The Burlingame Voice

Earthquake Warning: 3 Months Without Water

The SF Chronicle is reporting on a USGS study about the impact of a major quake in the Bay Area--something they say is overdue

While nearly 113 years have passed without a major earthquake on the fault from the Peninsula north, the quiet will end. It could happen tomorrow or next week or decades from now. When it does, hundreds of thousands if not millions of people will feel the ground shake like they’ve never felt before.  Based on current understanding of earthquake recurrence, that’s a statistical anomaly, according to a report this month from U.S. Geological Survey scientists.  According to a 1,000-year earthquake history of those fault branches, the chances that not a single site would experience a major temblor in any given 100-year period is about 0.3%, the paper said.

Yep, we are riding on a 0.3% wave of luck.  Burlingame is doing more than most to prepare for this by way of our annual Neighborhood Network disaster drills, supply caches, ham radio courses and the like we discussed here.  The added bit of information from the USGS study is that a major quake on our San Andreas fault would have the probability of causing 3.7 million people to go without water for the following periods of time:

1-3 days has a 60% probability

1 week has a 58% probability

1 month has a 48% probability

3 months with no water has a 30.5% probability

Wow.  It's basically 50/50 that we would have to go a month without running water.  That is one of the reasons I believe we should be strengthening the Hetch Hetchy pipeline, building more reservoirs and limiting further population growth until we have done that.  It is somewhere between sad, ironic and scary that plenty of politicians read the headlines about the IPCC's 100 year climate change model and want immediate action, but this much nearer and more identifiable threat goes unnoticed.  Forewarned is forearmed.  This year's drill is Saturday, October 12th.  Put it on your calendar and if you don't have a group working in your part of B'game, think about volunteering.

Sweating in B'game

The prevailing wisdom is that retail is struggling on the Avenew, on Broadway and elsewhere in town.  Examples include the demise of Books, Inc. and Anthropologie--not exactly Mom and Pop operations that still couldn't cut it here.  But exercise is a booming business in retail areas.  The Comicle touched on this in January as people were thinking about New Year's resolutions and I'm addressing it as bathing suit season approaches.  The Comicle noted

A city retail study in February found that traditional retail growth has slowed but fitness providers and restaurants are still eager to expand. Across the Bay Area, 53 fitness leases were signed in the past three years.  Being near, or even in the same building, as housing and office uses is deliberate. “It’s really about convenience and daily need,” said Weinhaus. “People are coming to us day in and day out.”  Gyms and fitness centers can thrive in upper floors and basements, where traditional retailers might struggle, said Helen Bulwik, a veteran retail consultant and senior partner at the Newport Board Group.  “You can kind of stick a gym anywhere. It’s kind of like Starbucks.”  “We haven’t really been able to find a new location in the city in a long time,” said Frank Napolitano, president of 24 Hour Fitness. “Dense downtown cores tend to have the boutique-type operators. They don’t need as much space.”

Here in B'game we have an ever expanding menu of choices from old school full-service gyms like Primetime on Rollins Rd. or Being Yoga in the B'game Plaza to specialized set-up like Pilates ProWorks on B'way to the very one-on-one approach using a personal trainer such as B-Fit on Park Rd.  I've been a client at B-Fit for two years and can vouch for the one-on-one approach as a great way to get pushed into shape and strength.  In the middle of the spectrum are Basecamp (Dethrone) on California in the old Route 66 building and the newest, Barry's Bootcamp on Howard.  Locals are curious about Barry's after watching a complete renovation of what was just an old Quonset Hut that housed the Bacci Food Center in the 1950's.  I gave Barry's a try and really enjoyed the Red Room where the workout alternates between treadmill and floor/weight/band exercises.  Not so sure about the name in view of the Fifty Shades of Grey reference, but the music and the instructor kept it from being too painful.  The building itself has been completely transformed keeping large skylights and adding showers and a juice bar.  B'gamers have a full range of choices and price points so there really is no excuse for not sweating in Burlingame.  Here's the new Barry's

 

A BART Non-answer

I'm catching up with the January issue of the free San Francisco magazine that magically shows up in the mail every month.  It's often worth a quick read and can venture south of EssEff once in awhile like four years ago when we were deemed Utopia-qualified.  This month has a piece profiling the newly-elected BART board member, Janice Li.  Her claim to fame is as a bicycle advocate.  She also "still thinks it is scary, weird and absurd to be an elected official".   But somehow she has the elected official's non-answer answer down pat as seen here:

Q:  Riders south of San Francisco don't get to vote for BART elected officials, even though there are BART stations there.  Is that a good idea?

