Henryville, regroups after tornado

As snowflakes fell on the ruined homes and businesses Sunday, many residents gathered in the parking lot of St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church.

Few people have power, so they hunched around propane fueled heaters, drinking hot coffee and eating eggs scrambled on an outdoor grill.

Two days after his home was severely damaged by the tornado that devastated the town, trucker Charles Boughton was not bowed by the work ahead.

“We’ll be fine,” said Boughton, 43. “We’ll make it happen.”

The tornadoes that ripped across much of the Midwest and South on Friday killed an estimated 40 people in five states, 22 of them in Kentucky and 13 in Indiana, including a 15-month-old toddler who had survived the same tornado that killed her parents and two siblings, according to the Courier-Journal in Louisville. Angela Babcock had been found in a field near her southern Indiana home, and died Sunday afternoon of a traumatic brain injury, the Courier-Journal reports. The deaths also included three in Ohio and one each in Alabama and Georgia. Death numbers, however, fluctuated Sunday, and Kentucky Emergency Management was reporting 21 people died in that state. The National Weather Service said the four twisters in Kentucky were the worst in the region in 24 years. The most severe damage appeared centered in small towns in southern Indiana and eastern Kentucky’s Appalachian foothills.

Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear formally requested an expedited major disaster declaration, and that move will get assessment and assistance teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency into communities more quickly, Beshear said at a news conference in Frankfort, Ky., on Sunday.

The country’s freakishly warm weather may have played a role in this early-season tornado outbreak.

“This year’s unusually mild winter has led to ocean temperatures across the Gulf of Mexico that are approximately 1 degrees C (1.8 F) above average,” says meteorologist Jeff Masters of the Weather Underground. This places it among the top ten warmest values on record for this time of year, going back to the 1800s, he says.

The preliminary tornado count for this outbreak is 74, says Weather Channel tornado expert Greg Forbes. If the final number is higher, it would be a record for the month of March, Forbes says.

In Henryville, an EF-4 tornado — the second-highest on the Fujita scale that measures tornadic force — brought 175-mph winds and stayed on the ground for more than 50 miles.

Two days later, all the talk was of the future. And of rebuilding.

Andrew Moore, 46, said he lost an addition to his 1910 house. “Lost three cars, lost part of the house,” he said. “Got the family.”

Inside St. Francis during Sunday Mass, the only light came from candles on the altar and pale sunlight coming through stained glass windows. There was no power and no heat.

The congregation of about 150 people compared notes about damage to their homes, the safety of their families.

Margaret Short, 62, said it was important to pray together “because we’re a small community and this is our church and we have so much to be thankful for.”

Tears fell as she spoke of her own family’s scary moments Friday — her daughter took shelter in a closet — and the generosity of her neighbors and church family.

Gesturing at the pile of donated items, she said, “It’s not remarkable. This is normal in our community.”

Steve Schaftlein, the parish priest, described driving into town after the tornado. When he saw the intact cross atop the steeple, he said, he knew “we were still here, we had meaning, and we had purpose.”

In his sermon, he said, “We can choose how we are going to frame this experience. We can choose to begin anew.”

In Chelsea, about a 25-minute drive northeast of Henrysville, there was ample warning before “a bomb went off” that destroyed Annette Cartwright’s home and barn on Friday, she says.

A fire truck stopped outside the house to warn her mother-in-law, daughter and son-in-law, who were outside watching the approaching storm.

“They told them to get inside,” says Cartwright, 40, who was at work.

Local TV stations also were sounding alarms, she says. “They kept saying ‘this is really bad,’” she recalls. “The warnings saved three lives at my house.”

Chelsea, an unincorporated area that’s more a sprawling neighborhood than a town, has no warning sirens, Cartwright says, as do most nearby towns. “We can sometimes hear the ones in New Washington,” she says.

Word of the likelihood of bad weather had been on the news for a couple days, Cartwright says. “If you didn’t realize something was coming, there’s something wrong with you.”

Retiree Jim Gray, 62, who also lives in Chelsea, had enough warning to pick up his 6-year-old grandson from school Friday. The boy ended up in the basement of Gray’s home, which was not damaged.

“Everybody knew it was coming,” says Gray, who first heard about the potential for tornados on Wednesday. “They kept saying, ‘It’s going to be a bad one,’” he said.

The subject of the warning system came up during a Saturday evening National Weather Service briefing in Henryville, during which the agency’s Joe Sullivan called the advance notice of the storms “a great success of the entire warning program.”

