Whiteout Conditions

On a day when they closed all area schools; and the winds gusted to over 50 mph; when the Weather Channel warned of a bitter cold weather pattern expected to last all day; with the possibility of 6 to 10 inches of snow in the Southtowns and more in the Southern Tier, my normal 30 minute commute to work took me…40 minutes.

How long did it take you?

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Behold the tree-statue of DeWitt Clinton marking the opening of the Erie Canal.  What’s wrong is the car in the background.  The parking lot is just past the single row of trees, about 20 feet from the sidewalk and adjoining Erie Street.

No matter what direction from which you photograph this and all the other tree-statues (the “Carvings“)  temporarily lining Erie Street as it extends to the end of the Erie Basin Marina, you cannot get away from the asphalt.  You can find plenty of parking and a very nice road that hugs the shoreline, but virtually no grass.  Barely a place to spread out a picnic blanket, set up a tent, hold a party.

No place to avoid engine exhaust.

My last post was about the lack of access to our waterfront.  This post is an example of how development of that access has sacrificed the very reason we go to the water:  To get away from the sights and sounds of urbanization.  In this regard we planned poorly but executed the plan well, leaving us with a jetty that from above looks dull and gray, and from the ground looks wanting for anything green.  I recall while living in Silicon Valley how parking lots were divided by fingers of grass and foliage to break up and hide the proliferation of cars.  Is that design, which sacrifices one in ten parking spots, not feasible out here?

The planned redevelopment of the Waterfront Village – with a newly approved hotel plan – really needs to incorporate natural elements into the design.  So do the existing properties in the Village, the road leading to the marina and the oversized parking lots on it.  My suggestion:  Take out the road beyond the last set of boat docks, and force everyone to walk the final 400 yards to the end of the marina on a grassy and sandy surface.  Barefoot even.

La Mancha Negra

15 years ago on the way back from an assignment in Caracas, Venezuela, I asked my taxi driver to take me to the airport “the long way”, so that I could get a tour of the city and surroundings before heading home.  As we went up one mountain road adjacent to acres of tumble-down slum, he slowed and then swerved to avoid a black stretch of road.  La Mancha Negra, he called it.  The Black Blob.

Years later that blob has grown eight miles long and killed 1800 people in car accidents.  It’s straight out of some horror movie. Parts of it looked sticky, like tar, while other parts were obviously oily/shiny and very recent.

Although they aren’t positive, Venezuelan scientists say the blob appears to be a seep from poorly-made asphalt or something below the road surface (like sewage, perhaps) that oozes out in the intense heat of the day.  Road repair crews clean up the mess yet it quickly returns.  More than once, vehicles on the busy airport highway have careened out of control, creating multi-vehicle pileups and carnage everywhere.

It has since spread to various parts of Caracas highways.  And of course, at least one band now shares its name.

The Rescue of Mono Lake

In 1982 I traveled to Mono Lake, near Yosemite National Park in California, to witness the tragedy of a national treasure being sucked dry by the demand for water elsewhere.  For 40 years the rivers that fed the lake – Lee Vining, Rush, Walker and others – had been diverted to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and evaporation was rapidly dropping the lake levels so low that what was previously a vastly rich ecosystem was now about to collapse to dust.

Mono Lake is a basin surrounded by mountains.  It has no outlet.  Fresh water streams fill the basin and as the water evaporates it leaves behind a brackish lake that is home to an amazing variety of brine shrimp and other aquatic animals, insects and tufa towers!  Birds loved the shrimp and alkali flies.  For millenia the lake was a waypoint to thousands of migratory fowl.  In its middle was an island which provided an immensely dense breeding ground, protected by water from predators.

Then the lake levels dropped; a land bridge appeared  – and that allowed coyotes and other carnivores to help themselves to a high-protein egg feast.  [Aside:  There is an interesting story somewhere about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers trying to blow up the land bridge to save the breeding ground; it was an extraordinary failure.] By 1982 the lake level had dropped almost 40 feet from its historic levels.  I shot over a hundred photographs of what I thought was the death rattle of (what some say is) the oldest lake in North America.

