When Will Cherry Creek Flood?

Until the Cherry Creek and Chatfield Reservoirs were built, Cherry Creek and the South Platte Rivers, respectively seriously flooded about once every thirty years and often at the same time.

From my days as a journalist, I learned that the Cherry Creek dam was not built to the engineer ordered specifications. It has nonetheless held for decades, so it isn't too bad, but it would probably fail under conditions less extreme than those it was designed to withstand.

We get more extreme weather events now than anyone expected when it was built. We will probably have what until recently was considered at 500 year weather event at least every 50 years now.

The Cherry Creek basin is mostly designed to address this risk, with green spaces and parking garages along most of its extent.

But, there is one place along its edges, where the basin has steep constraining walls, and critical infrastructure is just a few feet above the narrow walled Cherry Creek bike path. That is the Denver Health Emergency Room, Denver proper's only Level One Trauma Center.

I worry about this risk now and then, and we really should build a flood wall to protect it now, before the Cherry Creek dam fails is a "freak not freak" weather event.

Planetary Defense Is Worth It

I will always be a strong supporter of a strong planetary defense against comets and asteroids. These "Black Swan" events are rare, but the consequences of even one of them striking Earth and doing great damage would be immense.

If they are headed towards Earth's surface and too large for our atmosphere to provide an adequate defense against, they are always the "bad guy."

There are estimated to be about 45 undiscovered mass extinction class near Earth asteroids, about about 13,750 undiscovered "city killer" sized near Earth asteroids (that would destroy everything in a whole metro area of a major city, if it hit one, killing millions of people), and about 214,000 Hiroshima blast sized near Earth asteroids out there. These asteroids could strike us with short notice. The asteroids wouldn't create the radiation blast and contamination of a nuclear bomb (or highly toxic chemical weapon), but would have comparable kinetic impact to a nuclear bomb.

We need both better asteroid detection technologies (which NASA's new NEO Surveyor mission which is scheduled to launch in Septemer of 2027, twenty-one years after it was proposed, will profoundly improve) and better asteroid interception technologies that can respond to incoming asteroids and comets on short notice (i.e. many hours to several days), which is not currently in place, although rudimentary and ad hoc ICBM responses could be devised that could mitigate the harm if done right (but could make things worse if it diverts a large fragment or cluster of fragments from an uninhabited area towards a city).

Image via Wikipedia.

The NEO Surveyor mission is projected to:

• Find 2⁄3 of Asteroids Larger than 140 Meters in Diameter
• Assess the Overall Threat Posed by Potential Earth Impactors
• Assess the Impact Threat Posed by Comets
• Determine Orbits and Physical Characteristics of Specific Discovered Objects

140 meters in diameter is a commonly used threshold for a "city killer" asteroid and would have an explosive energy twenty-times that of the Hiroshima A-bomb, and more in line with a never used H-bombs in the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenal. 

If two-thirds of the 140 meter or larger near Earth asteroids were found, that would be about 5,000 of the estimated 13,750 undiscovered asteroids of that size in the first five years of the mission which is planned to run for twelve years.

It will also probably find at least a significant number of undiscovered global distinction sized asteroids of the estimated 45 that remain undiscovered, and a significant percentage of the estimated 214,000 undiscovered Hiroshima bomb impact class asteroids (of which only an estimated 7% of which are now discovered), although probably far less than two-thirds of them.

NEO Surveyor will also refine our estimates of how many large asteroids remain undiscovered despite this mission, and of the risk that these undiscovered asteroids could strike inhabited places on Earth. With more accurate estimates of known asteroid trajectories, more known asteroids which come close to Earth but are not on track to impact it could be ruled out as threats allowing surveillance of potential threats to be narrowed to those objects that really are something to worry about.

We are sufficiently technologically advanced at this point to build adequate planetary defenses, but organizing the planet to fund and deploy them is another matter. The NEO Surveyor mission cost $500 million to $600 million, which is less than a single major U.S. warship or Air Force long range bomber, or several start of the art U.S. Air Force fighter jets. Military missile defense technologies (like the "Golden Dome" plan for the U.S.) can be adapted for planetary defense purposes, to some extent, but aren't optimized for this task.

The good news is that the many millions or more smaller asteroids and space junk objects mostly burn up in the atmosphere before hitting Earth with enough damage to be much more dangerous than a random and rare lightning strike. So, we harm from not tracking or intercepting them is modest.

Also, a huge share of the Earth's surface is made up of oceans, large lakes, uninhabited ice scapes, thinly inhabited mountains and deserts, and thinly inhabited rural areas or wilderness. A "city killer" or smaller asteroid has a quite localized danger zone and isn't radioactive or toxic for the most part. 

So, while it might kill or injure a small number of people in the immediate vicinity of the impact, and might trigger a significant tsunami or landslide (urban areas are disproportionately coastal), about 71% of Earth's surface is water, about 28% of Earth's surface is nearly uninhabited or rural, and only about 1% of Earth's surface is urban. So, most "city killer" or smaller extraterrestrial impacts would lead to fairly modest casualties. But the risk of mass casualties from an extraterrestrial impact is much greater now than it was for most of human history, because the world's population has grown so much and is concentrated in cities.

This analysis assumes that all locations on Earth are equally at risk, which isn't strictly speaking true, but is a close enough approximation of the reality to be a useful starting point.

While there have been only a handful of attested really big extraterrestrial impacts in human history, and only a few more than we have clear evidence of in the last 300,000 years or so when the human species came into being, there have probably been hundreds, if not several thousand that went unnoticed because they landed in uninhabited areas, or left no survivors in thinly populated areas and didn't leave any traces clear enough to attested to their impacts geologically before their impacts were eroded away.

More than half of the “city killer” asteroids that might threaten Earth remain undiscovered. With an infrared eye, NASA’s NEO Surveyor aims to find them.

