While I doubt that people wake up every day with excited anticipation that there might be a new Quaketips post, long-time readers may have noticed that I haven't posted since August. I had to deal with various crises over a few months and had to take a break. Fortunately, this month's post has essentially written itself, because a while ago, I agreed to write an article about earthquake safety in the workplace from a medical perspective for San Francisco Medicine, the journal of the San Francisco Medical Society, and that issue just came out and is freely available for reading on the web. The article is not all that different from what I might have written for the blog, so I'm cheating a bit and instead of writing something new, I'm directing people to that article, available for online reading here. Hopefully you won't mind that it is written assuming that you are a doctor...unless, of course, you are a doctor.
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Saturday, November 10, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
At last, helpful hints on installing push-latches for cabinets!
UPDATE BULLETIN AUGUST 3, 2018: There has been discussion for several years about whether earthquakes can cause doors to shake enough to open up these push latches. Despite a range of evidence that push latches work well in earthquakes, I have seen earthquake simulations that were able to jiggle cabinet doors and cause push latches to disengage. However, I still like the push latches and feel that they still considerably reduce the chances that the door will open under most circumstances. I have written a new article that discusses this and describes an alternative latch, and I encourage readers to check that out also.
If there was a moderately sized earthquake and your kitchen cabinet doors swung open, what would happen next? Well, anything in those cabinets could (and frequently does) fall out: breakable bottles of various things, dishes, glasses, and even heavy appliances like blenders. Look in your cabinets and imagine the mess, loss, and potentially even injuries suffered by small children and pets who might get hit by falling objects. Even if nobody is hurt, if none of the humans are home but a dog or cat is there unattended, there�s now a bunch of sharp or potentially toxic things all over the floor for the pet to lick and eat before you get home. Clearly, it�s better just to prevent the doors from opening in the first place with quake-resistant latches.
These latches have a claw that is attached to the main cabinet on a shelf, and a ball-on-a-peg that sticks out from the inside of the door and gets caught by the claw. Some of the latches come with instructions about how much distance to have the claw part protrude from the shelf, but I have found that those instructions sometimes give you too much space and sometimes not enough. Too much pushing space is not good either, because the less closed the door is when latched, the less flat it will be, and with double doors, you can get a slight angling or tenting effect. You�ll have a little of this anyway but you might as well minimize it (there's a photo of this several paragraphs below). By the way, these come in dark brown, white, and black, but don�t be afraid to mix and match if it suits your cabinets better, as you can see in this photo from my kitchen (above right). (Alas, they don�t come in light brown; they should!)
The best way to become familiar with how this should look is by starting with one door of a double door, with the other one open so you can see inside. Have a pencil, some tool with a sharp point or nail to make starter holes, double-stick tape, an appropriate screwdriver, and an electric drill (optional but useful). Engage the peg in the claw to make one unit, put the whole thing into roughly the desired position, and hold it down to the shelf with one hand tightly so that it can�t slide (as shown in the photo at the left). With the other hand, close the door and experiment a few times to see where the latch needs to be to make it disengage and re-engage with the door is pushed a few times. Find the spot at which there�s the minimum space necessary to allow the latch to disengage. Don't let the claw part move. You�ll see that the main body of the claw part is probably sticking out slightly over the shelf, but as you can see in the group of three photos (below) from different cabinets in my kitchen, sometimes the optimal position is even with the edge, and sometimes it�s recessed a bit. It depends on how that particular cabinet is put together and how far away the edge of the shelf is from the inside of the cabinet door. The instructions assume that all cabinets are built the same; don�t make this assumption!
Try it out and see if it works well. The first time you do this, you might have to reposition a bit. The newer versions of these latches have pegs that actually are free to float a little within the part that holds them to the door (compare the two types of pegs in this photo and also look at the first picture in this article), which means that there�s a little extra fudge factor if you didn�t do it perfectly, but it�s still best to strive for perfection. This floating peg actually makes it harder to position, so when putting on the double-stick tape, try to position the floating part dead center in its window.
If there was a moderately sized earthquake and your kitchen cabinet doors swung open, what would happen next? Well, anything in those cabinets could (and frequently does) fall out: breakable bottles of various things, dishes, glasses, and even heavy appliances like blenders. Look in your cabinets and imagine the mess, loss, and potentially even injuries suffered by small children and pets who might get hit by falling objects. Even if nobody is hurt, if none of the humans are home but a dog or cat is there unattended, there�s now a bunch of sharp or potentially toxic things all over the floor for the pet to lick and eat before you get home. Clearly, it�s better just to prevent the doors from opening in the first place with quake-resistant latches.
