Way back when (to be more specific, the 1970s and 1980s), I was, in order of my career moves, a research associate in the Oregon Medical School Department of Family Practice, a manager with the State Health Planning and Development Agency, and the executive director of Oregon Health Decisions, a pioneering community-based bioethics effort.
As I like to say, I must have done a terrific job, because now our state's health care system is running perfectly smoothly with no problems.
Of course, that's a blatant falsehood. Oregon, along with the rest of the United States, has a disjointed health care system marked by inefficiency, inequality, and crazily high costs.
However, most people are satisfied with their health care providers. I know I am.
The dissatisfaction is mostly with the system that these providers have to work in, and under. Often this doesn't become obvious until someone has a medical problem that is causing them a lot of distress, so speedy treatment is desired, and the health care system moves with decided unspeediness.
As you probably have guessed, one of those someone's is me. After suffering from sciatica in my right leg that started off very painful in 2020, when I was a youthful 71, then got better though it never went away, the sciatica has morphed into being very painful again now that I'm 75.
So I've been seeing my primary care provider, a physical therapist, and the staff who have gotten me a lumbar X-ray and MRI. I like all of these people. It's the system that isn't working so well.
On the most basic level, there's a disconnect between a person with a medical problem, me in this case, and policies that are a buffer between what people and their providers want, and the insurance that pays for most of health care.
I don't mean to burst the bubble of those who are looking forward to becoming old enough to get Medicare, having tired of the B.S. private insurance companies engage in. I used to be in that bubble myself. I couldn't wait to rid myself of my Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance.
However, when I became eligible for Medicare, I decided to sign up for a MedAdvantage plan, as that seemed, well, advantageous. Kind of amazingly, I chose Regence MedAdvantage -- you know, the same corporation that offered the private insurance I detested for so many years.
It seems to me that with every passing year, Regence MedAdvantage introduces more barriers to getting needed care, probably due to cost containment pressures. What particularly irritates me is how third-party contractors are used by Regence MedAdvantage to assess referrals made by my primary care provider.
This doesn't happen with every referral, but often enough. For example, today I had an appointment with my physical therapist. He'd given me exercises to do over about five visits, and offered some great advice about how to manage my sciatica.
Since it seemed time to stop our visits, he started to suggest a plan for how to maintain an ability for me to see him again if I needed to.
Then he glanced at his computer screen and said, "Oh, but you have _______ as an intermediary. If we don't close out your case, and I see you again, they'll only approve half the visits they did this time, like from eight to four. And after that, they'll keep cutting the visits, like from four to two. But if we close your case, after 60 days they'll treat you as having a new problem and grant the original number of visits."
OK, I got what he was saying. However, it seemed strange that we weren't talking about what would be best for treating my sciatica problem; we were talking about what would be the best approach to dealing with my insurance problem.
Again, I have Medicare. I'm much better off, bureaucratic B.S. wise, than people who have private insurance.
But "much better" doesn't equate to pleasant. It bugs me when my primary care provider orders, say, a lumbar MRI to find out what is going on with my spine, then I have to wait for an approval from either Regence MedAdvantage or whoever Regence contracts with to decide if an MRI is warranted.
I realize this is a crazy idea, given how our health care system (actually a non-system) is set up, but it sure would be great if health care providers were the ones making the decisions as to what is appropriate care, with outsiders getting involved only if there's an obvious problem with what has been ordered for a patient.
Currently I'm waiting for a referral to a pain and spine clinic to be processed. I've been told that the referral has been approved. It just hasn't been processed, whatever that means. So I bug my providers, asking them what's taking so long, and they've been patient with me. I try to assure them that I'm not unhappy with what they're doing.
It's like when I hear my wife calling her MedAdvantage company when there's a problem with a prescription or care being denied. After explaining the problem, she always says, "I'm not irritated with you; you just work at ________; I'm irritated with management and your company's system."
I became a Starlink beta tester in January 2021. While this Space X satellite internet system was buggy in the beginning, it's gotten increasingly reliable. And the download/upload speeds are better also. At least, they are here in western Oregon.
However, the pipe adapter that Starlink is selling to attach the Gen 3 (third generation) dish to a variety of mounts -- I'm using the Ridgeline Mount for my Gen 3 dish -- is, to put it bluntly, a piece of crap. It's hard to believe that Starlink let this poorly designed piece of equipment that replaces the fold-out legs that come with the Gen 3 dish ever be sold to customers.
I got the Gen 3 rectangular dish even though our Gen 1 round dish was working fine. But the Gen 1 dish has a fixed cable that can't be replaced, and I figured that after more than three years of constant use, it was going to fail at some point. So I left the Gen 1 dish up on our roof as a backup for the Gen 3 dish.