Image from the linked article in Science magazine.

Better Isn't Impossible, Other Countries Do It

 

The HR Zeitgeist

So, today was my first day at a new job as a senior assistant city attorney with the City and County of Denver.

As usual, as a lawyer, I can't talk about the substance of what I actually do at work, due to attorney-client privilege and confidentiality rules and so on. 

But, as in any big organization (the City and County of Denver has at least 11,000 employees), day one at a new job is not mostly about the substance of the work that day. I probably only did about two hours of actual legal work on my first day. 

Day one at a new job in a big organization is about getting your employee ID, completing employment related paperwork, getting accounts with various workplace software systems set up, learning where the bathrooms and break rooms are located, figuring out the layout of your part of the building so you don't get lost, introducing yourself to your co-workers while trying to match their names to faces in your memory, watching orientation videos, and reading orientation materials.

This wasn't my first rodeo. I'm a middle aged man and I've been through this drill before in my life. But I haven't done it recently, since I've been self-employed and worked in small offices for a couple of decades. 

A couple of things struck me as very different from my prior experiences.

Preparing For Mass Shootings

The last time I went through the "onboarding" drill, in 2004, was five years after Columbine, and three years after 9-11. At the time, we were more concerned about international terrorism in high profile locations, than we were about the era with a never ending wave of school and workplace shootings, even though, in hindsight, that era really began with the Columbine High School shootings in 1991.

On the day of the Columbine shooting, in 1999, I had just recently moved to Denver and lived close to downtown before moving to the Washington Park neighborhood after which this blog is named the next year. I saw the Denver bomb squad's truck rush right by me, sirens blaring. I recall thinking at the time that something really bad must be going down, although I hadn't listened to the news yet that day and didn't know what was going down at the time. The Denver bomb squad truck was headed for Columbine High School. Not much later that day, the news confirmed my suspicions. It was a massacre. Thirteen students and one teacher were killed before the two shooters committed suicide (one died a quarter century later from these injuries, while the others died almost immediately); twenty-three more people were injured (twenty by gunfire) in a spree that lasted 49 minutes, even though a police office had responded within five minutes.

But back in 2004, during my last onboarding to a larger employer, five years after Columbine, our society's response to "active shooter situations" still hadn't really jelled yet.

Before Columbine, police and institutional administrators had doctrines about responding to armed threats that favored the cautious approach appropriate for situations where an armed person had taken multiple people hostage, but wasn't actively shooting anybody. 

After the fact recognition that the institutional and law enforcement response to Columbine had been inadequate, crystalized the recognition that a different response was appropriate in an "active shooter" situation. In an "active shooter" situation, the right approach is to minimize harm by denying the shooter targets, and by boldly doing everything possible to neutralize the threat as quickly as possible. But it took years for a consensus to emerge around the best law enforcement and institutional response to an active shooter situation.

"Lockdown" and "active shooter" drills only started when my children were in early elementary school, in the late aughts. None of my onboarding experiences in 2004 or earlier had imagined the possibility. 

The mostly small law firms that I worked at over the years devised skeletal security plans on an ad hoc basis when there were specific security threats (usually from a client's ex-spouse, or soon to be ex-spouse), like keeping shades drawn to deny someone with a rifle a target in our office, or thinking about escape routes out back doors and how to stall threatening people while everyone was trying to flee.

Fast forward to 2025. Onboarding and HR materials still have the old mainstays. A brief history of the institution you're beginning to work for. A review of various nuts and bolts considerations related to sick days, employee benefits, and other employee policies and procedures. Strong cautioning against sexual harassment.

What is new to me is the new, major focus on how to head off violence in the workplace, and how to react in the event of an active shooter, even though it has been a part of my children's lives for as long as they can remember. There was even once a shootout unrelated to their school, that took place just outside their high school, during which their high school was locked down. 

For me, this hit hard. Unlike my children, this was not something that I had ever been systemically prepared for before. Even in years in the Boy Scouts, with its "be prepared" motto, all of the way to becoming an Eagle Scout, we'd never considered these scenarios. But, this issue was raised in two or three different sessions in my orientation activities today, consuming almost an hour on my first day of work.

This isn't by any means a criticism, even though it was unsettling. This instruction is necessary in our day and age when these kinds of shootings are weekly, if not daily occurrences. There were two school shootings on the same day on September 10, 2025 last week.  And, the instruction works.

At the Evergreen High School shooting in Colorado last week, which involved an active shooter who emptied and reloaded his revolver many times, all over the school, firing dozens if not hundreds of times, and trying to attack students in many different classrooms, only two victims other than the shooter were shot.

One victim was in the school at the time. This victim was a casualty of one of the first shots fired, and was probably one of the intended primary targets of the shooter. He was shot with little or no warning, and until then, no one at the school knew that the shooter had a gun with him that day.

No amount of training about what to do when an active shooting incident starts could have saved this first victim, although someone might have taken action to prevent it from happening in response to the shooter's disturbing social media activity (which his parents appear to have been aware of, at least to some extent, but didn't act upon). The FBI had started investigating the shooter's social media postings in July, but wasn't able to identify who was making them prior to the September 10 shooting.

The other student was shot by the shooter while fleeing, outside the school. This student was probably a target of opportunity after the shooter was thwarted in his attempt to find his other intended targets in the school, and instead shot someone else at random out of frustration, not long before the shooter shot himself. The active shooting episode (as is often the case) was all over before law enforcement could confront the shooter. This second victim was, realistically, the only conceivably preventable casualty that all those drills were not enough to completely save. 

