Tag: disasters

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Charity impersonation following disasters or public tragedies

A disaster compresses the time between seeing suffering and wanting to help.

That is good for legitimate relief organizations.

It is also useful to scammers.

The Federal Trade Commission warns that fraudsters create fake charities or impersonate established organizations after hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, wildfires, and other emergencies. Familiar names, copied logos, photographs, and urgent appeals can make a new donation page look like part of a real relief effort.

See the FTC’s 2026 guidance on disaster charity scams.

The emotional context does some of the scammer’s work

A donation request tied to a tragedy arrives with a ready-made reason not to delay.

People need food now. Families need shelter now. Recovery costs are immediate.

The scam does not have to invent urgency because the event already supplied it.

That is why the FTC recommends researching the organization independently, especially when the request arrives through social media, text, or a newly created site.

Look the charity up through established evaluators such as Give.org or CharityWatch. Find the organization’s official site on your own. If the request came by text, confirm the donation number through that official site rather than trusting the message.

A familiar name is not enough

Impersonation works by borrowing reputation.

A copied Red Cross logo does not create a Red Cross payment destination. A fundraiser shared by a friend is not automatically verified merely because the friend meant well.

Payment method can also reveal trouble. The FTC warns against supposed charities that insist on cash, gift cards, wire transfers, or cryptocurrency. Legitimate charities generally provide ordinary payment options and clear information about the organization receiving the funds.

The point is not to become suspicious of generosity.

It is to separate the decision to help from the decision about where the money goes.

A disaster may justify acting quickly.

It does not require donating through the first link that appears in front of you.

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Ancient Web: The Sleipner A Disaster Page Is a 29-Line Warning About Bad Numerics

Some engineering failures need books. Some can scare the hell out of you in 29 lines of HTML.

Read the Sleipner A disaster page

Douglas N. Arnold’s page summarizes the sinking of the first concrete base structure for the Sleipner A offshore platform during a controlled ballasting operation near Stavanger, Norway, on August 23, 1991.

The structure developed a leak, failed and sank.

Nobody needs a dramatic soundtrack after that sentence.

The numerical error was not academic

The post-accident investigation traced the failure to a wall in a critical triangular section called a tricell. According to the page, the design problem came from a serious error in the finite-element analysis combined with insufficient reinforcement anchorage.

The numerical model underestimated shear stresses by about 47 percent.

That is the entire moral of computational engineering in one number.

A later, more careful analysis predicted failure at a depth of roughly 62 meters. The actual failure occurred at about 65 meters.

The first structure was lost completely. Arnold’s summary puts the economic loss at roughly $700 million and notes that the collapse produced a seismic event measuring about 3.0 on the Richter scale.

The platform deck involved tens of thousands of tons of structure and equipment. The failed concrete base ended up as debris hundreds of meters below the surface.

This was not a rounding error in a homework problem.

Why this page still works

Arnold’s page is part of a broader collection on disasters attributable to bad numerics. The Sleipner example is especially effective because the chain is so clean:

A numerical model produced stresses that were too low. The design followed the model. The concrete wall was not adequate. Reality ran the test suite.

The page links the summary back to investigation material and structural-engineering articles, and it uses a few diagrams and photographs instead of burying the event under interface chrome.

It was last modified in 2009 and still reads perfectly well because the information architecture is basically indestructible: title, facts, explanation, references.

There is a lesson there for both engineers and web developers.

Models are not reality, and presentation layers are not knowledge.

CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list exists to surface pages like this—small technical documents that have survived because their usefulness is much larger than their visual footprint.

You can read the Sleipner page in a couple of minutes.

You may remember the 47 percent for the rest of your career.

Read Douglas Arnold’s Sleipner A summary