal was put up to the voters to make a decision they were wholly unqualified to make. They voted their personal interests of saving money and not trusting the federal government to plan and build the warning system. A lot of bucks got passed.

Flash floods are nothing new. Their intensity and frequency is.  Every year uninformed or stubborn people camp in dry washes of New Mexico and other arid states only to be caught in a sudden flood event. People continue to build their homes where the scenery seems pleasant. They too get washed away when nature turns against them. Of course not everyone gets flooded in their poor decisions. Therein lies the fragility which results in the Collapse. They believe they will be the ones who don’t get killed in the flood. Probability suggests they can live in a hazardous location for years or decade s and not be present when the catastrophe comes. 

 

The PIC in Everyday Situations

The PIC in Everyday Situations

 

Principle of Imminent Collapse suggests that everything in our experience is on the edge of failure and all it takes is The Nudge to precipitate the cascading failure.

 

I first posed the Principle of Imminent Collapse in 2005 and it has manifest thousands of times worldwide ever since. It has been a specific to me several times but mostly I have avoided dire consequences by understanding it. 

 

Once on a long business trip I had driven about 600 miles to South Carolina. I was there for two days driving and parking in numerous spots without incident. On the last day when getting ready to drive home. My brake pedal went straight to the floor. Fortunately I was only moving at about 2 mph.  Only minutes before that total hydraulic failure I had had my vehicle moved to where I would load my equipment. The man who drove it had experienced not problems. 

 

A master cylinder brake line had been corroding at a fitting unobserved for quite some time. It was at that moment the metal burst leaving me without any brakes. 

 

This all transpired in a parking lot of a transit agency with no other vehicles immediately nearby. A few minutes later I would have been on the highway cruising on home. This catastrophic failure could have been deadly. 

 

The repairs had to wait until the next day after having the vehicle towed to a repair shop. It took all day to get done from having to locate parts and fabricate the shape of the pipe. It turned out the shop replaced the failed section of pipe and all the others which were equally old. 

 

When I got home I had my usual mechanic inspect every hydraulic line, the calipers, master cylinder and the ABS block. I was not going to have a repeat occurrence of an identifiable weakness. 

 

In advance of some upcoming interstate road trips I decided my existing four tires would be replaced before I headed out. They all had good tread depth but might harbor hidden flaws which could manifest the Principle of Imminent Collapse.

 

The 4-digit number imprinted on the sidewall on the tire, 4114, means the tire was manufactured in the 41st week of 2014. Specifically, my tires were nine years old. I had been pushing the envelope for a while. Every mile brought them closer to one of the four experiencing tread separation or a blowout due to failure of the steel belts. 

 

Being I am the originator of the statement of the Principle of Imminent Collapse itself and am fully aware of the perils of ignoring it, I spent the morning waiting in the installation of four new tires. 

 

I had to fight the reluctance of replacing four good looking tires. I had to resist the temptation of procrastination. I had to rationalize the fact that 95% of tire failures occur in the last 10% of its service life. 

 

Yes, a nail or shard of glass can fail a new tire. A pothole can crack the seal at the bead. A manufacturing defect may be present. However, all of those events are beyond the control of good management of the Principle of Imminent Collapse and the Nudges which brings on the failure. 

 

If one watches for the imminent failures they can be averted. The failure might not be stopped but horrendous outcomes can. 

 

Similarly, the phrase “a stitch in time, saves nine” is an early wisdom and admonition to heed the PIC and its consequences. 

The Inevitable End of the Titan Submersible

I can't help thinking that the fate of the Titan deep-sea submersible is an example of the Principle of Imminent Collapse. The designers chose a number of characteristics and construction innovations and build a device which would ultimately fail catastrophically. All it took was The Nudge.

The Principle of Imminent Collapse states that everything in our experience is on the verge of failure and all it takes is the Nudge to make it collapse. In so many examples this principle manifest itself in the worst ways possible. In other articles I present some famous examples.

Barring some as yet unknown vector of failure such as a torpedo, a giant squid or Neptune himself, The Titan succumbed to the pressures of the deep and in an instant crushed the interior of the vessel. The failure would have been preceded by a few moments of creaking noises then a WHOOSH. The 96 hours of oxygen and life support would ultimately be unnecessary.