But the obituary was a bit premature.  Around the same time an organized push was made to save the lake.  Through its efforts and the efforts of others the Mono Lake Committee successfully petitioned the California State Water Resources Control Board (CSWRCB) to reduce the flow diversions to a point where lake levels are now slowly climbing.  The land bridge is again under water.

Today Mono Lake is 10 feet higher than when I visited, but still 34 feet below its historic level, and has about 8 more to go to reach the targets set by the CSWRCB.  Even so, it is a step in the right direction and an inspiration to those who long to find that balance between societal demands and natural resources.  I was (un)lucky enough to capture photographs of what will hopefully be, in another generation, submerged land.

Dump the Pump

Today is “Dump the Pump” day, advertised throughout the nation as the day we should all try to take mass transit to work. I heard about it on the radio while I was filling my tank at the gas station, how ironic. The fillup cost me $65 and will last less than a week. I do not own a big car. It gets around 27 city, 32 highway.

But I live a good distance from my job, and that job demands non-regular hours. It will never be 9-5 so I drive alone, daily, like 85% of all other commuters in Western New York.

Aside from downsizing to an even smaller vehicle my wife and I have taken great pains to reduce our carbon footprint – something Dick Cheney might call a personal virtue but what we consider to be absolutely essentially for sustained future growth. Since 1997 we successfully cut our natural gas consumption by 60% and this past winter saved about $1,000 in the process. Our largest gas bill was $110. I have not taken the time to track our electricity consumption but I am quite sure that it too is significantly less than what it was just a few years ago.

It has not crimped our lifestyle.

Conservation is, however, all about habits, about changing the little things: Turning off the lights when you leave a room, sleeping with an extra blanket, caulking the windows, wearing sweaters, and being especially conscious of how you are using and wasting energy.

Four-dollar-a-gallon gas may have one saving grace: It may force all of us to make energy conservation a personal virtue.

Resevoir Balls

The Ivanhoe Reservoir in Silver Lake, near Los Angeles, is being covered with plastic black balls in an attempt to prevent the bromate count from exceeding health quality standards.  There will eventually be a few million balls tossed onto the reservoir.

Too much bromate – a carcinogen – which gets created from a reaction to bromine and sunlight, is not good for you.  The reservoir feeds LA, hence the need to do something about this.  Someone or some group decided that the black balls will essentially shadow the lake and therefore reduce the creation of bromate.

When sunlight starts breaking down the plastic and releasing other chemicals into the water, how much will the state of California pay to remove the balls?  When algae start adhering to and scumming the black balls, turning them green, who will clean them?  When the lack of sunlight on the lake bottom starts affecting the ecological environment 20 feet under the water, will the environmentalists suddenly clamor to have them removed?

I smell the law of unintended consequences coming into play, real soon.  This article makes it sound like there is little to worry about.  I’m not so confident about that at all.

Mom Will Never Again Go to Florida

It’s bad enough that Florida has suffered from fire ants, giant snails, two-inch cockroaches, cane toads and africanized honey bees.

Now it has to deal with pythons.  You know, really big snakes.

These are Burmese Pythons – which can grow to over 20 feet long and weigh 2oo pounds – released into the wild by owners no longer interested in keeping them.  It is estimated that their population in the Everglades is now around 30,000.  They are efficient swimmers and tagged snakes have been shown to swim over 30 miles in 3 hours.

My mom hates snakes.  As kids we had to stomp around to make sure that any garter snakes were scared away, before she would go work in the garden.

She’ll never set foot in Florida again.

The Myanmar Catastrophe and Why We Aren’t Doing Anything

The Myanmar government refuses to let foreign aid workers into the country to help distribute aid to the roughly 1.5 million people who have been cut off from food and clean water. The government claims that they themselves can provide the logistics necessary to distribute this aid.

Most countries have either refused or deferred aid unless foreign relief teams can participate in the distribution, out of fear that the aid will not get to those who need it. At least some of what has been distributed was painted over with the names of the generals in charge.