I'm not hugely mechanical. However, as soon as I got the Gen 3 pipe adapter from Starlink, I knew it was going to be a problem.
My Gen 1 dish came with an attached pipe that clicked neatly into the Ridgeline Mount (one with the red bricks for ballast in the photo above). The dish has been immovable through three years of Oregon storms.
Since the Gen 3 pipe adapter was so flimsy, with just a set screw holding the dish to a pipe, I contacted a friend, Frank, who is a blacksmith and skilled metal worker. He made me a short pipe with a "telescope" feature in an attempt to mitigate the pipe adapter's shortcomings. See: "A blacksmith made this for me to fit in screwy Starlink Gen 3 pipe adapter."
This is how the pipe turned out.
A short pipe with a notch on the bottom that would fit over a plastic bulge in the Ridgeline Mount to prevent the pipe from rotating in strong wind, and a larger top that would fit nicely in the Gen3 pipe adapter. This photo taken from above shows how Frank welded two pieces of larger pipe to form the "telescope" feature.
Here's how well the pipe fits into the pipe adapter, which is on the back of the Gen3 dish. This allows the set screw to be tight with just a few turns. But you can see that the round receptacle on the pipe adapter into which a pipe goes is very shallow, and the set screw relies solely on friction to hold the dish to the pipe.
That explains why not long after I installed the Gen 3 dish on our roof with the pipe adapter and Ridgeline Mount, one morning I woke up, looked at the Starlink app on my iPhone and saw that the dish now was something like 65 degrees off target, whereas before it was 8 degrees.
Going outside to look at our roof, the reason was obvious. The Gen 3 dish had blown off the pipe and was lying on the roof. Thankfully, it only fell about a foot and was undamaged. Working fine, in fact. I got a ladder out, climbed up on the roof, and reattached the dish to the pipe, tightening the set screw as firmly as my 75 year old hand could do it.
(I'm in good shape, so it was tight. Of course, it was tight before.)
Well, a few days ago we had some winds gusting to the 40-45 mpg range, or thereabouts. Nowhere near a hurricane, for sure. But the same thing happened: the dish was blown off the pipe again. This time I called Frank for some advice. I'd gotten a comment on one of my blog posts about the Gen 3 pipe adapter that advised using zip ties around the set screw.
That seemed like a good idea. However, Frank had an even better idea.
We went up on the roof and Frank drilled a hole through the outside layer of the two-layer "telescope" feature of the pipe he made for me. After some fiddling and grinding, the set screw fit through the first layer (a short piece of pipe) and butted up against the second layer (another short piece of pipe with smaller diameter).
That way, if wind tried to lift the dish off the pipe, the set screw wouldn't allow it, since the outer layer of the "telescope" feature would keep the pipe in place. Frank used a zip tie around the raised notch on the pipe adapter and the set screw as insurance, to prevent wind from lifting up the side of the dish on the opposite side of the set screw.
As a bonus, the two of us got the Gen 3 dish aligned perfectly. The Starlink isn't showing any problem with where the dish is pointing. (It lacks a motor to align itself, which the Gen 1 and Gen 2 dishes have.)
So far the dish has stayed on the pipe through some decent wind, though not as strong as what blew the dish off twice. And the speed is good: at the moment (10 pm), 302 Mbps down, 30 Mbps up. I'm confident Frank's fix is going to keep the Gen 3 dish secure.
I've complained to Starlink about the crappy Gen 3 pipe adapter. Haven't gotten a response yet. By the way, I have the pipe adapter that was sent after the first version was recalled. Apparently the only change was to the set screw.
Again, I was fortunate because the dish didn't fall very far when it blew off the pipe adapter. Some Starlink customers have their dish high up to avoid obstructions. They'd be advised to have a tether to catch the dish if they're using the Gen 3 pipe adapter.
As I said in a previous post:
What bothers me is that Starlink leaves it up to purchasers of the Gen3 kit, which is now the standard residential kit, to figure out how to best attach the dish using the poorly designed pipe adapter. I was fortunate to have a blacksmith as a friend. But what does a single woman, say, do?
Sure, she could go to her local hardware store and get a one inch pipe, hoping that it would be sturdy enough in the pipe adapter to hold the dish in windy/stormy conditions. It just seems to me, though, that Starlink should have made available a pipe similar to the one Frank made for me for customers who want to use the Ridgeline Mount to hold their Gen 3 dish.
Again, the Gen1 and Gen2 dishes came with an attached pipe. For some reason Starlink decided not to do this with the Gen3 dish. That's fine, but it seems strange that after paying $600 for the Gen3 kit, a customer then has to search for a pipe that fits well in the pipe adapter and Ridgeline Mount.
