What could be more 2020 than sightings of terrifying fire tornadoes? How about the dismantling of postal infrastructure in advance of an election where mail-in ballots may well determine the winner? In this episode, Christine and JJ discuss the fire tornadoes recently spotted in Northern California, then sort out the mail sorting machines at the heart of US Postal Service controversies. Recorded August 20th, 2020.
What could be more 2020 than sightings of terrifying fire tornadoes? How about the dismantling of postal infrastructure in advance of an election where mail-in ballots may well determine the winner? In this episode, Christine and JJ discuss the fire tornadoes recently spotted in Northern California, then sort out the mail sorting machines at the heart of US Postal Service controversies. Recorded August 20th, 2020.
Talk description to me with Christine Malec and JJ hunt.
Christine:hi, I'm Christine Malec.
:and I'm JJ hunt. This is talk description to Me where the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashed out in description, rich conversations.
Christine:So in many parts of the continent, it is unfortunately fire season. And because it's 2020, there's a new horror to be understood. And the phrase that I came across recently is fire tornado. And I wanted to think this was something out of science fiction, but it's, it's not. Can you describe what this new horror is and what it looks like?
JJ:Yes. Fire tornadoes or FireNadoes they have been called,
Christine:Oh, no, there's a nickname
JJ:Firenadoes. So they've been spotted and filmed in Northern California where there are ongoing fires. I think something like, I read a report that was something like 117 square kilometers or 45 square miles have been burned near Lake Tahoe. I did look this up and I saw some fire tornadoes being done in a, in a lab setting, as well as different images of fire tornadoes that have happened in nature, just so I could get a good sense of what exactly is happening and essentially what it is is in a fire of course, heat rises. So there's a significant updraft in a very strong and centralized fire. So if you've got a small fire that's burning very hot, you have an updraft. Now then if you have wind that is also blowing in a certain way, what can happen is that updrafts starts to spin and it creates a rotational effect. And then it starts feeding itself because you've got all of this extra wind, all this extra air feeding this now spinning fire. And what you end up with is this whipping rotating tall thin column of extremely hot fire. And it spins like a tornado. Like it's, it's shocking in a lab, in a lab setting when you can see it nice and clearly there's no smoke or anything like that. It's just being done in a nice clean atmosphere. What you can see is this, this tower of flame burning orange and red flames that are whipping in circles, that looks intelligent because it is, it looks intentional. It's so clear and clean, and I guess it has been created in a lab. So it is somewhat intentional and it whips back and forth. Like if you imagine a fire hose that's on full tilt, like coming out of a firetruck or a fire hydrant, and it's going full tilt and that hose is slapping back and forth. No one's holding on to it. It's completely out of control. It's kind of like that, except that it's almost always vertical. So it's snapping from side to side a little bit, but it's staying more or less upright as this tall ropey looking tower of flame whips back and forth. And so in California, because the, a lot of these fires are burning outdoors. They're burning lots of bush and brush the fire. Tornadoes are sucking up a lot of debris because there's, you know, there's a pole in toward this swirling tornado. So all the smoke is pulled into the tornado and the debris is pulled in. And so it's thick and smoky looking, swirling funnel cloud that's whipping around. And it looks much more like a classic tornado, except that instead of the sky, just being blue parts of the sky are like red fire, red and orange. And you've got the, the swirling clouds that are pulled into it. And it it's, the skies are, are so dramatic and an orange and the, and the clouds of smoke. And in the middle of this spinning fire tornado that's dark and cloudy. And I'm sure if you were able to get close enough with which none of these films are actually able to, because it's pretty, it's intensely hot and there's dirt and debris and Bush- burning bush- that's flying around inside this fire tornado.
Christine:I'm realizing that I personally want to take a step back. And can you just describe a normal old fashioned tornado?
