#880 freeway collapse

[remembertheplunge]

They talk earth quake there

12/30/1989

I drove to the sun.. Its warmth pervaded my soul. My warmth reached out and joined it. We both glowed through cool grey mists and the  electric blue blanket sky. And, the beacon of December 31 guided us home through the holy terror black cold blanket and I am home and I am alive.

They talk Earthquake there.

The 880 still shoots off in double fisted fashion into the cool air like some saddened amputee.

“My best friend’s boss would have been free of the upper freeway  in 3 seconds" said Richard at the Twin Peaks Bar. “His was the silver car that  they showed on TV…” Free flashlights were given out on the Castro. The Castro came through the earth quake alright. “It’s built on a rock.” “We saw a plume of smoke coming up from the Marina like a bomb had gone off” The Marina is built on landfill from ruins of the 1906 quake.

People are scared.

The City was quiet. Calendar pages littered Market Street and Montgomery. I gathered up a few, including 2 from October 17. Bart on the way back was the most crowded ever. I wore my SCAP T shirt openly. I got weird looks.

1990 rang across bar walls and radio speakers. You’d think ’89 had been gone for months. “Get out of the damed past” said one radio DJ.

Oh, we Americans. Always living 10 paces ahead of our position.

There is so much sweet uniqueness sitting here on the brink.

I enjoyed slipping my ladle into the bucket of swirling days and confetti and lifting out choice fresh deep blue green memories who splashed and gurgled on my face and down my parched mind throat.

With the decade goes so much. I just wanted to sit in the parlor with them all one more time. The dear sweet fog enshrouds and encloses us tonight. It keeps our meeting place safe. Keeps it protected. Sweet, soft , gentle, touch, kiss of the now.

End of this part of the entry

Notes 6/6/2024

In the above entry I am describing my drive from the California central valley where I lived to San Fransisco and the Castro District on December 30, 1989. It must have been foggy in the valley and sunny in the Bay Area. There had been a 7.1 earth quake in the Bay Area on October 17, 1989. It was called the Loma Prieta Quake.

It caused a large section of the upper level of the 880 freeway in Oakland to collapse into the bottom section, crushing the silver car mentioned in the entry. The Marina District was heavily damaged, but, the Castro came through ok because it was built on “a rock”. 

A tradition in San Fransisco was, and may still be , to. drop pages from the years calendar out of the building windows around New Years.

I wore my Stanislaus County Aids Project T shirt on Bart. (I was a volunteer with the project. We supportd people with Aids through their illness and death). BART is and was then Bay Area Rapid Transit. You could see the collapsed 880 freeway from the Bart train.

The Twin Peaks is and was then a gay bar located at Market and Castro Street, San Fransisco.

[broadcastnewsarchive]

Stranded drivers watch the aftermath of the I-580/I-880 Oakland freeway collapse. Multiple parts of the elevated span fell in on themselves due to a prolonged gasoline fire.

Coverage by the Associated Press

Time unknown, 2007/04/30

[x]

[lake-lyn]

ET’s exclusive excerpt of The Tyrant’s Tomb by Rick Riordan (1/2)

Chapter 1

There is no food here

Meg ate all the Swedish fish

Please get off my hearse

I believe in returning dead bodies.

It seems like a simple courtesy, doesn’t it? A warrior dies, you should do what you can to get their body back to their people for funerary rites. Maybe I’m old-fashioned. I am over four thousand years old. But I find it rude not to properly dispose of corpses.

Achilles during the Trojan War, for instance. Total pig. He chariot-dragged the body of the Trojan champion Hector around the walls of the city for days. Finally I convinced Zeus to pressure the big bully into returning Hector’s body to his parents so he could have a decent burial. I mean, come on. Have a little respect for the people you slaughter.

Then there was Oliver Cromwell’s corpse. I wasn’t a fan of the man, but please. First, the English bury him with honors. Then they decide they hate him, so they dig him up and “execute” his body. Then his head falls off the pike where it’s been impaled for decades and gets passed around from collector to collector for almost three centuries like a disgusting souvenir snow globe. Finally, in 1960, I whispered in the ears of some influential people, Enough, already. I am the god Apollo, and I order you to bury that thing. You’re grossing me out.

When it came to Jason Grace, my fallen friend and half bropppther, I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. I would personally escort his coffin to Camp Jupiter and see him off with full honors.

