(Transcript) Catastrophic Engineering with Ethan Moriarty

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[00:00:00] Gabriel: Howdy folks and welcome back to another episode of the Chaser Chat Podcast. I am Gabriel Harber and I am very excited to talk about today’s topic with all of you. It’s something that I was not expecting to be the inspiration for an episode, I was actually listening to one of my favorite financial podcasts called Oddlots, highly recommended to all of you if you’re interested in markets, trading, economics, that sort of thing. But as soon as I heard a particular portion of an episode that was about, of all things, insurance issues right now in the state of Florida, I could only think of one person and that person introducing right now, Ethan Moriarty. How you doing, buddy?

[00:00:45] Ethan: I’m doing well, Gabe. How about yourself?

[00:00:47] Gabriel: I am doing great. Very excited to be chatting with you about this because it might not at first glance appear that this is something that you would be an expert in, but once people have an opportunity to listen to this short clip that I lifted from the episode, I think they will understand very well why it is I knew I had to get you on the podcast. So I’m going to go ahead and play that clip right now, and then Ethan and I will be back in just a moment.

[00:01:12] Audio Clip: The 18% of Floridians having the insurance. Yeah. I think it’s gonna send a message because the message that we’ve been trying to send as we educate folks about insurance and how it works is that you need to spread the risk. You need to have a pool of risk in order to absorb the losses. Yeah. When they happen. To put it bluntly, are taxpayers in less flood prone areas currently subsidizing the construction of homes in more flood prone areas? Yes, they are. And that’s a problem. One of the fact that you have construction in areas that are in harm’s way. And when you have a development that’s by the coast, you’re going to have impermeable surfaces. When you have asphalt, there’s nowhere for the water to go. So it stays inside homes or it backs up. There’s one word which I focus on when I think about. Catastrophes and in Florida, and that is resilience, resilience, strengthen homes, capacities to withstand these kinds of storms. Florida has recognized the issue. So if we look at the track of Helene a few weeks ago, because Michael hit Florida in the Gulf area, in the big bend area, the panhandle side. Building codes were strengthened. Houses were built to code. But when Helene crossed the border from Florida into Georgia, there was much more destruction in Georgia because Georgia does not have those stringent building codes that you need to have to really make your house more resilient. So resilience is key on a national basis. I turned back to 1953 when the Dutch low country below seawater flooded lots and lots of times for centuries. 1953, they had a horrible Storm there and they said Basta it’s not Dutch, but Dutch equivalent of enough. They said Kuk, I guess Kuk. And they had a big project to build levies and other sort of defense systems and they haven’t had a massive flood loss since. And also if we compare Hurricane Katrina of 2005. To Ida, exactly 16 years later. We remember 2005 when the levees burst in New Orleans, and after that, the levees were strengthened and the city survived Ida, which was as powerful a storm for Louisiana. So that demonstrates that resilience works. There’s a ratio that’s typically used in the industry that 1 of resilience results in 6 of disaster relief averted. By the way, Tracy, I just got to say, if there are any academic economists listening to this episode, do a paper on the Florida versus Georgia damage and the natural experiment we saw on updated building codes. It sounds like it’s there for the taking for someone looking for their master’s thesis.

[00:03:48] Gabriel: Okay, so definitely something that is right up your alley, Ethan, and this gives us a great opportunity to actually talk for a second about your YouTube channel. I’m actually so happy and excited for everything that has happened for you over the past couple of years. I remember chatting with you when your YouTube channel ‘June First’ first started and I remember some of the early struggles that you were having and it has just absolutely exploded into a WX powerhouse at this point. So first of all, just congratulations to you on that.

[00:04:21] Ethan: Thanks, Gabe. I appreciate it. Yeah, it’s been a interesting journey thus far with how it’s evolved. It was a rudderless ship for a while. I would say in the early stages, dating even back to 2018, but to find my little corner and develop it from there, it’s been a very fun journey and I’m excited to be full steam ahead.

