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Engineering Public Safety

Personal drama aside. Thanks to everyone for the incredible outpouring of warmth and support. I really feel it. Thank you.

I was buying a coffee at the SOMA cafe today and glanced at the SF Chronicle, usually such a worthless rag that I can barely read anything but the headlines. But to my utter amazement a left column article detailed how engineers in the Dept. of Building Inspection have halted the mammoth 550-ft. tall Rincon Towers project that just broke ground a few months ago. Why? Because the public engineers are not convinced that the design can survive an earthquake! I’m flabbergasted.

UCSF has been building biohazard facilities on landfill in Mission Bay and there’s been nary a peep about public safety. It seems like everyone believes that modern engineering can defeat the movement of the earth, no matter how bad. But then this new tower (larger than the monster proposed by US Steel back in the early ’70s that was defeated by intense public opposition), which seemed to be on the fast track thanks to the funds extracted from the developer for community and housing funds, provokes the city’s inspectors to call a halt for safety.

Tellingly, the developers’ engineering firm offers its interpretation of what the extent of the code’s expectations are:

“It is our interpretation that the intent of the code is to provide design procedures that will result in structures that may be significantly damaged or perhaps unrepairable, but remain standing following a major earthquake,” read one reply from Magnusson Klemencic among hundreds of pages of technical documents reviewed by The Chronicle.

Hearty thanks to Chief Engineer Hanson Tom who threw the flag on this. After ruminating on public health and general preparedness for disasters of various natural and unnatural types, I’d really given up on anyone working for the City taking their job seriously enough to contest the Money that runs this town. Still a long way to go, but here’s to hoping for more bureaucrats with balls!

A Broken Heart

I may be absent for a bit here. The love of my life, Mona Caron, has decided to leave our relationship. These things happen every day to other people but when it happens to you–I mean me–well, sledgehammer, hit by a truck, the metaphors fail. I am hurting, real bad. I thank all my friends who are sending me love and support, which is so important to me, and incredibly helpful at a time when the pit of despair is at the edge of each moment. I have no idea who reads this blog, but I know a circle of friends and acquaintances do, so I’m using this to give you all the news quickly. Thanks again for your love and support. I’ll be back, maybe sooner than later, but right now, it’s impossible to say.

Memory and Responsibility

I spent Thanksgiving with a pleasantly boisterous and squishily affectionate gaggle of about 75 friends at an obscure box canyon resort called Saratoga Springs (not far from Ukiah or Clear Lake). It’s an annual event going on a decade now, and many of the friendships discovered there have been extended to our daily lives in the Bay Area, an ever-expanding community that feels a lot like an extended family.

Many of the participants understandably object to the whole amnesiac and gluttonous ritual known as ‘Thanksgiving,’ which has led us in each of the last two years to begin with a large group discussion. The “dark side” of Thanksgiving was aired out two years ago and this year the focus moved more broadly to questions of justice and our individual experiences of oppression. In both discussions an interesting dilemma emerged–when and how do our current choices and behaviors derive meaning from the past? In other words, does Thanksgiving have to carry the weight of genocide past, or can we collectively redefine it today as a convivial gathering and a brief long weekend of community and engagement?

Beneath this practical issue lurks ever-present concerns about noticing, responsibility, memory and history. Simply put, how can any of us ever enjoy a good meal with friends without simultaneously admitting that our prosperous and peaceful moment depends not only on centuries of genocide and slavery, but actually perpetuates real terror and barbarism right now, while we’re eating! We make political and practical choices all day long every day to ignore or at least skip over a very heavy history of violence and inhumanity that contributed crucially to our “peaceful” existence. How do we do that? Is it just a question of moral failure? I think not. There are intricate institutional and psychological mechanisms that have shaped our culture of irresponsibility, atomization and individualism.

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