Fragile Services

The local power company robo called and left a message that the grid was going down in two hours. They shut it down for repairs. Currently I’m powering my computer on my off-grid solar electric system.

Unfortunately, this won’t get posted until the grid comes back. Apparently my Internet is also down. The router powers up just fine on my power system, so the problem is on their end. Whatever. I take comfort in my personal library of actual paper books.

The power company estimated that the grid would be down for about four hours. We shall see.

Not much else going on around the homestead. We walked down to the lake today. The loons were playing right off our beach. Watching them never gets old. A kingfisher noisily went about his business. Their flight pattern always amuses me. It’s like they forget they have to flap their wings now and then so they do this flap, flap, and drop pattern. Beats the heck out of television.

I moved some of next year’s firewood around, but a lot less than I’d hoped. While I feel pretty healthy, my endurance is lacking. Months of inactivity and injury will do that to a person. Over time that should improve. Exercise is a good thing.

It’s not making the main stream news all that much, but there’s a really bad ebola outbreak going on in Africa. It’s happening in the middle of a war zone, so that complicates everything. The major world heath organizations admit they don’t have a handle on it. New cases keep appearing that aren’t on their list of people who were known to be exposed to the virus. That means there’s sources of the disease they’ve yet to discover.

In the past the spread of the disease was limited by people’s lack of access to rapid transportation. That slowed the spread down to a walking pace. This time around it’s affecting a population with access to cars and air travel.

Just to make things interesting, the United States has a lot of troops in Africa these days. Returning troops could unwittingly bring the virus back with them. If you want see what troop movements can do for disease spread look up how the Spanish flu traveled at the end of WWI. It’s speculated that the disease traveled by troop train, among other methods.

One thing about ebola is that it’s a fairly fast acting disease. To be frank, people died before they could spread it too far by walking. Air travel changes all that. The thing to do would be to shut down air travel before it could spread. That’s unlikely to happen fast enough. By the time they think about it, the cat will be out of the bag. You could still have sea travel as there would be time for symptoms to show before a boat crossed the ocean. Then again, I certainly would not want to be stuck on a quarantined boat carrying a plague.

-Sixbears