Our government sits with $3 million in aid offered, Australia with $23.4 million, the French with 1500 metric tons of food in a vessel in Myanmar’s waters. We and other governments play the waiting game with the Myanmar government; and the generals appear to be digging in their heels.

In the meantime, 8 days have now gone by since the typhoon hit, and 1.5 million people are still cut off from food and clean water.

In eight more days, the number of deaths from political stalemate will far exceed the carnage caused by the typhoon. I don’t get this at all, and I don’t understand how seeing who blinks first is going to make the world a better place.

If the world’s intention is humanitarian aid, then why not fly in as much as possible to Yangon – inundate the airport with food and supplies – and let the Myanmar military do as much as they can with it? Even with all the suspected corruption and expected diversion of aid, at least some of those 1.5 million might live to next week. So what if the generals want to take credit? Unless, of course, further isolating a junta that’s been in control for 46 years is more important than the plight of those 1.5 million.

Senator John Kerry said, “The only goal right now should be getting help to the people of Burma, however we need to do it.” I couldn’t agree more.

The Village of Williamsville

The village of Williamsville. 5 lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. Noise, and exhaust fumes. Waiting to cross the street at an intersection sets one’s ears ringing and does nothing to create any sense of an idyllic, peaceful setting. Last Thursday’s walk down Main Street, at 2 PM, made me thankful it wasn’t 5 PM.

This is a village? It’s come a long way in 30 years, not necessarily for the better.

The Right to Bear Arms – On Campus

An unarmed, angry, irrational, emotional wreck of a person is dangerous to me only when he’s an arm’s length away.  The same person with a gun is deadly to 50 feet.

Utah allows college students to carry concealed weapons on campus.  Nine other states are considering allowing the same.  Georgia state Representative Tim Bearden, a gun-rights advocate, recently stated “How many kids must die before we realize that firearms in law-abiding hands actually save lives?”

The key words being law-abiding.

…So 19-year-old, law-abiding college student Joe Jones, who just happens to get dumped by his steady girlfriend, decides to get drunk, then drunker, then confronts the ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend Mitch.  How might that encounter end?  I guess it might depend upon who’s carrying concealed handguns, and how freely the alcohol has flowed.

An argument occasionally escalating to a fight occasionally escalating to weapons fire doesn’t see the light of day very much; yet as emotional, irrational beings who tend to become more emotional and irrational – and less inhibited – while under the influence, we know that it happens often enough.

To have it happen on campus, even rarely, should be justification enough to take a long hard look at this issue and rationally ask if the cure is worth the price.

The Noble Bliss Windpark

The Noble Bliss Windpark project in Eagle, New York, will shortly have 67 windmills (scattered across several square miles of farmland) generating 100 megawatts of power whenever the wind is blowing.  To put it into perspective, if 24 of these wind farms were built around the Western New York area, you could turn off the Niagara Falls power plant and not notice.

As long as the wind is blowing.

This web site doesn’t seem to buy into wind power as a usable or cost-effective way to generate electricity.  From the use of many inflammatory adjectives, I would say that the authors may have an agenda or perhaps believe that fear-mongering will sway the average reader to their side of the argument.  There’s an interesting video you can watch, here.  Be forewarned:  You can be easily nauseated if you suffer from motion sickness.

Wind power doesn’t make much economic sense when a barrel of oil costs $25.  It does, however, make sense to plan and build the infrastructure to help minimize the impact of sudden increases in oil prices to, say $100 a barrel. 

All that is now past tense.  Last week the cost of oil reached $110 a barrel, and there is little to indicate that the instability in the Middle East and Venezuela, the corruption in Nigeria, the economic growth in China, the lack of refinery capacity in the U.S. or the decline of the dollar on world markets will end any time soon.  All these put upward market pressure on the cost of oil.  The growth (and threat) of alternative energy sources – wind and solar in particular – may help keep petroleum prices in check, or at least lessen our dependence on foreign oil.

I’m all for it.  Even if they are in my back yard.

Energy

Today, for the very first time, I put $5o worth of gasoline into a vehicle.  First.  Time.  Ever.

