Jeremy VanGelder

When there is a disaster the earth often moves, or buildings are swept away, or roads become impassible. It is helpful for rescuers and victims to know about these changes. A lot of these changes can be seen by up-to-date aerial or satellite imagery. But what is most helpful for people on the ground is a map that they can load onto their phone or GPS that can route them to different areas and tell them about the conditions there. This is where the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team comes in.

HOT is made up of volunteers all over the world who update the OpenStreetMap database when disaster strikes. They receive aerial, satellite or even drone images and put them up on their website. They have a Task Manager that keeps track of what areas have been updated. It also allows more experienced mappers to check the work of other volunteers.

The concept was proven after the earthquake in Haiti many years ago. There were very scarce maps of Haiti available anywhere. But after the earthquake hit most of the country was mapped in twenty-four hours.



Right now there are hundreds of disaster mapping projects on HOT. But they just opened a task for Buncombe County in North Carolina. Volunteering is easy. If you can draw a rectangle or a line on your computer screen you can volunteer with HOT.

There are a number of suggestions in this thread about sleeping pods. The first suggestion is to use the kind of cargo carrier that is put on the top of a car. Paul Elkins might have some plans at his site.  Paul Elkins DIY

I took a video of a belt-driven rock crusher at the Great Oregon Steamup last August. It was powered by a steam tractor. I didn't get close enough to find out who made it. I guess I could have asked the operator.

Steam powered rock crusher video

How can we help from a distance? What groups are helping on the ground?

I heard that the Ya'll Squad, founded by a weather watching youtuber, was running trucks and helicopters into the area. So I sent some money their way.

The Ya'll Squad

Aerial Recovery is also out there with helicopters and other disaster assistance.



Has anyone out there ran into some of these folks?

Timothy Norton wrote:I dabble in the battery world to a degree due to my work in filtration and there is something I have found fascinating.

For car battery parts (To make the actual battery), OEM specs are VERY tight. If you produce product outside of these specs, no worry. It can be sold to aftermarket battery makers who are more lax with quality standards.

As much as I dislike paying for name brand, this is an area that it does pay off in my experience.

That makes sense. I had to replace the battery from one of my Fords recently and I noticed that the Motorcraft (OEM brand) battery was more than ten years old. So I made sure to get a new one of the same brand.

roger christian wrote:The drinking water fountain at our church splashed so much for so long it ruined the wood on the adjoining wall.

15-20(?) years and nobody paid any attention.

One Sunday in 5 seconds, I dialed down the pressure so it was a nice sedate flow.

>>>. I did some further research on the subject, the minimum height is 4" from the catch basin surface.

Fountains are an example of what people will put up with and nobody does anything about problems FOR YEARS.

Drives me nuts.

Here is a link to a government publication which mainly deals with handicapped access issues, but also contains the stream arc height info.

Should have gone there first, but then I would not have found this forum.

https://www.access-board.gov/files/ada/guides/drinking-fountains.pdf

Hi Roger, welcome to Permies! I'm glad you were able to fix that fountain. I know I like the stream to be pretty high so that my face isn't down in the catch basin. But 5 inches sounds like a perfectly usable height.

It is frustrating when a problem is left to sit for years. Here at permies we are solution-focused. We try to turn that old saying on its head: "We have found the solution, and it is us!" So many problems can be fixed with some knowledge and just a bit of elbow grease.

To my eyes those look like the rather haphazard fields that Europeans have usually used for farming. They often have a wall or hedge between fields. And plowing can compact soils.

It has been pretty amazing to see floods of corporate trolls unleashed at other sites. A lot of the articles linked in this thread have been wiped off the web now.

YouTube lets you follow a channel, and you can press a button to "Notify" you when a channel posts a new video. But then it doesn't show you the new videos from that channel. It just doesn't seem to work the way we expect it to. But there is a way to see every new video that a channel puts out. To do that, you subscribe to the channel's RSS feed. You will need an RSS reader. There is a list of RSS readers at reddit. But my favorite is The Old Reader, which works like the discontinued Google Reader. That one is a web application. But you can also get desktop apps.

Anyways, once you have an RSS reader, just copy the url of the channel you want:

https://www.youtube.com/@paulwheaton/

Then paste it into the "Add Feed" or "Add Subscription" feature of your RSS reader. It will automatically populate with the most recent videos. And then, whenever that channel posts a new video, it will be there in your RSS reader waiting for you to see it.

Back in 2020 my extended family asked me to create a new garden for them with a massive deer fence. Since then they have stopped gardening that area, so my wife has taken it over. She grows a lot of food there. We were gardening before, but we took advantage of the situation to ratchet up our efforts.