Dan Cloak | Environmental Consulting

Los Tocayos Carlos

Written May 15th, 2012
Categories: Uncategorized
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In the first days of November 2004 I spent three days working for the John Kerry campaign in Albuquerque. My then-wife Jennifer and I joined with Jim Liebman to GOTV on the city’s northwest side. We parted from him in sadness after watching the returns that evening.

Nearly eight years later, I was glad to see his long-awaited book—part of his lifelong efforts in opposition to the death penalty—managed to get a little press.

Three somewhat random observations:

Innocents like Carlos DeLuna will continue to be wrongly executed long as Americans continue to support the death penalty.
Eyewitnesses can be dead wrong.
If you ever wanted an example of how one person can make a difference, and what it takes to do so, I present you Jim Liebman. Heck, he even took on reforming the New York City Public School system.

Strange Ride

Written April 4th, 2012
Categories: Cycling, Personal Status
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In the last couple of weeks, I’ve ridden the single-speed to work a few times, and around town on errands.

I can now put Zoe in a rear-rack-mounted seat on the old hybrid—much to her delight—and make it at least as far as the preschool.

However, today, almost 8 weeks after the crash, was the first time I’ve put on my cycling shoes and taken the road bike around the hills.

It’s a different experience. In addition to the speed and agility of the bike, and the feeling of the road flying by under the skinny tires, there’s the workout: the sustained elevation in heart rate and breathing, the leg and arm muscles working close to their peak, the abdomen and back providing the balance and counterpoint.

Today it felt weird, and wrong. I was fatigued, then strong, then queasy.

Usually, climbing tires out the quadriceps and gluteus muscles. Today, my knees and calves and ankles and toes felt painfully out of alignment. Usually, a sustained climb brings a general weakness as blood sugar dwindles. Today, with each turn of the crank, the out-of-line, out-of-sync feeling in my lower legs, and the knocks and vibrations of the road, brought back the spacey out-of-it feeling I associate with the brain injury. Usually, an hour or two later I feel pleasantly tired and relaxed. Tonight, I feel a bit raw and needing quiet.

Neighborhood Watch

Written March 30th, 2012
Categories: The Nature of Belief
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I’ve always been wary of Neighborhood Watch groups, crime prevention councils, and the like.

This helps me understand why.

Homeowners in George Zimmerman’s subdivision could be liable for damages from the wrongful death of Trayvon Martin.

The potential levy reflects the moral hazard in getting involved in this kind of activity—including just attending a meeting.

I like and trust my neighbors. I think it’s a good idea to keep an eye out for each other, and for trouble.

However, the popular misperceptions of crime, and criminals, and the fears that go with those perceptions, are volatile and toxic. I think neighborhood anti-crime groups can stir up those fears and misperceptions.

The resulting danger outweighs any benefit those groups might have.

A nice potluck or planting party serves the same purpose of building community cohesion, without the hazard of stirring up the George Zimmerman in any of us—or in all of us.

Shaking my head

Written March 29th, 2012
Categories: Stormwater Pollution Prevention, Work Status
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The current statewide stormwater Phase II NPDES permit was issued in 2003 and expired in 2008. It’s been extended administratively while State Water Resources Control Board staff drafts an update.

This permit tells smaller California cities and towns what they must do to reduce the amount of pollutants discharged from their streets, gutters, and drainage pipes.

Tomorrow I’m headed to Sacramento for an all-day meeting to discuss one permit provision—the provision governing how land development projects must be built so that runoff impacts are minimized.

This is my living, and I’m glad to donate a day, serving no client, to assist the State with this project.

But the meeting participants didn’t get the latest draft of the provision until this morning. And it is a very rough draft, with placeholders and sentences that trail off. There are proposed requirements that clearly haven’t been thought through. And this is four years after this permit should have been written, reviewed, debated, settled, and adopted.

I’m embarrassed for Water Board staff, who I know are capable and have good intent.

I can’t help but try to imagine what level of political and bureaucratic dysfunction, what kind of organizational and management clusterf*ck, could be going on behind the scenes at the Water Board.

Tomorrow I’ll put that imagining aside and, once again, focus on the issues: why the proposed criteria don’t make technical sense and can’t be implemented consistently, why the objective of the required studies is unclear and unattainable, how developers’ engineers will game the weak language, why this is an invitation to lawsuits against the Water Boards and the cities. And on. And on.

