dan

Hobble and Dither

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.

 

March 9, 2012 by Personal Status 0

Recent Work

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.

March 3, 2012 by Work Status 0

Inventory

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.

View of car fenderThis 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.

February 18, 2012 by Cycling Personal Status 0

Nightmare

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.

Picture taken from inside ambulance

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.

February 10, 2012 by Cycling 0

Voluntarism

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.

 

February 7, 2012 by The Nature of Belief 0

Midnight Oil

Applications for the State Water Resources Control Board’s Storm Water Grants are due Tuesday at 5 pm, and it seems like everybody and their brother is hustling to get their projects in line for funding. Me included.

January 27, 2012 by Work Status 0

Lost Opportunity

Here’s a pair of maps. The first one shows a 27-acre area tributary to a ravine. The second roughs out the location where a bioretention facility might go. The facility would intercept runoff&#8212infiltrating some of it, evaporating a bit more, and treating the remainder before letting it seep toward the creek downstream.

Boundary of tributary area for LID retrofit projectThe project was envisioned by a small group of public works planners and engineers. To me, this is government at its best&#8212both objectively and subjectively.

Objectively, because the project is a way to get a lot of environmental benefit for a relatively modest public investment. Subjectively, because planning and executing projects that improve the urban environment is really cool and fun. It’s the sort of thing government ought to be doing, to my way of thinking, and I appreciate the privilege to get paid to do it.

Not this time.

80% of project costs would be grant-funded, and some of the 20% match could be attributed to another project that’s already in the budget. Some of the remainder would be spread around among a number of municipalities. But there’s no money for matching funds. Ultimately, the project died because one of the potential participating agencies couldn’t pledge $540.

Why? A couple of reasons:

Proposed Location of LID Retrofit FacilityFirst, cities and counties are in a budget crisis, and every budget crisis, once the pressure builds long enough, produces irrational, penny-wise decisions.

Second, our municipal stormwater permit mandates so many actions, and with such specificity, that municipal staff would rather be damned than add yet another activity, and another expense, regardless of how cost-effective that activity and expense might be.

That’s sad for those of us who got into the environmental business, and the public works business, because we had an expansive and optimistic view of how government could protect the environment.

All these years in, we’re still doing the minimum.

 

January 20, 2012 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention 0

Do the Minimum

It was 1991, maybe early 1992. I left my office at the sewage treatment plant and drove down to City Hall.

In the City Manager’s office, I had 10 minutes of his time to explain the new stormwater regulations. Yes, under the Clean Water Act, permits would now cover rainwater runoff from roofs, streets, and parking lots. Yes, the City had to comply. Specifically, we had to have a program to stop illicit connections and dumping, to educate the public, and to inspect activities at local businesses and construction sites.

Yes, there were fines and possible third-party lawsuits if we didn’t comply.

And no, this wasn’t going to go away.

The City Manager looked at me through heavy-lidded eyes.

“Do the minimum,” he said. My 10 minutes were up.

20 years later, the stormwater business has matured. Sort of.

On the one hand, we’ve got a whole community of people who, like me, have built their careers around stormwater pollution prevention.

On the other hand, yesterday some of the best and most experienced members of that community gave me a taste “do the minimum” all over again.

More later.

January 19, 2012 by Stormwater Pollution Prevention 0

Whimsy

Pic of my new bicycleOne the best things about my new purchase is going to be figuring out why I bought it.

It’s a very impractical machine. To begin with, it has only one gear (flip-flop fixie/freewheel, for those in the know). The parts are not particularly high-quality. This is a “large” frame from Republic Bicycles, but it feels undersized. And now that I’ve made the Craigslist deal, in cash, and after riding away on the bike, I see it’s got a bad scuff on one side of the bright-blue seat (from being dropped, no doubt), and there’s something klunky going on with bottom bracket.

On the bright side, I enjoyed riding it the 8 blocks to work. And I’ve already received a half-dozen compliments on it.

Style = fun. I guess that’s why.

January 11, 2012 by Cycling 0

What I’m Working On

  • Writing and updating the Contra Costa Clean Water Program Stormwater C.3 Guidebook, 6th Edition. The 6th Edition includes implementation of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board’s Municipal Regional Permit requirements to infiltrate, evapotranspirate or harvest/reuse runoff from new development sites.
  • Stormwater Control Plan Template to go with the Guidebook
  • Participation with the San Francisco Estuary Project, San Francisco Estuary Institute, and others in an application for a Proposition 84 Low Impact Development Planning and Monitoring Grant.
  • Preparing an additional Proposition 84 Planning and Monitoring Grant application for the Contra Costa Clean Water Program.
  • Exploring a possible Proposition 84 Implementation Grant application for Low Impact Development projects on publicly owned facilities in Contra Costa County.
  • Planning for workshops for municipal construction inspectors.
January 6, 2012 by Work Status 0