Both of the victims who were shot were initially in critical condition, but have survived for more than five days so far (as of early this evening one victim was in critical but stable condition, and the other victim was in serious, but not critical, condition), as a result of extremely rapid and decisive medical responses once the shooting stopped (or maybe even earlier, the details aren't perfectly clear). The two victims were brought to a specialized trauma center, while receiving emergency care en route, well within the "hour of power" when a serious trauma victim can often be saved. While this is speculation on my part, I suspect that the less seriously wounded victim was probably the second one who was shot while fleeing, and that the distance that this victim put between him or herself and the shooter was probably decisive in preventing that shot from killing this victim.

The only life that wasn't saved was the shooter, who died from his self-inflicted, point-blank, gunshot wound which he intended to be suicidal and which ultimately did cost him his life. But even he survived in critical condition for hours due to the rapid medical response, and the quality of care that a Level One trauma center can provide. 

There were eight hundred or more people in Evergreen High School school at the time the shooting started. But, the active shooter training and lock down drills paid off. The shooter would almost certainly have killed many more people, as the shooters at Columbine did in 1999 in another affluent part of the same suburban Colorado county, if everyone in the school hadn't done what they had learned in their annual drills. 

Evergreen High School's students, teachers, and administrators, almost instantly after the first shots were fired, turned the school into a fortress of locked or barricaded doors. The shooter repeatedly tried to break into classrooms to kill more people, some of whom were probably his intended targets, but he failed. People who couldn't lock themselves into a safe place hid out of sight if they couldn't flee and weren't shot. The rest of the students, including those in a cafeteria near where the shooting started, and some hallways full of high school students, successfully fled to safety purposefully and without hesitation, mostly getting out within a minute or two after the shooting started. They ran far away, beyond the range of the shooter, to safety. 

Everyone who wasn't shot was promptly accounted for, to make sure that there were no victims who were shot, but not found, who needed medical attention.

The world has changed. Twenty-five years ago, an active school or workplace shooting of multiple people was shocking and almost unthinkable. Now, while it is still much less common than other kinds of murders and attempted murders, school and workplace shootings are a routine fact of life that we have accepted as a society (even though many of us urgently want policy reforms to address them), and we prepare for them in much the same way that we prepared for tornados when I was a kid in school, and in much the same way as we prepare for plane crashes in advance of every commercial airline takeoff.

Preparing For High Rise Fires

Another change today was more thorough and vivid instruction from HR on what to do if there is a fire in a high rise building than at any place I've worked before now. 

This is a direct offshoot of the 9-11 attacks in 2001, as well as the fact that I'm working on the 11th floor of a downtown office building.

I don't recall ever even thinking about fire safety when I worked near the top of a high rise office building in Glendale, Colorado from 1999 until the summer of 2001, a few months before 9-11. No one ever even mentioned the possibility.

My office at the time of 9-11 was a single story steel framed building with a brick facade, multiple exits, and a window that could be opened and escaped from in every room, so escaping a fire wasn't a concern there either. And, nobody was worried that our tiny suburban office building, which was also home to a miniature golf course and a drive though coffee kiosk, was a terrorist target. 

This threat wasn't a big deal at the workplace I joined in 2004, the last time I had a thorough onboarding at a new job in a large organization, since our offices were on the second floor of a modern, up to code, sprinkler equipped, three story concrete, steel and glass building in a suburban office park. It also wasn't much of a concern in 2005 when I worked on the first floor of a two story converted Victorian era mansion with a fire escape from the second floor, and many windows in every room from which people inside could safely escape if need be.

I did get a little fire emergency training from 2010 until 2019, when I worked on the 20th floor of a high rise office building in downtown Denver (on the same block as downtown Denver's signature "cash register building"). Within a year of starting to work there, I was appointed to the unpaid position of fire marshal for our little office suite with a peak occupancy of about six people that took up about half a floor of the building. We went through annual drills where we walked down twenty flights of stairs and assembled at our office's appointed regrouping site in front of the Warwick hotel a couple of blocks away. But my duties were communicated to me in a low key manner, face to face, from our previous office fire marshal to me. I served in this role until the office suite's lease ended, and so I never had to pass that hat to anyone else. My subsequent offices were also small and low rise.

But, now I work on the 11th floor of a downtown office building for a large, bureaucratic organization that employs everyone in the building. And, the horrors of people trying to escape the World Trade Center still seem almost as fresh as they did twenty-four years ago, even though the threat of foreign terrorism has slipped to the back of our consciousness. So, this was, rightfully, a significant focus in our orientation, even though it was also unsettling.

The Safety Of Trains v. Cars and Trucks

Understanding Rail Accident Risks With Appropriate Context

Honestly, it is surprising that so many railway deaths are not in the right of way (ROW). The defining characteristic of rail transportation is that it travels on fixed tracks which have a right of way.

There are extremely rare incidents of someone getting killed from a train while not being on the tracks - like when it falls off a bridge and kills someone below as one did not so long ago on I-25 near Pueblo, or when an accident releases a poisonous gas that kills people outside the ROW but nearby which happened to the parents of one of my first clients - but those are vanishingly rare.

Of course, what they are really doing in these statistics is distinguishing between deaths in the ROW at highway crossings and deaths in the ROW at something other than highway crossings, and basically ignoring the tiny percentage of deaths that fall in neither category.

The regulatory focus on highway crossings to the near exclusion of safety measures in railroad railways isn't unreasonable.  According to the Federal Railway Administration:

Highway-rail grade crossings are intersections where highways cross railroad tracks at-grade. Approximately 212,000 highway-rail grade crossings exist on the approximately 140,000 miles of track that make up the United States’ railroad system.

If we conservatively assume that the average highway rail grade crossing is 105.6 feet (i.e. 0.02 miles), then there are 4,240 miles of track in highway-rail grade crossings, which is about 3% of the total miles of track in the U.S. (and realistically the truth is probably closer to 1-2%). 

