Hurricane Irma and Amtrak

[jis]

Penny, be on the lookout for the double barrel 91 tomorrow (20th). 91(19) started from New York today with two consists coupled together head to tail. It is a sixteen car train, and will have two P42s out of Washington according to reports from folks up in the NEC-land. There is a video of it too passing Edison I think.

BTW Maria is now projected to be below Cat 3 974-110mph) when it comes abeam of Florida on Sunday, several hundred miles to the east.

 

[pennyk]

97 was supposed to start from Orlando today. Looks like someone has forgotten to initialize it in the tracking system.

jb

It looks like 97 is showing up on the Amtrak track a train map now.

Penny, be on the lookout for the double barrel 91 tomorrow (20th). 91(19) started from New York today with two consists coupled together head to tail. It is a sixteen car train, and will have two P42s out of Washington according to reports from folks up in the NEC-land. There is a video of it too passing Edison I think.

Unless 91 is fairly late (but not real late) tomorrow, I will not be around to walk to the tracks to take a look at the unusual sight.

 

[jis]

Looks like 91 is getting three diesels at WAS. so 3 diesels plus 16 cars.

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum

 

[Don Newcomb]

Agree with DA. Fortunately the people who actually live in hurricane prone areas are not stupid enough to follow random worthless advice on AU [emoji57]

I live in a town that was mostly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and I follow my own advice. I keep about 15 gal of fresh gasoline in cans in my yard shed throughout hurricane season and I'll keep all the cars topped up if a tropical storm is anywhere in the Gulf. Most of the people I know, at least those who have been through a hurricane, do the same.

 

[Devil's Advocate]

I believe the idea is to fill up - when convenient - when the tank drops to 3/4 or so rather than waiting until the low fuel light comes on.

When most of the fuel stations in your city are dry, and those with gas are an hour away with an hour wait parked in an active street it's not terribly "convenient" to keep refilling whenever you get below 75% of a fuel tank. In fact it's downright dangerous. My own car was rammed by someone trying to find a way into a gasoline waiting line that was snaking around and clogging up a major intersection.

Fueling up earlier than usual is not the same thing as hoarding.

It is when a million people suddenly decide to fill all their cars all at once even when they don't actually need it.

The level of advance preparation, policies, and infrastructure necessary to implement an effective and fair system of mandatory rationing could just as easily (and more efficiently) be applied to procedures to rapidly increase the available supply.

Modern gas pumps can be remotely programmed to only allow X gallons to be pumped at a time and/or to only allow a unique payment method to be used every so many hours or days. It's not perfect but it doesn't require expensive new infrastructure and would go a long way toward dissuading casual overbuying and help keep the pumps open and ready for those who actually need it. Whereas the current system results in people filling up rarely used vehicles, truck bed chemical tanks, and even trash cans with fuel.

 

[Don Newcomb]

I believe the idea is to fill up - when convenient - when the tank drops to 3/4 or so rather than waiting until the low fuel light comes on.

When most of the fuel stations in your city are dry, and those with gas are an hour away with an hour wait parked in an active street it's not terribly "convenient" to keep refilling whenever you get below 75% of a fuel tank. In fact it's downright dangerous. My own car was rammed by someone trying to find a way into a gasoline waiting line that was snaking around and clogging up a major intersection.

When the fuel stations are dry it's a good sign that you should be already headed out of the area. The northern Gulf Coast is in a much better situation than peninsula Florida. Here we can evacuate in three directions. In the Peninsula there is only one direction out and millions of people who want to use the three or four main routes. It's a very precarious situation only made worse by a population explosion. Otherwise, you need a safe place to ride out the storm away from the coast. A buddy of mine has an all-steel quonset hut on high ground, about 50 miles inland, stocked with camping (survival) supplies. Most homeowners in coastal Mississippi own a generator and a chain saw. This is the sort of thing that people do after they have weathered a serious hurricane or two. The advice to keep three days' supplies became obsolete during Katrina. If you stay, you need to be able to survive a week without resupply.

 

[jis]

So far restoration of Amtrak service to Miami is proceeding according to plan described in earlier posts in this thread..

Also SunRail is back to regular service, as is Tri-Rail.

Things should normalize quite rapidly as far as Amtrak goes, at this point.

 

[west point]

About gasoline. The American Petroleum Institute a few years back estimated the 60 -75 % of all unburned gasoline in he USA was located in auto, boats, lawn mowers, storage cans etc. That is fuel for thought whenever everyone tries to gas up for an approaching hurricane.

 

[JoeBas]

Agree with DA. Fortunately the people who actually live in hurricane prone areas are not stupid enough to follow random worthless advice on AU [emoji57]

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum

I live in Southeast Houston, and I fueled up on Saturday morning - the day AFTER Harvey made landfall. Easy peasy.

 

[JoeBas]

When the fuel stations are dry it's a good sign that you should be already headed out of the area.

So DA should have headed out of San Antonio, a week after Harvey dissipated??? Interesting...

Also, there are those of us engaged with EMs, First Responders, and Major Petroleum plants / utilities, for whom "heading out of the area" is not a realistic option. Nor is it an option for those on low-end jobs, or with little financial recourse.