JJ:That's totally fair. So a tornado is a funnel cloud, right? Looks like a funnel shape. And sometimes they're thin sometimes they're wide. So if you get a tornado that's quite thin, it might come to you, you know if you're looking at it across a horizon, you're going to see it come to a fine point and it's gonna seem to kind of dance and move from side to side as this spinning funnel cloud moves. And depending on what the sky looks like, maybe it's in a storm. So there's a lot of rain around it. Or maybe the sky is clear. Sometimes they, you know, you can see a spinning tower of conical cloud. That's just whipping around without much storm around it. And sometimes they're immense. Sometimes they're absolutely thick to the point where they don't even taper at the bottom. They look boxy and they move across the land and they're thick and devastating, and they seem to lurch. They're in fact, moving very quickly, but they're so large, again, same idea where in a tornado like that, perhaps you're going to be able to see some of the debris that's being whipped around anything that's in its path gets pulled up into the spinning, the rotating winds, and that debris can be whipped around. So, so you can literally see if you are close up, or if you are filming close to a wind tornado that you can see debris like cars and, you know, siding that are just whipping around the outside of one of these tornadoes.
Christine:Cars?
:Yeah. If they're big enough cars, car parts, and cars can be pulled up into a tornado. Absolutely.
Christine:Whoa. Um, so you referred to it as a cloud, are we talking a gray cloud, a white cloud? What's the coloring?
JJ:So in these fire tornadoes it tends to be smoky. So it's darker, it's grays and even black in the core. So in your standard a tornado, the clouds can be, you know, it's a spectrum that can be anywhere from whitish to very dark gray. And again, some of that depends on what's going on in the sky around it. Is it, you know, is this a dark and cloudy storm? Is this a fairly isolated event? And in some cases these tornadoes, they reach all the way up to the level of the cloud up above. So you'll have a blanket of clouds overhead. And then from that blanket of clouds comes this funnel that slowly tapers. And again, sometimes it tapers down to what looks like a very fine point. And sometimes they are, they are thick and they are, they look more like, you know, tubes that are moving across the land, but they generally reach from the ground all the way up to the blanket of clouds overhead.
Christine:Wow.
JJ:Yeah.
Christine:And so the fire version, um, are they as tall and how do they, do they differentiate from a standard old fashioned tornado?
JJ:Sure. How tall they are. I mean, they're not reaching up, I guess the difference would be that a standard tornado is coming down from a cloud, and this is coming up from the flames from the ground. So they don't have to reach all the way up, but that being said, one of the most available images of the fire tornado in California right now, the fire tornado that was filmed in California recently, it does have the cloud or the, pardon me, the smoke is so great over this plain that's on fire that the cloud of smoke, it kind of makes it look like just a regular standard overhead, weather system. It's not. So it appears to be the same size on the same scale as a tornado that you're going to see as part of the weather system. But I doubt that it is. I would imagine it's considerably smaller or certainly the, they would normally be, I think.
Christine:I'm kind of haunted by the description you, you said earlier about the way they move and it almost looking like it's willful, like it's moving on purpose. What's the mood that that conveys, like, if you didn't know what it was or how destructive it was say for a normal tornado, would there be something graceful or hypnotic about watching it or does it just look menacing?
JJ:That's a great question. I'm tempted to say it's both. I mean, there's real beauty in this, cause you often, you're seeing tornadoes on like big, wide, flat expanses of land, right? So there's usually a field and maybe a handful of trees, maybe a farm house, you know, a big open grassy field. And then there's usually an overhead blanket of clouds, which has its own version of beauty. Even if there's a storm going on, there's, you know, gray-ish or white clouds and there's some drama in the clouds, in the different colors. Sometimes there's a blue tint to some of the clouds or, you know, there's a silver gray kind of thing going on in some of them. And then this, this tornado, the funnel cloud starts to form and it starts to form, and it almost looks innocent because it's wispy, you're getting some of the wispiness of the tornado as it starting to gather, and the wind is gathering and it's pulling up dust. And I think it's moisture. A lot of this is like moisture drops of moisture. And that's part of what we're seeing is these drops of moisture. And then it, and then it starts to move and it's got this funnel that has suddenly become an object. Like it looks more solid, it looks like a solid cone, but again, it's dancing. And sometimes it's like skittering, like sometimes the bottom, where it comes to a point and is actually making contact with the ground, appears from a distance to be like zipping back and forth as the entire tornado moves. And sometimes it looks almost like it's leaning like the cloud overhead is pulling this cone behind it. And it's kind of dragging along the ground and scraping and pulling everything in its wake. And then as I say, sometimes it's like a giant mass, a tube of swirling cloud that is moving. So emotionally it's hard not to look at the dancing of this, the movement of it, the destruction, and, you know, people often talk about the fact that you can have a tornado that will rip down one house and leave the house right next to it standing because of this randomness. And, and it's true. The devastation is awesome. And I, I don't mean that in a positive way, but the devastation is awesome. If you are lucky it can move right past you and you just kind of have this brush with natural greatness for lack of a better term. And so I think when you're looking at these images or videos of tornadoes, there is a bit of that. There's both of those things where you can be in awe and in terror at the same time.
