Preparedness needed before disasters hit

I burn biomass that grows all around us and would rot into greenhouse gases anyway without extracting its heat in a wonderful Iowa-made A.Y. MacDonald furnace.

In an outage, I suffer only the minor lack of forced-air distribution that electricity affords, and rely upon that old physical law of nature: convection. Proper building design, using convective assistance, saves energy and yields worry-free reliability.

A wise Iowan fills stock tanks, buckets and the bathtub before a blizzard or ice storm. Yet, sometimes, the cattle never know how close they come to eating snow.

Some day, a disaster, taking more than three days for linemen to fix, will make me wish I had taken greater steps toward auto-sufficiency. I would like to see the day when the whole human family, our utility distribution system and the livestock that feed us, are nearly unaffected by such adversities.

More distributed generation via farmer-owned hydroelectric and wind turbines, hydrogen electrolyzes and biogas generators connected by buried pipelines and cables would go a long way toward that end.

Larry M. Aden

Jolley