Ramblings of a Transgirl

Referenced photo link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1wGiUvFtASJFRSqnujrxaQm49MkCs7HTX?usp=drive_link

$city had a flood that broke the 1000 year flood line in $year while I was an intern at $company. It was pretty crazy. Couple of bullet points:

1. The flood ended up being really really bad, ending up at 37.5 feet above the normal banks of the river. This flooded... everything, for miles and miles down the Cedar river, especially $city itself, as it sits in the middle of multiple river bends.
2. We initially used a Dairy Queen as a water marker, but had to give up on that when it went completely underwater. We then switched to using the main transformers at the downtown substation as our water level markers. I could be wrong, but I don't think that's what those are meant for?
3. The five-in-one bridge over the river in downtown has a small dam, a utility corridor, A avenue deck, F avenue deck, and then I-380 on top. It ended up flooding up to a few feet below the top deck.
4. The bridge in #3 was the only one open for a very long ways up and down the river, and we almost ended up trapped on the wrong side (work was north of the river, apartment was south of the river) one day. The approach road we took to the one other bridge still (20ish miles out of the way) open literally had water just lapping across it as we made it to the bridge itself and closed minutes later as the water was rising.
5. The local railroad put trains on the bridges to weigh them down so the buoyant force of the water wouldn't lift them off their piers as the water flowed over them. However, they used an empty train on one bridge and lost both the train and the bridge???
6. All but one of the pumps for the city were flooded, and the last was only saved by a last minute heroic effort (this is the isolated round building surrounded by sandbags) in the photos). We ended up on 20% water for the city for a few weeks, and things were a bit stinky without the ability to bathe.
7. At the height of the floods, the square mile or so our apartment building was on was actually an island for a few hours, though we somehow didn't lose power or cell during that time. (We did lose cable/internet, though.) That was a bit freaky even though we were well above water level and in no danger at all.
8. The local-ish power utility had their main HQ in downtown, a smaller secondary call center in Ohio, and a third even smaller facility elsewhere (can't remember where). The basements and first two floors of the downtown HQ skyscraper flooded, and the Ohio facility was wiped off the map by a tornado two weeks before the flood peak, so they had a really bad time. They literally had generators on the roof and helicopters flying interns into the helipad to man critical calls and equipment. (I know this because some $company interns had shared housing with theirs.)
9. $company had to close their main plant elsewhere in the city when it lost power one day during the height of the floods. It got power back a few hours later, and as /people were losing their houses/, they attempted to force everyone to come back and complete their shifts. I did not come back after my internship despite a job offer because of this. :(
10. I got these photos from a co-worker who was a private pilot. ($company designs and builds a lot of avionics and actually pays for ground school for their engineers so they will have experience with what they're designing.) He went up with a CNN photographer and got a copy of the photos, which I got from him. These are the ones you are looking at. :)

Misc additional stories:

1. The internship had a rough start, as $company brought on many more interns than their IT department was prepared for to the point where they were pulling random computers out of conference rooms (including mine) to cover the gaps. Mine ended up giving endless trouble, was super under-powered for FPGA compilation, and had a monitor with a burnt out green electron gun or phosphor. I discovered this last one when trying to view a Powerpoint template on my screen, which showed as black, but was bright green on my teammates' monitors. My computer was also totally non-functional for two weeks after the internship began, which made it hard to do work. The network was also so overloaded it was common for the VOIP phones to be down so you couldn't even call for help. :(
2. The entire internship project itself was a disaster, though in a positive way for the company. $company had started a number of projects over the last few years with the Analog Devices Blackfin DSP processor, a dual core DSP. This chip had all kinds of bugs and /absolutely horrible/ cache coherency issues at the time (hopefully fixed now) to the point where $company had created a common wiki internally for folks to report issues and workarounds between the /seven/ major projects using it. One of the projects just gave up and re-spun their PCBs, putting two chips on the board and disabling one core on each, which says a hell of a lot about how bad that must've been to deal with. My project (team of three of us) was to test out a new technology by Altera at the time, the C to H (hardware) compiler, /before/ it was potentially adopted by a larger project (shocking idea, I know). The idea was that you could drop a NIOS II soft-core processor on an FPGA and the compiler would be able to generate a co-processor for complex math functions (FFT in this case) and automatically hook it into the processor and call it when the code was due to be executed. The goal was to have normal software engineers be able to write FPGA code, saving the money on specialized FPGA engineers. Not only did compilation take as much as /40 hours/ on our underpowered machines, but you basically had to write your C knowing what hardware it would likely create, meaning you were just taking an FPGA engineer and having them write less efficiently (C vs Verilog or VHDL) with less predictable results. The compilation chain was built for Linux (okay), and ran Java and Perl (for a compiler???) on top of Cygwin, further slowing everything. Needless to say, this technology was not adopted for wider use at the time.
3. One of my team members refused to indent his C code for whatever reason. I still don't know why. I ended up scripting a linter that would run before code commit on my system (and the third team member also copied this) to clean everything up. Later on in the project I got to chose a scripting language. I chose Python. ;) I still smile a little bit every time I indent a line of code because of this. :)
4. There was a night where /every/ car (approximately 50) in the apartment parking lot (interns were in shared housing) was broken into with the exception of mine, because I left no visible electronics or anything else worth stealing in the car. I was quite unpopular for a couple weeks even though I had nothing to do with it, and ended up with at least on dent on my car likely due to that.
5. I don't remember what all of their password policies were at the time, but I do remember two things about them:
   1. The password policies were so constraining, including restrictions on length, to the point that the default password they gave you was basically the most secure password you could actually use.
   2. They had the most ridiculous password restriction I've ever seen: Your password could not be a palindrome. What the fuck hashing algorithm were they using and what was so horribly wrong with it???