You say Aba, I say Ngaba

A friend in Boulder alerted me to this story.

The mainstream media (MSM) has yet to pick up that the epicenter of the recent 7.9 quake is actually in Tibet. Read SFT's Statement on the May 12th Earthquake in China and Tibet. (Students for a Free Tibet)

Many people do not realize that the epicenter of the earthquake was in an area of eastern Tibet now administered under China's Sichuan province. This place is called "Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture" by the Chinese government, but "Aba" is actually "Ngaba" which is part of Amdo, the northeastern province of historical Tibet. The epicenter itself was in the Tibetan county of "Lungu" which the Chinese call "Wenchuan" and where, according to China's 2005 census information, at least 18.6% of the population is Tibetan.

It is throughout this eastern Tibetan region – Amdo and Kham – that a majority of the Tibetan protests have occurred over the past two months
...snip...
And while we have very little information about the impact of the earthquake on Tibetans because the areas around the epicenter remain cut off from the outside world, many fear the worst for thousands of Tibetans who remain detained or missing as a result of the crackdown. For instance, SFT has received unconfirmed but deeply distressing reports that many hundreds of Tibetans may have died when a large prison near Wenchuan collapsed. Official Chinese media has confirmed damage to a number of prisons in the area, but no detailed information has been released.
...snip...
The international community has rightly condemned the heinous efforts by the Burmese junta to block aid and relief to minority and dissident populations affected by the cyclone in Burma and must seek to prevent similar practices by Chinese authorities in Tibet.

Of course, we are not seeing images of the damage in Tibet because journalists (the entire outside world) are banned in the region.

In Boulder, I shared an apartment for a year with a graduate student studying the differences in disaster response and disaster reporting in the USA and USSR. You learn a great deal about the people and nations when they are confronted by a crisis. The USSR broke up while she was writing about it, but that didn't faze her. She loved visiting the former soviet republics. She was so excited by the spirit of glasnost (openness) in the early days.

Let's demand glasnost all around.

Links:
I previously wrote about this quake here. Click on the Environmental Hazards tag for more posts about earthquakes, other environmental hazards and disaster preparedness.

Bake Sales Won't Do It

I've been looking at horrific pictures of pancaked school buildings in Sichuan Province and small corpses. The magnitude of the death toll in Sichuan and Burma is hard to fathom. James Fallows does an excellent job, putting people and faces to the numbers. Read Masses, and individuals, in China. The pictures of the kids in their classrooms and dormitories, before the quake, are heartbreaking.

First I felt sad, now I am MAD. Why do schools so often collapse in earthquakes? Why are schools and hospitals deathtraps instead of havens in disasters? Andrew Revkin has been following the story. Read In Smart, Wealthy World, Schools Still Fall. Why?, Citizens Challenge China on Fallen Schools and Earthquake in China Highlights the Vulnerability of Schools in Many Countries. Follow the many fine links.

The middle school where the largest group of kids was killed was a selective academy. Chengdu and the surrounding area had hung their hat on IT (information technology) as a way to pull themselves out of poverty. Computer world estimates that Chengdu is the 10th largest IT center globally. Many schools were built to train the next generation to move up the IT food chain.

Kids competed for the right to leave their families and villages behind to live in crammed dormitories and attend huge classes in order to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Look at the picture of a typical dormitory room on Fallows' blog. The 18 girls that shared that room had fewer possessions between them than what my daughter has in one corner of her room. Those girls had nothing but pluck, brains and willingness to work hard.

What did the officials give them? Death traps. It's not just China according to Andrew Revkin.

Experts on earthquake dangers have warned for years that tens of millions of students in thousands of schools, from Asia to the Americas, face similar risks, yet programs to reinforce existing schools or require that new ones be built to extra-sturdy standards are inconsistent, slow and inadequately financed.

This is even true in western Canada and the United States.

Why do we take care of kids and schools last (after prisons and pensions and medical services for the elderly)? Why is there money to fund shiny computer labs, but not basic safety?

Andrew Revkin points to military spending as a place with plenty of money. Remember the bumper sticker, "Imagine a world where the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold bake sales"?

I once attended a meeting at an Air Force Base which was interrupted at noon by the public address system. The announcements of bake sales benefiting this and that military (social and medical) need droned on for what seemed like 5 minutes. When it was over, I looked over at the colonel running the meeting and asked, "What was that about?" He said it was a daily occurrence.

Great, now we are running bake sales to fund both our schools and our Air Force. There is no way we can ever bake enough.

