>> ^furrycloud:
Crazy tornado, eh?


Yeah we normally get some pretty nasty weather all around in Ontario, but this has been the big one so far. Had a few small tornados down by London, Aylmer, and Windsor earlier in the year with next to no damage but this one kicked up some serious stuff from Windsor all the way through to Owen Sound.

EC's damage report from AWCN11 CWTO 210959, more incoming still:
TIME(LCL) LOCATION EVENT DESCRIPTION
1:00 PM SARNIA TREES UPROOTED. DEBRIS ON LAKESHORE RD .
4:15 PM TOWNSHIP OF ROOF RIPPED OF THE CENTRE OF HOME DURHAM HARDWARE BUILDING. LARGE TREES DOWN. SIDING, EAVES TORN FROM THE SIDES OF HOMES OPPOSITE IN DIRECTION OF THE STORM. TRAILER OVERTURNED.
4:40 PM THORNBURY/ TORNADO SIGHTINGS, TREES AND CRAIGLEITH POWER LINES DOWN.
5:10 PM MARKDALE MANY TREES AND POWER LINES DOWN.
5:39 PM LONDON TREES DOWN, HIGH WINDS.
6:15 PM 401 WEST OF PEA SIZED HAIL. MILTON
6:15 PM VAUGHAN TORNADO SIGHTED NEAR VAUGHAN MILLS SHOPPING CENTRE.
6:17 PM NEWMARKET CARS FLIPPED OVER.DAVIS DR/HWY 48
6:30 PM DAVIS DR/MCCOWAN HOUSE DAMAGED.
6:30 PM ARNSTEIN/ SWATH OF TREES DOWN IN WOODS SW OF NORTH BEHIND HOME. BAY
6:45 PM MAPLE FUNNEL CLOUD OBSERVED. N OF MAJOR MACKENZIE
6:50 PM WOODBRIDGE MANY HOUSES DAMAGED, CARS FLIPPED,TREES DOWN EVERYWHERE.
6:57 PM NORTH BAY/ WATERSPOUT SIGHTING. MOVED OVER LAND. LAKE NIPPISSING
7:15 PM NORTH BAY FUNNEL CLOUD TO THE NW.
7:16 PM GRAVENHURST TREES UPROOTED. DEBRIS.
7:20 PM EAST GWILLIMBURY BARN DESTROYED.
7:22 PM WATERDOWN 30 MM RAIN.
7:44 PM STOUFFVILLE FUNNEL CLOUD SIGHTED.
7:44 PM ORILLIA TREES UPROOTED. FLOODING ON SIDEROADS.

Adding in unconfirmed reports of funnel clouds in downtown Toronto(Young & Bloor), Woodstock, Aylmer, and St. Thomas. Yeah hell of a storm.

WCN11 CWTO 220023 @ 2000 08/21/09 EC DAMAGE REVIEW
TORNADO LOCATION/PATH DAMAGE OVERVIEW
TORNADO 1 5 KM SW OF DURHAM TO MARKDALE F2 TORNADO DAMAGE (CONFIRMED) (ROUGHLY 20 KM) (SIGNIFICANT HOUSE + TRAILER DAMAGE, TREES DOWN, ETC)
TORNADO 2 FROM S OF THORNBURY TO THE SE F2 TORNADO DAMAGE (CONFIRMED) OF THORNBURY (PATH LENGTH (DETAILS UNKOWN AT UNCERTAIN AT THIS TIME) THIS TIME)
TORNADO 3 WOODBRIDGE/VAUGHAN F2 TORNADO DAMAGE (CONFIRMED) (SEVERAL KM LONG (HUNDREDS OF HOMES + 50 METRES WIDE) DAMAGED, TREES DOWN, CARS FLIPPED, ETC)
TORNADO 4 NEWMARKET AREA F1 TORNADO DAMAGE (CONFIRMED) (HOCKEY ARENA ALMOST DEMOLISHED)
TORNADO 5 POWASSAN TO NORTH BAY (PATH WATERSPOUT/TORNADO (PROBABLE) LENGTH UNKNOWN AT THIS TIME) SIGHTINGS (DAMAGE DETAILS UNCERTAIN AT THIS TIME)
TORNADO 6 MILTON F1 DAMAGE (POSSIBLE) (SOME ROOF DAMAGE, ETC)

