Like many, I’ve been watching the terrible news in Japan closely. It especially strikes home because I live in an earthquake zone, a tsunami zone and have the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station 30 miles from my home. Checking up on the plant’s emergency plans was a less than reassuring experience today.
San Onofre Can’t Run Its Web Site Properly
My first thought was to see what San Onofre itself had to say about a nuclear emergency. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the official web site using Google. Oh sure, it looks like Google has it:
But if you try to click from that listing to the official site, you’ll just get this:
What’s happened is that Southern California Edison, the electrical utility that owns most of San Onofre, has moved the page. When, I don’t know. But it was moved.
Normally when you move a page, you do what’s called a “redirect,” which is like a forwarding address or telephone number. If anyone tries to find the page in its old location, you automatically forward them to the new location. This is a best practice for web sites.
SoCal Edison isn’t doing that. Worse, they’re also not reporting the old location with what’s called a “404″ error code, which tells your web browser (and search engines) that the page is no longer valid. Instead, it uses a “200″ code, which means everything is “OK.” This is another best practice failure.
As a result, Google is continuing to list the old page because it hasn’t been told that it’s moved and that everything is fine. I know that building a web site isn’t nuclear science. But it’s sure not reassuring that San Onofre is getting this simple thing wrong.
By the way, despite San Onofre’s error, Bing:
and Blekko:
– both of which are Google’s competitors — have managed to find the new location and list it in their search results, proof that Google isn’t perfect.
Back to the San Onofre plant site. When I finally found it here, I started clicking through the pages, using the navigation links listed on the left-side. One of these was about decommissioning:
This section of the page really stood out for me:
Decommissioning began in 1999 and the majority of the plant’s structures and facilities are expected to be decontaminated, dismantled and removed from the site by 2008.
This is 2011, three years after when decommissioning of SONGS 1 — one of the three reactors on the site — was expected to be completed. So this copy was written before 2008 and hasn’t been updated since?
Again, it’s another thing that I don’t find that reassuring to read. From the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission web site, it seems that much of SONGS 1 has been dismantled but that decommissioning isn’t fully complete — there’s still more stuff to be dismantled, and there appears to be no ETA for when everything will be done.
So hey, San Onofre — maybe an update is in order?
In Case Of Emergency, Find Your Phone Book
Another page on the site deals with what do to in case of an emergency. There are sirens that will go off, though where exactly where these stretch to isn’t said.
There’s also an “Emergency Planning Zone” or EPZ that’s a 10 mile radius from the plant. Beyond that, there’s a Public Education Zone (PEZ) from 20 miles out. Education is only needed here, not planning, because evacutation would be “highly unlikely.”
Phew. All very reassuring. But wait, what if we want more specific details? For the EPZ, we’re told:
All residents within the EPZ receive instructions about emergency plans including protective measures, evacuation routes and shelter locations. These instructions are located in the customer guide section of the Pacific Bell Telephone Book, Orange County South edition.
For the PEZ, it’s similar:
Further information is located in the customer guide section of the Pacific Bell Telephone Book, Orange County South and San Diego County North editions.
Kids, you might not know what a phone book is. It’s a big huge binder that contains phone numbers. Numbers of people were printed on white colored pages; businesses had ads printed on yellow colored pages. That’s why you hear about these things called “White Pages” and “Yellow Pages.”
You might occasionally see these “phone books” appearing on your doorstep. Hopefully, you kept them, because that vital information you may want won’t be on the web. It’ll be printed on dead trees.
Don’t get me wrong. Those dead tree books probably will be working better than the internet during a nuclear emergency. But seriously, you can’t also put the plans online?
The Phone Book From An Extinct Company
But wait, as they say, there’s more! Pacific Bell used to be the local telephone company for much of Southern California. But I remember being confused when I moved back to SoCal in 2008, after having been gone for 12 years. I needed phone service, and PacBell was gone. There was no single phone provider any longer – and PacBell, along the way, got sucked into AT&T.
