Category: Current Affairs

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Wind and Water

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From the archives: Last spring, Kate and I drove out to Bethany Reservoir, just south of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta at one of the key points in the state’s complex water system. The site is also on the lower eastern slopes of the Altamont Pass country, a big wind-generation site. Pondering the state’s water story and how to tell it–do you take the narrative back to Genesis and/or The Big Bang and talk about where water itself comes from, and how long would it take from that point to get to a discussion of a salmon in the river?– I thought of that visit tonight. Here’s a shot of a wind farm virtually on the bank of the Delta-Mendota Canal–part of the federally developed Central Valley Project–just southeast of Bethany. Whatever you happen to think of the way the water systems were built here and the damage they have caused to salmon and other parts of the old California environment–the engineering is never less than impressive and sometimes beautiful.

The aqueducts move water through a combination of gentle flow and brute force: huge quantities of water are lifted from pumping stations to artificial lakes like Bethany. Then gravity takes over, and the water flows down the manmade rivers to the next set of pumps, maybe 60 or 100 miles away, and the process is repeated. (One of the more surreal sights in the state is along Interstate 5 as the highway climbs the Tehachapi Mountains. The aqueduct runs along the highway, and the water is pumped up nearly 2,000 feet through a pair of above-ground tunnels.) One beauty in the aqueducts is the way they follow the contours along the border of the Coast Range hills to the west and the great valley to the east. The engineers had to work with and respect the lay of the land here.

(Here’s the satellite view, with the hills in their full-on golden summer hue. The image shows Bethany Reservoir. The water comes in from a channel at the northwest corner, having been pumped out of the Sacramento River to a holding basin called Clifton Court Forebay. The California Aqueduct flows out to the south and east (below and to the right). Drag the map to follow the course of the aqueduct. In this image, the California Aqueduct is on the left and the Delta-Mendota Canal is to the right.)


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Special Election

As you Californians know, and as you non-Golden Staters may have heard, we have a statewide special election today. “Special election” is a misnomer of sorts, since we’re deciding not on any candidate but on a series of ballot initiatives that putatively address the state’s fiscal crisis. The state’s finances are in a royal mess thanks largely to the housing bust. The budget process has been subjected to a galaxy of special conditions thanks to decades of initiatives and ballot-box constitutional amendments. So the Legislature and governor are reduced to, and have let themselves be reduced to, the role of managers of the voters’ contrary and self-contradictory whims.

Expression of these whims may seem like a form of democracy. But it’s a twisted and extremely limited form of democratic expression. The simple arithmetic of our electoral process — about two-thirds of eligible voters register, and about two-thirds of the registered voters go to the polls in a good year, and decisions are usually rendered by a simple majority of those who cast ballots — guarantees a form of minority rule. And it’s a minority with an identifiable character: the active electorate tends to be older, whiter, more affluent, and more conservative than the population in general. Today’s vote will be even more skewed than usual. The guesses out there are that just 25 percent of registered voters will go to the polls. That means that the agreement of just one-eighth of those registered, and less than one-tenth of those eligible, will be enough to set state policy for years to come.

Not that I blame voters entirely. The propositions before them are singularly unattractive. The people are confronted with a palette of taxes, theoretical spending limits, special set-asides for education, and changes in the operation of the California lottery. They’ve been told that whatever the outcome, the state is about to undergo another round of deep budget cuts. To vote yes on most of these initiatives is to opt into a dim future; to vote no is to invite a dreadful one. The only measure people seem to really comprehend and support is one that will prevent state officials from taking a pay raise when the state is running a deficit.

California is one of those enterprises that is too big to let fail. It’ll be here tomorrow, next week, and next year, 38 million strong. It’ll have all its problems and its promise. But it’s stuck with a hell of an inefficient way of running things. It makes you think that some time soon it might be a good idea to consider tearing up the rule book we have and starting from scratch.

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News from the Road: Chase County, Kansas

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On the recent Chicago-Berkeley peregrination, we stopped in Cottonwood Falls, Kansas. One draw is the nearby Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, in the Kansas Flint Hills. It’s beautiful country. The town itself has a reputation as a well-preserved prairie village. It’s the county seat, and the courthouse is said to be the oldest still in use in Kansas (or west of the Mississippi, depending on who you believe). Broadway, the main street stretching north from the courthouse, is brick-paved. It is bordered by some handsome old buildings, including a hotel said to have a decent restaurant. We stopped for lunch at the Emma Chase Cafe and had burgers and fries; sweet-potato fries, in my case; never had them before.  