THIS SUMMARY WILL BE UPDATED WITH THE RECEIPT OF NEW UPDATED INFORMATION. NOT OFFICIAL.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'birds, power lines, perch, fly, amelie' to 'birds, power lines, perch, fly, amelie, yann tiersen' - edited by EndAll

"Look how much pollution I just put out".
Brilliant. You just described yourself as a balloon filled with hot air, spewing toxic waste, as a good thing.

Ever get the feeling that the English language doesn't quite mean the same on Fox News as it does in other places?

Like, "Soon they'll say electro-magnetism and noise are pollutants that need to be regulated", which they make sound so preposterous, so I'd love to see Glenn move to a house next door to an airport, under a cluster of power lines please.

>> ^rychan:
I think this guy did a good job. No injuries, no damage to the aircraft. He had a view of the road when he made his decision so he could see about traffic and power lines.

Power lines are not easy to see from the air, they're not even that easy to see from the ground. Next time you're out driving around, take note of how close you actually are to a power line before you can clearly see it. Then ask yourself if you could avoid that if you were in a plane with no engine doing 60-70mph.

Worrying about damage to the aircraft should the last thing on your mind when making an emergency landing. Many pilots are killed or injured because they try to save their aircraft.

I just read about this on some news site. In the article I just read, he said they had just taken off and were at 500 ft. when the engine quit.

In the video, the passenger points to the left and asks "can you make that field," and the pilot says "I don't think I can make it." Then he restarts the engine and turns AWAY from the field and directly TOWARD a populated area. Next he continues flying toward the city rather than turning back to the airport they just took off from or a safer place to ditch the plane.

I've never been in an emergency situation like this, but that's why you practice for emergencies during flight training.

>> ^jimnms:
He was lucky indeed. I learned during my flight training that a public road is the WORST possible place to try to land in an emergency. For one thing, roads usually have these things called power lines that run across them, but most importantly you endanger the lives of people on the ground.


"WORST"? So you would rather land...
1) on a preschool picnic
2) on a munitions factory
3) on a preschool picnic on a munitions factory

I think this guy did a good job. No injuries, no damage to the aircraft. He had a view of the road when he made his decision so he could see about traffic and power lines.

He was lucky indeed. I learned during my flight training that a public road is the WORST possible place to try to land in an emergency. For one thing, roads usually have these things called power lines that run across them, but most importantly you endanger the lives of people on the ground.

I knew a guy that got himself killed when landing on a road. He was landing there on purpose, it was a country road and he was the owner of a construction business that was working on a site there. As he was landing on a section of the road he'd used several times before. A truck pulled out on the road and he had to abort the landing. When he pulled up to go around, his gear snagged a power line, which don't break, and caused his plane to nose dive into the ground and catch fire. The workers at the site tried to get to him, but they couldn't get him out of the plane, and he burned alive.

>> ^joedirt:
"because UPS is an integral part of a server."
Yeah, sure. And my spare tire pressure is a critical statistic I brag about my hotrod.
Duh, the UPS has nothing to do with server operation nor power efficiency. Look at the spare tire on that Posche!!!! Wow, that's hot.


When you get a flat tire on your "Posche", it only inconveniences you (and your passengers, if any). I'd say that's a maximum of 4 people being inconvenienced, maybe 6 if you have one of those silly "Posche" SUVs.
Now, take a look at google - a single data center has capacity for 45,000 servers, and each server probably handles 10s to 100s of simultaneous requests (being conservative). Now lets say the data center loses power, without the UPS, every request is lost.
30 seconds later the generators kick in, all the machines reboot in a few minutes, and facility is back online, but in the meantime you've just inconvenienced a million people. Not really good for PR....

