Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

They notified buyers that they'll only be supplying 40% of normal levels, and even that may be optimistic. I'm hoping they at least shipping already completed product to warehouses further away from the storm.

From the article: The plant would "... typically producing 1.5 million bags per day, according to the American Hospital Association. The dozens of sterile solutions Baxter makes at the facility are used for everything from intravenous rehydration and drug delivery to peritoneal dialysis used to treat kidney failure." It was pointed out that veterinary practices use the exact same solutions in their clinics, but order much smaller quantities and are likely to be harder hit.

Baxter said they have been able to contact most - but not all - of their employees. Communications are still rough. One problem with recovering the plant and getting it working again is that a bridge leading to the plant is down, plus the little inconvenience of all of their employees needing to put their lives back together.

https://arstechnica.com/health/2024/10/helene-ravaged-the-nc-plant-that-makes-60-of-the-countrys-iv-fluid-supply/

They got massively clobbered by a storm that not only caused tremendous flooding, but included golfball-sized hail and lightning. Huge numbers of cars damaged or totaled, not to mention houses. They're going to be assessing damage for days. The photos are pretty nasty.

Meanwhile, the USA is still having lots of fun with tornadoes and such. I imagine cleanup is lots of fun and social distancing is pretty much impossible while doing so.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-storm-flooding-hail-1.5611619

Another "bomb cyclone" hit in Colorado, and we once again were on the fringe. Warnings of 75 MPH winds, woohoo. Russet went down to get a haircut and to attend a retirement board meeting - she's got 22 years in at the observatory and decided it was time to get some info. So I'm sitting up here with the dogs, listening to limbs of various sizes getting blown off trees and hitting our metal roof, both poodles huddled around me.

4:15 the power goes out.

4:16 I begin packing up my nebulizer stuff for two days away from the house - we were without power for 36 hours last time.

About 90 minutes later, Russet finished with her meeting. We decided I'd pack clothes, dogs, etc. and meet her down at Applebee's for dinner and we'd figure out what we were doing from there.

Dinner had a fascinating twist. I had a 6 ounce sirloin - they did a good job cooking it medium. That is, 75% of it. The remainder was VERY under-done. Normally the griddles they cook on have different temperature zones, all we can figure is when they flipped the steak, part of it slid into a colder zone and came out under-done.

Kinda funny.

ANYWAY, after we finished malingering for as long as we thought we could reasonably get away with, we hit the grocery store for a few things and headed home. We were slightly optimistic that power was back up as my WeatherBug app was reporting from the high school - a good sign. And lo - our house was illuminated when we arrived! Took a few trips to haul everything in since the dogs aren't very useful as pack animals (must look for saddlebags on Amazon), but eventually everything was in. Watched an episode of Midsomer Murders and then I had to fix my iMac.


Not long before the power went out, I blew up my iMac.

I've been running low on disk space for far too long now. Low as in below 200 gig on a 3 TB system. Then I did a little photo editing and built a panorama of twenty images. That's not what blew up my computer - I made the mistake of not flattening the image before cropping it. With those twenty layers, the image size was 1.3 gig! Far too big for my system, once flattened it was down to something like 250 meg. But since I didn't flatten it, it absolutely killed all system memory.

I had to force quit all apps, but that wasn't enough. I tried deleting files, and then I get this lovely error that I can't delete files because I don't have enough disk space to delete files! Now, for eternity Macs have always had a trash can where deleted files go, but the operating system was giving me a warning that the files would be directly deleted and would not go to the trash can. I was fine with that, but they weren't deleting!

Finally I did some digging around and it said to boot to safe mode, and that would flush some caches and free space. So I did. It did not seem to release any space. And I still couldn't delete any files! I tried booting into a maintenance mode, and that's when my computer did the boot dance of death.

So I gave up, at least temporarily, cut up a Jazz apple (very yummy variety!), some cheddar sharp enogh to bite back, and went into the living room to watch James May build a 1:1 model replica of a Spitfire fighter plane.

And then the power went out.