Gasoline in Western New York is typically 10-20 cents more than the national average, and at least a few pennies more than in other upstate towns like Albany, which I’m somewhat familiar with.   I’m told that it’s because we’re at the end of a long gasoline pipeline and so we pay for the cost of that extra pumping.  Sounds fishy.  More likely, gasoline suppliers jack up the prices a bit because they can.

The average New Yorker pays over 17 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity (I pay 15 cents, yippee), the most expensive in the country except for Connecticut and Hawaii.  The national average is almost 40% less.

Solar power costs in the sunbelt states are currently about 38 cents per kilowatt hour, higher here because we get less sunshine – on average, about half as much.  We really can’t get a break when it comes to energy expense.

But we do have plenty of cheap water, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Nonetheless, before I die I still hope to be completely off the grid.

Buffalo – We’re Not in the Top Ten – Again!

Article Deja Vu?

Today’s Yahoo News brings this article, which describes the ten most depressed housing markets based on the decline in selling prices over the past year. Buffalo is not in this list. Far from it, from a housing selling viewpoint Buffalo’s performance in 2007 ranked 12th best out of the top 150 metropolitan areas in the U.S.

There is no doubt that housing is cheap in this area – our median selling price was $105,400 while the average price in the Northeast was $261,700. This might not allow us to retire equity-rich, but it puts us in a very enviable position: We are not nearly so financially stressed when purchasing a home as most other parts of the country; we did not need to seek out creative mortgage financing in order to purchase our homes nearly as much as most other parts of the country; we are not defaulting on our mortgages; our housing prices are going up, not down, and it is still easy (relatively speaking) to feel comfortable buying a home.

Last week’s Forbes metropolitan misery index missed something when ranking the ten most miserable cities in the U.S. (see this article) because it fails to even consider the stress that struggling with financing, being in over one’s head, defaulting on a mortgage, and losing one’s home has on an individual’s psyche. Personal misery was left out of the equation.

If there is any unmeasured quantity that deserves to be measured, it’s the level of comfort one feels about one’s own satisfaction relative to where they live. Buffalo would undoubtedly rank near the top of this list, as the financial livability, housing, congestion and stress of pace connected to this area are, respectively, good, outstanding, outstanding and very low.

According to Yahoo, the 10 most housing-depressed cities are

• Raleigh
• San Francisco
• Austin
• San Antonio
• St. Louis
• Houston
• Portland
• Dallas
• Denver
• Baltimore

Because none of these cities showed up in last week’s most miserable cities list, one might conclude that there is little correlation between the uber-stress of being financially over-extended and metropolitan misery. I would argue that there is a connection, and that it may even factor into such issues as our nation’s ever-expanding waistlines. I think a measure of life satisfaction, by metropolitan area, is in order.

Well we’re not in this week’s Yahoo top ten. Why are they getting so hung up on depressing statistics?

Buffalo – We’re Not in the Top Ten!

Today’s Yahoo News brings this article, which is from Forbes.com describing the ten most miserable cities in the U.S.  The criteria for determining what was used to qualify a city for a miserable ranking includes the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, commute times, weather, crime and the number of nearby toxic dumps.

That’s some interesting, selective criteria that did not include other factors like social inhomogeneity, employment diversity, education opportunty, proximity to potable water, obesity, cancer rate, mortality rate, affordable housing, shopping experience or any other factors that you and I could devise with a few minutes of brainstorming.

According to Forbes, the 10 most miserable cities are

• Detroit
• Stockton, CA
• Flint, MI
• New York City
• Philadelphia
• Chicago
• Los Angeles
• Modesto, CA
• Charlotte, NC
• Providence,RI

The article is so much crap.  A much more interesting (and perhaps socially relevant) article would have been one that surveyed a few thousand Americans and asked what they considered to be the most miserable cities, and why.  I bet the answers would have been very different.  Buffalo might have been included in the top ten of that survey.

Perception alone has a major influence on how a municipality is treated with respect to government, business and the media.   Buffalo knows this all too well, probably ranking extremely low on the national scale (perception) yet much higher locally.  We (mostly) consider this a great place to live and raise a family; the rest of the nation might have a different opinion.

