X-Message-Number: 2377
From: 
Subject: CRYONICS Site Selection
Date: Fri,  6 Aug 93 02:10:35 PDT

Perry Metzger writes:

>Flats are precisely the places where you have to worry about flooding.
>Look at Iowa for example. 

The area is not considered to be in a "flood plain."  I don't know 
exactly how free from flooding that makes it, but from the looks of 
it, it would take an order of magnitude or more than the record floods 
of last winter to get water into the building.  Even then, a foot of 
flood water in the building would not hurt the patients (unless it 
went on so long as to prevent all LN2 delivery.) 

>Myself, I think that reliance on any particular area being fairly
>"safe" in terms of weather is foolish. No location on the planet is
>"safe" without lots of engineering. The desert has flooding problems.
>The north gets snow. Coastal areas get hurricanes. Some places get
>earthquakes.

No arguments here, but the more you have to cope with, the more 
expensive it gets. 

>Myself, I would have prefered that rather than simply picking Arizona
>because of familiarity that we had looked extensively around the
>country. I really have yet to see evidence that a systematic search
>was conducted. There are hundreds of regions around the country that
>provide enough services and liquid nitrogen. Did we REALLY look at
>them all? I've yet to hear if we did.

We certainly did not look at every possible location any more than an 
engineer looks at every possible metric and English and left handed 
bolt for a particular task.  Life is not long enough for such detailed 
considerations.

Patient safety eliminated the big areas which are subject to major 
earthquakes--which took out most of California, but not all of it, the 
entire Pacific Northwest, and the big section in the middle which is 
home to the super quakes.  

Because Alcor is not up to the size where it can afford to staff both 
a storage and a perfusion facility, the need to bring in patients to 
our only facility limited us to places where the airports are not 
closed for days at a time for snow.  Legal considerations having to do 
with who can deal with the "dead" along with hurricanes tend to 
eliminate much of the East Coast and much of the middle south (not to 
mention the reluctance of the staff to move there).  LN2 and services 
are available in most cities of half a million up, but the really big 
cities have a lot of "civil disturbance" (riot) potential which is 
just as much of a threat as earthquakes (maybe more).  

What's left is medium sized cities in the lower elevations of the 
southwest and west coast, less major reductions for earthquake areas.  
There wasn't that much left; the Phoenix/Scottsdale area, Las Vegas, 
Tucson, and (with some earthquake potential) Sacramento.  Further 
afield, there may be locations in southern New Mexico and Texas, but 
there are very few Alcor members close enough to those areas to help.  
(Austin would be a good choice if we went as far as Texas.)  

We wanted wherever we went to be within two hours flight time from 
Northern California because so many of the suspension team live there 
(nearly half of the non-staff members).  We seriously considered 
relaxing the earthquake criteria to take in more of California because 
it is possible to engineer building and dewar braces which would deal 
with the largest possible quake, but both cost and public perception 
considerations are against it.  

Scottsdale had pluses going for it because we found last year that the 
officials were willing to give us hard zoning (no need for conditional 
use permits and many restrictions), our new surgeon lives there, and 
we could easily resume training and research.  The Comos family came 
to much the same conclusion and bought land last year in the same 
area. 

By the way: change almost any of these criteria and the permissible 
areas changes.  For example, if we could get several medical places to 
do perfusions and cooldowns under contract, we could put Alcor as far 
north as anyone could ask for.  However, getting even *one* medical 
group to keep the special perfusate chemicals on hand, and to keep 
their staff trained for a use every few years would be very expensive.  
Getting them to keep a giant dry ice cooler chest, a whole body dewar, 
and to do computer controlled cooling on patients seems very unlikely 
--given the current suspension rate.  

With growth, this should change, though it may take 10-100 times as 
many suspensions as we now have to get the medical community 
interested in doing them for Alcor. 

Lest anybody thinks we do not take finding a new location seriously, 
we intend to start a new search for a storage-only location once we 
are in the new facility.  It should be ten years or more before we 
*need* it, but given the hassle involved, we had better start soon!  

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