Here's a report on my installation of the Starlink Gen 3 dish, which I bought so our Gen 1 dish could serve as a backup. First, some background.
This is how I started off a post about needing to have a blacksmith make me a pipe to fit in the poorly designed pipe adapter for the Gen 3 dish. I called the post, "A blacksmith made this for me to fit in screwy Starlink Gen 3 pipe adapter."
I've been a happy Starlink customer since January 2021, when I reported on the installation of the first generation round dish that I was chosen to be a public beta tester for. I described my tale in "Our Starlink is working well on its Ridgeline Roof Mount."
Since, that Gen1 dish has worked flawlessly, though Starlink has had its reliability ups and downs, with recent experience being much more on the upside, probably due to the much larger number of Starlink satellites in orbit now.
But nothing lasts forever, and my wife and I are heavily dependent on the much faster broadband we enjoy with Starlink compared to the crappy 6-7 Mbps CenturyLink DSL brought to us via the non-cutting edge technology of copper phone wires.
So when Starlink sent me an email last year saying that as a beta customer I could purchase the new third generation dish, getting several months of service free if I bought it now, I decided to buy the Gen3 kit.
My plan was to use the Gen3 dish, router, and power supply, leaving the deactivated Gen1 dish up on our roof as backup if something went wrong with the Gen3 kit and we had to wait a while before replacement equipment could arrive.
I ordered the new version of the Ridgeline Mount, as I wanted to put the Gen3 dish next to the Gen1 dish.
Here's a photo of the rectangular Gen 3 dish on our roof nestled next to the round Gen 1 dish. The Ridgeline Mount now has a different design. And you don't have to supply your own weights (I used bricks for the Gen 1 mount). The gray weights are supplied by Starlink.
This photo shows the angle of the Gen 3 dish. It doesn't have a motor like the Gen 1 and Gen 2 dishes. I gather that the fixed angle works because there are many more Starlink satellites up now.
The installation went quite smoothly. The 50 foot cable that comes with the Gen 3 kit looks like it will be able to follow the path of the 75 foot cable that the Gen 3 dish came with. I got a 150 foot cable just in case it didn't.
Pleasingly, both cables fit through the hole in the side of the house leading to our living room, where the router and power supply are. (The Gen 1 cable is permanently attached to the dish, so I had to leave it up, which is fine, since like I said, the Gen 1 dish will be a backup in case of problems with the Gen 3 dish.)
It was a bit of a pain to have to get back on the roof when the Starlink app told me the dish needed adjusting. That's the downside of not having a motor that turns the dish.
I believe the app said that the dish was 16 degrees off. I took my iPhone up on the roof and fiddled with the Gen 3 dish. It was kind of frustrating to rotate the dish, check the app to see if it was aligned correctly, then see that Starlink wanted it rotated back the other way.
The best I could do was get the dish just 8 degrees off. One reason is that I had to loosen the set screw on the pipe adapter, then turn the dish with one hand while looking at the Starlink app that I was holding in my other hand. The download speeds seem higher than the Gen 3 dish was giving us, so I'm not going to worry about the dish not being in the precisely correct position.
(The speeds vary a lot. Usually they're between 75 Mbps and 200 Mbps.)
A bigger aggravation was the dish falling off the pipe adapter when the wind was just 40 mph or so, maybe higher with gusts. That isn't exactly a hurricane. As noted in my post about the pipe adapter, the set screw just relies on friction to hold the dish to the pipe adapter. I thought I had the screw firmly tightened. Here's a photo.
But one morning the Starlink app said that the dish was 36 degrees off. Figures, since the dish was lying on the roof. We'd had about 40 mph winds the night before, maybe a bit higher with gusts. Not a hurricane, though.
You can see that there's not much room for a pipe to fit into the adapter. I was fortunate that the dish only fell a foot or so, landing on the back side. (We still had a decent internet connection even while the dish was lying on the sloping roof.) Some Starlink owners have to put their dish on a tall pipe/pole to get above obstructions. In that case, the dish falling off would be a bigger deal.
I can't understand why Starlink is shipping the Gen 3 dish with such a messed-up way of attaching it to a pipe. This is a photo from my previous post about having a blacksmith make a pipe that fit as snugly as possible into the adapter. Without the "telescope" feature welded on to the end of the pipe, which couldn't be any larger and still fit into the Ridgeline Mount, the set screw would have needed to be screwed in much further, with more ability for the pipe to loosen in a high wind.
Hopefully the dish won't fall off again. I've tightened the screw as much as I could.
I've been a happy Starlink customer since January 2021, when I reported on the installation of the first generation round dish that I was chosen to be a public beta tester for. I described my tale in "Our Starlink is working well on its Ridgeline Roof Mount."
