We are in Montgomery, Alabama (generic map), at the Red Cross disaster relief "hot site," a facility which is ready and waiting to receive hundreds of volunteers on very short notice to jump-start a relief operation whenever another hurricane or other disaster strikes the region. Possibly sooner than one hopes: we are currently watching Investigation Area 99, a low pressure region developing in the gulf with the potential to become a tropical cyclone, and whose forecast track would bring it straight here in about three days' time.
As usual, I can not disclose the actual location of the hot site. Suffice it to say that it is a warehouse-like facility in a rather run-down part of town, but we've been quite comfortably parked here for the last three days, with access to 15 amps of power and a water spigot. We only had about a day's worth of work to do, setting up networking and some equipment to support an advance team for the next relief operation. Everything here will be on hot standby, monitored from headquarters in DC and the maintenance center in Austin. We have two cases of cabling supplies that now need to be returned; this morning we are waiting for FedEx to pick them up, and then we are done here.
Where we go next is, at this writing, very much undecided.
Monday, October 15, 2007
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I hope 99L treats you all as (relatively) well as us. We've spent the last couple weeks under 99L which we were first introduced to as 94L, making a loop over the Yucatan peninsula and dumping massive quantities of water on the already hammered victims of Hurricane Dean. He then headed back out to the Caribbean, was renamed 99L and flew across the Yucatan in one day (but still dumped massive quantities of water on us). We'll take sunny days now, for $300 Alex.
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