15_the_circle

railroaders are probably no more superstitious than the general population, but ask one and they will tell you that bad things come in threes. whenever a carrier has a large derailment, folks are looking out for that second one and when it happens everybody is on tippytoes, watching for that 3rd calamity.

so it seems to go here as well:

we'll take the tree coming down as the first in the series.

the good news here is that the insurance company has come through and the rebuild should get underway shortly.
after the tree was clear one of the checklist items has having a technician come out to check out the heating system; a couple of pipes run up the old chimney and they might have been disturbed during the incident or the following cleanup. he gave the system a clean bill of health and life was good.

good, that is, until the first cold day came along and the furnace was found to be incapable of providing any heat. that's the second strike. it seems that the unit's primary and secondary heat exchangers (not sure what those things actually are, but they do sound like the sort of thing one would want to have working properly) have failed and are in need of replacement. it turns out they are nine-and-some-fraction years into their ten-year factory warranty so the contractor will replace them, charging only for the labour. of course a quaint old cottage like this sits on top of a rather nasty crawl space and it's not a pleasant working environment down there. when the parts come (expected Tuesday) the crew who does the work will have my every sympathy. but getting the heating plant back in service will be A Good Thing, a very good thing indeed.
as for the third-in-a-row, for the past couple of days Verizon has had a horrible case of slows on the DSL line. this is just something that happens periodically but they always seems to come at the most inconvenient moments, not that there's ever a good time for a connectivity outage. when effective bandwidth drops to a fraction of conventional dial-up speed it's hard to get anything done, let alone maintain some semblance of good cheer. with any luck the connection will sustain for long enough to post this entry.

on the other hand things could be a lot worse, of which I am mindful and for which I am thankful.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Good luck getting all three done. Just returned from visiting Roseville, CA. Enclosed is 1973 story. Rudi

Without warning, in the morning of April 28, 1973, 18 boxcars loaded with bombs began detonating in the Southern Pacific Railroad yard at Roseville, Calif., about 18 miles east of Sacramento. The yard at Roseville was a classifying yard used to make up trains carrying ammunition. More than 6,000 Mk-81 bombs loaded with tritonal were involved in the explosion. Their destination was the Naval Weapons Station, Concord, Calif. for further shipment overseas to Southeast Asia. The train arrived at the Roseville Yard entrance at 0605 and was staged in the westward department yard by 0630. Since the train was too long for the yard, the forward cars (which are the ones that exploded) were placed on a track well separated from the remaining three cars, which were loaded with more than 1,000 bombs. These three cars were saved with only minor damage. The bombs were securely blocked and braced and in perfect condition. At about 0740, two people saw smoke rising in the vicinity of the ammunition cars. One witness said the smoke was black at first, then turned white, followed by flames rising from the end of a boxcar. Immediately after seeing the flames, the witness heard a low-order detonation, followed shortly by a massive high-order detonation at 0803. Major explosions continued from that time to about 1030, with smaller explosions continuing until 1605 the following day.

Approximately 350 people were injured—some seriously by flying glass. About 5,500 buildings were damaged in varying degrees. Heavy damage to buildings and residences occurred as far away as 6,800 feet from the center of the explosions. Even buildings as far away as three miles had slight damage. One hundred sixty-nine freight cars were destroyed. A locomotive and 98 others were damaged.

Although the Roseville disaster was spectacular and caused millions of dollars of damage, no one was killed. This was remarkable, since people have been killed in less spectacular mishaps involving transporting explosives. The Navy can’t even say what caused the Roseville explosion, since most of the evidence was destroyed.

As a direct result of the Roseville explosion, spark shields above railcar wheels and non-sparking brake shoes were required. In 1974, Congress passed the Transportation Safety Act, which brought together numerous regulations by various agencies into one publication. Also, the law placed responsibility for shipping hazardous materials on everyone, be it the shipper, carrier or receiver. Another result was the increase in better and more effective training to implement the provisions of these new regulations.

3

Heat would be good