Fragmentary Evidence

In case you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you, say, filled part of San Francisco Bay with landfill and built some airstrips on it, then abandoned them for a decade or more, here is a photo I took yesterday at the Alameda Naval Air Station, which has been unused by planes for over a decade:

That’s a tidal pool on an old taxiway—the water shows up around high tide, then drains away as the tide subsides. Here’s a shot from the same angle, taken at a dry point in March:

When you gaze out at the runways with plants growing in every crack and shorebirds sometimes swimming in the temporary pools of water, you get the feeling that it would only take another decade or two for the bay to reclaim this land. With the ongoing battles over redeveloping the area, maybe we’ll actually see it happen. Here’s a different angle of the same tidal pool, with a disappearing runway and the cranes and shipping containers of the Port of Oakland in the background:

(I posted some other photos of NAS Alameda here back in March. Those photos and a few more are all collected in a Flickr set.

The bad news: The Large Hadron Collider won’t yield results anytime soon. The good news: If the paranoid crazies end up being right that it will destroy the universe, then we have gained a short reprieve.

As I feared and warned about just two weeks ago, BART’s profligate board of directors just voted to raise fares six months earlier than planned, citing budget deficits. See, it’s okay to waste money, because you can always get transit-dependent citizens (along with BART employees) to pay for it. Never mind that those citizens are also suffering in this lousy economy, and that the reason many of them use public transportation is because they can’t afford to own cars, and that for environmental reasons we should be doing everything we can encourage, not discourage, use of public transit. Here is CBS5’s early story on the vote:

Bay Area Rapid Transit riders can expect to start paying more to ride and park this summer as the transit agency tries to close a $250 million deficit projected over the next four years.

BART directors voted Thursday to adopt three fare hikes that will go into effect on July 1.

At the end of a lengthy discussion, BART directors voted to raise basic train fares by 6.1 percent and to add 25 cents to the minimum fare for short trips. They also voted to charge an extra $2 surcharge for all trips to the San Francisco International Airport.

The 25-cent increase in the minimum fare will increase the base fare from $1.50 to $1.75.

BART directors also voted to begin charging a $1 parking fee at eight additional stations. Parking fees are already in place at some BART stations.

BART had not been slated to increase its fares until Jan. 1, but directors voted to move up the fare increases by six months because of BART’s large budget deficit.

Union contracts expire on June 30 and BART is also likely to ask for significant concessions from employees to help make up for the budget shortfall.

I haven’t heard yet whether Lynette Sweet, the BART director who recently said that raising fares to SFO would be “hard to swallow” and a “hardship,” voted for the fare hike.

It was pretty clear that something like this was coming, but I thought that the BART directors would wait a while, for fear that it would appear unseemly to raise fares two weeks after deciding to waste half a billion dollars on a train-in-the-sky to Oakland Airport. Apparently they had no such qualms, however.

California’s official motto is “Eureka.” Our official nickname is “The Golden State.” Has any thought has been given to changing one of these to “State of Emergency”?

The most recent state of emergency was proclaimed by Governor Schwarzenegger on Friday, regarding the ongoing drought. (Our current heavy rains, although helpful, have only been a drop in the bucket, so to speak.) Three weeks earlier, the governor had declared a state of emergency because of the state’s projected $42 billion deficit. And every fall, we see numerous states of emergency proclaimed due to wildfires (four separate states of emergency in November alone.) Add to all these the potentially catastrophic emergencies caused by large earthquakes or failure of levees in the Sacramento River Delta, and I can’t help but wonder if “State of Emergency” would be a more apt nickname than “The Golden State.”

Rainfall at Oakland International Airport from January 1st to February 14th: 2.61 inches

Rainfall at Oakland International Airport on February 15th: 1.87 inches

Those two numbers are way below average and way above average, respectively. (In fact, the record rainfall for Feb 15 had previously been 1.41 inches.)