Since, that Gen1 dish has worked flawlessly, though Starlink has had its reliability ups and downs, with recent experience being much more on the upside, probably due to the much larger number of Starlink satellites in orbit now.
But nothing lasts forever, and my wife and I are heavily dependent on the much faster broadband we enjoy with Starlink compared to the crappy 6-7 Mbps CenturyLink DSL brought to us via the non-cutting edge technology of copper phone wires.
So when Starlink sent me an email last year saying that as a beta customer I could purchase the new third generation dish, getting several months of service free if I bought it now, I decided to buy the Gen3 kit.
My plan was to use the Gen3 dish, router, and power supply, leaving the deactivated Gen1 dish up on our roof as backup if something went wrong with the Gen3 kit and we had to wait a while before replacement equipment could arrive.
I ordered the new version of the Ridgeline Mount, as I wanted to put the Gen3 dish next to the Gen1 dish.
Our roof has a mostly unobstructed view of the northern sky, with just a few tall fir trees and oaks in the way. For quite a while Starlink hasn't reported any obstructions, again probably because of the increased number of satellites in the sky.
Only problem was, the Gen3 dish doesn't come with an attached short pipe, as the Gen1 and Gen2 dishes did. So I ordered a pipe adapter that replaces the flipout legs that come with the Gen3 dish, legs that obviously would be useless for placing the dish on the ridge of our roof.
When the pipe adapter arrived, before the Gen3 kit did, I was hugely unimpressed.
It was very shallow with just a set screw to hold the pipe in place. The pipe adapter seemed sufficient for a 10-12 inch pipe that would fit in the new Ridgeline Mount, but I sure wouldn't trust it if the dish was twenty feet or more in the air, as some Starlink owners have to do to get a clear view of the sky.
Further, the Ridgeline Mount could only hold a pipe a bit over an inch in diameter at most, while the pipe adapter could hold a pipe about two inches in diameter. That meant the set screw would have to be tightened almost all the way to hold a one inch pipe.
My brilliant move was to call a neighbor who is much more mechanical than I am, and a blacksmith to boot. Frank came to our house and took a look at the pipe adapter. He agreed that it would be much better to fashion a pipe that had a "telescope" large end to fit in the pipe adapter, with the rest of it being able to fit into the Ridgeline Mount.
I had to wait for Starlink to send a replacement Gen3 pipe adapter after the original one was recalled. I was hoping that a major redesign would have been made for the screwy pipe adapter, but apparently all that was changed was the set screw. And even that seemed the same to me.
Anyway, I finally was able to take the Ridgeline Mount and pipe adapter up to Frank's shop so he could do his thing. It could Frank about a hour of measuring, cutting, and welding, but the end result was just what I needed.
A short pipe with a notch on the bottom that would fit over a plastic bulge in the Ridgeline Mount to prevent the pipe from rotating in strong wind, and a larger top that would fit nicely in the Gen3 pipe adapter. This photo taken from above shows how Frank welded two pieces of larger pipe to form the "telescope" feature.
Here's how well the pipe fits into the pipe adapter, which is on the back of the Gen3 dish. This allows the set screw to be tight with just a few turns.
I was able to successfully install the Gen3 dish today. It seems firmly in place. I'll report on how the installation went in another blog post, as I wanted to focus on the pipe needed to fit into the pipe adapter here.
What bothers me is that Starlink leaves it up to purchasers of the Gen3 kit, which is now the standard residential kit, to figure out how to best attach the dish using the poorly designed pipe adapter. I was fortunate to have a blacksmith as a friend. But what does a single woman, say, do?
Sure, she could go to her local hardware store and get a one inch pipe, hoping that it would be sturdy enough in the pipe adapter to hold the dish in windy/stormy conditions. It just seems to me, though, that Starlink should have made available a pipe similar to the one Frank made for me for customers who want to use the Ridgeline Mount to hold their Gen 3 dish.
Again, the Gen1 and Gen2 dishes came with an attached pipe. For some reason Starlink decided not to do this with the Gen3 dish. That's fine, but it seems strange that after paying $600 for the Gen3 kit, a customer then has to search for a pipe that fits well in the pipe adapter and Ridgeline Mount.
I'm a big fan of Amazon. Almost am ashamed to admit it, given how huge Amazon is and the many tales of how it screws over employees and businesses it doesn't want competing with its brand products.
But there's no doubt that Amazon is amazingly efficient.
I have Amazon Prime. My orders arrive promptly, sometimes the next day, with very few errors. It's just so damn easy to get stuff from Amazon instead of heading into town, a 20 minute drive away, and looking for something that may or may not be on a store shelf. Plus, I get a lot of benefit from reading customer reviews of products I'm contemplating buying.