At least we’re not in this week’s Forbes top ten.  Whew.

Comments About the Buffalo Waterfront

I’ve been patiently listening to and reading about the Inner Harbor, the Outer Harbor and the rest of the Buffalo Waterfront plans, and have sprinkled minor comments here and there in various blogs, not really convinced that this is an issue very many Western New Yorkers care about. Mainly because most Western New Yorkers hardly care about the Waterfront. Mainly because they mostly don’t live there.

All of the players in the Inner Harbor/Outer Harbor folderol, all the hype about Skyway Park, and the Route 5 boulevard, all the Bass Pro plans – they are meaningless when there are no people around. And as such I think the effort and emotion being put into this development, today, is completely misguided.

Things get built where people are. Build up the townhouses, the condos and the apartments downtown. Return the heart of the city to a population that can actually live there and the Waterfront development will follow. We’re trying to put the cart before the horse and except for the extremists, no one is really listening because no one is there to listen.

We don’t need 9-to-5 retail outlets and casinos to accomplish a Waterfront revitalization; we need supermarkets and drugstores.

Rather than wasting precious state funds and politicians’ time with pie-in-the-sky dreams, Buffalo would be wise get their help luring a Wegmans or a Tops to the downtown area. We would be wise to make it conducive for more developers to build new homes within a stone’s throw of the water. This is where plans should be drawn up and executed much faster than their current glacial pace.

It is odd to me that so much energy and time have been wasted on planning little more than tourist attractions in an area still nearly devoid of residents.

I am ever hopeful that the recent trend to convert old city office buildings into condominiums rapidly accelerates, because all the other things that make a city vibrant will rapidly follow.

 

Fertilize the Ocean

Planktos is a for-profit company that sprays iron nanoparticles over the ocean to promote algae blooms.  Algae draws carbon dioxide out of the air and replaces it with oxygen as part of the plant’s respiration process.  When the algae die the sequestered carbon falls to the bottom of the ocean.

Planktos is in the business of selling carbon credits – that’s how they will make their money.  They have a really slick, environmentally friendly-looking web site with reference to healing the seas.  Treehugger.com is very cautiously optimistic about Planktos’ strategy of raising algae bloom levels to what they were in 1980 (based on NASA satellite observations of decreasing algae in the oceans).

I am a little less optimistic because

• Planktos is doing all this in international waters, where monitoring of the effects and regulation of the industry requires agreement from so many governments as to render enforcement all but impossible.
• It doesn’t address but merely masks the problem, which is that we are burning way too much fossil fuel.  In fact, Planktos’ for-profit business may encourage energy traders to promote even more inefficient processes knowing that energy credits for its customers will be available through Planktos’ efforts.
• It relies on dispersing iron in the form of nanoparticles into the atmosphere, most but not all of which settles onto the water.  Unlike natural processes, the man-made product is much smaller and can remain airborne for extremely long periods.  There is still some really serious debate about how particulates this small affect biological processes once they’re lodged in the lungs (comparisons to the 20-year delay between breathing asbestos fibers and the onset of asbestosis comes to mind).
• It’s illegal.

We don’t seem to have had much success fooling with Mother Nature on such a global scale.  I hope this doesn’t backfire, especially since all Planktos has to do to walk away from responsibility is declare bankruptcy and create enough obfuscation with murky science as to tie up any lawsuits for years.

In Katrina’s Wake

What has two years and $114 billion in government largesse brought to the region affected by Hurricane Katrina?

• 13,000 Mississippi families are still living in FEMA trailers, down from 48,000 a year ago. Governor Haley Barbour expects them to be all out of temporary housing by this time next year.
• “Better days are ahead” George Bush said as he spoke to a gathering in New Orleans’ Lower 9^th Ward. But grants are contentious, and money is being tied up in Congressional, Administrative and State battles. The President had plenty of words but not a lot to show for it. Those who heard the speech must have been wondering if the President was referring to New Orleans, or to Iraq, when he made that comment.
• The Port of New Orleans and tourism, the two largest revenue-generation sources for the area, have almost completely recovered to pre-Katrina levels.
• On the downside, New Orleans’ homicide rate of 70 per 100,000 is the highest in the country, and fully one-third of the population has not and cannot yet return.