A Different Kind of Bathtub Ring

The earth's atmosphere is often explained as a shallow pan of fluid atop the surface of the solid earth. It is a very large bathtub. So why should we be surprised to see a global-scale bathtub ring from space?

Read Dust Storms Overseas Carry Contaminants to U.S. There are huge clouds of dust traveling the rivers overhead. The dust carries heavy metals, toxins, insects, bacteria and viruses. Who needs jet travel to spread SARS when you have the jet stream?

I had thought it was a pacific northwest problem, but I learned that "authorities in Los Angeles estimate that on some days, one-quarter of the city's smog comes from China."

I downloaded the hemispherical view of the jet stream analysis from the California Regional Weather Service.

Check out NASA's MODIS picture of the day archive. A remarkable number of them are of severe dust events.

Look at my photos of the Fox Glacier. The guides told us that the reddish dust were deposited from the Australian outback during severe dust events.

What we eat

Yesterday, I serendipitously walked by poster H41C-0661 at American Geophysical Union (AGU): Tetracycline Resistance in the Subsurface of a Poultry Farm: Influence of Poultry Wastes

* You, Y (you.yaqi@jhu.edu), Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, Johns Hopkins University and a whole bunch of other people, including her PhD advisor.

Concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) are considered to be important man-made reservoir of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Using the electromagnetic induction (EMI) method of geophysical characterization, we measured the apparent subsurface electrical conductivity (ECa) at a CAFO site in order to assess the movement of pollutants associated with animal waste. The map of ECa and other available data suggest that (1) soil surrounding a poultry litter storage shed is contaminated by poultry waste, (2) a contamination plume in the subsurface emanates from that shed, and (3) the development of that plume is due to groundwater flow. We focused on understanding the spread of tetracycline resistance (TcR), because tetracycline is one of the most frequently used antibiotics in food animal production and therefore probably used at our field site. Microbiological experiments show the presence of TcR bacteria in the subsurface and indicate higher concentrations in the top soil than in the aquifer. Environmental DNA was extracted to identify CAFO- associated TcR genes and to explore a link between the presence of TcR and CAFO practices. A "shot-gun" cloning approach is under development to target the most prevalent TcR gene. This gene will be monitored in future experiments, in which we will study the transmission of TcR to naive E. coli under selective pressure of TcR. Experimental results will be used to develop a mathematical/numerical model in order to describe the transmission process and to subsequently make estimates regarding the large-scale spread of antibiotic resistance.

Why did this poster catch my eye? The words tetracycline and poultry, together. Then it hit me.

My doctors and I have been trying to figure out if I am sensitive to chicken in some way. I tested not allergic to chicken proteins. There is a theory that chicken is high in arachadonic acid, a chemical in the inflammation pathway. Perhaps the arachadonic acid found in chicken and beef are exacerbating inflammation of my joints and skin?

If so, then why don't fruits like bananas, also high in arachadonic acid, cause inflammation? Why is it sporadic? Why don't I have the inflammation every time I eat meat?

I am allergic to tetracycline. They feed it to animals. When I eat the dead animals, I am taking tetracycline. Only it is not labeled anywhere. That is apparently legal.

Ya Qi helpfully told me that tetracycline is fed to chickens to help shorten the time to market (40 days from hatchling to roast chicken!). It is fed to pretty much all 'conventionally raised' animals. tetracyline is so prevalent in our food system that the TcR gene has been found in organic beef (and even flies). The presence of the TcR gene in an animal doesn't mean it has been fed tetracycline. It only means that tetracycline resistance is now a common characteristic in our environment, due to heavy and indiscriminate use in the past and present.

How did dumping drugs and other chemicals into our food chain become 'conventional' farming and not doing so become 'alternative' farming?

Her poster showed the apparatus that she used to get a core of the soil floor of a poultry shed. It is like the ones used to get ice cores from glaciers. So cool. The stuff she told me about factory farming in the US and China, not so cool. It kind of turns the stomach, actually. We eat organic dairy and eggs. But we don't always buy organic meats. Now I know better.

See the full abstracts for that poster session. It is hair-rising. Don't read it right after eating.

Making it right or wrong?

I applaud Brad Pitt's commitment to making environmentally sound homes for the non-wealthy. You can read more about the project at Make It Right 9. The project plans are very exciting from a design standpoint. See some of the drawings in the NY Times Architecture article. You can even buy a low-flow toilet for someone who needs one, instead of buying more stuff for people you know that already have more than what they need.

But, I can't help wondering if we should be rebuilding in the middle of a flood plain. The reason that the lower 9th ward was built later than the French quarter and the garden district is because it is lower in elevation. The place is more flood prone and dangerous. Should we really encourage people to resettle there?

In fact, the area is more risky than when it was originally built. The land is settling so that the elevation is actually decreasing. Storm intensity is up for global, regional and local reasons. E. g., beachfront development has reduced the acreage of saltwater marshes that absorb the impact of storms. The levee system prevents natural processes such as sediment build up that gradually raises ground elevation. Urbanization (paving over) has made the area less porous to rainwater and more prone to flooding. Irrigation of crops between storms has decreased the ability of the soil to absorb rainwater. Increases in the temperature of offshore water intensifies the energy of hurricanes. The list goes on and on.

The only rational argument I have heard for resettling the area is to rebuild the social fabric of the neighborhood. Mark and I can attest to the friendliness and worthiness of the neighborhood first hand. When we visited New Orleans, we escaped the crowds and the Disneyesque atmosphere of the French quarter and gravitated to the lower 9th ward.

What if the populace of the lower 9th ward were to pick up and rebuild together on higher ground? It has been done in the past. Whole towns, or subsets of towns used to move together to new territory in the pioneer days. (Are the pioneer days gone or do we still have some pioneer spirit left?) Think of the residents of Salina, Kansas moving west and founding Salina, Colorado. Recall the Mormon pushcart emigrants. Think big.

The Missing Guest

On the northbound drive from LAX to SFO last month, tiny pellets fell on the windshield. They appeared dark silver or gold, depending upon the peekaboo sunlight. They rolled UP the windshield. I looked up to see if farmers were spraying some kind of nasty chemicals on the fields from crop dusters. I saw nothing but a few dark clouds off to the east.

It took me a few minutes to figure out that those pellets were actually rain. It had been so long since I had actually experienced rain, that I forgot what it looked like. Additionally, I had never experienced rain in the Prius, which has a sharply raked windshield. The car is so aerodynamic, and the droplets so small, that the force of the wind actually overcame gravity and moved the raindrops UP the windshield.

Technically, it was virga, not rain; the droplets evaporated almost immediately and the road surface was dry.

Wisps or streaks of water or ice particles falling out of a cloud but evaporating before reaching the earth's surface as precipitation.

Anyway, there is much weather excitement in LA because it might actually rain here this week. I took the Prius in to the car wash yesterday to make sure that it would rain. Note, I did not wash the car. Everyone knows that driveway car washing is the largest contributor to groundwater contamination and runoff pollution into the ocean in LA, right?

Asides:

• No, it is not narcissistic to believe that I can cause rain by getting the car washed. It is merely a statement of fact. The car was washed in preparation for the trip to SFO and it worked like a charm.
• It was news to me that driveway car washing is so detrimental to the environment. I learned it a few years ago at a groundwater workshop at UCLA's Institute of the Environment.
  
• I go to a car wash where they recycle the water. In fact, the stuff coming off cars is so toxic, that the sediment in the water holding tank at the car wash has to be hauled away by a toxic waste hauler. That's right. Road grime is toxic. In addition to the organic alphabet soup of petrochemicals, they also contain lead residue and heavy metals that escape from catalytic converters.
• Commercial car washes are required by law to recycle water and properly dispose of the sludge. The heavy metals can even by separated and recycled. It makes me feel better about my laziness environmental responsibility.
• Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models estimate we will get 1/2 to 1" of rain out of this storm. Rob at Are you cereus? was able to show convincingly that NWP models sometimes precipitate out the moisture too fast. They estimate too much rain on the windward side of the mountains and not enough on the lee side. In at least one instance, he was able to convince people to change their model. So don't just complain about bad weather forecasts. Do something about it. Document the bias and show it to the forecasters.
  

The Big Picture

I had a health setback this week. Instead of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to reflect on people with real problems. Imagine living in this region.

What are we doing about it here? Will we be ready if something similar happens in California? Will we even hold a statewide drill?

The LA Times ran a story about a town vulnerable to wildfire that held a fire drill. About two dozen people participated in the evacuation drill.

One of these days, I have to blog about an evacuation model that a UCSB geography professor showed at a seminar series at work. (Hey, they put me in charge of the seminar series one year so I invited people who I wanted to hear.) Rural settings and killer views come at a price.

Link
You can generate the latest map of this region at the USGS Latest Earthquakes in the World - Past 7 days site. Click for the Australia region (or whichever you want to see). Then click to zoom in for the 10x10 degree lat/lon map.

The trip home

I am never sure whether the drive from Los Angeles (LAX) to San Francisco (SFO) or the reverse trip from SFO to LAX is the homeward direction. I am sure that I am lucky to live in either place.