That turned out to be a good call. What with the ghouls attacking us and everything.

Sunset turned San Francisco Bay into a cauldron of molten copper as our private plane landed at Oakland Airport. I say our private plane. The chartered trip was actually a parting gift from our friend Piper McLean and her movie star father. (Everyone should have at least one friend with a movie star parent.)

Waiting for us beside the runway was another surprise the McLeans must have arranged: a gleaming black hearse. Meg McCaffrey and I stretched our legs on the tarmac while the ground crew somberly removed Jason’s coffin from the Cessna’s storage bay. The polished mahogany box seemed to glow in the evening light. Its brass fixtures glinted red. I hated how beautiful it was. Death shouldn’t be beautiful.

The crew loaded it into the hearse, then transferred our luggage to the backseat. We didn’t have much: Meg’s back- pack and mine (courtesy of Marco’s Military Madness), my bow and quiver and ukulele, and a couple of sketchbooks and a poster-board diorama we’d inherited from Jason.

I signed some paperwork, accepted the flight crew’s condolences, then shook hands with a nice undertaker who handed me the keys to the hearse and walked away.

I stared at the keys, then at Meg McCaffrey, who was chewing the head off a Swedish fish. The plane had been stocked with half a dozen tins of the squishy red candy. Not anymore. Meg had single-handedly brought the Swedish sh ecosystem to the brink of collapse.

“I’m supposed to drive?” I wondered. “Is this a rental hearse?”

Meg shrugged. During our flight, she’d insisted on sprawling on the Cessna’s sofa, so her dark pageboy haircut was flattened against the side of her head. One rhinestone-studded point of her cat-eye glasses poked through her hair like a disco shark n.

The rest of her out t was equally disreputable: floppy red high-tops, threadbare yellow leggings, and the well-loved knee-length green frock she’d gotten from Percy Jackson’s mother. By well-loved, I mean the frock had been through so many battles, washed and mended so many times, it looked less like a piece of clothing and more like a deflated hot-air balloon. Around Meg’s waist was the pièce de résistance: her multi-pocketed gardening belt, because children of Demeter never leave home without one.

“I don’t have a driver’s license,” she said, as if I needed a reminder that my life was presently being controlled by a twelve-year-old. “I call shotgun.”

“Calling shotgun” didn’t seem appropriate for a hearse. Nevertheless, Meg skipped to the passenger’s side and climbed in. I got behind the wheel. Soon we were out of the airport and cruising north on I-880 in our rented black grief-mobile.

Ah, the Bay Area . . . I’d spent some happy times here. The vast misshapen geographic bowl was jam-packed with interesting people and places. I loved the green-and-golden hills, the fog-swept coastline, the glowing lacework of bridges and the crazy zigzag of neighborhoods shouldered up against one another like subway passengers at rush hour.

Back in the 1950s, I played with Dizzy Gillespie at Bop City in the Fillmore. During the Summer of Love, I hosted an impromptu jam session in Golden Gate Park with the Grateful Dead. (Lovely bunch of guys, but did they really need those fteen-minute-long solos?) In the 1980s, I hung out in Oakland with Stan Burrell—otherwise known as MC Hammer—as he pioneered pop rap. I can’t claim credit for Stan’s music, but I did advise him on his fashion choices. Those gold lamé parachute pants? My idea. You’re welcome, fashionistas.

Most of the Bay Area brought back good memories. But as I drove, I couldn’t help glancing to the northwest—toward Marin County and the dark peak of Mount Tamalpais. We gods knew the place as Mount Othrys, seat of the Titans. Even though our ancient enemies had been cast down, their palace destroyed, I could still feel the evil pull of the place—like a magnet trying to extract the iron from my now-mortal blood.

I did my best to shake the feeling. We had other problems to deal with. Besides, we were going to Camp Jupiter—friendly territory on this side of the bay. I had Meg for backup. I was driving a hearse. What could possibly go wrong?

The Nimitz Freeway snaked through the East Bay flatlands, past warehouses and docklands, strip malls and rows of dilapidated bungalows. To our right rose downtown Oakland, its small cluster of high-rises facing off against its cooler neighbor San Francisco across the Bay as if to proclaim We are Oakland! We exist, too!

Meg reclined in her seat, propped her red high-tops up on the dashboard, and cracked open her window.

“I like this place,” she decided.

“We just got here,” I said. “What is it you like? The abandoned warehouses? That sign for Bo’s Chicken ’N’ Waffles?”