[cue sound of audio being fast-forwarded to indicate passage of time]

Just got my iMac booted! I was able to boot in to terminal mode, which isn't quite enough to work on the hard drive. Then you have to mount the drive for read/write access: by default it boots as read-only. THEN I was able to delete some stuff, and I now have 254 gig disk space free!

Everything seems fine now, Photoshop is not complaining, I was able to build the pano of 20 images with no problems - I remembered to flatten it this time before doing any manipulation! And it's a monster: the final JPEG is 84 meg! I'm planning on posting it tomorrow - it's interesting....

At least we're no longer weather refugees - for now. Here's to hoping no more bomb cyclones any time soon!

Sorry for the slow update, we didn't get to bed until 5am this morning.

Thursday afternoon I did laundry at the observatory, I'd brought a hamper of dirty clothes that I had planned on doing at home on Wednesday but obviously couldn't do. Rather than Russet giving the dogs a run at the observatory, we decided to go to the house and check things out, then down to Alamo for dinner, and give the dogs a run at the movie theater.

Then something happened... [CUE DRAMATIC CHORD]

I checked the weather app that I use, Waetherbug, and it showed the Cloudcroft school weather station as reporting - they had power back! And they're about 500 yards from our house!

So we go home and it's approaching sunset. There's LOTS of downed trees, but NOT on our house. The house two away from ours - not so lucky. I don't think it was damaged badly, and it's been unoccupied for years, so it was lucky. More on that, and photos, later. We talk to our neighbors, who also have no damage, and they say some power people were around and said we may have power in an hour or so.

In our house, we feed the dogs, let them romp around outside, then head down to Alamo. Do dinner, a little shopping, do the bike ride, come home. AND WE HAVE POWAH!

Lights are on, the heaters kicked in and the temperature had risen from 40 to 45. Turned up all the heaters to max and turned on the oven to warm the house further. The dogs are absolutely ecstatic, Rupert especially: his favorite spot is in front of this flat rectangular space heater that's in front of the TV and it's been running for an hour or so, so he's happy.

But now we have to go back to the observatory! We've got to clean out our room which includes our meds, and retrieve what little food we'd brought and my car. The observatory was shut down as it was still running on the generator and the generator was a good 30+ years old and was a little twitchy, so all the telescopes were parked and everything was in low-power mode, there were only two telescope operators: one was playing video games on the giant TV normally used to monitor weather, the other was surfing the web. That would have been it except for one other Cloudcroft weather refugee family, hopefully they can go home today.

Surprisingly, the dogs had no problem heading back to the observatory. It was instant "YAY! A car trip!" I will never understand dogs. Returning home, though, that was a different story.

Dante ran away.

Russet thought she'd closed the door securely behind her, perhaps the wind blocked it, doesn't matter.

We're very careful trying to not let the dogs run wild around the neighborhood because odds are they will (a) get skunked and/or (b) eat shit, but it happens. I wasn't too concerned about them getting skunked, because with it being about 22 degrees out and with the storm that had come through, I figured skunks were well in hiding. But we have lots of deer and elk wandering about, pooping where ere they please, and more recently wild horses wandering around. I don't know what the fascination is for dogs eating excrement, but they do, and that's all there is to it.

We tried all the standard lures to get him in, all to no avail. The most recent effective lure is for Russet to get on her bike and ride up and down the street we're on, but it was 1am and bloody cold. And the road was icy/slushy. Not gonna happen. We walked around a bit, calling out to him - not too loudly as we didn't want to wake neighbors. Couldn't hear him running about, gave up and went inside to watch some second and third season Pie In The Sky. Excellent BBC detective show starring Peter Griffiths, best known as Harry Potter's foster father. And no murders! We call it Murder He Baked.

We were checking the front door to see if he'd come back and was sitting there, waiting for us to let him in, also to no avail. Or Noah Vale. Finally Russet decided to do some serious tromping about and find the little twerp. And Charlie was eager to accompany, so she hooked him up to a leash, and within 5 minutes Charlie is saying 'There's something interesting over there!'

He found Dante, chased him back to our porch, and scolded him!

Maybe we'll have to use Charlie more in the future if Dante escapes again!