I believe there was a show in the 80's, whose theme song summed this up nicely:

Now, the world don't move to the beat of just one drum,

What might be right for you, may not be right for some.

 

[jis]

When the fuel stations are dry it's a good sign that you should be already headed out of the area.

So DA should have headed out of San Antonio, a week after Harvey dissipated??? Interesting...

Also, there are those of us engaged with EMs, First Responders, and Major Petroleum plants / utilities, for whom "heading out of the area" is not a realistic option. Nor is it an option for those on low-end jobs, or with little financial recourse.

I believe there was a show in the 80's, whose theme song summed this up nicely:

Now, the world don't move to the beat of just one drum,

What might be right for you, may not be right for some.

The general advice from Florida Emergency Management for Irma was to evacuate from evacuation areas and mobile/manufactured homes to safe places within 10/15 miles and not two states away. The emphasis was on moving to 2004 building code buildings preferably. We who live in safer structures volunteered to take in some folks if necessary, and between the shelters and volunteers a very significant part of the evacuation was absorbed locally in the area. Of course there was still a huge crowd that headed to friends and relatives out of state more so along the I-75 corridor than the I-95 corridor, perhaps because people thought that the storm will go up the I-95 corridor. It of course had other ideas.

For whatever reason, partly by plan and partly accidentally and partly due to sheer good luck, the event was managed relatively effectively by the government agencies and volunteers working cooperatively, at least this time around in Florida. The mandatory evacuations were much more effective this time around specially in the areas that got thrashed by Matthew last year, and power was restored remarkably quickly after a Cat 4/3 hit running right up the middle of the peninsula, which has generally been characterized as the worst nightmare.

Specifically in the Space Coast we never had even a day long gas shortage. There were sporadic several hours worth of gas outage in clumps of gas stations here and there. But they were resupplied relatively quickly as tankers unloaded in whatever port was available at that time, and tanker trucks with LEO escorts were dispatched to areas of outage expeditiously. Maximum power outage in Brevard County was immediately after the storm, and it involved some 280,000+ out of a total of some 310,000 customers. The number of customers without power was brought down to below 200 within 9 days after the end of the storm, and those are basically ones that had their property destroyed either by the multitude of Tornadoes that touched down at random places, and in areas flooded out by the St. Johns River. Properly shuttered 2004 building code houses apparently fared rather well even in the face of EF0 tornadoes which are typical in such storms.

 

[Green Maned Lion]

Personally I think people should head out of Texas on general principle.

 

[Bob Dylan]

Personally I think people should head out of Texas on general principle.

You are correct except as pertains to the Peoples Republic of Austin and Sam Antonio Lion!

 

[Don Newcomb]

About gasoline. The American Petroleum Institute a few years back estimated the 60 -75 % of all unburned gasoline in he USA was located in auto, boats, lawn mowers, storage cans etc. That is fuel for thought whenever everyone tries to gas up for an approaching hurricane.

My neighbor's emergency gasoline storage is his trailered fishing boat. I don't have a boat, well not a motor boat, so I keep a rotating stock of gasoline cans in my yard shed.

So DA should have headed out of San Antonio, a week after Harvey dissipated??? Interesting...

Also, there are those of us engaged with EMs, First Responders, and Major Petroleum plants / utilities, for whom "heading out of the area" is not a realistic option. Nor is it an option for those on low-end jobs, or with little financial recourse.........

My cousin in Miami is married to a surgeon. Evacuation was not an option for him so their emergency plan included staying in a hurricane-resistant building. That was a perfectly good plan and they came through Irma just fine. What's not a good plan is not having a plan, expecting the government to take care of everything or waking up at the last moment and panicking. Failure to plan is planning to fail.

 

[A Voice]

Failure to plan is planning to fail.

Well, at least we're back on topic for Amtrak.....

 

[Green Maned Lion]

No, planning to fail is planning to fail e.g. NJT in Sandy. Failing to plan is just stupidity.

 

[JoeBas]

What's not a good plan is not having a plan, expecting the government to take care of everything or waking up at the last moment and panicking. Failure to plan is planning to fail.

You rip that straw man up! Tear him to shreds!!!

 

[jis]

Failure to plan is planning to fail.

Well, at least we're back on topic for Amtrak.....

ROTFL!

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum

 

[JayPea]

Failure to plan is planning to fail.

Well, at least we're back on topic for Amtrak.....

If you want, we can veer off onto the topic of college basketball. That quote was one of legendary UCLA head coach John Wooden's favorites.

 

[neroden]

About gasoline. The American Petroleum Institute a few years back estimated the 60 -75 % of all unburned gasoline in he USA was located in auto, boats, lawn mowers, storage cans etc. That is fuel for thought whenever everyone tries to gas up for an approaching hurricane.

Blech. Everyone should have switched to battery-electric lawn tools by now. They're strictly superior to gas-powered lawn tools and are available in all sizes now. (Admittedly, the full sized riding mowers are still pretty expensive, but everything else is price comparable.)

Small boats should also be using electric. There are very nice outboard electric motors and several marine electric conversion companies.

 

[jis]

Clearly all this has a lot to do with Hurricane Irma and Amtrak [emoji57]

Sent from my iPhone using Amtrak Forum

 

[neroden]

It's called "holistic thinking".