Christine:Well, of course, all of our best hopes to people living in that region, our hopes for your safety. One subject that has been very much in the news of late is the US postal service. And when JJ and I were discussing this, apparently there are some stock images that get used all the time. And I think these are really interesting for themselves, but also to know, as a blind person, when a story is being covered, that there are certain images that you just see repeated over and over and over that become associated with that story. And that's one of the things that caught my attention when we were discussing what to talk about in this context. And so, JJ, you mentioned that the sorting machine is something that is being shown repeatedly and quite often, so can we, can we talk about that?
JJ:Yeah. The mail sorting machines, of course, are in the news because they're being threatened right now. There's some reports that mail sorting machines are being torn down in various parts of the US postal service. And so in all of the different news stories about this, whether it's on TV or in one of those silent news videos that get shown around on the internet that just has text printed atop of it, there's stock footage of mail sorting machines. Sometimes you'll find from network to network, it's the same stock footage that's being used of these sorting machines. And it's not actually clear whether the sorting machines that they're showing in these videos are the same sorting machines that are being threatened right now. But they're everywhere. So yeah, I thought maybe we'd have a little bit of fun and kind of describe some of these machines. Cause they, they look like cartoon machines, like Rube Goldberg machines.
Christine:That's what I picture. So it's immense room sized-?
JJ:Absolutely. Totally. Yeah, totally, totally. And I mean, I know we don't normally put music in our podcasts, but I kind of feel like we should have that Looney tunes"Doo do doo do..."
Speaker 3:The ice cream truck. If an ice cream truck went by right now that would be great.
JJ:Something about the goofiness of the way the mail travels through these machines. So I'll do my best to describe them. Again, like a lot of the stock footage, you just get clips of this clips of that. It's a little hard to piece together. I did find like an instructional video from the US postal service,"how the mail comes to you". And so I watched that and tried to combine that information with the clips that I was seeing in the news to come up with a description of what it looks like when the mail is going through these machines. So first of all, you're absolutely right. These look like one giant machine filling the inside of a warehouse and I'm sure it's not, I'm sure there are separate distinct machines, but these videos give the impression that this is one giant warehouse machine. And so the process starts with a bin of mail that is rolled up to the machine by a person, by a postal worker. And then it's loaded into the machine on a lift, like you might find on the back of like a moving truck or a garbage truck. So it lifts up this bin, that's on rollers and it tips it up and pours all of the mail into a hopper. And inside this bin are letters, junk mail, postcards, envelopes of all shapes and sizes and colors. And they are, they are dumped into the hopper and down a shoot. And then they get sent out onto a series of conveyor belts for culling, and they are being called for weight size and shape. And they move along these different conveyor belts. And depending on their weight, depending on their size, they get pushed in one direction or another. And they have these rotating horizontal barrels and they have corkscrewing fan brushes that are going up and down, like all the way up the barrel kind of looks like the inside of an old fashioned vacuum cleaner. So this barrel spins and the, the fan brushes that are in a corkscrew pattern, move some of the envelopes along as it spins. Cause it's in a corkscrew pattern. It pushes some of the mail along, but if it's a thinner piece of mail, it's going to sweep the thin letter or the thin postcard under it. So you have a series of these rotating horizontal barrels that move some of the mail along, pull some of it under. And that's one of the ways that it gets separated.
Christine:Hold on a sec. The brushes? I got to follow along, so, okay, I'm picturing a row of horizontal barrels, and they're, so they're turning almost like, like a conveyor belt?
JJ:Yeah, I know this is a weird one. It's a weird one.
Christine:I want a model!
