S1E110 - Colin on Structural Triage After a Disaster

Episode Summary

This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin talks to Brooke about how to asses damage to structures after disasters, what you can do when you're stuck in a building after a disaster, and ways to make your situation easier and safer.

Guest Info

Colin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.

Host Info

Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.

Publisher Info

This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.

Transcript

Live Like the World is Dying: Colin on Structural Triage After a Disaster

**Brooke ** 00:15 Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for it feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. Today I'll be talking with Colin, an experienced construction and trade worker, about how to prepare for and perform structural triage after disasters. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo doo, doo doo.

**Brooke ** 00:48 And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us today to talk about structural triage after disasters. Would you introduce yourself? Let us know your pronouns, where you're from if you want, maybe some of your background in the construction industry.

**Colin ** 01:19 Yeah, I'm Colin, he/him. Lived in around Western Pennsylvania pretty much my entire life—mostly in the Pittsburgh area. I picked up carpentry right after college just as a way to earn some money. Been in and out that for a while. I worked as an industrial electrician in the power industry for about seven years, and then decided I'd had enough of that and went back to doing carpentry.

**Brooke ** 02:10 Okay, so is your—is your background in those trades the reason that you're interested in this topic, or was there something else that sparked you or made you kind of get into learning about it?

**Colin ** 02:23 Actually, the impetus for this was a little over—actually, seems like ages ago, but actually less than a year ago, a friend had an apartment fire right after Christmas last year. And it's still that big cold snap. And fortunately, we managed to get them recovered from that, but it was only due to the fairly heroic efforts of a lot of friends. And after that I started thinking about, you know, like, what are the ways that, you know, if you don't have people looking out for you and willing to come bail you out, what can you do if you're stuck in a damaged building for a few days while you're waiting for utilities to come back online, first responders to work through a backlog? Just, how can you make things easier in the immediate few days after disaster?

**Brooke ** 03:14 Nice. So is this something that you then have you had to put into practice, or other people around you have put into practice? Or are we mostly theoretical at this point and haven't tested all these things—not that we don't trust your experience here.

**Colin ** 03:31 Yeah, no, I have done some of these things more in the context of camping and backpacking, just like, there are things you can do that will make the situation easier and safer. Also, a lot of my background in working in power plants involved constant safety trainings about how do you do things safely? What do you have to look out for? What are, you know, things that you just need to be aware of when you're in dangerous situations? And I'm continually surprised at how many of those applied to everyday life, and how much of that stuff we just don't have to think about when we're living in a house that has already been designed to be safe. But when you have a disaster, obviously things break. And suddenly, things that are—things that normally have the engineering and safety built into them no longer work the way they're supposed to, and suddenly, you have to take care of all of that on your own. It's not that hard to do, or even that expensive. You just have to do the planning and preparation before it happens. Because once you find yourself in that situation, it's too late.

**Brooke ** 04:46 Yeah, that makes sense. And we're gonna get into those details in a second. But for the listener, I just wanted to share that Colin had reached out to us with this really great list of different things we could explore on this topic. And as I said to him, the the part that stood out most to me was he was talking about how to shelter in place in a compromised building and how to do structural triage and first aid that can make the eventual recovery easier. So we may get into a lot more than that today, we may have a second episode at some point to talk about other things because Colin has a lot of great info to share. But that was the part that really struck me and the areas that I wanted to focus on. And so right before we get into the details, another question I wanted to ask you was, how broadly is this applicable? Like, you know, there's all kinds of different disaster situations, right? We've got floods, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, unnatural disasters. Do you have different tips for different scenarios that we're going to talk about, or is a lot of this like works across multiple possibilities?

**Colin ** 05:50 It's some of both. A lot of the things you need to be concerned with sheltering in place, or just being aware of what are the things that change when systems go offline. So when you don't have power anymore and you're relying on batteries or a generator, or you lose your gas, now, suddenly, you're relying on kerosene heaters or lamps. All of these things change how you have to think about your safety in a house. Obviously, people have been living with fireplaces and wood stoves and oil lamps for a very, very long time. It's not that hard to do. But if you're used to being able to flip a switch and have the lights come on, you're going to have to make some changes. And if you don't do those things, you can cause yourself serious problems.

**Brooke ** 06:38 Okay, so let's talk about the first part of that where work. Let's say we're in a situation where we've just had a disaster, we're in a compromised building—whether it be like—I guess mostly we're talking about homes, or maybe your apartment complex too, not necessarily, like, work structures. So let's say we're in that in that situation, we're in this compromised building right after a disaster, what's one of the first things that we need to do?

**Colin ** 07:01 So the very first thing is always keep yourself safe, because there's no disaster that you can't make worse by getting injured. And this is especially true—

**Brooke ** 07:12 [Laughing] That's a good line, yeah!

**Colin ** 07:12 That's especially true when you have, you know, something like the ERCOT disaster down in Texas and 2021, and you have an entire city that is struggling, and your first responders are overwhelmed.

**Brooke ** 07:28 Was that when they lost power?

**Colin ** 07:30 Yeah, they lost power for I want to say a week or two? I don't think it was continuous. I think it went off, and then it came back on, and then it went off again. The estimated death toll from that was like somewhere between 250 an