The problem is that many people are lulled into optimism by a variety of pinch-style latches, magnetic latches, etc., that can make the cabinet door tough to open without some effort. Some cabinet doors are harder to open than others; but you know that if you pull hard enough on the outside, they will open. Guess what: that means that if the items inside the cabinets are pushing hard enough on them, they will open. In some cases, the vibration itself can make the doors swing open and then everything can fall out.
Some people install the child safety latches that allow the door to open an inch and you have to slide your fingers behind it to move a lever before the door can be fully opened, but because this can be really inconvenient, I have installed push latches on my cabinet doors. That is, the door can�t be opened by pulling on it; you have to push first and the latch disengages, and then when you close it, you push again and it re-engages. While it�s theoretically possible that vibration in just the right direction might make the door push itself and open, I think it�s unlikely.
Some people install the child safety latches that allow the door to open an inch and you have to slide your fingers behind it to move a lever before the door can be fully opened, but because this can be really inconvenient, I have installed push latches on my cabinet doors. That is, the door can�t be opened by pulling on it; you have to push first and the latch disengages, and then when you close it, you push again and it re-engages. While it�s theoretically possible that vibration in just the right direction might make the door push itself and open, I think it�s unlikely.
I feel that the latches are pretty important, but they are a bit of a pain to install and they take some trial and error. That�s where this blog comes in; I try to save people from having to go through the same learning process that I went through, so here I�ll be giving you some hints on installation; things I�ve learned in the several times that I have installed these latches.
Installation
There are a few different kinds of push latches (touch latches) out there, some of which are not very good. All of my personal experience over many years has been with one type (shown here) and I�ll focus on that one for this article. The two videos embedded after this paragraph show how they work. I occasionally see them in hardware stores but not very often, and these days, I just go straight to the Internet. The two sites at which I have found them are Sunset Enterprises* and Woodworker�s Hardware. The prices vary slightly; and at the time of this writing, the latter site actually has a better selection of colors and also a low-profile version that I have not tried yet. [*Update comment on 4/28/14: this Sunset Enterprises site no longer works and a current site for the company makes it difficult to look up products, so I've deactivated the link.] These can be a bit tricky to install, because unlike normal latches that can keep the door closed to the maximum extent, the push latches only work if the door can be pushed in slightly farther than the "closed" position to disengage the latch. In fact, if you accidentally install them without enough extra pushing space, then you close the door and never open it again! (That happened to me once, on a single cabinet door, so there was no way to access the latch; I had to pry the darned thing open and it was really hard to do! That reassured me that the doors will not easily open if objects inside the cabinet are trying to push their way out.) For this reason, if you have double and single cabinet doors like most kitchens do, I recommend that you do the double doors first just in case you have beginner�s unluck.
These latches have a claw that is attached to the main cabinet on a shelf, and a ball-on-a-peg that sticks out from the inside of the door and gets caught by the claw. Some of the latches come with instructions about how much distance to have the claw part protrude from the shelf, but I have found that those instructions sometimes give you too much space and sometimes not enough. Too much pushing space is not good either, because the less closed the door is when latched, the less flat it will be, and with double doors, you can get a slight angling or tenting effect. You�ll have a little of this anyway but you might as well minimize it (there's a photo of this several paragraphs below). By the way, these come in dark brown, white, and black, but don�t be afraid to mix and match if it suits your cabinets better, as you can see in this photo from my kitchen (above right). (Alas, they don�t come in light brown; they should!)The best way to become familiar with how this should look is by starting with one door of a double door, with the other one open so you can see inside. Have a pencil, some tool with a sharp point or nail to make starter holes, double-stick tape, an appropriate screwdriver, and an electric drill (optional but useful). Engage the peg in the claw to make one unit, put the whole thing into roughly the desired position, and hold it down to the shelf with one hand tightly so that it can�t slide (as shown in the photo at the left). With the other hand, close the door and experiment a few times to see where the latch needs to be to make it disengage and re-engage with the door is pushed a few times. Find the spot at which there�s the minimum space necessary to allow the latch to disengage. Don't let the claw part move. You�ll see that the main body of the claw part is probably sticking out slightly over the shelf, but as you can see in the group of three photos (below) from different cabinets in my kitchen, sometimes the optimal position is even with the edge, and sometimes it�s recessed a bit. It depends on how that particular cabinet is put together and how far away the edge of the shelf is from the inside of the cabinet door. The instructions assume that all cabinets are built the same; don�t make this assumption!