Neighborhood Stroll

Written March 17th, 2012
Categories: Personal Status
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A few blocks of walking late last night has left my left calf and MCL singing. Most surprisingly, it also made me tired, the way an hour’s run or a 3-hour bike ride used to, before the February 9 crash.

I don’t know how hard to push myself. Each time, I’ll have to guess whether a little more effort will help strengthen or just re-injure the damaged tissue.

Mostly, it just felt good to move again.

Hobble and Dither

Written March 9th, 2012
Categories: Personal Status
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A month after the February 9 crash, I’m still hobbled by two sprained ankles, two sprained knees, and a torn calf muscle. And I can’t seem to focus for very long, or for very much of the day, on work or on anything else.

I’m stuck between two conflicting desires: One, to relax into the pain and loss, and take more time to heal; the other, to move on, not “back to normal,” but ahead, with purpose.

My usual mode to resolve this kind of dilemma would be to take a long walk, or to drain off my energies on the bike.

Instead, I hobble. And dither.

Recent Work

Written March 3rd, 2012
Categories: Work Status
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The Contra Costa Clean Water Program’s Management Committee approved the 6th Edition of the Stormwater C.3 Guidebook, which has been published on the Program’s C.3 pages. My presentation slides are here. Every time I update the Guidebook, I appreciate anew the municipal stormwater staff in Contra Costa municipalities. These are the people who provide the information and front-line perspectives that make each new edition better than the last. And with each update, I rededicate myself to the process of continuous improvement begun back in 2004.

At the request of the Napa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District and Napa County Resource Conservation District, I provided an update on the New Development (“E.12″) provisions in the draft statewide Phase II Stormwater NPDES Permit (presentation slides here) and training on Low Impact Development planning and design (presentation slides here–warning 42 MB download).

I gave a presentation (slides here) at the American Society of Civil Engineers Annual California Infrastructure Symposium in Sacramento. In their provisions governing how land development projects get built, California stormwater NPDES permits include common technical errors and mistaken assumptions. It’s a challenge to communicate what those errors are, how they came to be, why they are screwing up local efforts to improve water quality, and what the Water Boards’ staff could do to fix them. I’m pursuing my own continuous improvement effort here–presenting the explanations and arguments when and where I can, and trying to hone my delivery with each iteration. It’s a long haul.

Inventory

Written February 18th, 2012
Categories: Cycling, Personal Status
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In the first days after the accident, I felt bruised; I could still limp around. I spent much of the weekend with Zoe, and took her to a playground on Saturday. I went to the office in the mornings, and even went back in the late evenings to fulfill some overdue promises. I gave a talk up in Napa on Tuesday, and delivered a presentation in Martinez on Wednesday.

I felt unbelievably tired and wanted, above all else, to lie alone in a quiet room.

Driving back from Napa Tuesday, I had trouble finding my way home. I kept missing the exits, backtracking, choosing a different route–oh, I’ll just go this way instead–and then missing the next exit, again. Hmmm. Something was definitely wrong.

On Wednesday night, the agony in my legs set in. I upped the dose of Vicodin to the maximum, but the pain was still excruciating. The only relief was to lie perfectly still with my legs slightly elevated.

Thursday, my regular Kaiser doc checked out my legs and changed my prescription to Percocet.

This morning, the pain is resolving a bit, and I can differentiate what’s OK from what’s damaged (other than inside my skull): My left knee took a huge whack on the left side, loosening the patella and overstretching the MCL on the opposite side. My left calf muscle is separated a bit. My left ankle is sprained. The Achilles tendon is strained. My shin and the top of the foot are bruised. The right side faired a little better–sprained ankle, mostly, and considerable bruising on the shins. And a pulled calf muscle on that side as well.

So that’s what’s hurting worst. I also have some upper spine and neck pain, for which I got some chiro adjustments yesterday. Today I’m going back and hoping she’ll work on my shoulders.

I took a closer look at the photos of the car that I took from the gurney. it looks like there was significant damage to the front left fender. The bike came back from the shop OK–wheels knocked slightly out of true, and the handlebar tape scuffed, but with an intact frame–so I’ve got to guess that the impact from my body is what damaged the car. Ouch.

Nightmare

Written February 10th, 2012
Categories: Cycling
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Yesterday afternoon was gorgeous for a ride: Sunny, warm, and windless. I left at 2 pm, and I planned to be back in time to shower and pick up Zoe from preschool a little after 4.

In 20 minutes or so, I made it to the top of Fairmount Avenue, climbed the quiet roads through the cemetery, pushed my way up Sunset Drive and headed north on Arlington Avenue.