So that “Pacific Bell Telephone Book” with your emergency instructions? Good luck finding it. I’m virtually certain it doesn’t exist. And that tells me San Onofre doesn’t regularly review the emergency instructions that it posts on its own web site, shades of those emergency oil spill response plans that listed a spill consultant who was long dead.
Hiding The Far More Informative Site
Now in writing all this, I went back to the web site and finally noticed on the home page this easily overlooked link leads to a completely separate “community” site:
That link really leaps out at you, doesn’t it? And it’s nowhere to be found on the aforementioned emergency planning page or apparently other pages on the site.
That’s too bad, because the community site is more helpful. You can even play a clip of what the warning siren sounds like:
But looking for evacuation routes or shelter locations? That’s fobbed on on “check with your city.” And way over there, where San Onofre doesn’t bother to link to, you can even find those phone book guides.
San Clemente is the closest city to the plant, and it maintains a nuclear emergency page here that does seem to be loaded with really useful information. It even tells city residents how they are eligible for free potassium iodide (KI) pills and why those are issued. PDFs of those phone book guides are also offered:
Some Suggestions
I should have found the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station web site — the better site I’ve just described — in Google and Bing for a search on “san onofre.” I didn’t, and San Onofre can help with that.
I’d suggest that all the content from the Southern California Edison site about San Onofre be relocated into that community site. If there’s some legal reason this can’t be done, then certainly link more to the new site.
Also, a little SEO, please. Pages within the site lack descriptive HTML title tags, which would be a help, I’d say.
Get more links out to the individual cities, where they have more planing info. Post that phone book info right on the site. And update the information, so that you’re engendering trust.
More Information
I certainly don’t mean to fearmonger in this post. The safety of San Onofre has long been debated and will continue to do so. I’ve read any number of articles like this gem from Beverly Hills “Patch” that’s not written by talking to any experts and just assumes that because California is expected to have an 8.1 quake on the San Andreas Fault at some time, that’s more than the 7.0 quake that San Onofre is designed to withstand — so we’re perhaps screwed.
The reality is that exactly where a quake hits, how deep, the type of shaking and all sorts of factors can mean that a quake that’s lower on the Richter scale can do more damager than a “bigger” one — or a bigger one may not do as much damage as you think, depending on your location, to my understanding.
In another “Patch” article, this one from San Clemente, San Onofre’s chief Pete Dietrick talks more about that, and what the plant is built to survive. The Press-Enterprise, the San Diego Tribune, the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times all have interesting articles that look at the plant’s protections — as well as experts who still wonder if we’ll be unpleasantly surprised. You can also get updates on San Onofre news from the plant itself via its Twitter account.
Postscript (March 17, 2011): The Orange County Register followed up on this piece and got SCE basically fobbing things off as a Google problem:
“We don’t ‘send’ them to either. Your questions are why Google sends them to sce.com and why our page is not current. We can only help with the latter,” said Alexander in an e-mail.
That’s not true — and in fact SCE did start redirecting, which is good, though maybe someone should tell their spokesperson. Here’s more from the comment I left at the OC Register article:
Sure, Alexander is correct — they’re not “sending” anyone to either of the web sites. But they are publishing them, and they’re doing that in order to spread information, and they’re being inept in doing it.
When he says there’s nothing they can do to direct people from the broken link on their own site to the correct information, he’s dead wrong. They could redirect to the new location.
And, in fact, when I looked just now — they did. So much for the “that’s Google’s problem” attitude.
Of course, anyone reaching the info at the SCE site will still probably not easily find the single link to the far more informative community site, nor will they find it if they read the emergency planning page. They will, however, still see today that they should open up their “Pacific Bell” phone book for information.
Today, the New York Times is taking a major step forward as we 
A sad and strange story — a man in the UK killed after a text was misread as saying “nutter.” Even stranger, how I came to be reading it via the Huffington Post — several sources removed from the original story. My discovery chain.
A sad and strange story — a man in the UK killed after a text was misread as saying “nutter.” Even stranger, how I came to be reading it via the Huffington Post — several sources removed from the original story. My discovery chain.