“Nature.”

“Concrete counts as nature?”

“There’s trees, too. Plants flowering. Moisture in the air. The eucalyptus smells good. It’s not like . . .”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. Our time in Southern California had been marked by scorching temperatures, extreme drought, and raging wild res—all thanks to the magical Burning Maze controlled by Caligula and his hate-crazed sorceress bestie, Medea. The Bay Area wasn’t experiencing any of those problems. Not at the moment, anyway.

We’d killed Medea. We’d extinguished the Burning Maze. We’d freed the Erythraean Sibyl and brought relief to the mortals and withering nature spirits of Southern California.

But Caligula was still very much alive. He and his co- emperors in the Triumvirate were still intent on controlling all means of prophecy, taking over the world, and writing the future in their own sadistic image. Right now, Caligula’s fleet of evil luxury yachts was making its way toward San Francisco to attack Camp Jupiter. I could only imagine what sort of hellish destruction the emperor would rain down on Oakland and Bo’s Chicken ’N’ Waffles.

Even if we somehow managed to defeat the Triumvirate, there was still that greatest Oracle, Delphi, under the control of my old nemesis Python. How I could defeat him in my present form as a sixteen-year-old weakling, I had no idea.

But, hey. Except for that, everything was fine. The eucalyptus smelled nice.

Traf c slowed at the I-580 interchange. Apparently, California drivers didn’t follow that custom of yielding to hearses out of respect. Perhaps they gured at least one of our passengers was already dead, so we weren’t in a hurry.

Meg toyed with her window controls, raising and lower- ing the glass. Reeee. Reeee. Reeee.

“You know how to get to Camp Jupiter?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“ ’Cause you said that about Camp Half-Blood.”

“We got there! Eventually.”

“Frozen and half-dead.”

“Look, the entrance to camp is right over there.” I waved vaguely at the Oakland Hills. “There’s a secret passage in the Caldecott Tunnel or something.”

“Or something?”

“Well, I haven’t actually ever driven to Camp Jupiter,” I admitted. “Usually I descend from the heavens in my glorious sun chariot. But I know the Caldecott Tunnel is the main entrance. There’s probably a sign. Perhaps a Demigods Only lane.”

Meg peered at me over the top of her glasses. “You’re the dumbest god ever.” She raised her window with a final Reeee. SHLOOMP!—a sound that reminded me uncomfortably of a guillotine blade.

We turned west onto Highway 24. The congestion eased as the hills loomed closer. The elevated lanes soared past neighborhoods of winding streets and tall conifers, white stucco houses clinging to the sides of grassy ravines.

A road sign promised CALDECOTT TUNNEL ENTRANCE, 2 MI. That should have comforted me. Soon, we’d pass through the borders of Camp Jupiter into a heavily guarded, magically camouflaged valley where an entire Roman legion could shield me from my worries, at least for a while.

Why, then, were the hairs on the back of my neck quivering like sea worms?

Something was wrong. It dawned on me that the uneas- iness I’d felt since we landed might not be the distant threat of Caligula, or the old Titan base on Mount Tamalpais, but something more immediate . . . something malevolent, and getting closer.

I glanced in the rearview mirror. Through the back window’s gauzy curtains, I saw nothing but traffic. But then, in the polished surface of Jason’s coffin lid, I caught the reflection of movement from a dark shape outside—as if a human-size object had just own past the side of the hearse.

“Oh. Meg?” I tried to keep my voice even. “Do you see anything unusual behind us?”

“Unusual like what?”

THUMP.

The hearse lurched as if we’d been hitched to a trailer full of scrap metal. Above my head, two foot-shaped impressions appeared in the upholstered ceiling.

“Something just landed on the roof,” Meg deduced.

“Thank you, Sherlock McCaffrey! Can you get it off?”

“Me? How?”

That was an annoyingly fair question. Meg could turn the rings on her middle fingers into wicked gold swords, but if she summoned them in close quarters, like the interior of the hearse, she a) wouldn’t have room to wield them, and b) might end up impaling me and/or herself.

CREAK. CREAK. The footprint impressions deepened as the thing adjusted its weight like a surfer on a board. It must have been immensely heavy to sink into the metal roof.

A whimper bubbled in my throat. My hands trembled on the steering wheel. I yearned for my bow and quiver in the backseat, but I couldn’t have used them. DWSPW, driving while shooting projectile weapons, is a big no-no, kids.