A:  There are two sides to the San Mateo problem.  Some people say that the people who live there aren't paying their fair share.  Others say that they are losing out because they have no representation.  I'm not totally sold that BART should even have a voter-elected board.  It's extraordinarily rare.

If you are waiting for the rest of the response, join the club.  I'm not feeling super confident about the future direction of the Caltrain and high-speed rail connections at the intermodal station in Millbrae.  You?

Bad B'game Branding

Here at the Voice we celebrate the good, and call out the bad and the ugly of B'game.  Now that Black Friday is over, let me be the first to hope that NOBODY bought this piece of trash that is for sale on the Avenew.  I won't deign to mention the shop because it doesn't deserve the attention.  If you are a retail enthusiast and happen to go in there, tell them to get their act together and behave like they belong here, not like they are doing now.

Veterans Day 2018

Today is the centennial Veterans Day when major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918. That is when the Armistice with Germany went into effect.  Then in 1954, at the urging of major veteran organizations, Armistice Day was renamed Veterans Day.  It's a day of remembrance as it is called in Europe, so let's do that.

I finally got down to the County Historical museum in Redwood City to see the WWII exhibit and it is highly recommended.  The theme is the war's impact on the Peninsula and there are several mentions of Burlingame residents and local places like Coyote Point.  It has been on display for about two years and is very worthwhile; you have until January or so to see it.  Here is one local airman (Allan Brown's) uniform that is on display.  Remember we shall.

B'game Rating: #38

The wizards at the San Francisco magazine have rated all 101 cities and towns in the Bay Area and we came out at number 38.  By combining scores for Education, Diversity, Health, Transit, Affordability, Public Safety, Culture and their own fudge factor "Editors' Rank", they arrive at Albany being the best place to live in the Bay Area.  Six years ago we were labelled as a sort of Utopia by the same magazine, so let's dig in a bit deeper.  Here are the scores

I get the good scores for Education and Transit.  Our public schools are quite good in spite of occasional issues with administrators at BIS and BHS and there are a lot of residents with bachelor's degrees or higher.  I also get how we land near the bottom in Affordability since we have always been an expensive place to live--it is more a result of the other criteria than an input on its own.  But how is B'game in the bottom half on Health?  They use physicians per capita, air quality scores and percentage of residents without health insurance.  With a major hospital in town and doctor's offices surrounding it, we must rate pretty high on the first one.  I hear at the meetings on the SFO runway noise that some residents also smell jet fuel fumes, but I doubt our air quality is below the median.

The real head-scratchers are Public Safety on the downside and Culture on the upside.  B'game has recently returned to "full strength" with 40 sworn officers and crime rates (aside from car break-ins mostly at Bayfront hotels) are pretty low.  Oakland ranked just ahead of us at 57!  And they do mean Oakland, California!!  There must be some spreadsheet error somewhere at the magazine.

I also cannot fathom how we got to number 15 in the whole Bay Area on Culture when the critieria are artistic venues per capita (we've got none other than the tiny art museum on the north end), the number of residents who list their occupation as "artist" (on Open Studio weekends we have a couple), and liquor licenses per capita.  I guess if one considers drinking with muzak playing "culture" we do OK.  While #38 isn't bad, I can't take much heart in the overall subjective nature of it all.  You won't catch many B'gamers moving to Colma (#18) or Pacifica (#22) or Belmont (#24).  I bet we just stay put.   
 

Pipe Bomb at Rollins Rd. USPS

In the spirit of covering all things Burlingame, I'll just note that we made the national news yesterday when the Postal Service located a pipe bomb in the mail addressed to activist Tom Steyer.  The mail sorting facility on Rollins Rd. went into shutdown and this message went out at 11:50 am

Burlingame Police responded to assist the FBI on a report of a suspicious package located at our mail facility on Rollins Rd. The package is consistent with the mailings throughout the nation. The package has been removed from that facility and the area has been rendered safe. This incident poses no danger to the community of Burlingame.

Later in the day, a guy with a long criminal record was arrested in Florida and accused of being the perp who mailed about a dozen such packages.  If you want the full details, the Daily Journal has it here.

 

Disaster Preparedness - Practice, Practice

Today was the city-wide disaster preparedness drill sponsored by the Burlingame Neighborhood Network.  22 "blocks" or neighborhoods in B'game took part and B'game police, fire and city officials toured the gathering sites to get a feel for how residents participated and learned about preparing.  This was my second year participating and I can verify that the more you do it, the more engaged and informed you become.  Step 0 is knowing where your block meets which is the most fundamental thing to know.  We had many new faces this year as people have moved into the neighborhood or just decided to come to the event.  That interaction alone makes it worthwhile.

I'll just tell you three things about being prepared.  Neighborhoods that plan and practice do far better, in the aggregate welfare, than those that don't.  That may seem obvious, but it bears repeating so that participation can get above 3-4% of everyone in the neighborhood.  Second, B'game has about 100 first responders in total but only about 25 are on duty at any given time, so figuring out what has happened, how serious it is and getting the most dire issues up the "chain of command" is essential.  The rest will be up to us.  Lastly, the city is doing a good job of assisting this grass roots efforts.  My neighborhood qualified for one of the 22 "caches" of emergency supplies that the city has funded based on our history of engagement in the process.  We also got one of the decommissioned radios to enable a communications lead to talk to ham operators at the elementary schools (who then relay the most critical info to police and fire).  We cannot count on 911 and cell phones for everything when all is chaos.

All in all it was a worthwhile morning and kudos to BNN for the planning, documentation and coaching needed to make it a success.  Here is the cache spread out for the drill.

SpaceX: We Live in Cool Times

I was in the backyard tonight barbecuing a nice rack of lamb and drinking a nice Napa cab when I looked up in the sky and saw something that I had never seen before.  I watch the planets and the constellations and sometimes make the effort to see "blood moons" and such (as you know from this post).  I called Cathy over to see the thing and we joked about it being a UFO, but the rack was done and it was time to eat.  Here is the answer to the spatial mystery

Elon Musk’s rocket company launched a commercial satellite for Argentina on Sunday evening, marking SpaceX’s 17th mission of 2018 in the type of steady success that so far has eluded his electric-car maker Tesla Inc.

The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base on California’s central coast about 7:21 p.m. local time. About 8 minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first stage returned and landed at Vandenberg in a first for a California-based SpaceX launch. The second stage deployed SAOCOM 1A, an Argentine Earth-imaging satellite, roughly 12 minutes after the launch.

When I was a cadet at the U.S. Air Force Academy I had a chance to tour a missile silo at Vandenberg AFB in 1977.  That was cool but the fact that Musk's team can launch and retrieve a rocket from/to Vandenberg is....well, cooler.  Did anyone else in B'game see it?

Bracing for the Big One

Yes, I was a Boy Scout.  Not much of a Boy Scout but enough to have assimilated the "Be Prepared" motto.  It's not often we have much to learn from Ess Eff.  Usually it's a matter of learning what not to emulate.  But in this one case, we could learn from The City.  The Chron's front page says "S.F. is doing its best to brace for the Big One":

A crucial 5-year-old program requiring action by the owners of San Francisco’s 4,900 most earthquake-vulnerable buildings is well on its way to making the city safer, with nearly half of those structures now seismically retrofitted, city inspection officials said Thursday.

Meanwhile, geological experts pointed out that there is a 72 percent chance of a massive shaker on the 60-mile-long Hayward Fault or any other of the Bay Area’s big faults sometime in the next 25 years. Which really means any day now.

The city started talking about "soft story" retrofits after the Series quake and did something official in 2013

The program was created to compel the 4,900 owners of soft-story buildings — the ones that have several stories rising above an open garage or commercial space, deemed more susceptible than many other structures to collapse in a major quake — to seismically retrofit.

It seems to me emulating this would be a good use of the City of B'game's regulatory reach--much better for more people than getting into the sort-of-affordable housing business since

U.S. Geological Survey scientists say a 7.0 magnitude quake on the Hayward Fault is likely to kill at least 800 people throughout the Bay Area, leave 150,000 people homeless and cause losses of more than $1.5 trillion. At least 400 fires will ignite, potentially engulfing 50,000 homes.

It's not just about the residents in such "soft story" buildings but also their neighbors.  In the meantime, the next B'game city-wide emergency drill is coming up on October 13th.  If you neighborhood is organized to participate, please do.  If not yet, it's not too late to get the basics in place via the BNN.