Hi Glen, thanks for giving me a thought in regard to the NYC plane crash. No - I didn't get to see it. I was sitting in my car, eating lunch between classes, and heard the early reports on the radio, but then missed all the rest. I TIVO CNN for a 3.5-hr. segment every day from 0830 to 1200, just in case anything interesting is going on, but that ended just a little too soon. I think I'll set it up for 8 hrs! I missed all the events of 9-11, too, as I was on a 24-hr shift on a large fire in Northern Ca at the time. No Walkman's on my crew, and all we got was an occasional reference to the event on our very busy fire tactical channels.

Your post is not entirely off-topic, though, as fires, including high-rise conflagrations, are definitely going to be a big part of the scenario when a major quake strikes in or near an urban area. And it's good that people were able to see a well-trained municipal FD in operation. My own specialty, hand-crew firefighting, by its very nature, typically meant that we were miles from the nearest roads, and, hence, TV cameras. I spent a 5-year stretch in Orange County (back in the late '70's, when OCFD was staffed entirely by CDF peresonnel) assigned to a 90-foot Snorkel truck (elevating platform), and a 100-foot aerial ladder truck. We drilled constantly on high-rise fire-fighting and ground and aerial-ladder raises. But, I eventually decided that training was all very fine, but I wanted to actually fight fire, and so I returned to my main interest - wildland firefighting. For many of those municipal firefighters, that's all the real fire they'll see for the next several years.

Good luck with your Baja prediction, Glen. As you know, I think you're fighting an uphill battle, as nobody else has yet succeeded in making predictions based on patterns of seismicity. But you might have found a key.

Mike Williams
Arroyo Grande, CA USA