Now that you have this basic feel, leaving the claw part firmly held in place with one hand, take a pencil and mark where the holes are. Some of the holes are actually wide enough to give fudging room so I try to outline the entire hole with the pencil if I can. Remove the claw and use the sharp pointed tool or nail to gouge a starter hole right in the middle of the pencil mark. Then, if you can fit your electric drill into the space (not always possible), make a small hole in the wood appropriate in size for the screw (that is, slightly smaller than the diameter of the main part of the screw not including its threads, so that it will still take some effort to screw it in). Please don�t drill all the way to the other side... Then attach the claw part to the shelf with the included screws (the screws for the claw are different from the screws for the peg; don�t mix them up!)
At this point, I�m always tempted to use my power screwdriver, but I rarely can because I find it usually does not fit due to the hole being so close to the main body of the latch. Just be ready to use a manual screwdriver and some effort.
You are probably wondering what to do with the single doors. You�re right; unless you knock out a wall of the cabinet or enlist the services of a small elf, you can�t really test the latch in the way I just described for the double doors. In this case, you can put the latch (in one unit as before) loosely on the shelf where you will mount it, but sticking out too far; and then slowly and gently close the door all the way and open it again. The complete latch should get pushed back by the door to about the right place, but too far because there's no extra room to push. Move it ever so slightly forward, about 3 mm, to give yourself some push room, hold it down firmly without moving it but make sure that it is straight, trace the holes, and proceed as above.
Either way, now that your claw is in place, put some double-stick tape on the back of the peg and close the door. Push again to open the door and the peg should be stuck to the door in the correct position. Take your sharp point and press through the hole, through the tape, to make a puncture mark that will still be there when you remove the peg and tape. Then you can drill it (DEFINITELY don�t drill through to the other side) and attach the peg with its screws.
Some of these latches are now being shipped with a little bit of quake putty that you can use to stick the peg to the door while positioning. This is meant to be left in place during the installation. I can�t imagine why anyone would want to do that; you can see the putty when you open the door and it holds the peg farther out from the door, leading to larger gaps and more tenting effect. The double-stick tape works just fine; keep the quake putty for use elsewhere as...quake putty! (One of these days, I will write an article about the hundreds of other things you can do with quake putty.) A little tenting is unavoidable, as you can see in the upper photo at the right, taken from below the cabinet looking upward, but from the front as shown in the lower photo, it�s not that bad.
Special circumstances
That was a description of the ideal case, but I keep running into non-ideal situations that I need to solve, so here are some examples of solutions:
In one cabinet, there was no room for the latches on the bottom shelf due to a large spice rack, so I needed to put them on a middle shelf, which was too shallow to reach the inside of the closed door. That meant that the latches had to stick out into thin air to reach the door. Here, the quake putty really came in handy; as you can see from the photo taken from below that shelf, I used the two rear screws and then wadded up as much quake putty as could fit into the fortuitously placed crevices in the underside of the latch. Between the two rear screws and the quake putty, those latches are actually quite firmly stuck to the shelf (see photo at right, taken from below the shelf). This would have been really difficult to do with a single door; being able to hold the latch in place while positioning was crucial.
If you attach them to a middle shelf that isn�t attached to the cabinet, make sure that it can�t easily slide forward because then you haven�t really latched the door to anything solid.
One thing they don�t warn you is that if the door is narrow enough, and closes with a tight arc, the peg will move into the claw with a strong curve and the mechanism might not work. One solution is to mount the claw sideways on the wall of the cabinet rather than on the shelf; as shown in these photos from my desk cabinet door.
On the other hand, look at this funky kitchen cabinet that houses the duct for the over-stove fan vent. There�s no place to put the latch at the edge of the cabinet, and putting it in the middle by that blender didn�t work; and doing a side mount just wasn�t practical. The blender is heavy; I didn�t want that falling out. My solution was to forgo the push-latch altogether and install a catch on the front of the doors; effective, but less convenient and certainly not pretty. A sliding bolt would have worked as well. For pairs of doors that are hardly ever opened, you could even put a heavy rubber band between the handles, although that doesn�t look very refined.