While only 30% of rail deaths nationally are at highway crossings, the number of deaths per mile of track are 10-30 times greater at highway crossings than they are away from them. But, the cost of safety measures to prevent rail deaths is roughly proportional to the length of the track when they are put in place.

Also, both passenger rail and freight rail cause far few deaths per passenger-mile than cars, to both passengers (who are safer by a factor of seventeen) and bystanders like pedestrians and bicyclists and people other cars, and per freight ton-mile than trucks carrying freight to both operators and bystanders.

In the U.S., in 2024, there were 954 railroad deaths and 6,542 nonfatal railroad injuries.

(Source)

There is about 1 fatal rail death away from highway crossings per 196.5 miles a track away from highway crossings, and there is about 1 fatal rail death per 806 highway crossings at highway crossings. Vanishing few fatal rail deaths are to people on the train itself 

People on railroad tracks who shouldn't be (i.e. trespassers) account for 69% of railroad deaths, but only about 10% of nonfatal railroad injuries, because 51% of rail accidents involving trespassers that make it into official statistics are deadly. 

The vast majority of rail traffic in the U.S. is freight. U.S. freight rail carried 1.71 trillion ton-miles per year with about 100 tons per train car. So, about 17,000 million train car-miles per year. 

Amtrak provides 6544 million passenger miles per year of transportation. About 35% of those are in the Northeast Corridor which run about 80% full on average and about 65% are outside the Northeast Corridor which run closer to 50% full on average. A coach car holds about 74 people which is about 59 people per car in the Northeast Corridor and about 37 people outside it. So, about 39 million train car miles per year in the Northeast Corridor and about 115 million train car miles per year outside the Northeast Corridor, for a total of about 152 million train car miles per year.

So, about 0.9% of train car miles are passenger train car miles and about 99.1% of train car miles are freight train car miles.

If rail deaths are no more likely, per train car mile, to be caused by freight train cars than by passenger train cars (although arguably the risk is per train and not per train car, in which cars passenger trains which have far fewer cars per train are much more dangerous, even though this is harder to estimate), we can reasonably estimate that passenger trains kill about 12 people per year on average (2 passengers and 10 other people), while freight trains kill about 942 people per year on average. Adjusting for train car length who shift this somewhat from freight trains to passenger trains, but even so, freight trains would be the dominant issue.

Do Existing Rules Reflect The True Nature Of The Problem

Of course, it only makes sense to take measures to reduce right of way deaths away from highway crossings if there is an effective (and cost effective) way to do so. 

People walk across and along train tracks all the time, and since trains are noisy, and you only need to move a few feet away from train tracks to avoid being hit by one, normally walking across or along train tracks is pretty safe, so long as you are able to hear them coming, you pay attention, you don't fall asleep on them, you don't get stuck on them, and you get out of the way when they come. And, it isn't really clear what the statistics use to define a trespasser, and we can't really understand the statistics without knowing this definition.

Is a trespasser merely someone who is in the right of way at all? Is a trespasser someone who tries to hitch a ride on a train that isn't using it like a passenger on a typical passenger train? Or what?

Common intuition wouldn't consider crossing over a train track when there is no indication that a train is coming, away from a highway crossing, to be trespassing, nor would common intuition consider walking along a train track in the right of way when there is no indication that a train is coming to be trespassing. I did that on my walk to and from school in junior high school almost every school day for two years without anyone even suggesting that I was trespassing.

Crossing a highway crossing when there are indications that a train is coming such as flashing lights or barriers that come down probably is trespassing, but that obviously doesn't apply when you aren't at a highway crossing.

The Federal Railway Administration, however, begs to differ, stating:

It is illegal to access private railroad property anywhere other than a designated pedestrian or roadway crossing. Trespassers are most often pedestrians who walk across or along railroad tracks as a shortcut to another destination. Some trespassers are loitering or are engaged in recreational activities such as taking photographs, jogging, bicycling, hunting, or operating recreational off-highway vehicles (ROVs). Riding ROVs along railroad tracks leads to the erosion of an important part of the track foundation known as ballast, or the rock and soil material that supports the ties and rail.

But, this definition is awfully harsh. From a pedestrian's perspective, it is often much safer to walk across or along railroad tracks away from a designated roadway crossing, than it is to cross at a highway crossing where there is much more frequent and less noisy car traffic, or across open ground away from the railroad right of way (indeed, railroads that are no longer in use are often converted to pedestrian trails for just this reason) which may constitute trespassing on private property (which is dangerous in much of rural America) and is sometimes uncleared brush. 

Sticking to official pedestrian routes is challenging. Many rural areas have no sidewalks, and walking along rural roads at night can be much more dangerous than walking along railroads. 

Designated pedestrian crossings are extremely very rare outside of dense urban areas and resort areas, because they aren't cost effective in places with little pedestrian traffic and only marginal safety risks to the pedestrians who do without them. 

But train tracks have to be crossed somewhere to get from point A to point B in many cases, because tracks often split whole states in two. 

In flat farmland, highway crossings are often a mile to six miles apart, and highway crossings can be even more sparse in mountains, forests, wetlands, and deserts. 

These detours can be tolerable in a car or a motorcycle, but represent immense delays relative to crossing a train track away from a highway crossing for a pedestrian who may have to cross that track to get to school or work or a friend's house on a regular basis.

So, simply writing off people who are simply meeting the strict FTA definition of rail right of way trespassing as "at fault" is really unreasonable, blames the victim, and unreasonably protects railroad operators from legal liability when the common law "Learned Hand" test for negligence liability (i.e. that the probability adjusted risk of harm is greater than the cost of a measure that would prevent that harm) would hold railroad operators liable for these injuries if they didn't take reasonable and cost effective measures to prevent them.