So I decided to give Amazon Pharmacy a try.
At my last primary care doctor visit I left with a prescription for daily Tadalafil, the 5 mg generic version of Cialis. In addition to its well-known use for erectile dysfunction, Tadalafil is prescribed for treatment of an enlarged prostate, which I have.
I got a paper copy of the prescription because I wasn't sure where I wanted to get it filled. I'd asked the small local pharmacy that my wife and I use to let me know what it would cost for a 90 day supply of Tadalafil. Never got a response to the text I sent, which made me think that the cost would be a lot.
My next step was to go to our nearest Walgreens. I showed the person at the pharmacy window the prescription, and they scanned it into their system. I said that I'd filled some other prescriptions there, so they have my Regence MedAdvantage insurance information.
After some clicking away, the Walgreen's staffer said that my insurance didn't cover Tadalafil. I asked what the cost would be if I paid for it myself. Can't recall the exact amount, but it was about $840 for a 90 day supply.
Wow. For a generic. I said I'd have to think about this and took the prescription back. The cost quoted by a Canada pharmacy was about $140 for a 90 day supply, which shows how crazily expensive drugs can be in the United States.
I then remembered that Amazon had a pharmacy. It was easy to sign up for Amazon Pharmacy given that I was already a regular customer with Amazon Prime. The cost of prescription drugs is easy to find since all you have to do is type it into the usual Amazon search box.
This is what I found for daily Tadalafil, 90 day supply.
I decided to dip my prescription feet in the Amazon waters. I sent a message to my primary care provider asking that an electronic prescription for my Tadalafil be sent to Amazon, using the phone and fax numbers provided by Amazon Pharmacy.
That just took a few days. Amazon Pharmacy then notified me that the prescription had been received. Soon after I got an email saying that, not surprisingly, my insurance wouldn't cover the prescription. I was asked if I wanted to make an order and pay out-of-pocket.
Sure. A few clicks later I'd completed the order and almost immediately got this message from Amazon.
That message came on January 30. The next day, today, January 31, the Tadalafil was delivered to my doorstep. The cost was $29.50 rather than the quoted $26.60, but that's no big deal. The bottle had an expiration date of January 30, 2025 and said that the manufacturer was Solco Healthcare, which appears to be a reputable distributor of generics.
So my first experience with Amazon Pharmacy was very positive. I looked at some reviews of Amazon Pharmacy and many of them were negative. However, quite a few of them were from the early days of Amazon Pharmacy, so I suspect some of those initial problems have been resolved.
My other prescriptions aren't nearly as expensive, which means I'll likely stick with a local pharmacy for them, at least for now. Amazon Pharmacy can sure save people a lot of money on certain prescriptions, though, that's for sure.
My wife, Laurel, and I agree about most things. That's one reason we've been married for 33 years. But we differ when it comes to watching television with subtitles (a.k.a. closed captioning) on.
I enjoy subtitles considerably more than Laurel does. So when I'm watching on my own, I almost always turn subtitles on, especially with streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. With sporting events and news programs, I usually leave subtitles off.
Though I'm 75, firmly in the Baby Boomer generation, not being able to hear dialog isn't why I like subtitles. I can hear what actors are saying just fine. It's not understanding what they're saying that drives me to tell the voice command on our Apple TV device "subtitles on."
British accents are the worst for me. For Laurel also, which is why we agreed that subtitles were a must for the Ted Lasso series, as it was set in England.
I find that the main benefit of subtitles is being able to understand the plot much more easily. Too often actors either mumble their way through an important scene, or lower their voices almost to a whisper. I don't find subtitles to be a distraction, though my wife does.
It turns out that I have a lot of company when it comes to liking subtitles. About half of Americans say they use subtitles most of the time, according to a survey of 1,200 people.
It's interesting that the younger you are, the more likely you use subtitles. Us baby boomers are the least likely to use them.
Here's the pros and cons of subtitles, according to survey respondents.
I have a friend who was born in Germany. She tells me that in Europe, almost all power lines are buried. She can't understand why here in Oregon, so many power lines are strung along wooden poles -- a "technology" dating from the 1800's when telegraph lines used the same approach.
After every major disastrous weather event in our area, such as the high winds and freezing rain that caused massive problems in the Portland area recently, along with freezing rain that decimated the Eugene area, there's calls for our power companies (PGE and Pacific Power, mainly) to do a better job of both preventing damage to lines and restoring service more rapidly.
Since my neighborhood in rural south Salem was without power for eleven days in 2021 due to a serious ice storm, I'd love it if PGE buried the power lines that supply electricity to the several hundred homes in our area that regularly lose power, usually due to tree branches, or an entire tree, taking a line down.
Today a letter to the editor in the Sunday Oregonian resonated with me, big-time.
