Earthquakes and Nevada - Is There Fault to be Found in the Truckee Meadows?

My neighbor and friend, Peg O’Malley sent this to me toay in an email, saying “Remember when we did this?  Maybe it’s time to redistribute the info?” Yup. She and I put this together for the South Hills homeowners association, back in the day. Thanks for finding this and reminding me, Peg!

This is exactly what I was talking about in my recent Friday Fish Wrap when I suggested that folks use the Japan earthquake as a damn good reason to initiate conversations among their own families -  in addition to their schools, work places and neighborhoods. I’m going to work on distributing this to folks around here in the neighborhood again.

Peg’s seimic information is timeless. Some of the contact and reference information - especially in the sections I authored - needed updating, and I have done that.

Please, take the time to sit down with your familes, friends and co-workers. Don’t wait for somebody else. Be the person who initiates the conversation to prepare!

- Lt Col Cynthia S. Ryan, Nevada Wing, Civil Air Patrol

AKA maven

EARTHQUAKE AWARENESS

Is There Fault to be Found in the Truckee Meadows?

By Peg O’Malley

The recent earthquake in the Pacific Northwest finally prodded me to write about an issue that I’ve been meaning to address for years. A number of neighbors have asked whether South Hills is in an “earthquake zone”; what the chances of an earthquake occurring in this area might be; and if they should be concerned about this possibility. These are difficult questions to answer given the nature of earthquake faults and how the probability of their future movement is estimated.

Western Nevada is one of the more active areas in the United States when it comes to earthquakes. Everyone knows about California and the San Andreas Fault because of the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 and, more recently, the Loma Prieta and San Fernando Earthquakes of the 1980s and 1990s, among others. Washington State has also been the site of several very large earthquakes in the past 50+ years; the Olympia Earthquake of 1949, Seattle Earthquake of 1965, and now the Nisqually Event of 2001. But what about Nevada? Nevada and adjacent areas of east-central California have experienced a number of very large earthquakes (around magnitude 7.0).

1845 Stillwater area of Nevada, magnitude unknown. In 1845 Nevada was sparsely populated. Reporting is limited.

1872 Owens Valley, California - the Lone Pine Earthquake,

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An extra $345 to $500 billion toward paying down the deficit?

That’s right. What if we could put that kind of money toward our ‘ballooning deficit’ as the least hysterical Republicans refer to it? Wouldn’t you think that would be a good thing? Wouldn’t you think they’d be all over that? They aren’t. In fact, the Republicans and their Tea Party friends are considering cutting the budget of the very agency that could get that money.

It’s the IRS.

We’re talking about the ‘tax gap’. What, you ask is the ‘tax gap’. Simply speaking, it’s the difference between what ‘we the people’ are owed (through the IRS collection agency that we employ) by deadbeats or those who are simply math-challenged, and what they haven’t paid up.  There are a couple main components of the gross tax gap: Under Reporting, Under Payment, and Non-filing.

Under Reporting accounted for nearly 68% of the tax gap among individual filers in 2001. Imagine what it must be today. Of that, 60% is estimated to be from business and self-employment income, which is difficult for the IRS to verify.

As you can see, much of the under reported taxes are from individuals. Things like Estate, Excise, FICA and Corporate taxes are fairly easy for the IRS to verify automatically due to reporting requirements.

So why isn’t the IRS making some better efforts to take care of this problem? Remember the Grover Norquist maxim: Starve the Beast? Libertarians, Tea Party types and many within the mainstream GOP think the IRS ought to be abolished, but failing that, they can work at defunding it. And when you defund an agency enough, and it becomes dysfunctional, then you can self-righteously point and say “See. It doesn’t work. Get rid of it.”

Notice that it’s never news when government works well - keeping your federally inspected airliner safely in the air on your vacation trip through strict safety and training regulations for the airlines through the FAA, an effective Air Traffic Control System that covers the entire nation, a federally funded/financed system of effecient, modern airports around the nation, federally funded and run real-time weather reporting from federally funded satellites (so you don’t fly right into a big thunderstorm). And, if you should be in your own airplane, and the worst happens, it’s federally funded volunteers like me - in the Civil Air Patrol - using federal assets (those Cessna 182’s) and SARSAT that come looking for you.

What? Did you think all this came for free?

It’s only ‘news’ when government screws up. And being run by mere humans - people like me and you - that’s likely to happen occasionally.

However, there is another way of looking at taxes. Like maybe taxes are good. Douglas Amy, Professor of Politics, Mount Holyoke College says on his website Government Is Good:

To put it another way, you can’t support the things the government does – like caring for the elderly, establishing justice,  providing public education, fighting terrorism, and protecting the environment – and still maintain that the taxes that support those things are bad. Taxes are the lifeblood of government and so if government is basically good, then so are taxes.

Just a little Google research told me that the IRS has been trying to fix this problem for several years at least, but can’t get it done with ever decreasing funding. OMB Watch has this to offer:

The IRS has requested $13.3 billion for fiscal year (FY) 2012, a $1.2 billion increase over the agency’s enacted FY 2010 budget. House Republicans, however, are unlikely to grant that request, as they are currently attempting to cut $603 million from the IRS’s current budget. Much of the IRS’s requested FY 2012 budget increase will go toward increasing the agency’s ability to narrow the tax gap through better tax enforcement and information technology (IT) enhancements.

We want agencies to work better and more effeciently, but apparently we’re not willing to give them the tools to do just that - even with a clear, unambiguous objective.

It’s rather like a couple sitting down in marriage counseling and telling the counselor “I want things to be different.”

Yes, and just how do you want it to be different? And what ‘skin’ are you willing to put into the game to see that ‘different’ happens?

