CROSSING OVER THE THRESHHOLD OF NO RETURN

Boy, after a while, I start to sound (and feel like a broken record).  Yesterday, I was watching some vids from my old mission comp, Elder Christensen who lives on the East bench areas of SLC and I worry about him in light of what Spencer and others have had to say.  I think he is in Holliday, UT which is a massive rock fall off the east cliffs.  The nice part of that is that the effects of liquefaction are minimized with larger media below you.  Once the boulders become dog sized, the effects are largely minimized with a relatively light structure.  Those with "slab on grade" foundations will literally float like a boat and ride it out.  Others with standard "T" wall foundations will have to rely on the square footage of the footing divided by the mass of the building above it compared against the soil's ability to handle compressive loads (moisture content figures in as well at the time of the shaker) in order to get thru the event.  Some boulders in that Holliday area are the size of houses.  I will now go down a bunny trail about that topic on building for seismicity I had talked about in a previous post.  The best structure you can have in a shaker is not what we now have for our homes, but is actually what your horse is living in and what your TV came in from China.  Yup, I would much rather live in that than what I am currently in - if I knew when a shaker was coming, that is.  I think my bags would be packed and on the porch if I were to propose that to the family (other than my oldest daughter - she has been probing me for info on it and wants to build completely debt-free in a southwest adobe style using shipping containers).  I am pretty impressed with her resourcefulness and creativity.  She is going to be an engineer, but she peppered me with alot of engineering questions about reducing wall strength for cutouts for doors and walls as we were working inside my 20' container, and then announced her plans to me.  The beauty of them is not so much living in them, as it is using them as a "life boat" for food storage and as a backup shelter in case your principle structure is in a disorganized jumble on its former foundation.  The problem with the container is that it is subjected to the extremes of heat and cold which is bad for food storage - and not so great for living.  The best one you can get is the cold storage container which is made from stainless steel and is very well insulated.  They are hard to find because corrosion is minimal (which is what kills the standard Cor-10 steel units), so their problems are that they are punctured or badly dented (dropped during shipping transfer).  When you do find one that is "timed out" and in good shape, you will pay a premium for it.  I have owned three or four of them now and I have never stepped up and gotten the more expensive stainless units.  I kind of wish I had - knowing what I know now.  Color is a big deal - the white one we have is about 20-30 degrees cooler on a sunny summer day compared to the white one.  Unless you can afford to have one for each season, you will struggle with HVAC issues on each account.  The other nice thing about the stainless units is that they make MUCH BETTER underground shelters - if you are thinking along those lines.  If you choose to bury one, face the doors east or west in the hillside you put it in.  I have my reasons for that - but I am still waiting for a Spencer to come along and confirm what those reasons are.  There will be very high winds at some point (I have not seen Spencer confirm it) although, Mother Mary Shipton and Gayle have mentioned it in their descriptions.  Every one should have a place to get into a basement or underground shelter at the very least - as I see that as a distinct possibility and I have no clue how or when that will be in the narrative, so I cannot answer that other than to say to go look up what Shipton had to say on the matter (may be a pole shift or large planetary fly-by or??).  When you understand what wind can do to structures, you never think the same about buildings again.  A large wind creates enormous pressure differentials (inside to outside) on the structure and when you watch the slo-mo footage of structures subjected to those forces, its disheartening.  They simply explode.  In our airplane designs, great pains are taken to ensure that sudden pressure differentials are contained and arrested before a catastrophic event can occur.  We have things you cannot even begin to imagine to keep the unimaginable from happening.  The recent 737 Southwest decompression event high-lighted how well those features worked.  Entire lives have been devoted just to those details so the flying public is safe.  Companies have gone under (early on - the BAC Comet disasters) when they did not fully understand materials properties and decompression failure modes.  Soooo.....the absolute best living space for disasters is a properly buried or berm-earthed stainless container with alot of details I simply do not have time to go into here.  The next best thing is one above ground out back of the house and the third one is a simple pole building.  Pole buildings are extremely low mass buildings (not necessarily good in wind), but cheap to build and, when combined with a reinforced concrete slab on grade, provide great protection from basic elements and EQs.   They simply will not disappear up to their eaves if you live in a bad liquefaction area.  The thing I like about the containers is that they float.  After the Japanese tsunami, there was a container complete with a rusted out Harley that made it to our shores with very little water having been taken on.  I think its only because the motorbike and other stuff were pushed to the back of the contain and it mostly floated here with the doors above the water line.  But those things float - making them a de-facto boat.  So, EQ/wind/water resistance give those things high marks in my book.  Buried properly (there are you-tubes out there where people have followed proper engineering principle so there is some longevity in your endeavor), those things are great for all scenarios including storing root crops and many veggies after the fall freeze, as well as long-term food storage.

So, back to David Christensen - he made a great vid talking about destruction in the days of Noah that I talked about in a previous piece:

http://woodyoubelieveit.blogspot.com/search?q=marrying+and+giving+in+marriage

Here is David's video - and I hope you enjoy the excellence of it as much as I did:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTt4YYN-jtQ&playnext=1&list=PL9BDC08FF9B8F27C8&feature=results_main