My last example is from an apartment in which we were renting, which had two problems; the difficulty in putting holes in the woodwork of a rental, and the fact that the shelf was slightly lower than the edge of the cabinet (as in the photo). I had installed these things in cabinets in a previous apartment without much thought because the cabinets were archaic and full of holes already, but this was a brand new apartment, never used. My solution, as shown in the photo, was to use plenty of quake putty (love that stuff) under a piece of plywood that brought up the level of the shelf to match the edge. Then, to avoid holes, I used 3M Command strips (the adhesive strips that release when you pull the tab) to attach the latch to the plywood. For the pegs, well, I admit that I put some holes in the inside of the door, but in my defense, there were actually starter holes in the right place already as if they had been made to accommodate a latch of some sort...and I filled those tiny holes with wood putty before moving out.
The challenge faced by renters in making effective quake preparations in their apartments is a whole topic itself, which I will tackle in a future article.
By the way, I suggest that you do NOT use the �shocklock,� which is supposed to have a piece fall into place when the shaking starts to prevent the door from opening. I got one of these things and tried my hardest to make it work by shaking violently; the piece fell occasionally and only after many seconds of shaking, and only if the shaking was in the right direction. I think it has been discontinued. There are better versions of this for industrial lab cabinets that look pretty good from what I can tell (I�ll explore them in the future), but they are too big to be practical in a home kitchen cabinet.
Here�s one more issue to consider, do you remove the handles from the cabinet doors? Handles are meant to be pulled, and YOU know that you should push the door first, but any helpful guest will automatically pull the doors open, and either they are in for a shock, or they will keep trying until they break something. In the old apartment with archaic cabinets, I removed the handles (I kept them for when I moved out) and temporarily filled the holes with a waxy wood filler that matched the color of the cabinets. That can work, somewhat imperfectly, with dark stained wood; although I think it would be pretty obvious with light wood. In our current kitchen, the handles are still on the doors and we just warn guests when they go into the kitchen. It�s a great way to trick them into an impromptu discussion about earthquake preparedness!
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Experience an earthquake! And then go see the ostrich chicks and have lunch.
About a week ago, I and about 14 other people experienced two earthquakes in a row; and then another ~15 people experienced them about 10 minutes later, and it continued that way all afternoon. Micro-aftershocks? No, it was the new Earthquake exhibit at San Francisco�s California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, where they have a �shake house� that first simulates the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and then simulates the 1906 San Francisco quake. That was a fascinating experience for me, because when I felt the real 1989 quake, I was outdoors, which is a very different experience; and when I went through the 1971 Sylmar earthquake, I was a little boy in my bed, and was more bounced around than shaken. Standing on the floor and having the walls shake and the floor rock and shift certainly does feel different.
I�m glad I finally got the chance to attend this Earthquake exhibit, especially since one of my recent earthquake preparedness talks was at the SF Main Library in partnership with the California Academy of Sciences itself, so I was part of their lecture program associated with this exhibit. Presumably I was not as cute as the ostrich chicks but I�m glad to have been able to contribute a bit to the effort!
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While experiencing these simulations, a few things occurred to me. First, the books didn�t fall off the shelves, the picture didn't crash down to the ground, the fishbowl did not slide off the shelf, the cabinet doors did not swing open, and the glasses did not break all over the floor. That was because this was an exhibit rather than a real home and everything was fastened; which is a great example of why in your real home, it�s a good idea to have everything fastened! Second, it sure is useful for the kitchen to have a hand-rail with capacity for ~15 people to hold on to it, and to have advance warning; but of course those exhibit features presumably will NOT make it into your real home. And lastly, and this will be more meaningful to actual San Franciscans, the view out the fake window from this shake house of the famous �Painted Ladies� Victorian houses seems to put the location of this hypothetical house right in the middle of Alamo Square Park...but we�ll let that one slide.
One more thing that occurred to me is that experiencing the feel of these quakes is good preparation for the real thing. It is hard to respond effectively to the unfamiliar; easier if you have already gone over in your mind the sounds and sensations that you will probably experience. Amanda Ripley, in her truly excellent and gripping book �The Unthinkable,� describes various real disasters and discusses how the simple act of knowing what you will do before the unexpected occurs can make a crucial difference in the outcome. I imagine that not just knowing what you will do, but also knowing what you will likely be experiencing, will help save those extra few seconds that are better spent responding than freezing like a deer in the headlights.
Other nice aspects of this exhibit were the planetarium show in which you can see cool simulations of the continents drifting, fly through the San Andreas Fault, and be part of a very realistic CGI simulation of San Francisco�s Market Street in the early morning as the 1906 quake was hitting; and also the real live ostrich chicks running around in the pen as an example of the speciation that has occurred due to tectonic plate movement.