View from inside the ambulance

The first part of the descent of Arlington is a little steep, but routine–I’d been this way many times before. In a few minutes I’d finished the the curvy parts and was headed down a long, straight, moderate grade through East Richmond Heights.

There was a car where a car shouldn’t have been, heading south in the northbound lane. He’d crossed over the yellow line, and my mind wanted to believe he would soon duck into a driveway, or veer back, or…

That was about all the time I had. I squeezed the brakes, hard, but there was no chance to steer around and no way to break my momentum.

I was looking down at where my front wheel was about to make contact with the bumper. Maybe that was why I flipped, rolled, and then smashed into the driver’s side windshield with my shoulders and upper back, sending glass shards flying through my helmet vents and into my scalp. I felt the bike rip clear from my clipped-in shoes and continue in another direction.

Then I was aware of my momentum carrying me onward, my butt and back sliding up the shattered remains of the windshield.

And then I was stopped, balanced on a hip and a forearm, on the roof of the car.

An old man got out of the driver’s side below me.

“How fast do you think you were going?” he said.

I asked him to call 911.

“You go ahead and call ‘em,” he said. It sounded like a challenge, maybe even a threat.

“No, you call them,” I pleaded. I didn’t know whether my hands could operate a mobile phone.

A passerby was watching from the west side of the street. He had his phone out and agreed to call 911. Then someone appeared on a porch and said they’d called.

My legs hurt like hell. I sat up and dangled them over the passenger side and looked down the street, telling myself to breathe slowly and deeply.

The old man pulled the car, with me still sitting on the roof, over to the curb on the wrong side of the road. He wanted a bunch of things–to see my driver’s license, know my insurance company, to roll up the window beneath my legs, to leave to go pick up his granddaughter.

EMTs arrived. I took this picture from the gurney inside the ambulance.

Voluntarism

Written February 7th, 2012
Categories: The Nature of Belief
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From wikipedia:

In epistemology, ‘voluntarism’ describes the view that belief is a matter of the will rather than one of simply registering one’s cognitive attitude or degree of psychological certainty with respect to a stated proposition. If one is a voluntarist with respect to beliefs, it is coherent to simultaneously feel very certain about a particular proposition, P, and assign P a very low subjective probability.

In my Marxist days, we used “voluntarist” to describe an ultra-left tendency to substitute one’s own will and desires for objective facts, including–objectively–the will and desires of the masses of people. With time, I think most of the comrades came to see the label applied pretty consistently to all of us. The revolution wasn’t going to happen no matter how much we wanted it or sacrificed for it.

I had reason to look up “voluntarist” yesterday as I was composing a comment on this sloppy and lazy-minded article. Chris Hedges writes about the “Black Bloc” activists who have added property destruction to a “diversity of tactics” within the Occupy movement. I was looking for a more succinct and accurate way of describing the fundamental error of the “Black Bloc.”

As humans, we are all prone to violence and grandiosity; we can only seek foresight and “think it through,” and thereby convince ourselves to take a more peaceful and productive course. If we err and seek a will to believe, rather than a reason to believe, then we are immune to the leavening effects of foresight. I’m saying it’s not so much that the Black Bloc arrogantly substitutes their own beliefs for those of the larger movement, it’s that for them, their own desire and determination trumps all other forms of evidence and argument.

I came back to these thoughts today as I read the 11th District Court’s decision n Perry v. Schwarzenegger. The majority found that California voters (at least 52.3% of us) “took away from gays and lesbians the right to use the official designation of ‘marriage’–and the societal status that accompanies it–because they disapproved of these individuals as a class…” and therefore enacted a judgment about their dignity and worth.

This is, of course, the essence of bigotry. However, I was most struck by how gently the Court regarded the motivations of the electorate, holding that it was not necessary to believe they had real animus–their mere disapproval of gays and lesbians is enough to explain our discriminatory actions and violation of our Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

Except that it isn’t. I think it has to be more than mere disapproval. I think those who voted yes, most of them, really believed, against all reason and evidence, that they were protecting something they value.

Somewhere in there is the popular idea that belief–yours, mine, and our neighbors–is a matter of will. I’m thinking that only this idea–voluntarism–adequately explains how, for most people, prejudice triumphs easily over facts and reason. We believe what we want to believe, you and I and our neighbor, and if you don’t believe that gay marriage is a threat to society, it’s simply because you don’t want to believe it.

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