Unless the mission involved a dive too deep the failure would have been unexpected yet not unpredictable. Pressure vessels have a useful life which can only be exceeded at the peril of those around it. The two kinds of pressure vessels are ones designed for internal pressure like a SCUBA tank or an acetylene welding rig. The other is the one for external pressure such as a submarine. The Beebe-Barton Bathysphere  was a steel ball-shaped container which was lowered on a cable into the icy dark depths of the ocean. It set depth records with its missions. It had communications and power from the surface and was retrievable by the surface operator.

The Titan was a free dive device which had supposedly redundant system to self-rescue in the event of mission ending conditions. The one which could not be survived is the one which ended its time. All materials undergoing cyclic stresses are subject to material fatigue even when the ultimate strengths are not exceeded. Jet engines are an exercise in predicting fan blade failures before they happen and explode the engine in flight. Every aircraft which flies above the altitude where cabin pressurization is required experiences the cyclic expansion and relaxation of the fuselage. The metal will eventually crack. Those cracks will propagate until the structure fails.

This is why the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia in not rung any more. Its crack would get longer with each and eventually peal a large chunk of the bell would fall off. The contraction and expansion of the composite materials of the Titan submersible introduced regions of delamination which would only be recognized by the sensors place on the hull. They knew there was a problem that needed constant monitoring.

Hubris is one of the causes of the Principle of Imminent Collapse manifesting early failures. They believed they had way to know when enough was enough. The problem was the interval between first warning and failure was way too short. If there was any earlier indications of imminent collapse and they ignored them, they were living on borrowed time. In such hostile environments there is very little time to decide to abort and get into shallower water. Reports were made that some technical staff had misgivings about the integrity of the craft.

It was a case of "one time too many." It was also a case that the immediately previous mission was on the verge of the same failure and that crew got lucky. The Titan was a million dollar piece of hardware. It needed to make a minimum number of missions in order to be financially sustainable. Its last mission exceeded the parameters and failed. Unfortunately one never knows when the Principle of Imminent Collapse will determine the last mission. Only the humans can decide to call it a day and retire the equipment before the inevitable failure.

Democracy and the Principle of Imminent Collapse

Democracy and the Principle of Imminent Collapse

The existence of democracy itself is an improbable phenomenon in a heavily populated global civilization. Today a multitude of factions vie for recognition and participation in the global forum. Even the inventors of democracy, the Greeks and later the Romans, did not allow just anyone to cast his vote for or against a law or action of the state. Athens was full of Athenians who voted and a slave class of people who did not. One did not merely move to Athens or any of the other city-states and sign up as a voting citizen.

Then, there was a ruling class of learned and/or powerful people who constituted the intelligentsia who could plan and implement the business of the state. The blacksmith, the stone masons and the shepherds first had no interests of state nor and say in the matters of state. Slaves certainly were not valued as contributors to the running of the state. Today, we hold as self-evident that everyone should have a say in the matters of selecting representatives who will ultimately conduct the state’s business.

The plebiscite is only for the lesser offices not the decision making process that determines when and with whom we go to war, who we obliterate in bombing raids, how we reduce the enemy to a quivering mass of humble flesh. Our learned and powerful representatives meet to make a show of supporting or condemning each and every law, penalty, budget item and regulation.

Men and women stand for election and re-election to be the ones who cast their votes for and against the things that are to be for the good of the people. It is difficult however to determine what is truly good and not good for the people. A tax might allow the community to have a safe bridge to cross into the next county or state, but the very same tax might send marginal family incomes into a fatal downward spiral to insolvency. Reducing tax burdens may allow taxpayers to buy essential goods and services, but the lack of funding of healthcare leads to poorer aggregate health and higher costs later. This fiscal relationship may impact the same individual directly. Lack of spending for public transportation services for people who do not drive causes their friends and families to have to bear the cost of the transportation themselves.

In the 4th to 3rd century BC, there were no multi-national corporations that earned multi-billion dollar profits while neglecting human needs and exploiting cheap labor and the masses’ need for some commodity. Well there was salt; and salt mines; and people who were sent to the salt mines. People needed salt; wanted salt; were sometimes paid in salt. And if there were wildly profitable corporations in ancient Greece, they certainly would have felt justified in paying the campaign expenses of a Senator or Caesar or two.