Anyway, with having to unpack some things from suitcases, etc., didn't get to sleep until about 5am. The clothes dryer at the observatory didn't do a very good job, so had to re-run them through our dryer while we were watching TV. The house was up to the high 50s when we went to bed, and we have an electric mattress pad in addition to decent quilts, so the bed was warm enough. Rupert was wrapped up in a blanket, as was Dante, and Charlie joined us on the bed, so we were all fairly warm last night. Today the temperature is a little above freezing, though it's overcast and there's a decent chance of snow Saturday and Monday, though that bomb cyclone is far away and there's no wind alerts.

My apologies for a lack of replies, it hasn't been the best of days.

Wednesday we lost power around 11am, packed up a bunch of stuff including emergency meds, dog food and the dogs, and headed up the mountain. I took the time to shut down my computer and turn off the two UPSes. Outside, it was hella windy! It was also extremely gorgeous! It hadn't snowed a lot, but it was wet enough to stick to the pines, and because the temperature was in the mid 20s and the sky was clouded over, it wasn't going to melt. I really wish I could've stopped and done some shooting, but the wind was gusting so high that it just wasn't safe, so we went down to the library where I'm interning and spent a few hours in my work room/office.

In the basin, it was also hella windy, and there was a ton of dirt in the air - comes from living in the southwest. Moved my computer (an HP touchscreen all-in-the-monitor) to the floor and we had a nice large table. We putzed about until 5:00 when we went for a leisurely dinner, then went and saw the new How To Tame Your Dragon movie. During the afternoon, Russet had found that all three web cams on the main street in Cloudcroft had gone offline, as had the weather station at the high school. So the power failure had spread beyond our street to the rest of the town.

While we were waiting for the movie to start, I pulled up the web page for our electric utility to see if they might have an update on the power outage. They had a list by zip code of their service areas, the number of accounts without power, and the total number of accounts in the zip code. It's been constant for the last 7+ hours at #out = 3423, #served = 3545 for a %out of 96.56%.

*sigh*

We decided the best strategy was to go home, see if it was still intact, grab some clothes and food, then go to the observatory. We'd been in contact with the woman running the 3.5 meter, they'd lost power much earlier in the day and had been on generator power for a long time. And because of the winds, there was no hope of opening. I checked the New Mexico Roads app and as far as I could tell, there would be no problem getting back to Cloudcroft, though the highway to the observatory was labeled risky due to packed snow and ice.

First we fueled up our cars, just in case something bad happened and Alamogordo lost power - power failures do sometimes cascade and grow in area! Then we headed up the mountain.

That, at least, was uneventful. Not even breezy! It was eerie driving through Cloudcroft with no power in town at all. Getting up the last bit of hill to our house had some slips and slides, but we got there in the end. A couple of small trees in our front yard had toppled, no big deal, and it looked like the fence in the back yard was intact. The house was down to 49f from the mid 60s. I set up some small flashlights firing into the ceiling as lanterns and we packed stuff away.

And then I noticed the sound of a UPS chirping in the kitchen area! I knew for certain that I'd turned off my iMac's UPS after I'd powered down the computer. I go and look, and sure enough the UPS is off, yet there's a chirp. Then I remembered that our fiber optic internet connection has its own UPS! That puppy was finally close to being completely discharged and was announcing its unhappiness for all to hear. Sadly, there was nothing that I could do for it.

We're now at the observatory, and I'm heading for bed momentarily, thoroughly exhausted. I don't feel stressed, but I know it's been a stressful day. We have a few days of food, I have five days of some of my meds, and if the power is going to be off for more than another day or so, we'll probably go to Phoenix for a few days.

So the house wasn't destroyed, much to our joy. We're still weather refugees for the nonce, it's happened before, also due to wind knocking power up the mountain. The wind warnings are over, it's currently running about 20-25 MPH gusting to 40, so perfectly manageable.

Thank you for your concern, it is much appreciated. I'll have to dig out my chainsaw and buy some oil and do a little carving soon.

The storm broke up early this morning or some time, and we had blue skies and sunshine on the top of the mountain. The snow plows were able to clear the roads, and I imagine lots of people were able to get up to the ski resort and have fun.