We picked up the local paper, the Chase County Leader-News, which ran the following story at the bottom of the front page on April 9. The story never says so–the locals must just know it–but the R3 Energy plant at the center of this incident is using chicken fat (among other things) as a raw material for biodiesel fuel. I had never thought of chicken fat that way before (a story earlier this week in the Arkansas Daily Gazette mentions that Tyson Foods, a big chicken processor, has a renewable energy group and is building a plant in Louisiana “to make high-grade biodiesel and jet fuels from Tyson-produced nonfoodgrade animal fats such as beef tallow, pork lard, chicken fat and greases.” I am way behind on my alternative energy news).

Six months before the incident, the Emporia Gazette ran a rather long article on the new biofuels plant in Cottonwood Falls. It was put up by a local family looking to get into a new business. It was a win for everyone–until the chicken fat spill.

R3 cleaning up spill

City Utility Supervisor
informs council of
chicken fat spill at R3

Jerry Schwilling
Chase County Leader-News

City Utility Supervisor Ron Lake informed the Cottonwood Falls City Council at its Monday, April 6, meeting that he had discovered a large amount of chicken fat at the city’s sewer lagoons Friday, April 3.

The chicken fat had run through the sewer line from R3 Energy to a lift station and from there onto the ground around the lift station.

Lake said when he discovered the chicken fat he asked R3’s Mike Swartz about it and Swartz said it was chicken fat that had been spilled at R3.

Swartz said Tuesday, April 7, that the spill had occurred when a truck was off-loading at the plant. The truck’s equipment, Swartz said, had malfunctioned spilling the chicken fat on the ground in the plans off-loading catchment area.

That area is designed to catch any spill and divert it either to the plant’s lagoon or the city’s lagoon. The decision was made to divert the spill to the city’s lagoon, Swartz said.

However, the lift station on the sewer line malfunctioned and the chicken fat spread on the ground around the lift station instead of going into the lagoon.

Swartz said the chicken fat was biodegradable and posed no ecological threat.

Lake told the council that he was required by the state to report the spill and to have it cleaned up.

Lake said that Swartz told him the spill had occurred on March 26. R3 did not report the spill to the city, Lake said.

Swartz said he reported the spill to two city employees the day it occurred and was told that Lake was not available.

R3, Swartz said, was having the lift station steam cleaned Tuesday, April 7, and had contracted a skid loader to pick up and dispose of the chicken fat on the ground at the city’s lagoons. He said he expected the clean up to be completed by the end of the day, Tuesday, April 7.

The council directed [city attorney?] North to send R3 a letter asking R3 to clean up the spill in the next seven days or the city would contract to have it cleaned up and bill R3.

The council also asked North to look into the creation of an ordinance to deal with any future spill.

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Watching Water

I’ve become preoccupied the last two or three months with the level of water in California’s reservoirs. If you’re inclined to, here’s where you can join in the fun: The state Department of Water Resources’ California Data Exchange Center. The cliche to describe a collection of information like this is “treasure trove.” For example, here’s one report that I’ve taken to taking a look at just about every morning: The Sacramento/San Joaquin Daily Reservoir Storage Summary. It’s a quick look at about three dozen state’s biggest storage facilities: how much water they’re holding, how many acre feet have flowed in or out in the past day, and–especially interesting–how much water they hold compared both to the average for this date and to the amount held a year ago.

There’s a story in the numbers, though I’m still puzzling out what it is. For instance, the state’s current drought is not a drought everywhere. Although rainfall and the mountain snowpack are generally below average, some reservoirs hold more than average for this time of year and much more than they did a year ago (which was an even worse year, precipitation-wise). But the numbers are just one dimension of a complicated picture. All that water has a lot of work to do. We count on it not just for irrigating the Central Valley farms and bringing drinking and lawn water to the citiies and suburbs, but for providing electricity, too. And in recent decades, the state and federal water managers have even been made conscious of another function the water might perform: preserving wildlife–especially the once-magnificent salmon runs in the Sacramento and San Joaquin watersheds.

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Pandemic, the Game

If you happen to spend time with your adult-age kids, as we occasionally do, they may share some of their enthusiasms with you. Our older son, Eamon, and his wife, Sakura, have become avid fans of the San Jose Earthquakes and taken us to several games. I realize that I like non-American football. I’d be up for seeing some rugby and footy, too.

Our younger son, Thom, is into what I’ll call new-wave board games. Ticket to Ride, a railroad-building game. Carcasonne, a sort of territory-acquisition game. Power Grid, the game of electrical utility domination.

He also introduced us to Pandemic. It’s different from most board games in that players cooperate to head off a series of global disease threats. The game requires consideration of what threats deserve immediate attention and a lot of planning for how to respond. We played the game once. Sadly, we were unable to prevent the world from being overrun by multiple deadly disease outbreaks.

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Snow Again

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Here’s what that Friday morning snow in Mount Shasta looked like. Not sure when it started, but it was over by 10 a.m. By noon, it was turning into a nice day. I spent the afternoon on a ranch north and east of town, and it was dry and warm there.