Democracy has become synonymous with Capitalism in the American sense. Ironically, it has become synonymous with Communism and Marxism in South America. In the USA sense, bringing democracy to the people of a country means deposing a dictator and opening their markets to American investors.

But all of that aside, democracy must spring forth on its own from its intrinsic nature, from the unified will of those people who are the “demo’ of the “cracy”. One cannot force a people to become democratic. When a people finally do decide that a voting system for representatives is what they want, it is a fragile thing indeed. Young democracies typically see a dozen or more parties and affiliations emerge to promote a candidate to tilt at the windmill of the incumbent who probably seized power in a coup and held that power for many years before being pressured to step down or is deposed by CIA backed insurgents.

A few assassinations of prominent candidates or a couple of improvised explosive devices tossed into the polling places can unset any gains toward stabilization of a new government. Everyone has his particular agenda to promote in these latter days of democracy. Just imagine even the 13 states which were the original 13 revolutionary colonies of England trying today to agree on the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the whole three branches of checks and balances of the Federal government along with its expanded powers and authorities as acquired since the first continental congress. Britain would have had ample opportunity to sneak back in and re-establish colonial rule while we were bickering over who had the prettiest powdered wig and curls or the flashiest shoe buckles.

We name-call and degrade the personal attributes of they who would otherwise be wise statesmen and women. We mash together a bit of truth with a dash of lie, then fold in a whole lot of opinion then blend it all with innuendo and revisionist history, and half bake it. For all that effort we get a democracy soufflé that is fluffy, puffy and light. If we are not careful a single nudge will make it fall in on itself. We have all been busy erecting the thin scaffold of party politics in a race to get one over on the competition all the while neglecting its long term stability. No body sneeze just now.

The acid rhetoric between candidates of even the same party let alone candidates of opposing parties has eroded the stone foundations of our nation. Senators and Congress-persons cannot debate the merits of any proposed legislation without smearing the reputations of every legislator in opposition. Where is the end of this contention? Will we reach Extinction or a New Equilibrium? While legislators and their backers spit vitriol at each other, the interest on the national debt grows over $39 million.1 And that doesn’t even include the increased spending and the increases of obligation for budget items for which we have a long standing commitment.2

The American Presidents of recent administrations, along with all of their advisers, financial backers and mouthpieces have lead the nation to the precipice and will be only a nudge to send us tumbling into the morass. The Principle of Imminent Collapse postulates that it takes only The Nudge to manifests the imminent collapse. The Soviets discovered the Principle of Imminent Collapse as they kept trying to compete in the Cold War against the much larger and more sophisticated economic machine of the West. They were drawn into intractable military conflict in Afghanistan and bankrupted themselves. The Soviets put themselves in the position of immanency and the West provided the Nudge.

Today the financial sector of Western Capitalism has put itself in that very same position and little groups of dissenters plot as how to create that Nudge. There are so many possible Nudges to use. One or more in combination are so easy to employ when the tower is so flimsy and lousy with rot.

Democracy and the Western financial system are extensively intertwined. The true electorate is the businesses which buy and sell influence to create and maintain a climate which is conducive to the long term survival of enterprise life even as the atmospheric climate becomes hostile to biological life. In the Terminator movie franchise, it is the rise of sentient machines that takes over the world. Orwell wrote of Big Brother who rules the future (now the Past) of 1984. In both worlds we the people failed to heed the prime warning: Make a system as powerful and extensive as you want, but do not let it have control of its own on/off switch.

Switching off the machines and enterprises upon which we have come to depend may be painful but when they run amuck it sometimes becomes necessary. Either way we have to live with the consequences even when the clock of progress is set back too.

One significant flaw inherent in democracy is that the people can vote to do something that is totally wrong and destructive. The people can vote to stop being their “brother’s keeper” and let the less fortunate among us sink. When we allow that to happen, we have already set in motion our own decline.

1 10 mos. Fiscal 2004 Interest / Hour was $39,494,260.00 ($Mil) from http://www.geocities.com/cmcofer/interest.html

2 Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Military.