“Maybe you can open the window,” I said to Meg. “Lean out and tell it to go away.”

“Um, no.” (Gods, she was stubborn.) “What if you try to shake it off?”

Before I could explain that this was a terrible idea while traveling fifty miles an hour on a highway, I heard a sound like a pop-top aluminum can opening—the crisp pneumatic hiss of air through metal. A claw punctured the ceiling—a grimy white talon the size of a drill bit. Then another. And another. And another, until the upholstery was studded with ten pointy white spikes—just the right number for two very large hands.

“Meg?” I yelped. “Could you—?”

I don’t know how I might have finished that sentence. Protect me? Kill that thing? Check in the back to see if I have any spare undies?

I was rudely interrupted by the creature ripping open our roof like we were a birthday present.

Staring down at me through the ragged hole was a withered, ghoulish humanoid, its blue-black hide glistening like the skin of a house y, its eyes filmy white orbs, its bared teeth dripping saliva. Around its torso uttered a loincloth of greasy black feathers. The smell coming off it was more putrid than any dumpster—and believe me, I’d fallen into a few.

“FOOD!” it howled.

“Kill it!” I yelled at Meg.

“Swerve!” she countered.

One of the many annoying things about being incarcerated in my puny mortal body: I was Meg McCaffrey’s servant. I was bound to obey her direct commands. So when she yelled “swerve,” I yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. The hearse handled beautifully. It careened across three lanes of traffic, barreled straight through the guardrail, and plummeted into the canyon below.

[scienceblogtumbler]

The climate change exchange: ‘Back-up’ plan

Whether we are talking about atmospheric normalization or global warming’s and/or climate change’s causation, “balance” is the word. That’s right, balance.

So in a kind of holistic air-healing sense or maybe more precisely, a holistic air-remedying context, what does being balanced mean exactly?

From physics, we know that if an object exerts a force opposite and equal to that which is being externally exerted upon it, then that object is said to be in a state of equilibrium and consequently that object remains at rest. Furthermore, for soils whose pH levels are lower they are more acidic (less alkaline) and for soils whose pH levels are higher they are less acidic (more alkaline). When a state of equilibrium is reached and pH levels are balanced, the alkalinity zeros out the acidity and vice versa, meaning in terms of pH levels these soils are balanced.

So, how does this relate to air or the atmosphere?

Ever hear of the term “carbon neutral” or “carbon neutrality”? What this implies is that for whatever amount of carbon is entering air or the atmosphere, as long as there is an equal amount of carbon exiting or leaving air or the atmosphere, the air or the atmosphere is carbon neutral.

So, the question becomes: Is carbon neutrality what we should be shooting for?

What we know definitively is that since the introduction of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, Earth’s average surface temperature has risen approximately 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit). If we stay on the track we’re on currently, that is, without any intervention – human or otherwise, the scientific consensus has it that by 2100 the Earth’s average surface temperature will rise to between 3.4 and 6 degrees Celsius (5.2 and 7.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

So, it is with this in mind that NASA Earth Observatory correspondent Rebecca Lindsey in 2009 reasoned, “If the concentration of greenhouse gases stabilizes, then Earth’s climate will once again come into equilibrium, albeit with the ‘thermostat’—global average surface temperature—set at a higher temperature than it was before the Industrial Revolution.” The operative term here: greenhouse-gas stabilization.

The bigger question here is: What is the plan to get there?

Backing up

An important consideration to keep in mind is that historically global mean surface temperature has heated up much more rapidly than the rate at which GMST has cooled.

So, any intervening or mitigating strategy involving extraneous means with which to achieve atmospheric greenhouse-gas stabilization, must not only be effective in bringing this so-called air normalization about, but does so, in theory, at least, in relatively short order.

In realistically approaching this situation, we have options. One of these, of course, is carbon capture and storage (CCS) and carbon removal and reuse (CRR). These are atmospheric recovery or air rescue – mitigation – schemes. There are others as well.

What “back-up” means is just what the term implies: to back up or go in reverse.

Think about all of the times we have gotten lost when behind the wheel. What do we do to get out of the jam we’ve gotten ourselves into? We ask for directions if that is an option or we go back the way we came and start over again. As to the latter, why not do the same when it comes to atmospheric greenhouse gas stabilization or atmospheric normalization? This is not difficult. Just back up!