So for a business like Google, a UPS IS an integral part of a server.

As far as efficiency - take a 10 megawatt data center, assume you have a central UPS (for reasons mentioned above) that is 95% efficient. That means you lose 500kW of power in the form of heat. If you replace that UPS system (as a whole) with one that is 99.9% efficient, you lose only 10kW of power to heat.

To put this in perspective, the average household in America consumes about 14,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy.
That's an average of 1.6kW per hour. So by going from 95% eff to 99.9% eff UPS system, google saved 306 households worth of electricity.

The main reason for the effeciency gain is that you aren't going AC-AC-DC-AC-AC-DC, like a traditional server room, but rather AC-AC-AC-DC.
(AC = alternating current, like power lines ; DC = direct current, like batteries; hyphen represents a conversion, none of which are 100% efficient)

Pretty interesting project, but it seems rather selfish to send garbage bags off to land on power lines, in the water, etc.

hmm.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Power-Line-Fliers

/edit - upon posting, i see gwiz came upon this just as i did.

http://www.videosift.com/video/Power-Line-Fliers
3 min after this post.. arvana, I'm looking down my nose at you.

>> ^DrPawn:
Cut the power lines from your house and buy a wind turbine. Obviously the reason you don't do so is you prefer cheaper power.
Nobody is stopping you.


I live by 3 mile Island. Wind turbines are stupidly expensive and you have to buy a converter box thing from the state to hook it up in your home, also stupidly expensive. You're right to guilt me a bit though I guess.

"Not to be a tree hugger, but we've been using coal since the middle ages. It's a filthy inefficient resource, you'd think we'd have upgraded since then."

Cut the power lines from your house and buy a wind turbine. Obviously the reason you don't do so is you prefer cheaper power.

Nobody is stopping you.

^----- Um, riiiight DrPawn.

I live close to a power line corridor. Does this qualify me to rewire your house?

* edit....damn, beat me to it....I still like my analogy.

Wow, very cool - my sister and I were driving right behind that storm along I-80 on our way back from Colorado. The severe part of the storm was traveling east perfectly in line with I-80, so we got a good view of the extent of damages. We saw over 10 semis blown over, power line poles snapped in half with cables strewn across the highway, a few trees uprooted, metal guard rails wrapped around columns of an overpass, a large aluminum shed ripped to shreds, and we counted over 20 divots in the corn fields completely twisted apart and blown over.

We only experienced gusty winds and a little rain, but were so close behind the storm that they were calling the mile markers off on the radio where the tornado warnings were... between markers 369 and 381, right as we passed 360, etc. Literally ten minutes after passing certain portions of the interstate they were being closed down and re-routed. Despite living in Nebraska for 23 years now, I hadn't ever been that close behind the path of a tornado (at least while still being outside), so it made for an exciting finish to our torturous 8-hour ride back home.

>> ^jwray:
Since water utilities cannot meaningfully compete with each other because of the underlying infrastructure, the only reasonable option is public control of water utilities. Deregulation has no potential for benefit when there is no feasable way for free competition to occur in that niche.


Surely they didn't think of that! Or else they would be Evil! Imagine that! They're only poor capitalist trying to make a buck! Nothing wrong with that, right?

When will you people realize that ALL access to resources are few and that the difference between a monopoly/oligarchy and a "free market" is only one of degree, not quantity? For example, De Beers can control the whole diamond market even though it's one of the most common of the "precious" minerals, mined in countries as different as Russia, Australia, Botswana and Congo.

Also, your argument per se is totally bogus: while there is only one telephone line to your house, you can choose which provider to use. Same thing with cable. And power lines (in the U.S.A. at least). Etc. They could have opened-up the market, but then they wouldn't have had fat bank deposits/high paying jobs waiting for them at the end of their terms.