There’s the rub. Many couples just expect to keep on doing what they’ve been doing, expecting ‘different’ results. Doesn’t work very often.

Same with government.

Oh, BTW this same problem has surfaced in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker would like to take the presumed ‘deficit’ out the of the hides of state employees (while getting rid of that pesky damned union representation and money that flows to Democratic candidates) rather than go after unpaid corporate incomes taxes that would damn near deflate that deficit.

Hmmmm. The man needs couples counseling.

-maven

Friday Fish Wrap: April 30, 2010

“We are not here to spend money to build new hangars for those tenants at the airport. We are not here to bail out people who can afford the luxury of their own personal aircraft.”

Krys Bart, Washoe County Airport Authority President and CEO, in the Reno Gazette-Journal

I can’t tell you how tired I am of Krys Bart, and her repeated attempts to use the people’s airport - Reno-Tahoe International Airport - to satisfy her delusions of greedy grandeur.

When she came to Reno-Tahoe Airport in 1998, she brought with her a rather undistinguished career from the San Jose International Airport and Fresno Air Terminal. And, left a pretty good wake of bad feelings among her fellow airport co-workers at both facilities. How do I know this? Because Capt. Maven and I knew the people she worked for.

Bart no sooner landed in Reno, that she initiated controversy and bad blood in this community - all under the guise of increasing revenues for the airport.

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The Fossett Search never ends

Updated on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 at 11:55 by mavenandmeddler

Last week I got an email alerting me to the air date of the latest in what will certainly be just one more speculative television feature - ‘Lost in the Nevada Triangle’ - about what may or may not have happened to famed aviator Steve Fossett on the Labor Day weekend of 2007.

I thought briefly of letting my readers know, but held back.

I was a part of that story, and have had plenty of bitter first hand experience of just how badly wrong a seemingly innocent ‘interview’ for the ‘truth’ can go. It can turn out to be a career destroyer.

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Don't bet your life on that GPS you got for Christmas

I’m talking about the nimrods on the local news this week that managed to get lost in the woods for days - with the help of their GPS. They’re seriously lucky to be alive. I remember actually being out looking for another family from Oregon some years back that nearly lost their lives.

Uh, here’s a thought: just because your cute little dash mounted gizmo tells you that following a certain road will be faster, it might not be safer or even passable.

This last week, two different families thought GPS was a sure thing and followed it right into snow drifts that trapped them for a couple of days until search crews and others were able to find them. The first clue might have been fresh, deep snow without tire tracks other than yours.

It’s time to use some common sense with these technological wonders.

Maven with fellow CAP pilot, Russ Johnson 

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The rock star mojo is back: ITN and National Geographic come to Reno

The other day at work, LC asked me why I was being so agreeable about something or other.

“Where’s the rock star that I used to know?” she said, referring to the me of the Steve Fossett search, with my officious little face popping up all over the international media, giving them what for.

There was a bit of swagger in my step during those heady days, but time marches on.

I think I got just a tiny bit of the old mojo back on Sunday, when a film crew from London’s ITN came to town.

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Observations from ground level and above

Updated on Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 22:22 by mavenandmeddler

After that CBS ‘60 Minutes’ segment about the cancer patients in dear old Nevada that can’t get their chemo and care, I needed to get some time to clear my head- so that’s what Monday and Tuesday were about.

I want to mention that I did receive one - just one - reply from all the Nevada Democratic Assemblypersons and Senators about my blog post on the ‘60 Minutes’ segment. That was from Assemblywoman Peggy Pierce, and is as follows:

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Paul Harvey: A personal memory

I was saddened today to learn of the passing of broadcast pioneer Paul Harvey, at his home and surrounded by family in Phoenix, Arizona. He was 91 years old. Having begun his well known career in 1951, he was a familiar fixture of the lives of millions of Americans throughout several generations. That included me.

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The only thing you can count on: Change

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.” Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121 A.C.E.- 180 A.C.E) Meditations.

Reading the headlines of the last few months, it seems like a lot of people had never heard the word change before Obama came along. Depending on which side of the political or philosophical fence they reside, they either blame him or praise him for it.

Change, however, has been a consistant theme throughout the centuries, written and talked about by great and small. With Obama’s campaign for change, though, it’s spurred me on to make some admittedly small changes in my own life during this last month

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The search for Steve Fossett: Will it never end?

Well, well, well. That was certainly an interesting version of Steve Fossett’s untimely demise, which premiered on Discovery Channel this evening. The only part that I couldn’t quibble with, having been so much a part of that bit of history, is that we may never know exactly what happened. 

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Fall back to a new beginning and new ways of seeing

With the change of time, I immediately get a bit sad for the loss of daylight at the end of my day. I found myself doing housecleaning in the semi-twillight this afternoon. But the good news: I had more energy and was going, going, going like some sort of energizer bunny.

That’s the way it is with autumn for me. It’s my time of rejuvenation.

Perhaps it’s because I was born in late October ( the 20th, for those of you who forgot my birthday), it seems like the beginning of everything.

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National Information Officers Association 2008 Conference, Reno, Nevada

Yes, they did indeed take pictures of the presentation about the Steve Fossett search that Trooper Chuck Allen and I did yesterday:

At the official Monday morning opening ceremonies were: NIOA President, Judy Pal, Reno Fire Chaplain Steve Arvin, Nevada First Lady, Dawn Gibbons, Reno Mayor Robert Cashell and Sparks Mayor Gino Martini.

First on the presentation bill was “Where is Steve Fossett?” presented by myself (Lt Col Cynthia S Ryan ) and Trooper Chuck Allen of the Nevada Highway Patrol.

As I told Chuck afterward: “we’re still rock stars” (of PIOs that is)