When are we, as a society, going to decide to make it a priority to keep people safe by changing the codes and paying the price to bury power lines? (“Portland winter storm: Power outages, grounded planes, dangerous roads continue Wednesday,” Jan. 17). For now, I am living in a country and a city where each citizen is responsible for themselves. I am fortunate to have great neighbors and friends who look out for each other. I am thinking about the many people who are not as lucky as I am.
I am safe but angry. I have wood for the fireplace. I dug my camping stove out of the earthquake kit. In the days before the storm, I went grocery shopping and charged the lantern and the power bank. Unlike my neighbors, I still have water and no tree has landed on my house.
What makes me angry is that all of the above was expected, as it is the same playbook with each major storm. I am 71 years old and each storm is more difficult to bear than the last one. I have lived in Canada with blizzards and temperatures as low as -25 degrees Fahrenheit, but never lost power. I have lived in the Swiss mountains with blizzards and never lost power.
I have been without power since 9 a.m. on Saturday morning. I abandoned my house on Monday morning, when the temperature inside the house got down to 32 degrees Fahrenheit and even a day later, I still did not have an estimate for when my power would be restored.
Irene Vlach, Portland
Unfortunately, it's unlikely that very many existing above-ground power lines in Oregon are going to be buried anytime soon. A post-ice storm Willamette Week article from February 2021, "Why Don't We Put Our Electric Lines Underground?", provided the simple answer in response to a reader's question.
You'd think that if anyone would be motivated to put their power lines underground, it would be fire-ravaged California.
And yet it hasn't happened. It also hasn't happened in hurricane-ravaged North Carolina or, as you point out, in ice-storm-ravaged Oregon. The reason, I'm sure you'll be shocked to learn, is money.
Here's the problem: Building a mile of overhead transmission line costs about $800,000. Building a mile of underground power line, meanwhile, costs $3 million to $4 million. And, of course, leaving a mile of existing line right where it is and going out for a beer costs approximately $6, plus you get a beer. You don't have to be Elon Musk to see how the incentives pencil out in this situation.
Okay, so what's the next best option, if burying existing lines isn't going to happen? Well, PGE has been doing a decent job at trimming trees that pose a risk to power lines. Recently I was pleased to see crews from Asplundh doing their tree-trimming thing along Liberty Road, where our neighborhood's electricity comes from.
PGE should be even more aggressive in its tree management.
It's good to trim branches when an electrical line passes close to a tree, but even better is taking down an entire tree if it poses a significant risk to the line. Nobody likes to lose a tree on their property. But nobody likes to go without electricity for days, which can happen when trees topple because of freezing rain, heavy snow, or high wind.
If PGE and other Oregon utilities don't have enough money to bury power lines, then they should do a better job of preventing damage to above-ground lines. An editorial in today's Oregonian, "Oregonians must build a culture of resilience," makes some great points.
Last week’s winter storm took a tragic toll on our state. At least 13 Oregonians died due to hypothermia, falling trees, fire and electrocution from fallen power lines – brutal circumstances in which vulnerability and bad luck combined to horrific effect.
The misery did not end there as tens of thousands of people across western Oregon endured days-long power outages in subfreezing temperatures. Homeless Oregonians in the Portland area sought refuge in warming shelters only to be sent back out into frigid temperatures later in the week. With high winds and low temperatures, trees toppled onto houses while frozen pipes burst, flooding homes and businesses. A forecast of rain and 40-degrees never sounded so good.
Electric utilities, county officials and the many agencies involved in emergency services will be reviewing their response in the coming days and weeks. But on a local, regional and state level, from individual households to power companies, Oregon needs to significantly up its preparation game. With such extreme weather events expected to become more common in our changing climate, we are witnessing the limits of our infrastructure and the vast needs left unmet. And with significant risk of a massive subduction zone earthquake hitting the Northwest, we must use this storm as motivation to build a culture of resilience.
That should start with a robust evaluation by regulatory and emergency management agencies of utilities’ performance and vulnerabilities. For days, even as much of the country struggled with winter weather disruptions, Oregon led the nation in number of outages, based on poweroutage.us reports. The cause of outages, barriers to restoring service, difficulties in communication all require greater analysis of what, if anything, can be changed, as well as a focus on tree health and maintenance.
I'm seeing a pattern here. Last Saturday I wrote a post, "Portland's Channel 12 gets Salem freezing rain annoyingly wrong."
My gripe was that Channel 12's Mark Nelsen said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain on Saturday, January 13. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021.
Actually, the National Weather Service was forecasting much less freezing rain for the Salem area.
That turned out to be correct, as there was little freezing rain in our area on Saturday, with no power outages, so far as I know. So Nelsen broadcast a sensationalized forecast that freaked people out, but didn't come to pass.