[00:04:44] Gabriel: A lot of the content that you cover on the June First YouTube channel is related to damage indicators, damage markers, how building codes affect the eventual outcomes of severe weather. And that particular clip that people just listened to talked a lot about how maybe the reason we don’t see as much damage in Florida from something like Helene is because they’ve just been battered and beaten down so many times that it has forced insurance companies and legislators to both demand that the building codes be increased to a higher quality and then you get into places like Georgia, North Carolina, places that are already synonymous with maybe some of the poorer economies in the US situated there in the Appalachian Mountains. So I’ll go ahead and give the floor over to you, and if you could maybe just share with folks some of what you discovered when you were doing some research into this.

[00:05:44] Ethan: Yeah, so with Florida’s building regulations, a lot of this goes back to Hurricane Andrew in 1992, which is a extremely infamous case when it comes to inland hurricane impacts. For those that don’t know, Hurricane Andrew made landfall as a Category 5 along the eastern coast of Florida, basically going through the Fort Lauderdale area and then eventually coming back out the far side into the Gulf and then landfalling another time up in the interior Gulf. But the widespread impacts were mainly within interior Florida, which is not something that we typically associate with hurricanes. The surge in Andrew was not particularly impactful, but it was those inland winds that really devastated so much of interior Florida. And at the time, I believe there was $25 billion in damage in 1992 just isolated to Southern Florida alone when it comes to home and residential impacts. I think there was an estimated total of 100,000 homes with some level of damage and 60,000 completely destroyed. And the domino effect from that was what really led to Florida taking a step back and being like, okay, we really need to reevaluate how we go about things because the domino effect after resulted in tent cities across the state, just from the sheer amount of people dislocated. Multiple insurance companies went bankrupt. I think somewhere, I think there was almost like 20 insurance companies that went bankrupt in the direct aftermath of Andrew and there was a resulting housing crisis as well in the years after Andrew.

[00:07:33] So, Andrew really woke the state of Florida up and when they were going back and looking at this all, it was realized that building codes were not standardized across the state and they varied wildly. Nonetheless, it’s… goes to show that the building codes in Florida are a particularly important thing, especially with such a frequency of hurricanes being a common staple of Florida. So ultimately in the years following, they took the findings from surveys, Tim Marshall being a big part of one of the surveys and other members from like ASCE, which is the American Society of Civil Engineering and other code writers came together and ultimately Florida was able to adopt new building codes that were made mandatory statewide, which is the highest level of building regulations in the country. And that’s mainly because of the impacts of Andrew and you can see the lingering effects of that and influence of that. If we look at Hurricane Milton and the associated tornado outbreak, if you looked at any of the damage indicators from like the Palm Beach tornado, for example, it was in rated an EF3. But if you look at those EF3 damage indicators and look at the images, it doesn’t look anything like an EF3 damage indicator and say the Plains or even Dixie Alley for that. The homes have just been so rigorously built to code that EF3 damage indicator is not the same in Florida as it is in the rest of the country. Which is, an interesting thing to see so far down the line, the positive impacts from the changes within Florida itself.

[00:09:21] Gabriel: Yeah, and I find that to be really interesting because oftentimes, you have this weird play within the WX community where people want things to be rated higher. Essentially, what they’re saying in a roundabout way is they want there to be more damage. But a lot of times, that means that things might not have been built as well as they could have or should have. And so then you have a situation like you just mentioned where an EF3 damage indicator in Florida is not the same as an EF3 damage indicator, let’s say deep in the heart of Mississippi. And it almost seems like a really good problem to have that we don’t see tornadoes being rated as highly as they used to be, because that does mean that at least to some degree, places are taking their building codes more seriously.

[00:10:09] Ethan: And, Florida is obviously a pretty unique case. But, it should be almost like a standard that we should be seeing across the country. In some ways, obviously there’s, economic reasons as for being the primary drivers as to why that is not the case. But, you look at, tornado prone regions of the country particularly in the Deep South and the Great Plains where you have you know, economic implications where, you see a greater abundance of mobile homes. And if you look at Florida, for example, even their mobile homes are on a stricter standard than the rest of the country. And all of that kind of gets traced back to Andrew in the case of Florida. So it’s really interesting to see the disparity of practices across the country when you really zoom the lens out.

[00:10:57] Gabriel: Did you happen to come across any of the reasons or the methods that they use for the mobile homes in Florida to make them more resilient?

[00:11:04] Ethan: A lot of it comes down to like retention methods and different types of mobile home construction. They’re obviously a much more stringent, less I don’t want to say a paper mache, but basically their building standards are way more significant and particularly also in the retention methods as well. Way more rigid and have much more solid retention methods and tie down methods that we typically don’t see in areas of the Deep South where that type of stuff is not regulated as much, or at least on a statewide level. Coastal areas are oftentimes like a county by county basis a lot more stringent, but nonetheless looking at some of the states that were impacted by Helene, for example Georgia, for example, granted, not the most typical Dixie Alley state that we think of tornadoes, but nonetheless, there have been multiple EF4s over the years that we can look at in terms of tornado examples, but, comparing the two states in terms of their building practices the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, IBHS, they do a lot of very interesting work when it comes to severe weather and how it impacts home residences and all that type of stuff some really interesting stuff that they do there, and one of the things that they do is they do a report every so often basically codes along the Atlantic coast and Florida earns a grade of a 95 where Georgia on the other hand earns a grade of a 67, and kind of the main thing that kind of differentiates Georgia from having a nice rating, even though it being a Atlantic bordering state is due to the fact that they do have a statewide building code, but it’s, a pretty boilerplate building code from the outside looking in. But the real kicker is that there are provisions within the laws that allow counties and local jurisdictions to opt out of statewide code requirements. So therefore the state doesn’t really have a uniform enforced building code when, you really dive into the details of it. So it’s those types of things that you get these wildly varying kind of building practices across a state. Whereas, you look at the prime example of Florida being maybe the standard that we should be seeing if we really want to be serious about limiting damage from wind borne type storms.

[00:13:31] Gabriel: And that brings me really to the first, I guess you could call it, action item that I was thinking of when I was formulating this podcast. It’s that when something like Hurricane Helene happens, people throw their hands up in the air and they say, there’s nothing that could have been done. This was an act of God. It was out of anybody’s control. And obviously, that’s true to a pretty large extent but I think when you attribute everything to just it was an act of God and there was nothing that could have been done to help the situation you set yourself up in the future to have similar or worse scenarios play out because there is I think a lot of stuff in retrospect you can look at and say you know hey what there’s you know the concept of min maxing like we get it that there’s not always going to be the most amount of economic resources available to people in those parts of the country. It’s, awful It’s not fair, but it is what it is at least at this point in time. But what where do you get the most bang for your buck in reinforcing a lot of these buildings and a lot of these communities that people live in? And so that’s I guess one of the things I’m hoping to come out of this podcast is maybe it falls upon the ears of somebody who is in a position where they can actually make suggestions whether at the legislative level or you know at the executive level or you know anything in between I think would be a pretty desirable outcome for a conversation like this.

[00:14:53] Ethan: Yeah, I think a good place to start in that respect is that report that I was talking about earlier the IBHS, I want to get the exact name here… I think it’s called rating the states something along those lines and they have exact outlines detailing what should be done on a regulatory level in order to enforce those types of things. But I think even if you’re an individual, say you’re looking to build a house in either hurricane prone area or a tornado prone area, there are standards that you can build your house to if you really want to be serious about it. Fortified comes to mind. Fortified is ultimately the most bulletproof design standard you can employ when it comes to building a house from the bottom up. It’s that type of standard that ultimately will, you know, save lives in the grand scheme of things, even if you’re hit by an EF4 level to an EF5 intensity type tornado, it’s going to enforce the reinforce the structure enough that if you’re following proper safety practices of getting to the most interior lowest room that you’ll have that fighting chance and not leave it up to fate. Especially if we’re looking at a mobile home type situation, for example. So that’s a place that I think would make most sense in terms of starting. I think also too, it’s worth keeping in mind too, with Helene’s inward extent that, from a meteorological perspective, it was an outlier case as well, where Helene was moving I think I think I found a figure that it was moving at like the 98th percentile in terms of forward speed for Gulf landfalling hurricanes, which is an extremely interesting point to look at as well that, it’s this myriad of factors that really made Helene such a devastating storm.

[00:16:46] Gabriel: Yeah, absolutely. And I like your suggestion of people taking things into their own hands and I guess for lack of a better term demanding that their houses be built to a higher code when they actually do go to build those houses or those businesses or churches or whatever it might be. But I also think we subsidize a lot of stupid shit in this country. A lot of dumb stuff, and it seems to me like a pretty uncontroversial place to put federal money, whether it’s, created out of thin air via money printing or, used via tax revenue, whatever the case may be. I don’t think a lot of people would have problem with subsidizing new structures that were being built in these areas that are prone to severe weather so that they were built to these higher building codes. I think that would be a pretty good use of government money. And I’m going to cite back to the beginning when I played that clip from the Odd Lots podcast where the guest on the show said that $1 of resilience in the insurance industry is generally regarded as worth $6 of disaster relief. And, in the WX community, I think we do an absolutely excellent job of raising awareness for and raising money for disaster relief, but it sure would make a lot more sense and be a lot nicer to just pay 20% of that on the front end, whether it came through organizations like charities, or even if it was just some sort of government program, rather than having to spend so much more money down the road. And also, force people to deal with the disparate impacts of having their entire lives upended.

[00:18:18] Ethan: Yeah, for sure. And, a positive lens to look at that. Granted, it’s not so much in the windborne side of things, but looking more at the flooding perspective. One of the things that I’ve seen personally; I moved to Hoboken, New Jersey about a year ago and this was a town that was heavily impacted by Hurricane Sandy. On paper, Hurricane Sandy doesn’t seem like it would be such a devastating storm, it being only a Category 1 on paper, but it was such a low pressure storm, such a wide storm, it being the largest storm ever in the Atlantic basin at almost 1200 miles in diameter, and containing such a low pressure that it’s windfield timed with a really poor high tide at a full moon… it was just like a worst case scenario for greater New York City. And it, ultimately had one of the most devastating surges ever seen on the eastern coast, and Hoboken, New Jersey in particular, right across from Manhattan was completely submerged basically. There was only Stevens University that was basically spared in terms of surge inundation. And in the wake of that there were a lot of programs that were ultimately utilized to put funding into flood infrastructure in the city. So around here, there’s tons of bioswales, which are, natural storm drains almost that allow for there to be not that you’re not having to rely on these grates to take care of the water, but rather these kind of much larger kind of earthen type structures that are much better at naturally distributing water back into the watershed and are much cleaner as well. And then additionally several parks that they’re building, one just finished and there’s another one that’s being finished, that is a giant flood mitigation project basically. And underneath there’s like a multi million gallon storm water detention area that basically, diverts all this storm water from the residential areas. So, it’s cool to see lessons being learned, at least, in my local area. But at the same time too, it’s like this is a lesson that can be learned across the country, not only from, maybe a flood protection measure, but also from the windborne damage side as well like what we saw with Florida in the years after Andrew.

[00:20:42] Gabriel: One of the things that always irritates me is that narrative after the fact of it was a generational event. It, it only happens like once every 40 years or a hundred years or 250 years. And I get that there is a lot of utility and referring to things in those terms. But really what I’m hearing is, so we know it’s going to happen again at some point, or if it hasn’t happened yet, we know it’s going to happen at some point in the future. That just takes me back to the point that I was making earlier about an ounce of prevention being worth a pound of cure, and if we know that things like this are going to happen, it’s great to hear that the greater New York area has been fortified. Is that the greater New York area? Did I get that right?

[00:21:26] Ethan: Yeah. Hoboken is.

[00:21:28] Gabriel: Okay.

[00:21:28] Ethan: Yeah. Hoboken is pretty much it. It’s more New York than Staten Island as far as I’m concerned. So the fact that Staten Island’s a borough is funny to me, but anyway.

[00:21:39] Gabriel: That’s a topic for a different podcast right there.

[00:21:41] Ethan: Definitely.

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[00:22:28] Gabriel: So yeah it’s good to hear that area has been fortified and it’s great to see those lessons learned, but it would be wonderful to actually take those lessons to other places that have historically, since we’ve had modern civilization here in the United States of America, never experienced an event like that, but we can look at that area and we can say, if what happened with Sandy happens here, then the situation is going to be very similar and I know that what it really comes down to right is it comes down to willpower and a lot of that is just politicians, regulators not having the desire to front the bill for something like that. But I like what Bill Belichick, you know take it back to your region of the country again I like what Bill Belichick says which is: Gabriel You’re going to be in pain regardless. It’s obviously this isn’t verbatim But you can have the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. And you just, you get to pick which pain you want to go through. And I think that this is the type of situation where you definitely want the pain of discipline upfront, rather than having to pick up the pieces from Sandy and fortify everything after the fact.

[00:23:26] Ethan: Definitely. And it’s interesting too, because, obviously the primary devastating impact of Helene was ultimately the interior excessive rainfall event in Appalachia. Western Carolina, obviously getting a lot of the focus, but Eastern Tennessee was obviously just as impacted. And, Eastern Tennessee isn’t unfamiliar with an historic excessive rainfall event. If we look back to, I believe it was August 21st, 2021? Waverly, Tennessee, which was it wasn’t quite Appalachia, but it was another, mountainous area of central Tennessee saw, I think an absurd amount of rain in a 12 hour span, like well over a foot, I think like 18 inches or something along those lines. And the town of Waverly, Tennessee took the brunt of the impact. I think they had somewhere near double did or double- no wait, like two dozen fatalities, I think somewhere in that figure there. And it was a very similar type of excessive rainfall event with it being a community along a main tributary in a mountainous area where if you’re going to dump that much water there, it’s going to have to go somewhere and it’s going to come through that town, unfortunately. And though the mitigations there it’s less a matter of, putting infrastructure in place, but, taking the lessons learned and, okay we know how to use the weather prediction center is really good at issuing their excessive rainfall forecasts. Helene was a well forecasted excessive rainfall event. This other event in Tennessee, I believe was forecasted a day or so in advance. And if you look at the eyes of legislature or whatever, this would have been a great learning opportunity to apply to the mountain communities. What’s the playbook if we can put something in place to ultimately respond? Okay. If you’re in a a high volume water location, I’m not sure what the best term to use there is, but if you’re in a, a main tributary kind of watershed, that’s the kind of area that you should be putting the messaging in place well ahead of time and, putting some sort of evacuation. Granted, it’s, obviously it’s gonna, the playbook that would be needed for that would be, much more granular in detail. And it’s really tough to hammer home the details, but nonetheless an event like what happened in August of 2021 should have ultimately set the wheels in motion that, three years later, given the forecast that was presented with Helene, you would think that three years would be enough time to figure out an action plan and enact said plan in order to evacuate the people that needed to be evacuated in a systematic fashion or something along those lines. So it’s this kind of, slightly disheartening to see, but not overly surprising at the same time, given wheels of government are not exactly the most fastest of moving.

[00:26:21] Gabriel: Yeah. It’s definitely once you get to a point where you’re relying on these large bureaucratic behemoths to save your life, you’re already in a really bad position because like you said, they just move so slowly that a lot of times all the damage is already done before they can even arrive on the scene.

[00:26:40] Ethan: It would be nice to have seen at least an effort made in the aftermath of say the 2021 event. Maybe it’s a little bit more understandable if something was started, I would think three years would be enough time to get something started. But at the same time too, now that Helene has been such a widespread event. I think the 2021 event I think was, if I’m recalling the timeline correctly, was quickly then overshadowed by Ida just a week or two later. So you know, you think about it in that perspective, a freak excessive rainfall type event that doesn’t have a name attached to it maybe falls out of the mind pretty quickly in the weeks following. But something like Helene, especially being in a much more heavily populated area in Asheville, for example, is ultimately going to maintain the attention span for a little bit longer. Maybe not necessarily from a government sense, though, that would be nice to see. Maybe this is the kind of event that takes place that ultimately kind of wakes people up a little bit in these types of communities that live in kind of mountain tributary towns to maybe pay attention a little bit more to WPC excessive rainfall event type messaging. If you live alongside a river, maybe it’s worth keeping an eye on that type of thing or setting up an alert and kind of getting ahead of the stone if you want to call it that.

[00:28:00] Gabriel: I really liked the point that you made about the Tennessee event, not having a name, but Hurricane Helene being like an event with a name because Gabriel humans, for all of our downfalls and inadequacies, we tend to react very well to stories. We love stories. And so when you give something a name and there’s a narrative behind it, I do agree with you that I think there is a lot of potential for this to actually stick in people’s memories and spur some action versus a random rainfall event in Tennessee or Kentucky, which, it’s basically called the rainfall event of August 15th, 2022 or something like that.

[00:28:40] Ethan: For sure. And, I think there is a lot of good that’s going around, too. Granted obviously the impacts are tragic. There’s nothing that we can really do about that. But I think like folks like Aaron Rigsby, for example, that have been back and forth between the impacted areas and documenting the people’s stories out of there. I think it’s really cool to see that people within our community particularly are taking the initiative to capture not only the imagery associated with the devastation, because that’s obviously a primary thing that so many chasers do, but to also capture the stories associated with it, which is something that I personally have wanted to do for some time now and have started to get those wheels in motion as well. But to see what Aaron’s doing, for example, is really cool to see and those and they’re reaching a wide audience too. And hearing directly from the sources of people that had to endure such a traumatic and life threatening event, hearing it directly from a first person source is the type of messaging that ultimately sends the learning lessons home, if you will even though we get these messages ahead of time what to expect. When you hear stories about like storm surge or flash flooding events where the water really is rapidly rising inches per minute type of thing, and it’s like hard to even comprehend, but hearing it from not just some graphic that you see posted on Twitter or whatever, but rather the lips of the person that experienced it themselves. It goes to show like how much more powerful I think of a messaging that ends up being.

[00:30:19] Gabriel: Yeah, we recently had an episode on Chaser Chat. People can scroll back in the feed with a survivor of the flooding in western North Carolina. Rosie Vortex actually did that interview and it was extremely compelling. Very harrowing stuff. I would highly recommend anybody who’s listening to this episode, if you’re interested in the subject matter to go and listen to that one once this is over. And like you said, it just, it really drives the point home to be listening to a person who experienced it, and he was very candid with Rosie. He thought that he was about to die. He was making his peace with his creator and he was like I guess this is it ’cause I’m in a trailer and, he had watched other, other structures just basically being washed away down the mountainside. And he was like the water’s up to like my knees now. And it’s coming up to my midsection. And I guess this is it. So it’s really chilling to, to hear stories like that.

[00:31:12] Ethan: Yeah, definitely. I listened to that podcast episode on a run as a matter of fact, and there was at like one point where I was I was so entrenched in this guy’s story that I realized they had ran a little bit too far. And just to go to, yeah, it goes to show just how powerful that messaging is. But just to put like an engineering perspective on kind of the power of water, for example, because I think it’s a really important message to, to be had, water is, I believe around 800 times more dense than air. And, with that if you move the same volume of water at say a hundred miles an hour as you would air. So say a volume of water at tornadic speeds, low end tornadic speeds, for example, that water contains 800 times more energy than that of air. Water is something that you will not win the battle against, and it’s… the “turnaround, don’t drown” is the classic example you can point to. But for anybody that’s been in a rip current in the ocean, you know exactly that helpless feeling of being at the mercy of the water. It’s a terrifying experience from a firsthand perspective and being in floodwaters for that matter of fact, filled with debris and mountain runoff water that has massive amounts of energy from all coming down the sides of mountains, just gaining speed and pooling all in this one tributary. It’s scary to think that, anything that goes into the water, your chances of survival pretty much diminish to zero. And listening to that story in particular, I believe he had referenced how the people that were across the lot from him, I don’t believe they were accounted for. I’m not sure if there was any update on that after the fact, the people that once that their trailer had ultimately gone downstream, like there’s not much you can do and you can be Michael Phelps for all I care. You’re not swimming out of that water. Just to put, some numbers behind it, just to emphasize it. I think that’s an important message to be had.

[00:33:23] Gabriel: I think so too, and as we bring this episode to a close, I really hope it’s given some food for thought. Especially on the preventative side of things that hopefully we can all just keep in mind that we like to gather lots of people together and rally behind disaster relief causes, which is one of the things I love so much about the WX community. There’s just there’s so much caring and so many heartwarming moments where people come together like that, but just… let’s not take our eyes off the ball, and when there’s no disaster to be had, when the situation from Helene and Milton fades from memory, and it’s been six months or a year or whatever since we’ve had the last disaster, there’s still work needs to be done. There’s still battles that need to be fought, and obviously they’re not always as top of mind and sexy in the media as other causes, but they’re definitely worth it. And It’s one of those things where you never know how bad things could have been. So it’s not like you can quantify how many lives you saved or how much money you saved when a disaster happens and buildings are properly fortified and evacuation plans are followed and people do act on those sorts of things. And so it typically doesn’t get the same sort of press because, it’s not a great headline like preventative measures hold strong, nobody injured, no property lost, like that’s not going to get, that’s not going to grab headlines on newspapers and, the five o’clock news, but it’s absolutely something that’s worth all of us continuing to keep in mind and striving for.

[00:34:49] Ethan: Yeah, 100%. And, this kind of goes back to something that I like to think of from my, my, my days playing hockey was, the verbiage of the best defense is the best offense type of thinking where if you have the preventative measures up in place, you can take things into your own hands to be prepared for the situation that pertains to you, whether you live in a hot spot of tornado alley, for example, and, you install a shelter if you have the means to, or at least just having, some sort of action plan in place, evacuating when evacuations are recommended or in place. Ethan It’s those types of things that ultimately save lives, and at the same time too, if you have the means to take the more structured approach of designing a home- granted, obviously not everybody has that capability to do that, but nonetheless, if you are at least aware of what you could be doing within your means, that sets you up more for success in the future.

[00:35:50] Gabriel: Amen to that. Ethan, I really appreciate you joining me on the podcast here today. Before I let you go, could you tell people where they could find you on social media and also give june First a little bit of a plug here, let people know what they can expect if they go visit the YouTube channel and tell them why they should subscribe.

[00:36:07] Ethan: Yeah. The main platform that I probably post the most often on in terms of a personal level is Twitter @EMoriartyWX. And then to plug June First, a bit June First is what started as a project it from an engineering lens, researching weather and stuff like that from that engineering perspective and ultimately now the kind of the main primary focus is a weather based content channel on YouTube. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t strayed from our engineering roots. I like doing the film stuff, like I like making videos and stories and documentaries about weather events and my own weather stories, but at the same time too we’re doing a couple of cool things as well now on the side. We’re doing some interesting weather based engineering projects that I can’t really talk too much about yet. But what I can say is that it’ll improve the live storm chasing experience from a very specific perspective in a very interesting way that really blends engineering and what my skill set is in terms of being a mechanical engineer and developing the future tools of weather research. So I’ll leave it at that for now and let the imagination kind of wander if that’s the best way to do it. But definitely will be some video stuff about that alongside other films and stuff about historical weather events.

[00:37:38] Gabriel: Awesome. My imagination is definitely running wild. So thank you for teasing that. And thank you once again for joining me on the show here. It’s been a great conversation.

[00:37:46] Ethan: Thanks Gabe for having me.

[00:37:48] Gabriel: Thanks for listening. If you’re not already subscribed, hit that button right now and then make sure notifications are turned on so you never miss an episode again. There are lots of ways to show your support for Chaser Chat. You can pick up something from the merch store, leave a rating and a review on your favorite podcast app, leave a comment and a like on YouTube, or just share the link to this episode on your preferred social media platform.

[00:38:09] Thanks again for listening, and I’ll catch you on the next episode.