In the face of unreasonable trespassing definitions and regulations of pedestrians near train tracks, even extremely expensive preventative measures, like tall fences, will be routinely circumvented. And, authorities won't do much to prevent the harm, because the authorities seeing the situation up close will be aware that these work arounds that circumvent overkill prevention measures like tall fences, will mostly do more good than harm.

Also, my intuition is that ordinary pedestrians walking across or along railroad tracks, especially in rural and suburban areas, are not at all typical of people who are killed in rail accidents, because it is so easy to hear trains coming and because it is so easy in most cases to get out of the way. I suspect that these cases probably actually make up less than 10% of rail accidents involving pedestrians, even though the FTA itself admits on its own website that this is the predominant form of "trespassing" in rail right of ways.

Instead, I suspect that the typical cases that result in serious injury or death are very different. 

Maybe the pedestrian is a young child to little to appreciate the risk of being on train tracks when one can hear a train coming. Maybe the pedestrian is deaf or wearing headphones. 

Maybe the pedestrian falls asleep on the tracks while drunk, on drugs, or homeless, mistakenly thinking that this particular track which has low frequency traffic has been abandoned entirely. Maybe the pedestrian has been assaulted or knocked unconscious and left on the tracks. 

Some of these cases may be close to the boundary between reckless behavior indifferent to the grave risk that they will be killed and full fledged intentional suicide a bit like playing Russian roulette. 

Maybe the pedestrian is trying to hitch a ride on a freight train and stumbles. 

Maybe the pedestrian is on a rail bridge or other part of the right of way where there is no easy place to move and get out of the way of the train when it is coming. Maybe the pedestrian somehow gets stuck on the tracks with a foot wedged into a gap or is trying to rescue someone else.

Ideally, better data would add insight that the official statistics do not, and we wouldn't have to rely on intuition. But, relying in intuition grounded in common sense and lived experience until better data is available, is usually better than taking no action at all until better data is available, especially if the measures suggested by that intuition aren't terribly expensive or difficult to implement.

If my intuition is right and these are the predominant cases of result in rail deaths or injuries to "trespassers", then the broad FTA definition in addition to blaming the victim, also undermines its effectiveness by being so broad that it fails to distinguish between reasonable conduct that is only dangerous in the most freak circumstances and unreasonable conduct that really does pose an extraordinary risk of death which should be actively policed to prevent rail deaths and injuries. By not tolerating reasonable conduct, the overbroad definition undermines its own effectiveness at preventing the harms it is designed to discourage.

Distinguishing between "safe trespassing" within the FTA definition and "unsafe trespassing" within the FTA is also critical to determining what kind of preventative measures could reduce rail right of way deaths and injuries.

Possible Infrastructure Based Solutions To Reduce Harm

If the real problem is predominantly people who fall asleep or are otherwise unconscious or stuck or inert on train tracks away from highway crossings, then the solution might be to periodically put something like a LIDAR sensor along active train tracks that warn the train operator of the obstruction in time to stop the train (which could take more than a mile of warning about a minute before the train reaches that point), which would prevent not only deaths to trespassers, but also train collisions with fallen trees, large sleeping wildlife (for which "cow catchers" were designed in an earlier era), and debris carried there by a storm. These preventative measures weren't really technologically feasible or cost effective in the late 19th century and early 20th century when existing freight rail systems were invented. But now, these kinds of sensors and a way to send their signals to trains on the routes are cheap and easy to retrofit commercial off the shelf technologies that require only minor modifications for this application.

At crossings, something like a LIDAR system, or even just an "emergency stop" switch that someone could activate in the highway crossing infrastructure, could reduce the number of collisions arising from vehicles stuck at a highway crossing. Even if the warning was transmitted to the train when it was too late to come to a full stop, on oncoming train aware of an imminent collision could slow down as much as possible and activate maximum warning sirens to mitigate the magnitude of the harm from an unstoppable collision and could alert first responders so that they could on their way to the scene of the nearly inevitable collision before it even happened, in situation where every moment counts in saving someone's life. 

If a big part of  the problem is people who are deaf or wearing headphones, bright, flashing, motion sensor activated lights that only go off when trains are actually coming, located away from highway crossings, which are also cheap, easy to retrofit, commercial off the shelf technologies could do the trick, and might even reduce the need for loud train horns in the middle of the night.

The solutions above would be cheap, and could be implemented at a very manageable cost by railroad operators in response to newly adopted safety regulations (which would prevent a race to the bottom by profit minding companies competing with each other) over a period of perhaps five or ten years.

If the problem is people trying to hitchhike on train cars, hobo style, maybe a partial solution would be to design train cars so that they are difficult to ride or mount, without ladders or anything else to grip, and with the top of enclosed freight cars designs with pitched roofs that are too steep to rest upon for any length of time.

This would be very expensive to retrofit, but if the new design standards were imposed only prospectively to newly purchased freight cars as they were replaced over their useful lives, the new design would probably not be much more expensive than the old one, and as the percentage of new design cars increased over time, the entire strategy of hobo style hitchhiking on freight trains would grow increasingly less popular.

This gradual replacement would also dovetail with reduces consumption of coal, which is the single largest component of of rail freight, in favor of renewables, nuclear, and natural gas transported by pipeline, and declining consumption of liquid fossil fuels (another major component of rail freight) as electric vehicles gradually replace internal combustion engine vehicles, with freight rail instead being used to ship more containerized cargo.

Regular underpasses or overpasses for wild animals might not save many human lives but might prevent train collisions with wild (or domestic) animals that are unable to get out of  the way in time or don't realize the risk, which is surely something that both conservationists and train operators would appreciate, which is fundamentally, very low tech, like Roman Empire class civil engineering. But these measured could potentially be quite expensive to retrofit into existing rail lines. Still, good data on "rail kill" could identify the areas where these kinds of collisions are most common so that the investment in these solutions could be implemented first where it would do the most good, and these standards could be established for new rail lines (mostly proposed high speed rail lines).

