2013 marks the 20th anniversary year of Cabling Installation & Maintenance. Over the course of 20 years, from the hunkered view our catbird seat in the Atlantic hurricane corridor, we've covered a lot of ground with increasing regularity – much as the massive hurricanes churn over land and sea, year after year. And so we take you back to:
People here in Nashua, NH, home of the head offices of PennWell Technology Group's Cabling Installation & Maintenance, have for a long time been more than passingly familiar with danger and, indeed, disaster lurking in the weather forecast. Around here, there is the famous Flood of March 1936 and the Great Blizzard of 1978 to attest to, in particular. And in our present time, many, many communities of people up and down the East Coast of the United States have had similar experiences with extreme weather events, be they of the variety of snow, rain, catastrophic wind, thunder, hail, tidal surges – or sometimes all of these at once, as was the case with Hurricane Sandy, last year.
In point of fact, people now just about everywhere in the country seem to be getting their fill of extreme weather, if we take into account the apparently periodic cycle of wildfire, drought, blizzard, tornado and flood events, including mudslides, that now recurs annually in the Western, Southwestern, and central U.S. At this very writing, another titanic weather event of maximum horror and chaos is topping the national headlines, this time in the Midwest, and striking a bit too close to home: a deadly F5 tornado near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, home state of PennWell's flagship offices -- already being reckoned as one of the largest tornadoes in modern history.
Again. Because the same thing just happened in the town of Joplin, MO in May of 2011. In 2011, itself one the most notable, record-busting years for catastrophic weather -- not to mention other types of unthinkable, quasi-apocalyptic disasters (see the Japan earthquake/tsunami/nuclear plant tragedy) -- at least until 2012 rolled in. In what other subsequent decades have there been not one, but two epochal hurricanes of the magnitude of Katrina – surely thought of, at the time, as the whopper: the storm to end all storms, to say nothing of the magnitude of absolute human misery produced by that hurricane – to be followed only several years later by the tsunami-like wrecking ball of devastation that was Hurricane Sandy, as it plowed over the Northeast megalopolis?
It must be noted that Cabling Installation & Maintenance has a coincidental, disturbingly "crystal-ball" type relationship with the two largest, most destructive and deadly hurricanes to ever hit the U.S. (so far?). The cover story of the magazine in August 2005 was entitled Staying connected when disaster strikes, and recounted one cabling contractor's experience in the state of Florida during the tumultuous 2004 hurricane season. That issue of the magazine featured this image:
