by Paul Kando
Coastal Journal contributor

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY — I am on the lookout for practical ideas, especially when traveling. Here are two worth sharing. First, Hungarian laws now prohibit the sale of a house without an energy audit report that describes current conditions. Other countries in the region have similar rules. A seller is not required to fix any deficiencies, only to advise the buyer of the actual energy performance of the house. Since I hear many comments by Maine homeowners about how, now that oil costs more year after year, they didn’t know what they were getting into, I consider this an excellent idea. 

Second, I am impressed by the way Hungarians (and other Europeans) now insulate existing houses, regardless of age or style, from the outside. The method is so simple that many home owners do the job themselves. Alternatively, a two person crew gets the job done on the typical single-family house in two to three working days, without in any way disrupting or inconveniencing life within. The method has been developed for masonry buildings, the most popular, highly airtight construction in Hungary, but I have seen it applied to wood framed houses as well. I will focus here to polystyrene panels applied to exterior walls, although other materials are also being used. 

Hurricane Sandyby Paul Kando
Coastal Journal contributor

Hurricane Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, with winds spanning 1,100 miles. If damage estimates are confirmed, it was also the second-costliest in history, behind only Katrina. It killed 110 Americans, affected 24 states, from Florida to Maine and west to Michigan and Wisconsin, with particularly severe damage in New Jersey and New York. 

Its winds left 70 percent of Jamaica’s residents without electricity, blew roofs off buildings, killed one, and caused about $55 million in damage. In Haiti, Sandy’s floods killed at least 52, caused food shortages, and left 200,000 homeless. In the Dominican Republic, two died, in Puerto Rico one. In Cuba, there was extensive coastal flooding and wind damage inland, killing 11, destroying 15,000 homes, and causing $2 billion in damage. The Bahamas sustained $300 million in damage and two fatalities.

by Paul Kando
Coastal Journal contributor

Back in 2009, an earthquake struck L’Aquila, Italy. Three hundred people died. A few days ago, an Italian court sentenced seven scientists to jail terms for failing to report consistent findings about earlier, smaller tremors. Their confusing messages, according to the prosecution, resulted in the absence of timely advance warning about the earthquake and constituted a crime. Four hundred years ago the Inquisition forced Galileo Galilei to withdraw his “heretical” thesis that Earth circles around the Sun, not the other way around. Not until 1992 did the church apologize for that absurd trial. 

These two trials effectively frame much of mankind’s defective understanding of science. Galileo’s was an attempt to bend science to serve pre-ordained conclusions. The recent Italian verdicts are an attempt to scapegoat science for events over which it has no control. In fact, Enzo Boschi, one of the sentenced scientists, did warn before the L’Aquila earthquake of a major tremor that “may soon occur in Italy.” He could not say exactly where or when because that is beyond what science today is able to ascertain.