Sailing with my sister, Ann, and her friends on her boat, Matsu.
The view from Grandview Park is indeed, grand.
Moon rise over downtown San Francisco. Can you make out the Transamerica Pyramid?
Another view from the place more people on earth say they want to visit than any other. I never tire of the place.
Iris and her cousin, Waldo the wonder dog, in Ann's backyard.

Thai Silks in Los Gatos (NorCal) gives Oriental Silk Co. in Los Angeles (SoCal) a run for its money. I love them both. I spent so long trying to make up my mind, Ann had time to shop at Uncommon Threads across the street and Iris read an entire book. Ann and I also shopped Artfibers in SF, but I was too overcome by the fibery goodness to remember to whip out the camera.


Much book shopping occurred, at Village Stationers (in Palo Alto), the Great Overland Book Company and especially at Black Oak Books (the SF location). These came home with us. (A few left home with us for on the road reading.)

Iris' haul.
My haul. Love, Loss, and What I Wore by Ilene Beckerman is a gem. If you see it in a bookstore, buy it.
Mark's haul.

The Woods are on Fire

Remember my rant in Fire is a river that runs uphill? Don't miss the NY Times article, On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Fires Meet.

A new generation of Americans (snip), in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.

Their migration — more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin — has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.

Not only are there more fires, but the number of structures in the trees is going up. Who pays? You and I do. (And let us not forget that firefighters pay with their lives all too frequently.)

About 45 percent of the Forest Service’s proposed budget for 2008 is designated for firefighting, compared with 13 percent in 1991. Last year, the agency spent $2.5 billion, a record, thinning fuels and fighting fires that burned 9.9 million acres, also a record.

California, braced for what fire officials have said could be one of the worst seasons in history this year, has set aside $850 million for wildfire suppression.

The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the country’s largest landlord, spent $424 million fighting fire last year.

To put this in perspective, California budgeted $5.1 billion of the University of California and $4.0 billion for the California State Universities for this year. $.85 billion is not chump change. I would also argue that state spending on higher education has the potential to pay back the state many-fold because graduates (relative to those who never went to college) will likely earn more and hence, pay more in taxes.

Aside: The article does end with a newly transplanted (to the woods) couple deciding to join the volunteer fire department. That's showing the right self-sufficient pioneer spirit!

I knew a woman who moved from the city to the mountains. Not only did she join the volunteer fire department, but she eventually became the fire marshal. She was always complaining about the part-time residents in the fanciest and biggest homes. It appeared that those owners were much less likely to clear their brush or thin trees too close to their structures; they almost never joined the volunteer fire department.

It drove her crazy. Up in the mountains, you depend not just on yourself, but on your neighbors to do their part for mutual safety. What could she do? She cited and fined them. They could afford to pay her fines and ignore her requests .

Wildfire Season ad Nauseum

Although it is only May 11, we have already had quite a busy wildfire season already. I am worried about how the summer and fall will shape up. Fall is traditionally our most active fire season.

Take a look at the MODIS visible spectrum imagery of Catalina today taken by the Terra and Aqua satellites. Terra flew by in the mid-morning. The area lies near the edge of the image so the resolution is not optimal.

Aqua flew by in the early afternoon. The marine layer had burned off a bit. Catalina is near the center of the image so the resolution is better than Terra's today. (This coverage changes daily and Terra gives better coverage than Aqua some other days.

The smoke plume gives you a pretty good idea of the wind direction. Now, take a look at the terrain. (I just love the tilt feature in Google Earth.) See if you can predict where the fire will go next based upon Fire is a river that runs uphill.

There are several species that live on Catalina island and nowhere else on earth. I hope they will survive.

Links:
You may also want to look at the USDA Forest Service Wildfire Maps. Click on California/Nevada. Click anywhere on the map to zoom. See how many fires have burned since January 1, 2007 in California. Yipes.

Allstate has decided to halt writing homeowner's insurance policies in California, citing the fire danger. They've been writing policies and collecting premiums here for years. The policies even have clauses excluding flood damage. So, if they collected premiums during the wet years and now want to stop covering the state because they might have to pay out fire claims this year, then why do we carry insurance?

Wildfire Season 2007

Take a look at the photo galleries from the LA Times story about the Hollywood fire. Why does the fire burn only on one side of this ridge?

Remember that fire is a river that runs uphill? Do you see the wind direction? Note that the fire spread uphill and flowed into another "fire basin" only in the downwind direction? You can see it clearly in the Europa Technologies/Google Earth annotated map below.