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Water: The Midwest View

[Other posts on water: 

Big Bathtub II: 'Wasted']

Spotted the following letter today on the Chicago Tribune's (Tom Skillings's) weather page: 

Dear Tom,
The level of Lake Michigan is up 13 inches from last year. That's great, but could you 
express that in gallons of water?
Dan Fridley
Dear Dan,
The quantity of water that circulates through the Lake Michigan hydrologic system is 
truly staggering. And expressing that volume in units as miniscule as gallons yields 
numbers that are so huge as to be practically incomprehensible, but here it goes. 
A 13-inch increase in the level of Lake Michigan's 22,300 square miles amounts to 
5.044 trillion gallons of additional water (5,044,000,000,000 gallons). And that's not 
all. Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are essentially one lake; their water levels rise and 
fall in tandem. Thirteen inches of water added to the level of Lake Michigan means 13 
inches added to the 23,000 square miles of Lake Huron as well, and that amounts to an additional 5.202 trillion gallons (5,202,000,000,000 gallons).

So to summarize the arithmetic: Lakes Michigan and Huron, total surface area 45,300 square miles, have risen a foot and an inch in the past year. The total increase in water volume is 10.2 trillion gallons.

There is no doubt that is a lot of water. But it is an abstraction, proof that in the wet eastern two-thirds of the United States, water is, most of the time, something that's just there, like leaves on the trees, mosquitoes, corrupt politicians and bad beer. In fact, this immense amount of water, these trillions of gallons, are a trivial amount in the Great Lakes context, where volumes can be calculated in hundreds or thousands of cubic miles.

But before we get to that, let's put those 13 inches of Michigan/Huron water to work: let's frame them in the California context. 

In California and anywhere in the West where water means the difference between nothing and abundance, the working unit is the acre foot: the water it takes to submerge an acre a foot deep. An acre foot is 325,851 gallons, and that is said to be enough water for two average American households to keep their toilets flushed and lawns green for a year. 

The extra 13 inches of Michigan/Huron water: It comes out to something like 31.3 million acre feet. California's total reservoir capacity is said to be about 42 million acre feet. So that foot and an inch here–the incidental effect of increased runoff in their basins–would fill California's collection of monster lakes and catch basins three-quarters full. What a gift to a dry place. 

Lake Michigan has an approximate volume of 1,180 cubic miles, and Lake Huron 849. A cubic mile of water is just under 3.4 million acre feet. So the 13 extra inches of water in Michigan/Huron added about 9 cubic miles to their volume, or a little less than 0.5 percent (that's not too shabby, actually). All California's reservoir capacity would be satisfied with roughly 13 cubic miles, about 0.75 percent of the volume of the two lakes (and while we're throwing Great Lakes volume numbers around, the combined volume of Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario is about 2,538 cubic miles; the volume of Lake Superior is 2,900 cubic miles). 

When you see numbers like this, which may be close to meaningless without more context, you think you can understand the envy and ambition of Westerners who think the Great Lakes would solve all their problems. It seems a little crazy, until you travel up and down California and see how much has been invested in large-scale plumbing to make water go places and do things that seem to defy nature and physics.  

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Your California Sales Tax Update

California’s state sales tax is going up by 1 percent–a penny on the dollar — at midnight tonight. That’s part of the deal the governor and Legislature struck to try to deal with our $40 billion (or is it $50 billion?) budget deficit. We didn’t manage to go out and buy anything major, like a car, semi tractor, or fusion-powered Water-Pik, that would have prompted self-congratulations for dodging the state’s nefarious revenue schemes.

The Associated Press and some other news services are saying the tax is increasing from 5 percent to 6 percent. That’s news to the millions who pay the tax and to the state Board of Equalization, the agency that makes sure the tax is collected. The board says the “total statewide base sales/use tax” is 7.25 percent. And checking county to county and town to town, that appears to be the minimum charged anywhere in the state. The highest rate charged, and remember it is about to go up, is 9.25 percent.

So what gives? Why the discrepancy between the news organs and the state bureaucrats and what shoppers up and down the state know?

Well, the sales tax is complex. Due to past budget crises and efforts to ensure local governments–and police and fire services, and transportation projects, have a more reliable source of funding–supplemental levies have been added to the sales tax. Currently, a nickel of tax for every dollar spent on a non-grocery item goes into the state general fund, where in theory it can be spent on anything. The extra penny of tax that goes into effect tonight will bring that general fund portion of the tax to 6 percent. So that’s what the media are talking about.

But then you need to start adding in the supplemental levies:

–An 0.25 levy that went into effect July 1, 2004, that goes to a “fiscal recovery fund.”
–An 0.50 percent levy that goes to a local revenue fund.
–An 0.5 percent levy passed by the voters for a local public safety fund.
–A 1 percent levy, effective July 1, 2004, dedicated to county transportation projects and county and city operations.