This recovery has taken too long, not only because of Government bureaucracy and mismanagement but because it probably shouldn’t have occurred to the extent that it is occurring. There are a number of issues that will remain unresolved, with disastrous consequences, and I for one think that it is unquestionably foolish to re-create the city as it was:

• New Orleans is already 8 feet below sea level and continues to sink another inch every three years. The Lower 9th Ward is 11 feet below sea level.
• The levees have not and probably cannot be built to withstand a category 5 hurricane within either a reasonable time frame or a reasonable budget. (2006 estimates were $32 billion. Only $7.6 billion has been authorized with virtually none of it allocated, and completion estimates take the rebuilding phase out to 2015). It only takes one weak spot in the miles of levees to re-inundate New Orleans again.
• No housing regulations have been established to force homeowners to elevate their homes above sea level.
• An unintended consequence of the Old River Control Structure, which is the only thing holding the Mississippi River from completely diverting to its natural ocean course (the Atchafalaya River), is that Mississippi River sediment settles within the river bed, continuously raising the river’s elevation above and through New Orleans. Already a billion-dollar structure, the Old River Control Structure is costly and growing more difficult to maintain as the elevation differences between the Mississippi and the Atchafalaya increase.

The insurance companies who refuse to provide flood insurance to New Orleans residents are an indicator of how unwise we are to throw so much good money after bad. It was a dreadful decision to rebuild any part of The Big Easy that’s below sea level.

Brown Lawns in WNY

The water pressure in my town is very low today. I’m sure many people are trying to salvage their landscaping.

It has not been a good year for my lawn. Our remarkable, sunny summer has been tantalizing, but the last 30 days officially produced all of four-tenths of an inch of rainfall at the airport weather station, and certainly less where I live. My wife has done a good job keeping the flower beds and vegetable garden watered, but the grass is another story. It’s in brutal shape and has gone from lush green to Arizona scrub.

I’m so accustomed to green around here that the acres and acres of brown are demoralizing.

Hawk Creek

A stone’s throw from the village of East Aurora and twenty-two minutes from downtown Buffalo, nestled back off the main road, is Hawk Creek Wildlife Sacntuary where they take in broken birds and fix them. Some, like the two eagles that cannot fly, remain as permanent residents.

The sanctuary is not normally open to the public, but they do give educational tours by request and over the past two weekends, opened its doors to the public for its annual Wildlife and Renaissance festival. I’m not into the Renaissance part and in fact, I thought the jousting and fake battles were a little hokey; but the outfits that some of the young maidens had on were very flattering if not sweltering on the hot, humid day.

Protections for birds of prey (eagles, in particular) have been in effect since their numbers were decimated by the use of pesticides – mainly DDT – 50 years ago; and their numbers have been increasing yearly. There are nesting perigrine falcons in downtown Buffalo and several nesting eagles pairs throughout Western New York. Whenever I cycle into the hills in southern Erie and Wyoming counties, I usually spot at least one or two falcons or other birds with large wingspans.

It’s great to see them back. I hope we maintain some respect for them and let them continue to thrive in this area.

Recycling for Recycling’s Sake

The front page of today’s Buffalo News has an article on community recycling.  It cites Buffalo as having a woeful history of recycling, down to 7% of households from a peak of 14% in the 90’s and well below the federal average of 32% of municipal households.

The article discusses a reward system for incentivizing municipal recycling:  Paying households, via discount coupons to popular retailers, for every pound of recycled material.  The recycling coordinator responsible for monitoring Philadelphia’s pilot incentive program was quoted as saying that its key selling point was not the incentive rewards.  It was that residents could “throw all recyclables in one container without separating them.”

Are we lazy, or what?  If only we could recycle from our couches.

Conservation is obviously not high on Man’s list of important duties.

I applaud the ingenuity of the incentive approach but, like most other government programs involving money, an incentive program will quickly turn into an entitlement program. 

I’m surprised the News didn’t mention this.