Fast forward to Monday, January 15, when another ice storm was being forecasted on Tuesday.
Basically the same thing happened with a Salem Statesman Journal story by Zach Urness. I made a screenshot of how the online story started out, because I suspected Urness also was sensationalizing the impact of the storm -- probably for the same reason Nelsen did, to garner more audience attention. You know, clicks, which generate advertising revenue.
As you can read below, Urness claimed that the National Weather Service was forecasting from a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of ice for the area from Salem/Corvallis up to Portland. The Statesman Journal headline spoke of a major ice storm being likely for the Willamette Valley on Tuesday.
Actually, that wasn't true. Urness should have checked more National Weather Service sources than merely talking with the National Weather Service forecaster quoted in the story and including a NWS graphic that was on the site formerly known as Twitter, and he should have included details in his story about the amount of freezing rain being forecast for Salem.
This is what the National Weather Service web site was forecasting for Salem on Monday, when the Statesman Journal story appeared online. The Tuesday ice accumulation was shown as 0.1 to 0.3 of an inch possible, with less than 0.1 of an inch added Tuesday night.
So there wasn't a quarter to three quarters of an inch forecasted for Salem, as the Statesman Journal story implied. The amount being forecasted was a bit more than a tenth of an inch to a bit more than three tenths of an inch. In reality, on Tuesday the Salem area got around a tenth of an inch, to my understanding. That was the case at our house in rural south Salem.
It also appears that Urness either didn't read the National Weather Service Ice Storm Warning issued at 2:26 pm on Monday, January 15 or he didn't pay attention to it. Though it came out before his story was published, the Ice Storm Warning said that Salem and other central/south Willamette Valley cities could expect total ice accumulations of one tenth to two tenths of an inch.
That's less than the quarter of an inch that Urness said in his story was the low-end of the National Weather Service forecast, which obviously wasn't true.
All in all, then, this was shoddy reporting by Urness. He created a lot of anxiety among the (thankfully few) Salem residents who still read the Statesman Journal by failing to present all the facts about how much ice was being forecasted by the National Weather Service for our area. Which is too bad, because I enjoy Urness' stories about the Oregon outdoors and he's a good writer.
Being a weather geek of sorts, I'm well aware that forecasting is an uncertain science. It's about probabilities and models, not mathematical precision.
All I ask is that professional weather forecasters recognize when they can be wrong, and communicate that to the public as clearly as possible.
Which Mark Nelsen, the main KPTV weather guy at Portland's Channel 12, failed to do Friday night, the day before today's winter storm was to hit Oregon. This annoyed me.
After all, on Thursday I'd written this blog post: "Among Saturday forecasts for snow and ice, I'm hoping the NWS is correct." It started out with:
I've been experiencing post-traumatic stress from our area's horrible Great Ice Storm of 2021. Our rural south Salem property had a huge amount of tree damage. I measured ice 5/8 of an inch thick.
Now snow and ice are being forecasted again for the Willamette Valley. Yikes!
I've been doomscrolling my iPhone's weather apps and the National Weather Service web site forecast for Salem (and our specific location near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge).
I thought it'd be interesting to share those forecasts for next Saturday, January 13, which is when the bulk of snow and ice is supposed to hit the Willamette Valley.
Then I'll award my blog post praise to whichever forecast came closest to reality. As shown below, my hope is on the National Weather Service.
That hope came true. With a bit over an hour left until the NWS Winter Storm Warning expires tonight, our home in rural south Salem has gotten about 1 1/2 inches of snow and quite a bit of sleet in the form of tiny ice pellets. Freezing rain accumulation was just about zero.
Which fit with this portion of the Thursday afternoon version of the Winter Storm Warning:
That forecast was right on, by and large. Salem, in the central Willamette Valley, got mostly snow and a small amount of freezing rain. Now, the Friday version of the NWS Winter Storm Warning did have a forecast for higher freezing rain amounts in our area, a quarter of an inch to half an inch.
This worried me, but I figured that since Salem was on the borderline of the freezing rain area, chances were we'd get closer to .25/inch than .50/inch. Bad, yet not horrible.
However, Friday night my wife and I watched the 11 pm news on KPTV. We've been doing this most nights since DirecTV got into a dispute with the owner of KGW and took Channel 8 off the air. That was our favorite weather forecast. We enjoyed Mark Nelsen's forecasts on KPTV too, though.
That was when Nelsen went way overboard on KPTV's First Alert Weather Day schtick. For he said that Salem and other parts of the central Willamette Valley easily could get an inch of freezing rain. That, Nelson added, could produce widespread power outages on the magnitude of the Great Ice Storm of 2021.
