sj's Longest Now [v.1]

In 1870, Indianola, Texas
was growing rapidly; a coastal town with 5,000 inhabitants.  Then
in 1975 it suffered the first of two massive storms, killing hundreds
and flattening the city.  It was rebuilt; but a second storm in
1886 caused residents to give it up altogether.  Today, thanks to
storm erosion, most of the original city is underwater.

In 1900, Galveston
had enjoyed even greater growth without disaster.  It had a
population of 42,000.  The city had worried about facing the same
fate as Indianola, but as decades passed without any serious storms at
all, some experts (including then-director of the Galveston Weather Bureau, Isaac Cline) suggested that hurricanes “could not” hit Galveston, for one reason or another.

That fall, an unnamed hurricane swept through town, killing around
8,000 people and flattening the city.  There were communication
problems back then… bridges and telegraph lines were cut, making it
hard to send messages to the mainland.  Once messengers did
arrive, they had a great deal of bureaucracy to negotiate, despite the
extraordinary damage.

When rescuers arrived, they found thousands dead, instead. 
Funeral pyres were set up all around the city, and burned for
weeks. 

Since then, over the following century, the city has built up a 17-foot
high seawall, and raised the city some 4-5 meters with dredged
sand.  The seawall itself has become a tourist attraction, and
hotels and other tourist sites have been built along its length…
buildings along the main Galveston Strand are marked to indicate they
survived the hurricane.  So far, this has sufficed…

Losing to nature

The pending storm produced by Hurricane Rita
boasts sea surges of over 30 feet (some have suggested 50), making the
seawall seem rather slender protection.  Galveston has built out
towards the water, not back away from it; and the whole city has fled
before the potential disaster. 

If history is any indicator, it will take another storm of similar size to change anyone’s habitation habits.  But perhaps architects and developers will learn to be more respectful to nature in laying out groundplans and designing seaside retreats.

From Deborah Elizabeth Finn, encyclopedic thoughts and a rec for a non-profit banner-ad generator.

Every city needs its own wiki; a single repository
for community information on its history, culture, landmarks and
ongoing events.  Arlington, for instance, needs its own
wiki.  The existing “Arlington Wiki” is dormant, part of a top-down Live from Arlington site.  On the other hand, the Arlington mailing list is active and the town is full of tech-savvy (and history-loving) people.

I brought up the idea tonight at the monthly meeting of a technical
advisory group.  I hope I didn’t offend anyone by suggesting that
a push-only website wasn’t the perfect model for an information
portal.  The “Citizen Needs” section of the seven-section Needs
Assessment the tech advisors carried out this past summer was voided,
rolled into the Town Website group… people decided that any citizen
needs would be covered by improved website design. 

Other citizen needs I can imagine :

• the need for a place to post important citizen-to-citizen town announcements,
• the need for a way to send public comments
  to the town (that others can see, add to, comment on) — this is being
  taken care of via the selection of a “customer response management:”
  tool (is that the acronym?),
• the need for a collaborative, up-to-date city calendar
• the need for better, more accessible archives of town data – property, legislative, judicial, executive
• the need for public schedules and timelines
  for important ongoing tasks.  Example : the Arlington cemetery
  plots are expected to fill up in 10 years.  A number of
  representatives from the cemetery came to the Selectmen’s meeting on
  Monday to mention this, and point out that we should start thinking now
  about how to proceed in 5 years so we don’t run up against a real
  crunch.  This had apparently been brought up previosly, perhaps 5
  years ago, with no progress since… It is not enough
  to see a three-line summary of this request in the meeting minutes —
  there should be a timeline and suggestion-repository, updated whenever
  the relevant groups make progress towards the goal of finding a place
  to expand, which can be followed this year, next year, and for the
  coming decade… keeping track of each revision of any public documents
  and proposals involved.
• the need for a good collaborative annotated map of the city — both at the present time and at key moments in history.  (For inspiration, see the Wikipedia project on geographical coordinates.)

Note that in each of these cases — as, indeed, in the case of the town
website itself — the services and information above could be provided
by third parties, asking for information independently and sharing it
with the world; not officially on government servers or part of a
government project.    But it makes a lot of sense for
the town government to directly provide,  facilitate, or cheerlead
such efforts, if for no other reason than that they are an important
part of a thriving community.  .

A few months after Yahoo! announced it was donating a passel of servers
to Wikimedia’s global network, along with rackspace and bandwidth in one of their Korean
server farms, the first of those machines have been set up and are
operating as squids. (see the network topology)

The yellow regions on the daily status graphs show traffic and requests being handled by the Korean cluster.