Fire is a river that runs uphill

Remember the "dreamscapes" homes featured in the Los Angeles Times' west magazine? When I asked what the four homes had in common besides killer views, no one guessed that the homes are all in harm's way.

The ocean view home in Pacific Palisades was built after the previous house slid down the hill. The Malibu home replaces one that burned down in 1993. The hilltop studio is just that, and situated amid a grove of oily, fire-prone eucalyptus trees. The Palm Springs house does not look like it is in imminent danger, but it is essentially a glass box sitting next to an active earthquake fault.

Years ago, I listened to a fire modeler from Los Alamos National Lab. The takeaway message from his talk was that fire is a river that runs uphill. On flat land, in the absence of winds, a fire will burn itself out after it has exhausted the fuels in the fire perimeter. To fight the fire, you need only create a firebreak which denies the fire of the fuel it needs to maintain itself.

Flames and hot embers rise. On a hill (still in the absence of winds), the fire will keep moving uphill, picking up fresh fuel, until it can climb no further. Living on a ridge line is doubly dangerous because you are in not one, but two firesheds. A mountain top compounds the danger even further. But that is where the killer views are.

Living below the ridgeline, say on the ocean side, is not a guarantee of safety. Strong winds (can you say Santa Ana?) can blow a wall of flames over so that it curves up and over mountain ridges.

After the LANL scientist had his say, I turned to the fire chief (of a major metropolitan city with many people living at the urban wild land interface) sitting next to me and asked, "Why do you give people building permits for those homes?". He replied that he didn't. He denies them the first time because they are unsafe.

But the people who have the financial resources to build those homes are not used to hearing no. They call their buddy, the mayor, and then the mayor calls to ask the fire chief to chew his hide. To save his job, he gives the rich and powerful what they want, even though he knows it is a bad idea.

It costs a lot of money to fight fires in those mountainous subdivisions. That cost is subsidized by people living in the flatlands with views of the apartment building 10 feet away. The fire chief doesn't want to expend his department's meager resources on defending yet another home deliberately put in harm's way. But he feels like he has no choice.

Similiarly, the land in Malibu has a habit of sliding away when it rains. Caltrans does a bang-up job, continuously clearing the rocks that fall on the Pacific Coast Highway so that the rich and powerful are not inconvenienced in their commute. (The same goes for "Devil's Slide" near San Francisco.) That is money that is not spent fixing potholes in the flatlands, home of plebian chumps.

Some will say that those people pay a lot of taxes for their expensive homes. That may be, but more taxes are paid in the flatlands simply because more people live there. Yet, the cost of providing services, on a per capita (or per dwelling unit) basis are disproportionately high for the extreme view neighborhoods.

Perhaps it is time we institute something like Boulder's "blue line". Above that line, you can build a home, but don't expect any city water or fire protection. That preserves personal freedom, but doesn't ask someone else to shoulder your risk. (Well, unless you count the insurance risk pool.)

Read Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert.

Since 1990, more than eight million homes have been built in Western areas that foresters call “the urban-wild land” interface, also the focus of recent federal firefighting efforts...

Last year, wildfires burned nearly 10 million acres in the United States — a record, surpassing the previous year. The Forest Service has become the fire service, devoting 42 percent of its budget to fire suppression last year — more than triple what it was in 1991.

One major reason that fire fighting in the western forests has become more expensive is the number of structures (homes) being built in the trees. One Colorado newspaper had the guts to run a story questioning if our firefighters should risk (or lose) their lives protecting the vacation homes of the rich after twelve firefighters died in the Storm King Mountain fire.

It is an issue of fairness. Why should poor and middle class people subsidize the requirement of the rich to have their views?

(Of course I am jealous. I would love to have a killer view and a glass house to frame those views. Alas, my scientist salary does not allow that anywhere within bicycle commuting distance of my job. Maybe I can paint a mural on the apartment building next door to improve my view.)

Addendum
The Hollywood Hills fire behaved just like a computer modeled fire!
Read Wildfire Weather to find out why I am so obsessed with wildfires.

Alarm Clock

We felt an earthquake at 6:19. It was one quick, clean motion. Mark said that meant we were close to the quake epicenter. We are not seismologists so that was a WAG. We did report the quake here. Fill out the web form if you felt it, too.

The quake just showed up on the shake map. We were really close to the epicenter. See?

My first thought was, did Iris fall out of her bed? She was ok, but it woke her up.

That's all folks.

Rest of post

Earthshaking News

It felt like a stronger quake than it actually was. I was sitting quite close to the epicenter. You can read the details of the event here.