JJ:I know this would, this is a perfect opportunity for a model! I would disassemble a vacuum cleaner, take this fan brush and put it in front of you if I could. So it's a barrel, and imagine a barrel rolling back and forth. Right? That back and forth rolling. But they're on a, it's on a spit essentially. So it's just rolling in one direction, whipping around. And if before it moves, there's a long thin brush, like eight feet long. Imagine if you take a piece of string, okay, here we go. You take a piece of string and you wrap it around your finger and you move from the closer to your hand to closer to the tip of your finger. It goes around and around and around like that. Does that make sense? Yeah.
Christine:But instead of that being a string, it's like a brush and the whole thing is made of brush and that's what the barrel looks like. It's a barrel with these fan brushes corkscrewing up around one end to the other all the way around that's right. Ok, ok.
JJ:So then when it spins, if a letter hits one end of this, the back end of this spinning barrel, the action of the corkscrewing fan will move that letter along to the top. Does that make sense? So it's moving it along, but if the envelope is thin enough as it's spinning, the fans are going to whisk it underneath the barrel. So the fat envelopes get sent along and the thin envelopes get pulled in behind, and then they get sorted into a different system.
Christine:So they're dropped down below the barrel?
JJ:Yeah. They're dropped down below where they're put on a different conveyor belt. It's just a way of organizing thicker, thinner, however these get separated. Okay. So that's stage one. That's culling.
Christine:Okay.
JJ:Then, then the machine, instead of there being a flat conveyor belt, now most of the conveyor belts get flipped to vertical conveyor belts. And these are long, very, very long vertical belts on rollers. So the rollers are standing upright and the belts are now vertical. And this is for the advanced facer canceler system.
Christine:Oh yeah, that.
:Ya you know, that one! Yeah, exactly. And what these do is these long vertical belts, envelopes can now stand, kind of on their side. They're facing forward. So if you were someone who w as sitting down and looking straight at this belt as it whips by, you would be able to- theoretically- read the address in and see the stamp on the envelope as it went whipping by because it's facing you.
JJ:That's the position that's being held in. Now they are being moved at a speed such that no human ever could read any of this. It is a whipping along and not just in a straight line. These rollers are positioned in such a way and the bands go around them. And so they weave around them so that you can turn the mail, you can send it in one direction or another, it goes back and forth and in and out. So you've got these belts that are zipping back and forth between these rollers. And it reminded me a little bit of like a thread, the way it weaves through the inside of a sewing machine. So it's up here, down here, across here, and it's zigzagging back and forth all around. And the mail is being pulled along letter by letter. Long, long, long, seemingly never ending rows of letters and postcards all with the addresses facing out, being whipped along through this machine. And what happens is they get sent through these very small tunnels as they are being whipped along on these belts and high speed cameras are snapping pictures of the stamps and of the addresses. And then onboard computers are matching the addresses that are written in hand with addresses that exist in the computer database. And they're making sure that the stamps are appropriate for that address. And then based on that, the, the belts then take the mail to one place or another based on the information that it gathers. And, and just to give you an example of how fast this is, I slowed down the video to a one-quarter speed, which is as slow as you can do it on YouTube. And at one quarter speed, it was moving way too fast to see what was happening. I couldn't even distinguish between one letter and another when it moves at a quarter speed. This is happening lightening fast, zipping all around. And then when a belt takes this mail to an intersection, right? So it's, it's now decided- it's taken a picture of the address, it knows it's going to, the letters' going to this location, not that location, there are there are these like teardrop shaped bumpers that are part of the system and they're in pairs side by side. And they kind of look a little bit like the flippers on a pinball machine. So the flippers that hit the ball and make it go back and forth. But they're side by side. And what these are used for is redirecting the incoming mail onto a different path. So in the same way that on a railway system, you switch lines. These two bumpers that are parallel will move from side to side. And the letters that come up to it, if you were watching it in super slow motion, a letter would come up to the bumpers. The bumpers would in parallel move from one direction to another, the mail then shoots between them and get sent to a different line. But then a fraction of a second later, another piece of mail is coming. It's got to go in a different direction. The two parallel bumpers shift onto another track, and the letter gets sent onto another path. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Christine:I have to pause here.
JJ:Please!
Christine:So what you're saying is- yeah, take a deep breath.
JJ:" D oo do Doo do...."