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Monday, May 14, 2012
A personal account from the aftermath of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake
Well, I�m pretty busy this month so I will cheat a little and not really write a blog entry, but instead will link to a truly amazing account of one person�s experiences in the hardest-hit section of San Francisco immediately after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. This is written by Stewart Brand, who is perhaps better known as having been the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. Brand just happened to be in the Marina District during the earthquake and helped with the civilian rescue attempts that are credited with having been the genesis of the San Francisco Fire Department�s Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) program and ultimately the Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) programs throughout the country. It�s interesting that Brand encapsulates the lessons that he learned during the experience, things that should be done before this happens again, and this basically sounds like a blueprint for how these programs are run and what they teach to the participants; a very forward-thinking individual!
By the way, there�s been a bug in the last few months in which people who receive this blog by e-mail have gotten messages in which some words are run together, despite looking normal in the blog. I did some testing and I can�t reproduce the problem right now, so hopefully it is fixed...and of course the e-mail people might be laughing as they read this if it is missing spaces...
In fact, this article was brought to my attention just last month by Dennis Hyde, the Co-Coordinator of the Inner Sunset/Golden Gate Heights NERT group. I�ve linked to it instead of reprinting it here to avoid any copyright problems.
It�s quite long...but honestly, when I started reading it, I could not put it down, due to a combination of his excellent writing style and the no-holds barred and brutally honest account of how he and other people acted that day.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
Do I really have to stick down EVERYTHING? What about my TV remote?
When I give talks about earthquake precautions and I mention the concept of sticking down loose objects, I sometimes wonder if people are picturing a home in which absolutely nothing is moveable, with TV remotes, dinner plates, pencils, cats, you name it�all stuck down to surfaces. Well, that�s probably the safest set-up for earthquake preparedness but it would not be very fun.
I confess: if I want to pick up my cordless telephone, I can! The stapler and other odds and ends on my desk, the water filter jug on our kitchen counter, my electric razor on the dresser top; they are all perfectly usable. And our little dog wanders around unimpeded.
So for example, sitting on my desk at home are a bunch of loose items: stapler, wireless router, cordless phone handset, electric pencil sharpener, and even a few loose notebooks; but it also has some small but dense decorative knick-knacks that are stuck down with quake putty and quake gel, and the printers and computer monitor are attached to their desktops and cabinet top with buckles and straps. Ironically, my laptop, the thing on the desk about which I�d probably care about the most, is not attached to anything except a couple of cables, because of course, laptops need to be mobile. Fortunately, the pull-out keyboard tray on which my laptop lives has a small lip around its edge that would probably limit the computer�s ability to slide off.
In the kitchen, we have lots of knives, too many good quality knives to be shoved in a drawer, and I�ve never quite trusted those wall-mounted magnetic knife-holding strips from an earthquake safety standpoint. The knives are in knife blocks, and the knife blocks themselves are stuck down to the counter, initially with quake putty and more recently with double-sided Velcro squares. Sure, it�s conceivable that the knives could fly out of the knife blocks, but in order to do that, they�d have to be shaken out at the perfect 45 degree angle to fly up and out of their slots. I think it is pretty unlikely. However, if any budding entrepreneurs out there want to invent an earthquake-safe knife block with easy-to-use mechanisms to prevent knives from flying out of their slots, go for it!
There are a few unavoidably loose items on surfaces in the kitchen, like the electric mixer and the food processor, although the processor blades are stored safely in the cupboard. Our drip coffee maker is on the counter; my wife pointed out to me at one point that the glass carafe that I stored right on the coffee maker burner would be the first thing to fly off and shatter into dog-unfriendly glass shards, so now we keep the carafe in the cupboard above the coffee maker. I could not stick down the salt shaker or pepper grinder without making them absolutely useless, and I did not stick down the sugar container but we did replace our old glass sugar container with a plastic one. The vitamin pill bottles will certainly have fallen down, but will still be closed. Our Brita water filter pitcher gets picked up each time we pour water out of it, so we�ll just have to deal with some water on the floor.
I admit that we take chances with flower vases. If we have flowers on the dining room table for a few days, the vase tends to get shoved around depending on what else is on the table, so it just doesn�t make sense to stick it down. Similarly, small potted plants that sit in water drip trays are not straightforward to stick down, so I got rid of the jade plant that easily dropped leaves that I knew were toxic to dogs. But most of the decorative objects that never get moved are stuck down with quake putty, such as these four objects in the photos.
