Landslides, Power Outages, and Being Prepared

Today about 1 p.m., we lost power here at the park. Longmire and TWoods (park HQ) were affected, but interestingly, the Nisqually entrance station (about halfway between Longmire and TWoods) had power.

Since most of my office work today and tomorrow requires a computer, I was stuck for a while. So I finished up putting together some of the mail - mostly requests from individual students, wanting park info. for their research projects. I have a standard set of brochures that we mail out, unless we get a unique request.

So anyway, I got the mail together and walked over to the HQ building to drop it off. Of course, they were without power, and many of them were in the same boat as me: budget and HR folks need computers too. So I was talking to my friend Mika. It occurred to me that my entire kitchen is electric. I couldn't cook dinner if the power didn't come back up. Raw veggies for dinner. Ok, so I like raw veggies, but on a cold, stormy night like we're going to have, I prefer hot soup or something. Anyway, Mika and I decided to pool our food and do steaks on their grill. Her husband will be happy with that decision!

This lead me to think about another disaster that happened this weekend: a landslide east of here near Naches. A few people were evacuated, a road closed, etc. The pictures are cool, but really, this was a relatively small slide for our area. The POTENTIAL for the area around Mount Rainier is tremendous as this mountain holds more snow and glaciers (and thus, more water) than just about any other mountain in the Lower 48 states. Warm temperatures plus 30+ square miles of melting ice and snow = flooding like you wouldn't believe.

I really should have more canned tuna in my apartment. And candles. And gas for the ol' Coleman stove.

Obviously, we have the power back on...