Admittedly, none of these measures would be very effective against someone who is simply reckless to the point of being virtually suicidal, or someone who is actually suicidal. 

For these cases, a highly targeted campaign of public service announcements, that focuses only on the conduct that other preventative measures can't deal with, that actually is high risk, in channels that the people most likely to act this way are most likely to hear and take seriously may be the best possible solution - a bit like the campaigns in the 1980s about drunk driving and the importance of having a designated driver. A PSA campaign probably wouldn't be as effective as some of the new safety infrastructure suggested in this post, but it would almost surely make some difference if it was well done.

This And That

1. King Soopers workers in Colorado are on the verge of going on strike, shortly after the King Soopers-Safeway merge fell apart in the face of obvious anti-trust concerns.

2. An interesting linguistics question I've never seen addressed is why some peoples, like the Italians, gesture a lot while they speak, while other do not.

3. In England, a major road is washed out by a landslide, leading to a fourteen mile detour. A private individual contracts with a farmer owning nearby land and in two weeks builds a substitute road and charges a toll. Thousands of cars a day willingly pay the toll and the man recovers his $150,000 equivalent investment and makes a modest profit in the three additional months it takes to fix the road. The government could have cited him for not seeking regulatory approval, but instead, lets it slide and has its own emergency vehicles use the road. The government could have done the same thing, but it didn't. One of the positive aspects of capitalism is that it allows individuals to act without a comparatively complex and bureaucratic process. The alternative is to find ways for government to be more nimble, something that Japan, for example, is quite good at in these situations.

4. Microsoft bans someone from its online service for truthfully putting his location data as "Fort Gay" in West Virginia, despite the fact that this was the name of his town, on the theory that it is offensive, even after he demonstrates that it is real place. It refuses to relent until the Mayor goes to the press to complain. Moral of the story: Corporate bureaucracies can be just as stupid as governmental bureaucracies.

5. The Colorado Department of Transportation is warning people that any texts asking individuals to “Pay your FastTrak Lane tolls” are scams, because Colorado does not collect fines or tolls by text. I've received some of these scam texts myself. But it still astounds me that prompt investigation and prosecution of these scammers using an electronic paper trail and following the places where they want you to send money isn't more effective. This seems like a problem that could be solved much more effectively given sufficient political will to do so, with a combination of specialized enforcement teams and possibly technological upgrades to the cell phone network.

6. A roughly 9.0 magnitude earthquake, of a type called a megathrust earthquake, struck in the year 1700, resulting in a tsunami to the Pacific Coast of North America from Vancouver to California. Its effects were also noted in Japan. Earthquakes like this happen every 300-600 years or so, and we're about due for another one.

7. New imaging of the geology under Yellowstone in the U.S. reveal that this mega-caldera is not currently anywhere near erupting in a mega explosion like the last time it occurred. Such an eruption would be a catastrophe affecting a large swath of North America and would have global climate implications.  

8. Pollen issues in U.S. cities are, to a significant extent, a product of city planning policies to plan only male trees to replace those lost to Dutch Elm disease on the advice of a 1949 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Nesting

In many cases, the best response to a situation is nesting, i.e. staying inside your well-stocked house and not going anywhere. 

Nesting is a good response to situations including:

Blizzards, deep snow, deep freezes, heat waves, hail, intense rain, high winds, thick fog, tornados, flying or jumping bugs everywhere, infectious diseases in the community, bad air quality, downed power lines, wild animals on the prowl, and violent people in the neighborhood who aren't specifically out to get you (a.k.a. "shelter in place").

Nesting isn't a good response to everything. It is a bad response to:

Wild fires, nearby structure fires, floods, landslides, sink holes, natural gas leaks, poisonous gases, violent people who are specifically out to get you, and seismic events like earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions.

Coincidentally, most of the things that nesting is a bad response to are most common, in even urbanized areas, in California and/or Florida.

How Safe Are Townhouses and Duplexes?

TL;DR Townhouses and duplexes are probably not much more or less dangerous than single family homes, and on balance are probably a little safer from structure fire risks.

A friend on Facebook, in reaction to the meme above, expressed concern that townhouses and duplexes might be more vulnerable to threats like fire and insect infestations (relative to single family homes) or unlawful entry via the attic, and that even if current building codes address these concerns, that codes are not widely complied with to alleviate this risk. My own home which is half of a duplex, does not have a firewall that extends to the attic and has a shared open attic space (it was built in 1925, long before current fire and building codes were in place).

While this is a facially plausible possibility, I am skeptical of all of these points.

Structure fires were way down in the U.S. from 1977 to 2021, which suggests that more stringent building and fire codes are having the desired effect of reducing the risk of home structure fires:

Structure fire statistics are lumped by 1-2 unit homes v. "apartments" which seem to include everything from structures with three or more townhouses to high rise apartments, so the distinction between single family homes and duplexes is hard to evaluate:

Another fire statistic publication provides raw data in chart form, and reveals that there are slightly fewer deaths per fire in duplexes than there are in single family homes, despite the fact that duplexes have more residents, on average, than single family homes:

The structure fire statistics aren't provided as rates relative to the percentage of housing stock of each time in residential units, although another source sheds some insight into the existing mix. If the chart below is right, there are about 1/3rd as many townhouses and duplexes as there are single family homes (or less), but the number of fires in duplexes is about 11th of the number of single family homes (with considerable uncertainty because the distinction between single family homes and duplexes isn't made in about half of the data).