We decided to head down to Alamogordo: get the shopping done, have dinner, let the dogs have some time out of the house and maybe a chance to pee somewhere that wasn't buried under 3'+ of snow. Well, it didn't quite work out like that.

As we were heading out of town, there's this one spot that gives you an incredible view across the valley, all the way across the basin to the Organ Mountains east of Las Cruces. And the whole thing was covered with a sheet of clouds! It was insanely gorgeous, so immediately I asked my wife to stop at the trestle pullout so I could take some photos.

It was buried with snow. There was no way to stop there. Additionally, while the roads had been plowed, the shoulders were still built-up and you couldn't pull off for some photography. Opportunity lost. Big sigh.

The cloud layer started much higher than we thought. We live at 9,000', which is not the highest point in our part of the mountain: you crest 10,000' driving to the observatory. Alamogordo is at about 4,650', the tunnel which is about half-way down the highway between our house and Alamogordo is around 7,000' and seems to be a transition point for weather.

Not today.

The clouds were well above the tunnel, it was shortly before sundown when we hit them, and it was quite a spectacle driving into them with snow on the trees. It's been a few years since I've gotten to see a spectacle quite like this, Russet thinks it might go back to 2010 when we've had a winter quite like this along with dense cloud cover this low. It looked like something you'd see in a movie.

The cloud layer wasn't as thick as we were expecting, and we were below it before we got to the tunnel. It was clear that Friday's snow had gone all the way down to the basin floor, we were wondering if White Sands and the Air Force Base had gotten any, of course White Sands is closed due to the government shutdown. Anyway, by the time we got past the tunnel (it's not a very long tunnel, maybe 10-15 seconds driving time) it was well-past sunset - I told my wife to take the next pullout and shot this photo sequence.



As usual, clicken to embiggen.

This photo was actually quite a bit of work to assemble. First off, it was difficult to shoot. This was after sunset - the sun was fully below the western mountains, and for those of a photographic inclination that means f3.3 at 1/6th(!) of a second exposures at an ISO of 1600! Hand-held! Five frames, I think the last one or two were at 1/5th of a second! I have successfully hand-held a one second exposure and gotten a sharp result, but that was 12 or 13 years ago and even with image stabilization and a very good camera, this is not a stunt that I would recommend.

Because of the gap of coverage from the missing photo, I had to 'create sky', and that was a somewhat tricky proposition! But I got the job done, and unless you look at it at 100% zoom, it's hard to see exactly where I did it.

Not that I had a tripod with me, but if I'd had one, there would have been no time to set it up - the light would have been entirely gone. It's not as sharp as I would have liked, and one of the images was entirely too blurred, fortunately I had a lot of overlap and I was able to get by without it and still produce a good panorama.

I've seen snow in Alamogordo before, but I don't recall ever seeing this amount of snow on the mountains around Alamo before. This was really something to see! I'm guessing it's on the order of 4", but that's purely a SWAG. The weather report for Sunday in Cloudcroft is a high in the upper 30s and sunny, so we're expecting a lot of melt. Alamogordo they're expecting about the same, so pretty much all of this will be gone in the next couple of days. Another storm is supposed to hit Tuesday, no telling how much area it'll cover. Except for the really big - area-wise - storms, most of them just dump snow on the mountain areas like Cloudcroft. It takes a really large area storm to nail the desert and Alamogordo like this.

Weatherbug has been reporting a winter storm warning over the last couple of days for this weekend forecasting 40 MPH winds and 12-20 inches of snow. The winds at the observatory last night were gusting to 80 MPH and consistently over 40. People were trapped in other buildings because it was too risky to leave where they were and get to the main building. The woman who was running my wife's 3.5 meter telescope made it to the dorm after her night was over, only to send out emails reporting trees hitting the dorm. Fortunately the trees in the area are smaller and apparently didn't break the dorm.