Paul Wilson, NXP Semiconductors

Wilson discussed some of the hardware components that intelligent lights require and the importance of power control and efficiency in a successful intelligent-lighting network:

"Lighting represents one of the world's greatest opportunities for significant energy savings, as up to 25% of home-energy usage is from lighting. We all know the energy-savings potential of LED lighting in replacing the existing base of incandescent lights. We estimate that another 30% of savings can be gathered by applying [and combining] these LED lights with intelligent lighting: Use light when you really need light. With smart controls, you can do dimming, scenes, profiles, adjustments, monitoring, [and] preventive maintenance. [In addition] intelligent lighting enables participation in utilities' demand-response programs, resulting in reduced tariffs.

"Some of the key elements of an intelligent-lighting network are the switches, sensors, controllers, and the wirelessly enabled smart lamps themselves. If you want to have access to them through smartphones, tablets, and other Internet-connected devices, then you need to have some sort of gateway. I'll talk a little about what's going on inside that wirelessly enabled smart lamp because there is a price to pay in terms of power when you're putting all this smart technology inside a light bulb.

"One of the gotchas in smart lighting is now that you have the smart power supply, it must be constantly on and drawing power. Even when the switch is in the off position, the light must be listening for controller signals. Fortunately, intelligent light bulbs, which are often centrally positioned in every room, can make ideal network routers, but they do draw continuous amounts of power even when off, so standby power can impact system power efficiency.

"Standby power can vary dramatically based on power-supply topology. For example, a low-cost linear supply can consume as much as 3W; in a 13W LED you'll negate the power savings of using an LED lamp, so that's not a really smart way of doing it. … A better choice is a buck topology with about 10 mW of standby power. State of the art for a radio transceiver for the wireless portion is about 17 mA of current. The networking stack you choose has an impact, as well. David [Ewing] mentioned 6LoWPAN. I think the key is to get the code size small and then keep the RF-transceiver- and microcontroller-power needs as low as possible. Using a ‘mostly asleep' duty-cycle design where the transceiver and microcontroller don't have to be constantly on also helps cut down on standby power.

"As an example of how real this issue is, a 10W bulb on for four hours a day uses 40 Whr a day. If the standby power for the device is 1W ... it will consume about 20 Whr a day; 33% of the power is consumed in standby. At 100 mW, it falls to 2 Whr, or just 5% of the electricity bill at 100 mW standby power; NXP demonstrated at LightFair last May its 6LoWPAN chip set operating with a duty cycle of about 10% on and listening for control signals, resulting in a standby power of about 30 mW and reducing standby power to negligible amounts.

"Dimming control becomes much simpler when designing for smart lighting networks. Currently, LED lamps must be able to dim with existing TRIAC [triode-alternating-current] phase-cut dimmers, and including this circuitry in an LED lamp costs about 50 cents. In an intelligent-lighting system, users control dimming from a tablet, a smartphone, or a wireless device. Eliminating the TRIAC-dimmable circuitry will help offset the cost of including wireless circuitry and intelligence in LED lamps.

The secrets of taking good pictures: Cellphone cameras

I’m never without my cellphone and I use its integrated camera almost every day. A few years ago cellphone cameras could only take low quality snaps but now they can produce excellent high resolution pictures that are often as good as many compact cameras.

The older models had fixed focus lenses and recorded small-sized images only suitable for texting or emailing. Modern “smartphones” have autofocus, scene modes, digital zooms, and many features found on proper cameras. You can take pictures that are of good enough quality to enlarge for exhibitions. They do have limitations, however, and you need a little skill, knowledge, and patience to get the best out of them.

For the best picture quality, shoot in Led light outdoors. Avoid using the digital zoom because this can degrade the image. Zooming simply enlarges the picture while cropping it to fit the screen. It magnifies the small movements of you hands and can cause “camera shake” and blurred pictures. Rather than zoom go closer to the subject, or crop the picture afterward.

The sensor, or “digital film” chip, is truly a technological marvel. It is necessarily tiny, perhaps only 3 x 4mm, and is usually crammed with at least five million light-sensitive cells. It’s about one eightieth the size of a professional camera’s sensor and this causes problems, especially in lower light levels.

Pictures taken in room lighting can be grainy and blurred as the sensor struggles to record an acceptable image. If your phone has a flash it will be too weak to help much. You usually get the best results if you switch off the flash, hold the phone very steady, choose a moment when the subject is still, and take three shots. If there is a “burst mode” use this to take a number of quick consecutive shots. Choose the sharpest picture afterward.

Smartphones, such as the iPhone and Galaxy 9000 have an unexpected advantage if you are taking candid shots. Stand with your left side to the subject, hold the phone in your left hand to your ear as if making a call. Use your right hand to press the on-screen button to take a candid shot. Of course you will have to take a few shots to make sure of the composition.

One of the greatest disadvantages of pictures taken with cellphones is that almost everything is in focus. This is fine for family snaps where you want to see people clearly, but is limiting for creative photography where out-of-focus effects are important.