There are about 32% as many apartment fires as there are single family home fires, but it is unclear from the illustration above where the percentage of housing stock that counts as apartments rather than 1-2 unit residences fits between 10%/62% (for 20+ unit apartments) and 32%/62% (for all attached residences except single family homes), so somewhere between 1/6th and 1/2. The 5% of the housing stock that is not elsewhere classified probably fits into the other categories of residential structure fires in the fire statistics. The statistics aren't inconsistent with the likelihood of a fire being roughly the same for apartments as for 1-2 unit residences, but don't definitively establish this point either and could err in either direction.

Apartment fires are much less deadly per fire than single family home and duplex fires, despite having far more residents per fire, on average, in a distinction that has arisen since 1980, probably due to more strict building codes for apartments built since then:

The statistics above don't completely and finally resolve the issue, although they do seem to suggest that duplexes and townhouses at a minimum, aren't materially less safe than single family detached homes. The homeowner's insurance bill for my duplex is not very much different than for a comparable single family home, which suggests that there isn't much of a difference in risk.

Also, modern townhouses and duplexes do require a firewall between each unit, in a building and fire code requirement that I suspect is followed in a very high share of all new builds, although though my friend is more skeptical about code compliance (and I would agree that code compliance is patchy in smaller scale renovation work).

Note also that these trends exist despite the fact that apartment dwellers tend to be younger and less affluent than duplex and townhouse dwellers, who in turn tend to be younger and less affluent than single family home dwellers, on average, and one would generally expect, a priori, that younger and less affluent residents would be more likely to do things that would cause fires (although younger people are less likely to smoke and are probably more likely to live in more recently built housing).

Shared walls (and ceiling/floors in apartments) also have benefits. Most notably, they increase HVAC efficiency.

Motorcycles Are Still Dangerous

 

Things That Aren't True

One of the most serious problems with the current political climate is that large numbers of people believe things that aren't true. And, the absurdity of some of those beliefs is extreme.

Consider this example:

The outcome of the 2022 race for Governor in Colorado did not hinge on Republican Heidi Ganahl’s bizarre obsession with the ridiculous idea that public schools in Colorado were infested with children dressed up as animals (which she referred to as “furries“). . . . The final six weeks of that campaign were dominated mostly by Ganahl’s bizarre insistence on bringing up the widely-debunked conspiracy theory that public schools were catering to children who wore elaborate cat costumes in class. This is the same nonsense conspiracy theory that other Republican politicians have used to claim that schools were providing “litter boxes” for students; a Nebraska State Senator publicly apologized for the suggestion in March 2022. . . . 

Long after the 2022 gubernatorial race had ended, Ganahl was still talking about furries as she pushed to start up a “Moms for Liberty” chapter in Colorado — an idea that brought “Furry-Lago” full circle. Ganahl launched herself down this insane rabbit hole in 2022 at least in part at the suggestion of a Jefferson County woman named Lindsey Datko, who runs a Facebook page for like-minded idiots called “Jeffco Kids First.” Datko’s involvement was detailed in a story by Rylee Dunn of Colorado Community Media (publisher of the Arvada Press) that explained how “Jeffco Kids First” tried very hard to prove the existence of the invisible furry menace:

Over the summer, the members of a Facebook group called Jeffco Kids First began shifting their concern away from pandemic policies in schools to identities it deemed disruptive to learning. A leading voice in the group told parents to empower their children to find “furries,” kids who dress up in animal accessories, and to record them.

“If any of your kids would be willing to record anonymous audio of their experiences with furries hissing, barking, clawing, chasing, and how it affects their school day, please send to me or let me know ASAP!” Jeffco Kids First creator Lindsay Datko, a parent in Jefferson County Public Schools, posted.

Details like these have not been widely publicized because the Facebook group is private, meaning only members can see what is posted. After being denied entry to the group, Colorado Community Media gained access through a member who wanted the group’s content to be public.

School officials say the group’s activities can be disruptive and harmful to kids. But it has some strong backers, including Heidi Ganahl, the Republican Party’s nominee in this fall’s Colorado gubernatorial race. She’s also a member of the group.

There are other common falsities out there, some of which influence politics or are otherwise harmful:

* The false belief that election fraud is widespread and frequently impacts election results in the U.S. for the benefit of liberals. It is in fact, vanishingly rare, usually unintentional, is at least as common in benefiting conservatives as liberals, and almost never influences election outcomes before being caught. When election administration issues influence close elections voter suppression by conservatives, and unintentional bureaucratic and technological errors, are the main causes of outcome changing impacts.

* The false belief that almost everyone in the U.S. has a valid photo ID (about 11% of adults do not).

* The false belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 Presidential election.

* The false belief that the United States was established as a Christian nation.

* The false belief that many or most leading Democratic politicians are involved in child sex trafficking. 

* The false belief that ritual Satanic abuse is, or was ever, common.

* The false belief that transgender identity doesn't exist.

* The false belief that male to female transgender individuals present a high or elevated risk of sexual abuse of women or girls, for example, when using a women's restroom.

* The false belief that homosexuality is merely an immoral choice.

* The false belief that immigrants (or undocumented immigrants) commit more non-immigration crimes than native born persons.

* The false belief that illegal immigration across the Mexican border is a source of people who commit acts of terrorism in the United States. 

* The false belief that immigrants are a net economic burden on taxpayers.

* The false belief that vaccines are more harmful than beneficial.

* The false belief that Young Earth Creationism is accurate.

* The false belief that everything in the Bible is literally true. 

* The false belief that evolution isn't real, or that it isn't a conclusively scientifically established scientific reality.

* The false belief that the Earth is flat.

* The false belief that literal demons are real. Of course, the "demons" in the metaphorical sense of past traumas, addictions, and anti-social impulses do exist.

* The false belief that demon possession is an important cause of physical or mental illnesses.

* The false belief that IQ and almost all other human behavioral traits have no significant genetic component and are predominantly and even overwhelmingly a product of nurture. In fact, IQ is heavily genetic and more than a third to more than a half of a great many human behavioral traits are attributable to one's genetic inheritance, while the parental nurture impact on a great many human behavioral traits is widely overestimated.