Christine:So what you're saying is that, although this is happening at breakneck speed, each envelope is being identified. The text is being recognized. The stamp is being evaluated. And some mechanism or computer algorithm decides what path that needs to go on. And it's working in tandem with this bizarre mechanical contraption to send it down the right pathway as though it was a train, but this is all happening at a speed too fast to be perceived by the human eye. And each envelope is being, or each piece of mail is having this process done to it independently of the next piece of mail.
JJ:And while they're doing that, they're also canceling the stamp and putting an ID tag there. Spray painting as it whips by. They're spraying an ID tag onto it. So that ID tag can then be used at different points in the system to help separate and to help cull and move it along so that it doesn't always have to read the handwriting. Once it's read the handwriting, it interprets it sprays on a numerical, you know, a different code so that the computer system can move it more quickly and efficiently. But yeah, it's all happening, all of that is happening at a speed that is far too fast for the human eye to actually see what's going on. it's crazy.
Christine:It's hurting my head.
JJ:Oh yeah, it's something else. And so then those vertical belts, they take those letters and they, you know, using the paired bumpers and the belts, they ultimately take them to a series of what look like small open filing cabinets. So big, big, big, long banks of these open filing cabinets. And the letters get shot into them. And then pressed- did you ever come across a card catalog at the public library? Like the old fashioned?
:Ya! It's like that, where you've got all of these letters, one behind the other behind the other, behind the other, but the system has made sure that they're all facing forward. They're all upright. And they get pressed into these long rows in this bank of open filing cabinet drawers. And that's when a postal worker gets back into the system. A postal worker takes those. They pick up these long rows, keep them in a row and load those into bins. And those bins are put on carts. And I believe those carts are then transferred to sorting facilities near the delivery point.
JJ:So you've just broken it down. So now all of the mail that is going from Toronto to Prague is in one of these bins, that bin gets sent to Prague. And now we kind of start that again. Now you take those rows of letters and all we know is that they're going to Prague you, then take them out of the system, put them in a new sorter. And It leads them through the same kind of labyrinth of high speed rollers and bumpers and everything. And the only reason it's doing this is to separate them all and then put them back in a delivery order. So now when they come out, when they're spit out into a new row, into a new row of filing cabinets, now they're in delivery order. So a mail carrier can take that row, go down and as they deliver, all of them are in the order of their route. Crazy system, crazy system.
Christine:I understand each step, but in my mind, I'm trying to slow it down to some comprehensible speed. And the parts that puzzle me most is that this works with pieces of mail of all different sizes, and sometimes mail has images on both sides. And so the technology can... I think I get it separates it by size by using the barrels, the horizontal barrels, but then it's got to somehow flip them all so that the address is pointing facing in the same orientation.
JJ:These are just for letters. There are different systems for packages, but if a letter is say too fat or too wide, or it's such an odd size that the machines aren't going to be hande it, that probably is culled out at the very beginning by those vacuum cleaner rollers. And they probably do have to go to a system that is about a human making changes.
Christine:Right.
:But for the most part, it's about these systems, these machines. And so you can imagine the amount of material that can be gotten through, the amount of mail that one of these machines or a series of these machines can get through. So if you take them out, you remove these from the postal system, the system grinds to a halt. The systemas we know, it depends on mail sorting machines in order to process the volume. Without them it's impossible. No amount of human intervention could, you know, could match it. It's just incredible.
Christine:And so I'm really getting now why these images would be so compelling and maybe to the point where people get numbed, because they've seen them so much if they're used as stock footage. But just for one, watching, it would be mesmerizing and hypnotic. Lke watching the row of dominoes fall, you know.
JJ:Ya exactly!
Christine:Five million dominoes falling or playing mouse trap or something. But also, as you say, to indicate the volume and the speed at which the mail- it's interesting viewing just to stare at it in a mesmeric way, but also to get a point to get across of how much volume these machines are processing. That's quite striking.
JJ:Absolutely. It is. There's, there's the fun of it. There's the fun of watching how was it made, how it look inside the factory, to get to watch the Wallace and Gromit machine do it's crazy thing. But it does actually, if you take a moment and you pause and you consider all of the action, and all the material that's being processed, then you do get a sense of the importance of these machines. These aren't just helpful, they're essential to this process.
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