After midnight, adding the 6 percent to the General Fund and the various other levies equals 8.25 percent.

On top of that, many counties and cities have added their own sales taxes. San Francisco charges .5 percent for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (as do most of the other Bay Area counties), .5 percent for the county transportation authority, and .25 percent for a “public finance authority.” The total sales tax in the city is rising to 9.5 percent. In Alameda County, where I live, sales tax will hit 9.75 percent.

Two Los Angeles County towns appear to share honors for the highest sales tax rate in the state: South Gate and Pico Rivera both charge 10.25 percent as of midnight.

Here’s the Board of Equalization’s detailed breakdown of state sales and use taxes: http://www.boe.ca.gov/news/sp111500att.htm

Here’s a list of all the jurisdictions in the state and the sales taxes effective 4/1/2009: http://www.boe.ca.gov/sutax/pdf/Pending_Rates-4-09.pdf

And a historical note: The Board of Equalization includes a little table that recaps the history of the California sales tax. Interesting to see the state instituted the tax in 1933, also known as hard times. If I had more time, I’d delve a little into the political back-and-forth that must have accompanied that move.

Also interesting to note, at least by way of contrast, the sales tax in Oregon today: still nada.

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Oakland: The Coverage

Working for the news department of a local radio station, I’ve been paying close attention since Saturday night to the incident in which a paroled armed robber shot and killed four police officers. One observation, in the age of disappearing media sources and shrinking newsrooms: lots of good coverage from the journalism dinosaurs, little or none from our next-generation darlings, the blogs. The former have been swarming the story; the latter offer rehashes of what the dinosaurs report. Not to say that new-type media have not been useful: the Twitter stream on Oakland has been a good source for both news links and to sometimes disturbing online reactions (“disturbiing” defined: rationalizations/justifications for the killing of the police officers; more on that later). If one is looking for an object lesson in what news organizations do well that independents and bloggers do not do well–yet, anyway–the reporting in this case over the last several days is a decent example. Below are some notable examples of local coverage from the last day. I’m starting with a story that we at KQED produced yesterday evening. Reporter/anchor Cy Musiker, who began hustling after the story as soon as he heard about it Saturday afternoon, did a great job at capturing the city’s mood. The rest of the links are to stories that appeared sometime Monday.

KQED Radio News: Oakland Mourns Police Officers

Cy’s Monday evening report.

San Francisco Chronicle: Oakland Killer Was Linked to Rape

Chronicle reports, and OPD confirms, that on Friday (day before shootings) the OPD had learned of a DNA match linking Mixon to a rape earlier this year. OPD reportedly investigating link between Mixon and second rape, too. The Chron did a good job with court records and turned up details of the crime (attempted carjacking) that sent Mixon to prison. Good details on his background as known at the time of his trial and conviction. The story also expands on earlier reports that Mixon was suspected of an earlier murder.

Los Angeles Times: Lovelle Mixon’s parole record

Very detailed chronology of Mixon’s contacts with parole officer.

Los Angeles Times (blog post): Slaying of four Oakland officers raises concerns about parole system

“Concerns” is putting it mildly.

San Francisco Chronicle: Gunman had spent years in and out of prison

Contains a few more biographical details for Mixon.

Oakland Tribune: Parolee stood over wounded police officers and fired again

More details on shooting, per OPD sources. Mixon is said to have disabled both motorcycle officers, then fired again at close range to finish them off. Also, the story names the type of rifle Mixon is supposed to have used in his shootout with SWAT officers, an SKS (Soviet origin; see: http://www.sks-rifles.com/ or http://www.hk94.com/sks-rifle.php and prepare to be charmed).

San Francisco Chronicle: Woman says she pointed police to Oakland killer

Anonymous first-person account from woman who says she hesitated before telling an officer where suspect was hiding. Also note the Monday details of neighbors prying plywood from apartment door to inspect shootout scene.

S.J. Mercury: Cop killer was depressed about heading back to prison, family says

A little more detail from family on Mixon’s background, and other reaction across the city. Interesting detail from one resident of shootout neighborhood: “One woman, hosing down her driveway two doors down from the apartment where Mixon was killed, said some of those lives could have been saved. She said neighbors knew immediately where Mixon had run, but they didn’t tell police — who combed the neighborhood — until nearly an hour later. But in East Oakland, lamented the woman, Elaine, who didn’t give her last name, that cooperation doesn’t easily happen. “It makes you feel bad. But you just don’t want to be a snitch. The word, ‘snitch,’ it’s almost worse than murderer.”

Oakland Tribune: Street shrines for slain officers draw crowds, debate

A pretty good writeup on the range of emotions expressed in Oakland on Monday–especially at the scene of the shootings.