* The false belief that substance abuse lacks of strong genetic component. In fact, it is one of the most strongly genetic human behavioral traits. 

* The false belief that atheists believe in and follow a literal Satan.

* The false belief in the reality of transubstantiation.

* The false belief that meteorologists control the weather.

* The false belief that U.S. Presidents have a significant ability to influence the inflation rate.

* The false belief that U.S. Presidents have a significant ability to influence gasoline prices.

* The false belief that owning a gun reduces your risk of being a victim of a violent crime.

* The false belief that successful, legal, self-defense from crime with a gun (including by brandishing it) is common.

* The false belief that crime rates are high and rising in the year 2024.

* The false belief that personal injury and malpractice lawsuits are usually frivolous.

* The false belief that climate change isn't real.

* The false belief that climate change isn't caused by human caused pollution.

* The false belief that nuclear power is more of a threat to public health and safety than fossil fuels. There are reasons to be concerned about nuclear power (e.g., the risk that nuclear fuel will be diverted to nuclear weapons), but that is not one of them.

* The false belief that someone who has not committed any crimes more than seven years after finishing a sentence for a previous crime is at highly elevated risk of committing a crime in the future compared to a comparable person with no prior criminal record.  

* The false belief that rape can't cause a pregnancy. 

* The false belief that abortion is more dangerous for abortion patients than giving birth.

* The false belief that miscarriage is rare (something on the order of 1/4 to 1/3 of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and this is an underestimate of the total miscarriage rate because it excludes miscarriages before someone knows that they are pregnant).

* The inaccurate belief that income taxes cause people to earn less (a concept associated with the Laffer Curve) at income tax rates much lower than the rates at which this is actually true. The peak of the Laffer Curve is actually at tax rates of about 70%.

* The false belief that high tax rates are strongly correlated with low economic growth.

* The false belief that prayer itself (as distinguished from community support and knowledge of community support) influences anything.

* The false belief that astrology is valid.

* The false belief that literal ghosts are real. Of course, "ghosts" in the metaphorical sense of recollections of people who have died are real.

* The false belief that the United States has very nearly the best health care outcomes.

* The false belief that driving is safer than commercial air travel. 

Today's Safety Fact (No Joke!).

From the New York Times.

Planetary Defense Is Still A Good Idea

The technology necessary to defend Earth from meteors and comets that could cause massive harm to all living things on the planet as part of a planetary defense system continues to advance. 

Preparing for this potential Black Swan event continues to be a good idea because this low probability event could do extreme harm, on a scale comparable to a global nuclear war, if it happened.

Quote Of The Day

Some people's caution signs are other's instruction manuals.

- Eric W. Olsen (on Facebook today).

Stray Thoughts

* Firetrucks should have lead blankets to assist in dealing with radioactive materials.

* Humans are gradually becoming like Tolkien's elves, long lived, with few children, and high cultural development. Unlike many other technologies based upon physics which are nearing their theoretical limits, medical technology and biotech has immense potential without hitting any hard scientific barriers. We already know all of the physical laws pertinent to biology and chemistry more or less exactly We have proof of concept and possibility in various existing plants and animals. We have increasingly solid understandings of many diseases, of genetics, of biochemistry and anatomy, and of the aging process itself. We have the power to remake ourselves in almost any image we imagine. 

* We are fast approaching peak human population, and have the potential to gradually reduce the globe's population without coercion and in the process increase the amount of natural resources per capita while becoming more efficient so we need fewer natural resources per capita.

* Seattle has lots of roundabouts and narrow city streets. More intriguing is why it has so many independent small businesses. Its diversity and large share of immigrants come to mind. Its downtown architecture, on the other hand, is dismal. Liquor in grocery stores is nice. Its high level of environmental consciousness and traffic safety measures are probably good on balance, but inconvenient. It seems to be doing a decent job of infill development.

* Cultures of honor are outdated in the modern world, unless it backslides. Christianity with its doctrine of forgiveness was a way to end blood feuds and get past cultures of honor to a more adaptive society. But we may be backsliding, if civilization can't work well enough.

* Imagine how utopian the world could be without dogs and without guns.

Premature Death In The Demimonde

Most unsolved gun murders, and a substantial share of all murders, involved adolescent and young adult men, mostly non-white, in gangs in poverty stricken neighborhoods. Prostitutes, homeless people, alcoholics, drug addicts, people with traumatic brain injuries, severely mentally ill people with some particular mental illness like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and PTSD (often veterans), high school dropouts, runaways, foster children who have at some time been abused or neglected, people with juvenile delinquency or criminal records, disowned LGBT people, and disabled older men without any college education, are also particular vulnerable to premature death. And, of course, these categories have lots of overlap.

Targeting assistance these populations could greatly reduce premature deaths in the U.S., but there isn't the politically will to do so. Politicians and the public don't care much about people in this demimonde.

Stress Test

Yesterday was the wettest day in Southern California history (and much of Nevada and Arizona history as well). Southern California had a 5.1 magnitude earthquake and high winds at the same time.

There was some property damages, but there were very few casualties. SoCal survived this extreme stress test well. People took the warnings seriously. First responders were prepared. California has endured disasters and hardships, but it has produced a resilient and prosperous state.

Various Recent Trends

There is a substack article entitled "What the heck happened in 2012?" whose premise that 2012 in particular was an important year is a bit dubious (with the 2007-2008 financial crisis being a better date in many cases), but which does have lots of neat charts on older and more recent trends. 

The premise is that we're having something of a 1968 style cultural upheaval driven by economic prosperity, smart phones, and the Internet. The link between pedestrian deaths and smart phone ownership is particular viable as a causal connection.