Other damage includes:
--a power line downed in the parking lot
--the site manager decided to stay at the site for a couple of days and was only able to get halfway down the driveway before felled trees stopped him
--they couldn't turn the dome. Normal procedure is to point the dome away from the wind, but the wind was so strong it locked the dome motors.
--this stuck the dome facing IN TO THE WIND. As a result, there is snow accumulating on the floor of the telescope. This is not ideal conditions for astronomical equipment.
--the adjacent observatory, the National Solar Observatory at Sunspot, is suffering similarly. One of the Apache Point workers who lives at Sunspot wanted to check on a neighbour four doors away, but there were five trees down and he couldn't.
--The observatory lost power around midnight. They have a diesel generator, but it has limited fuel, and with lots of trees down on the drive up it is doubtful that a fuel truck could get up there.
--Because of the problems, they'll probably have to power down the telescope and rest the mirror on the hard supports. The problem is that the ideal would be that the telescope would be parked pointing at zenith (straight up), but with the dome seals leaking that would risk water pooling on the mirror, which would stain it. So it'll have to be parked at an angle to encourage water to run off, which will strain and possibly bend the supports.

LOTS of fun!

Fortunately there isn't a huge amount of snow: it's been largely blowing sideways. It still accumulates in drifts, but the roads are largely clear. The temperature is around 15f, which is approaching the temperature that the telescope would normally close at. The storm now seems well past its peak with greatly diminished winds, but a lot of damage has been done.

Which brings us to the question: will our house be there when we get home, or will it be in Kansas? We don't know, we're trying to contact a few people that might be able to go and look. I think we're safe because if we'd had a catastrophic event, i.e. a major tree crashed in to our house, I would expect the power company would have called us because they'd have to shut off the power, and they haven't. So I expect we're OK, but we won't know until we get home Wednesday.

It's going to be interesting....

Coming down quite well, but it's only 29f outside, so it's going to be gone quite quickly.

The poodle is not happy.

Two weeks ago we had a cold snap from a new storm system. Not much snow, no more than 4-6 inches, but that night when I got home around 7pm it was -4f outside according to my car. Wednesday got down to -17, our neighbor next door recorded -19. We had a bit of a problem with frozen pipes in part of our house, but nothing burst.

Not so elsewhere in The Village (of Cloudcroft), on The Mountain (in the Lincoln National Forest), or nearby. We haven't seen temperatures like this for over 25 years. NMSU in Alamogordo was closed for 5 ½ days, the City Hall and city government of Las Cruces for three days. Their City's electric provider, El Paso Electric, was having problems keeping up and ordered rolling brownouts. They even got emergency power from Mexico, until the cold extended down there and Mexico had to stop sending it across the border. The gas utility had low pressure problems from increased demand. We never lost power up here as we're not served by EPE, and we have a propane tank in the back, so we're not dependent on a pipe for that, but the story was different at NMSU-A. Apparently the gas utility, with no warning, shut off the gas to the university. I don't know if it was because of the gas shut-off or frozen water, but several boilers throughout the campus burst, so now the university is suing the utility for interrupting service with no warning. Had they been warned, I guess they could have drained the boilers or something and prevented damage.

But the story continues! In El Paso, because of burst pipes, they now have water supply problems! Apparently the number of leaks is critically draining their water reserves and also caused a bacterial problem requiring a boil water alert. New Mexico Environmental Quality department issued a similar warning for my area, but not for Cloudcroft, so we didn't have to bother with it.

So burst boilers, brown outs, boiling water, and the ice on the road made things kind of interesting. We just hunkered down and didn't leave the house for 4 days and were fine, but had we lost power for any length of tie, it would have been off to the observatory as they have two emergency generators.

Speaking of the observatory, they've always had limits that they had to close the telescope if certain meteorological conditions existed: wind, dust particle count, dew point, etc. They've had to add a couple as the telescope has never experienced temperatures this low. They now can't open if the temperature is below zero, and they lowered the wind limit if the temperature is approaching zero. The issue is strain to the telescope's motors. Standard lubricants have a temperature operating range, and as they get increasingly cold, they act weird. The telescope's motors have to move a 5000+ pound object with amazing precision in order to correctly track celestial objects, and the strain of the lubricant represents unwanted wear and tear on the motors, so they now shut down.