So, does that entail reverting back to practices comparable to those just prior to the introduction of the Industrial Revolution? No. What it means is what brought us to this place air quality/atmosphere degradation-wise, do less of what has contributed to that and, while we’re at it, make more use of the practices, procedures, programs which help improve air quality as well as not cause further air degradation.

Examples

Flue gas stacks and scrubber absorber vessel

Cutbacks in coal-fired power plant generation – Just about a third of U.S. energy production is by way of coal-fired power plant generation. This is down significantly since the mid-20th century; about a 50 percent reduction.

There are examples of coal-fired power plant shutdowns. One, the Navajo Generating Station in Page, Arizona, profiled in “With Ariz. generator decommissioning come coal-hauler, mine demise,” on Sept. 7, 2019, was due to go offline in December of last year.

Coal-plant closures have come about for one reason or another. There are other more efficient ways of producing electricity. Another has to do with requirements for meeting clean-air standards. Doing such for some plants is cost-prohibitive. Some that are able to can reconfigure, that is to say that they can be converted to burn natural gas, for instance, in place of coal which is cleaner-burning.

Boulevards from highways – You know what they say: Out with the old, in with the new. It’s a familiar refrain.

This topic was covered in the “Being on ‘broad way’ maybe not such an air-smart move after all,” Jun. 25, 2018 Air Quality Matters post.

From the post: “On the afternoon of Oct. 17, 1989 in the Santa Cruz Mountains located south of San Francisco, California a magnitude 6.9 earthquake struck. Violent shaking from what is now known as the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989, affected a number of buildings and infrastructure throughout the area and that included in West and East Bay Area communities alike as well as to the upper and lower spans of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge east of Yerba Buena Island. Hardest hit it seems were San Francisco and Oakland. Extensive damage to freeway structures including the Cypress Street Viaduct portion of the 880 interstate in Oakland and a section of the Embarcadero Freeway (State Route 480) in San Francisco was incurred. The double-decked structures experienced “pancaking,” whereby the upper portions collapsed onto lower parts. Where damage occurred those portions were demolished.”

Long story short, “In the Embarcadero Freeway’s case, it was torn down and replaced by a boulevard at grade or ground level. Moreover, new development in the area took root.”

Similar cases abound. An excellent resource is: “A federal Highways to Boulevards program is the infrastructure project a healthy and equitable America needs,” by Ben Crowther, a Public Square article on the Web site of the Congress for New Urbanism here.

and lastly …

Cities transformed – How one city, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, got it right.

When faced with the choice on how to redevelop, Vancouver, Canada chose smartly.

So really briefly, “This truly insightful decision resulted in Vancouver being transformed, evolving from what once could be described as having a “cookie cutter” urban framework or appearance, in effect, following a growth and development style so common in so many other cities across the North American continent, to what can be considered a model with respect to place-making, space utilization, and enhanced travel and transportation efficiencies. A new and improved Vancouver had arrived!” (Source: “Growing pains: Dispersed or concentrated cities: Which is better?”).

Vancouver, B.C. is among good, like company.

These are but three examples. There are indeed more.

Images: Dennis Murphy (upper); U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (middle)

Published by Alan Kandel

source https://alankandel.scienceblog.com/2020/08/30/the-climate-change-exchange-back-up-plan/

[newsfundastuff]

