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! Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=2377