Well, that was when our home was without electricity for twelve freaking days. My wife was shocked. I told her that an inch of freezing rain was way more than what the National Weather Service was forecasting, so I didn't think what Nelsen said would come true.
Of course, it didn't. However, that didn't stop me from lying in bed Friday night worrying about how we'd cope with another lengthy power outage. Heck, being in our mid-70s, some days we have difficulty coping with life (and our health issues) when the weather is just fine.
Saturday morning, today, Nelsen wrote a weather summary for the impending storm. It said in part:
Well, it probably is true that the weather models Nelsen looked at Saturday morning said that a destructive ice storm was going to hit the Willamette Valley. But Wednesday the National Weather Service had forecasted just a tenth of an inch of freezing rain, and on Saturday the amount was .25 to .50 an inch in the Willamette Valley, not the inch Nelsen was forecasting.
At the very least, Nelsen should have told his viewers that there was considerable uncertainty in how much freezing rain would fall in the Salem area, with an inch being a worst-case scenario that had a good chance of not happening.
Look, I understand that local news on television is subject to the same pressures to keep viewers interested and engaged that social media like Facebook and Twitter are. Advertisers want as many eyes as possible on their ads. To get viewers, news outlets have to sensationalize things. As the old saying goes, "If it bleeds, it leads" (the newscast).
However, I see local news weather people as needing to adhere to a higher standard. Accuracy should be job #1. Entertainment value should be a distant second priority. Really low temperatures (its 18 right now in Salem) combined with a lot of freezing rain producing power outages is a scary proposition.
If that's a near-certainty, fine. Mark Nelsen should have spoken the truth. But it turned out that not only wasn't there an inch of freezing rain in the Salem area, there was very little. Nelsen's confidence in his forecast was misplaced.
So today I shifted our DirecTV DVR to start recording the Channel 2 news at 11 pm. For it will take a while for me to forget how badly Nelsen botched the freezing rain forecast for our area.
Oh, almost forget to mention, for the benefit of other weather geeks, that after it was clear that the National Weather Service did the best job in forecasting the winter storm, I searched for an iPhone app that made use of NWS data and came up with the National Weather Forecast Data app.
It isn't the most attractive or well designed weather app, but it packages NWS data in an easy to use format and has lots of information that isn't available on other weather apps. For example, it has a "Discussion" section where detailed analyses written by regional NWS offices can be read. Geeky for sure, which is why I like this app and have paid $11 for a year's subscription to the Pro version.
I've been experiencing post-traumatic stress from our area's horrible Great Ice Storm of 2021. Our rural south Salem property had a huge amount of tree damage. I measured ice 5/8 of an inch thick.
Now snow and ice are being forecasted again for the Willamette Valley. Yikes!
I've been doomscrolling my iPhone's weather apps and the National Weather Service web site forecast for Salem (and our specific location near the Ankeny Wildlife Refuge).
I thought it'd be interesting to share those forecasts for next Saturday, January 13, which is when the bulk of snow and ice is supposed to hit the Willamette Valley.
Then I'll award my blog post praise to whichever forecast came closest to reality. As shown below, my hope is on the National Weather Service.
That hope isn't unwarranted. After all, my understanding is that the National Weather Service is the data source for most private sector forecasts.
Those private forecasts, which include the apps on my iPhone, tend to overestimate bad weather, from what I've heard.
The reason is that people get more upset if they're planning an outdoor party, say, and an app says that day will be warm and dry, then it turns out to be cool and rainy, compared to the app saying the day will be cool and rainy and it turns out to be warm and dry.
Here's the current National Weather Service forecast for Friday and Saturday in Salem.
No mention of freezing rain, which is way worse than snow. Total snow and sleet accumulation is 2 to 3 inches. Not a huge deal for me, especially since I drive a Subaru Crosstrek with winter tires.
This is the current Winter Storm Watch message for our area. It speaks of snow being the main precipitation type in the central Willamette Valley and freezing rain in the south Willamette Valley. Salem is in the central Willamette Valley. So that's good news if it comes true
By contrast, here's what the Apple Weather app is forecasting for Salem on Saturday: an inch of precipitation in the form of 13 inches of snow. Way different than the NWS forecast.
This is the AccuWeather snow forecast: about 1.5 inches by Saturday afternoon, which is close to the NWS forecast.
But this is the AccuWeather ice forecast: over 6/10 of an inch by Saturday night. That'd be disastrous, and is hugely more than the NWS forecast.
Lastly, here's The Weather Channel forecast: it doesn't differentiate between snow and ice, simply saying that the total will be less than an inch. Which isn't helpful, since an inch of ice brings down trees, while an inch of snow is just a minor inconvenience. (Unless you have bald tires and live on a hill.)