Is the lack of an evacuation a sign of failing public institutions or just your good old-fashioned disregard for the safety and well-being of the plebs?

Apparently long enough for the FD to get there and evacuate the house.

Looks almost like lightning set it off though...

Help an ignorant European brother out, will you...

This shop operated without a business permit. Would the appropriate procedure not be:
- official delivers notification that shop will be closed down if operator doesn't acquire permit within a week
- official returns after week if owner failed to acquire and present permit, cites owner for operating without a permit and gives another 48h deadline
- official returns after 48h and, if the owner still cannot produce a permit, notification is given that shop will be closed down
- police calmly evacuate the building, take photographic evidence of current state, close shop until end of legal proceedings

Instead, what I saw on the video might pass as an instructional video for the ‛Ndrangheta but not for a police force in a civilized country. These people strike me as unfit for duty and the brazen nonchalance with which they consumed the drugs themselves in front of other officers might be a reasonable argument to put the entire department under investigation.

"They methodically fired explosives into every room in this house in order to extract one person. Granted, he had a handgun, but against 100 officers? You know, the proper thing to do would be to evacuate these homes around here, ensure the safety of the homeowners around here, fire some tear gas through the windows. If that didn’t work, you have 50 SWAT officers with body armor break down the door."

-----

You see, they methodically blew out walls with explosives to force him into one area. They used an APC with a breaching attachment to open multiple entries into the residence. One hundred cops against a guy with one handgun.

If this is our standard procedure, terrorists don't need to hit big targets, just split up and hide out in buildings. By the time our militar...oops, police force is done, the building will be wrecked to a shell. But we'll have that one terrorist, so as the Chief of Police said in this case, it's a WIN!

My favourite bit in the film? Spoilers...
[spoiler]When Michael Caine admits there never really was a plan B. That felt real to me. That's how it might/would/probably will play out. The earth is fucked, physics aren't going to allow the entire population to evacuate the planet, so some kind of generation ship with embryos is a viable solution. [/spoiler]

And best of all? It wouldn't be a standard Hollywood happy ending.

"Look, here's the reality! We're fucked, and this is the best we can do under the circumstances"

But instead we get a bullshit deus ex machina.

Its NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Almost all launch facilities weather they be in the US, Russia, China, India, French Guiana have service buildings close to the launch site. You are probably used to watching shuttle launches at the massive facility in Florida where the launch structure dwarfed any such service buildings.

For the launch all personnel are evacuated to a safe distance. If the range officer is on the ball a self destruct would be sent to the vehicle before it strayed out of its saftey zone.

Those tidal turbines are all well and good, right up to the point they start making sushi out of whales, then they'll be scrapped.

Always thought the Bay of Fundy would be a good place for ship building. Save a lot of energy flooding and evacuating the drydocks.

Smaller "warning bombing". Priceless.
And evacuate to where, indeed. I've often wondered that myself.

Quite unlike Israel, whose various lies include first claiming the school had been hit by Hamas rockets that had fallen short, then that they were returning fire on Hamas fighters in the area, then that they had told the UNRWA to evacuate the shelter but Hamas had prevented them from leaving (so I guess they just had to bomb it anyway).

Yeah, you think that shit's funny -- when Asiana crashed at SFO, the evacuation was slowed down by people grabbing their baggage from the overheads.

If it's GMO grain, I would evacuate. Monsanto would probably sue you if you drove by and saw the grain.

I confess to be a toilet terrorist. On numerous occassions I have tracked down superiors at work in the toilet to discuss work related matters with them. A great opportunity to talk about topics they'd like to avoid as they can't just leave in the middle of bodily waste evacuation processes.

Looks like they're being evacuated or crossing a border illegally.

The roads have a capacity.
~15 feet per car.

100 feet of road will fit about 6 or 7 cars, bumper to bumper.
Alternatively, 100 cars will require 1500 feet of distance to fit.

If a driver keeps 30 feet in front of him, at all times, even when stopped in traffic, then that takes the total per-car size up to 45 feet.
100 feet of road now fits 2 cars.
100 cars now require 4500 feet of distance to fit.

The greater the distance kept between cars, the bigger the strain on road capacity, and the farther back the traffic jam will stretch.



Traffic jams in massive commuter areas do not exist because people are driving too close.

They exist because the rate of people entering the highway exceeds the rate of people exiting the highway, for a long enough duration that the highway 'runs out of room' to fit the cars.

You can widen the roads to increase capacity, so the traffic jam doesn't go as far back.
You can increase highway speed limits, so that people can attempt to 'evacuate' the highway faster.

(Travel-capacity in terms of cars-per-second of any given section of road, is 'cars-per-second-per-lane x number-of-lanes'. Increasing either factor will improve travel.)

...But you can't eliminate the jam.

The rate of 'highway exit' is determined by the number of exits, and the capacity of the exit roads to absorb traffic from the highway.

When people exit from a highway, they usually go into local traffic, and are met by a light within 100 feet.
Between the lights, and other cars looking for parking spots, pedestrians, etc, local traffic is a dog.

Highway traffic can't diffuse out of the exits fast enough, and the traffic backs up on the exit ramps, and then backs up onto the highway. Once the traffic backs up onto the highway, exiting traffic consumes a lane for queuing, which forms a choke.


Basically, to avoid a jam, the rate of people entering the highway can not exceed the maximum possible rate of people exiting and diffusing into the destination city.

Because 'everyone goes to work at once', and local traffic is not geared to rapidly absorb exiting traffic, the jams are unavoidable.

Driving with a massive space in front, refusing to fill in the gap, only uses up the highway's buffering capacity more quickly.
That leads to the 'complete' jam happening sooner, where traffic is queued all the way from the destination, all down the highway, and onto the feeder roads miles away, blocking local traffic elsewhere.




IMO, if people really care abut stopping traffic jams, they should put a commuter parking lot at every exit at major commuter areas.

When you exit off of the highway, you would immediately wind your way through a parking lot, and at the other end of the lot you would exit into local traffic.

The parking lot acts as a buffer, allowing the highway exit lane to not get backed up, and prevents the queue from building up onto the highway.

That way the traffic on the highway can travel without chokes.

Although, this would just move the "parking lot" occurring on the highway, into a literal parking lot. You'd still be stuck waiting a while, as the rate of people exiting the parking lot into local traffic would still be limited by the rate at which local traffic can absorb the highway traffic.

Basically, to have literally no waiting, the city streets absorbing exiting highway traffic need the same uninterrupted cumulative bandwidth as the highway.

In the end, if you want to fix highway traffic jams, fix city streets.




You can make the argument that keeping more space in front will make people more comfortable with driving faster, and traffic will move faster.
But, that faster moving traffic will merely more quickly arrive at the same clogged exit, and queue with the same other cars waiting to get onto the local roads.

-scheherazade