Are you getting the idea?
So what would our showcase-level wonderful example of a prepared home look like after a major earthquake? Well, there would be stuff all over the floor! But for the most part, it would not have broken and would not pose any hazards to us or even to the little dog even if home alone during the quake. The TV remote would be on the floor, so perhaps we�d return home to see the little dog watching TV while happily shredding the napkins that will be everywhere, lapping up the water from the toppled water filter pitcher, and generally oblivious to the fact that the other 95% of the large and small objects in the home were in the same place they�d always been.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Double feature Part I: If you install a closet organizer system, don�t skimp on that last screw.
(Haven't posted in a while, so this month you get a double feature.)
How many of you have closets that look like this (Figure A)? These are closet organizing systems, a big business, with companies like California Closets and the Container Store (Elfa brand) making it possible for a small space to accommodate lots of shoes, slacks, shoes, sweaters, shoes, suits, shoes, and if you are like some people I know, shoes. You install these yourself, or the company will come out and install them for you, and they can make a huge difference. They work by installing shelves and clothes-hanging rods that are all cantilevered from vertical rails on your wall (Figure B), which themselves are hanging from a horizontal strip of metal fastened to the wall at the top (Figure C). I installed one of these Elfa systems in our closet a couple of years ago. It�s pretty impressive, and can hold a couple of hundred pounds in the configuration that I used. The amazing thing about this popular system is that it is only attached at the top to that thin horizontal strip of metal that is fastened to the wall by one small bolt every 16 inches (wall stud spacing). The rails have hooks at the top with which you literally hang them from a groove in the strip (Figure D). That means that the rails and everything else attached to them can swing out as a single unit from the wall attached only at the top--but they don�t, I�ve been told, because all that weight is pulling the rails down against the wall and it�s remarkably stable. The heavier the junk is that you put on the shelves, the more it presses against the wall, and those handful of bolts at the top are sufficient to keep the whole thing in place. In fact, if wall studs are not handy in the right positions, you can even go right into the dry wall with the appropriate anchors because (they say) there will never be a force outward, just downward.
Well, what�s missing from this picture? The San Andreas and Hayward faults, of course, or your favorite other local earthquake source. I would never DREAM of having a system like this without fastening the bottom ends in any city that experiences decently-sized earthquakes. The right kind of back-and-forth shaking could start that whole unit swinging away from the wall and back again, and now you�ve got force at the top pulling straight out from the wall with some twisting, torqueing, and shearing thrown in for good measure. That�s NOT what you want for bolts in drywall, and even with bolts in wall studs, it�s not a great situation, especially when the rails are just hooked on.Bottom line: I think any such system should use rails fastened on the bottom if your closet is the kind that shakes. I highly recommend spending the extra few bucks on one fastener for the bottom of each rail, and if attaching it into dry wall, I recommend using an anchor that spreads on the other side of the wall like a toggle or molly bolt. That last screw could be the straw that saved the camel�s back.
Double feature Part II: Can I get a fire hose to use after a quake if my house is burning down and the fire department is not coming?
(Haven't posted in a while, so this month you get a double feature.)
I got this question at the end of one of my recent talks and said I�d look into it and post an answer. The question went something like this: �I was around in the 1989 quake and in parts of the city, it was impossible to find a firefighter or policeman. There�s a fire hydrant across the street from my house. Can I purchase and keep my own fire hose to hook up to that hydrant if my house is burning down and the fire department can�t make it due to other emergencies?�
I had never really thought about the fire hose issue, and on one level, it makes sense because the fire is there, the water is there, the person who wants to bring the water to the fire is there, and the Fire Department isn�t coming. But on other levels, there could be concerns about legality, liability, safety, and feasibility. So I checked with the SF Fire Department.
The official answer is: no. The unofficial answer is: no. The water that comes out of a fire hose is extremely pressurized. In the SFFD, it takes two trained fire fighters to wield one of those things; we are not talking garden hose here. If the average Joe or Josephine hooks up a hose to a hydrant and turns it on, they probably are not going to have much effect on the burning house, but could injure themselves and cause other damage. And then if there�s nobody able to turn it off again, now you are losing the precious water from that local bank of hydrants.
I could add one suggestion, which is that if enough of us join the NERT program (or CERT programs in other cities) and take care of the smaller problems after an earthquake, then the firefighters will be available to save that house.
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