The 6.9-magnitude Loma Prieta quake killed 63 in 1989. Decades later, the Bay Area is still plagued by structural threats and flammable fuelsIn a 17 October 1989 photo, a California highway patrol officer checks the damage to cars that fell when the upper deck of the Bay Bridge collapsed onto the lower deck after the Loma Prieta earthquake in San Francisco. Photograph: George Nikitin/APOn the afternoon of 17 October 1989, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake rocked the San Francisco Bay Area, killing 63 people and causing $13bn in damages as it toppled a chunk of the Bay Bridge, colapsed a section of freeway in Oakland, and crumbled thousands of buildings from San Francisco to Santa Cruz.Thirty years later, California will launch an earthquake early warning app, the first to cover the whole state, developed by UC Berkeley and the California Office of Emergency Services. The decades since the Loma Prieta quake have been remarkably quiet – yet it’s not a matter of if, but when, the next large earthquake will rattle the Bay Area, and the consequences will undoubtedly be severe.There are multiple faults to worry about in the Bay: the infamous San Andreas is a system, with branches that run up the San Francisco peninsula, along the East Bay foothills through Oakland and Berkeley and further inland through Dublin and Walnut Creek.Just this week, a 4.5-magnitude quake with an epicenter in the Pleasant Hill area shook the region.An antenna to send data stands on a rise above an earthquake monitoring well, right, powered by a solar electric panel, lower left, as scientists from the US Geological Survey set up an earthquake monitoring station on the San Andreas fault. Photograph: Reed Saxon/APIn the case of a major earthquake, experts are particularly worried that “ground failures” will cause widespread structural damage in many parts of the region built on landfill and sand. The California Geological Survey’s most recent map of earthquake hazards shows huge swaths of the inner Bay Area are in “liquefaction zones”, meaning that during a major earthquake, the ground could be shaken so violently that it would very temporarily soften into jelly. “People love to ask the question: is X place prepared for X disaster? Is California prepared for the next earthquake? The answer to that question, 99.99% of the time, is no,” said Dr Samantha Montano, assistant professor of emergency management and disaster science at the University of Nebraska Omaha. “The way we think about preparedness is really kind of weird. When we talk about it day to day: do you have an emergency kit, yes or no? Just because you have that doesn’t mean you’re prepared for an earthquake – there’s a lot more going into that.”For any community facing a potential wide-scale disaster, the preparation is twofold: mitigating risk and preparing for the inevitable management of the emergency.While newer, stricter building codes put in place after Loma Prieta have required more quake-resilient construction, thousands of buildings in the Bay Area were built using old, shaky standards. Oakland passed an ordinance in 2019 requiring owners of vulnerable apartments to retrofit their structures. In San Francisco, where retrofits were due to be completed in 2018, about three-quarters of susceptible units have been quake-prepped.Politicians in Berkeley cited earthquake risk as one motivator for moving to ban natural gas hook-ups in new buildings earlier this year.Officials and others evacuate a man, Erick Carlson, from the Cypress section of Highway 17, now called Interstate 880, in Oakland, California, following the Loma Prieta earthquake. Photograph: Michael Macor/The Oakland Tribune/AP“We have basically allowed ourselves to pump a toxic flammable greenhouse gas producing an expensive liquid into our homes across earthquake fault lines,” the Berkeley city councilmember Kate Harrison said at the time. “It will seem crazy in 100 years. We can see that this is a dangerous situation.”The East Bay had perhaps a little taste of that danger earlier this week: following the mid-sized East Bay quake, two of the area’s five refineries shut down due to the “upset” and their built-up gasses flared.Later, on Tuesday, a NuStar energy fuel storage facility suffered an explosion and large fire, leading many to speculate the earthquake had triggered the accident. A spokesperson could not confirm the cause of the explosion, which some in the area said felt like yet another earthquake.“We want local governments to really be taking the lead and making sure not only that there’s a plan for the city’s government but also that they’re integrating the plans with communities and businesses – particularly businesses like refineries, where there could be an added hazards,” said Montano.> BREAKING : WOW! You can see the tank's top being blown off during this giant explosion at a NuStar refinery in Contra Costa County. According to fire officials, 3 large tanks of ethanol are burning. @kron4news https://t.co/b1zIju9159 pic.twitter.com/IYy6NNcRhP> > — Amy Larson (@AmyLarson25) October 15, 2019Environmental justice activists in the East Bay city of Richmond cite this kind of risk in the bigger quakes to come.“When the Hayward fault shifts, and we have that earthquake, the reality is, large portions of the Chevron refinery are built on landfill,” said Andrés Soto, an organizer with Communities for a Better Environment in Richmond. “And despite the best assurances from Chevron about how they’ve secured their refinery in the event of an earthquake, nature seems to have a way of conquering man-made structures.”A transition away from the fossil fuels that in turn contribute to several other impending California environmental disasters could help make the Bay Area more resilient when the big one inevitably hits.

https://ift.tt/2oHcIu8

[coffeeshoprabbi]

It Was 30 Years Ago Today...

It Was 30 Years Ago Today…

Image: Arial image of the collapsed Cypress Structure in Oakland (USGS)

The engineer who came to take a look at my house said to me lightly, “Well, I wouldn’t trust it in a major earthquake, and you really ought to get that foundation fixed, but it isn’t an emergency.” I had called her in to check out a crack the basement wall. That conversation took place early in October, 1989.

When the…