Comments by Carl May
August 02, 2006
Ray, The freeway bypass through Montara Mountain was fought for decades, producing thousands of pages of literature on the many very real issues. The red-legged frog wasn't even on the radar screen, not having been listed until May, 1996--and then listed without critical habitat for it being designated. You are making a totally baseless assumption about the situation. The red-legged frog didn't enter the picture until the environmental studies for the twin tunnels were being conducted. This was after…
August 04, 2006
The high school cheerleading approach is amusing but overlooks the fact that Devil's slide is *not* unique compared to other landslides with roads across them that are reopened to traffic more quickly. Sure there are some that are just little slippages of material across intact roadbeds, but that is not at all what I have been referring to. I'm talking about roadbeds going out. The basic geology of the landslide on Devil's slide has been known for many years and is not particularly unusual. It is…
August 03, 2006
Yes, you have been shafted by Caltrans during the unnecessarily long road outage. But the people to turn to are already in place: all those jurisdictions and road departments that handle roads across landslides elsewhere and make reopening any road disruptions to traffic their *first* order of business. For the past 40 years, the biggest problems with road closures at Devil's Slide have been the refusal of some in the public to learn about the actual situation on the landslide and the willingness…
August 02, 2006
Want an amusing vision? Reminiscent of the scene in the opening pages of "The Monkey Wrench Gang," the invited government officials and Chamber crowd are gathered at Grey Whale Cove to blurt their specious sound bites and pose for photo ops. The TV cameras are rolling, when suddenly in the background a loud blast is heard, a concussion is felt, and the road leading to the slide is.... Sure I'd be upset once I got done cheering. I need that road to get to my office in less than an hour. But there…
August 01, 2006
Probably. Don't the politicians and bureaucrats deserve their day of invitation-only self-congratulatulatory ceremonies for a job poorly managed?
Carl May
August 02, 2006
First, I have given extensive information leading to the "answers" to Newton's questions over the months. I realize he is new to the coast, but one thing he needs to learn is that there are thousands of pages on Devil's Slide if one includes all the shenanigans Caltrans has tried to pull (and is still pulling) in the name of addressing the very occasional outage of the highway on the landslide. And to understand those thousands of pages, one needs to get into the nature of landslides and how engineers…
August 01, 2006
If the shoe fits... Uninformed and inexperienced people are welcome to the hardships they bring on themselves. It's so much easier to cave in to those manufacturing consent than to insist on the obvious and existing ways of doing things better that are in practice elsewhere. My only gripe is that I'm stuck in the same sinking boat built partly with their compliance. It's an interesting exercise to estimate for the past three months the total hours lost by people in traffic; the extra gas burned;…
July 27, 2006
Ah, yes, capitulation to heavy-handed authority, even when the facts repeatedly show that authority to be wrong. Another great, run-it-up-the-flagpole American trait. Gee, let's crawl on our knees to the "public servants" amplifying and prolonging our problems. Surely they'll see our pain. From the early days after the slide went out this time, I stated coastsiders would be a big part of the problem due to the cowtowing to the agencies and politicians playing their manipulative games and acting in…
July 26, 2006
No big deal if the slide had been opened to controlled traffic in May and any slowing of repairs requiring access to the roadbed caused the schedule to go on into October. (Of course, we don't know if slowing of repairs would have been necessary with different scheduling.) Caltrans could have spent its money as easily that way and saved everyone three months of unnecessary disruption of their lives and businesses. Pumpkin Festival? Easy--just halt any construction for that weekend and keep the road…
July 24, 2006
Thank Caltrans for doing something in another week and a half that should have been done two and one-half months ago? Be embarrassed for stating the obvious, as demonstrated by how roads across landslides are opened after outages everywhere else? Anyone who is falling all over themself in gratitude is just setting themself up for more life disruption the next time a road goes out around here. You are letting the politicians and bureaucrats know that their spin works on you, that they can play on…
July 26, 2006
Leonard, How are "requirements imposed from above" any different than imposition of LAFCO opinions from outside or the absurd suggestion that a few unified voices should be able to force abandonment of an independent district into a consolidated one without a vote on such a major change to *their* district by citizens of the communities involved. That citizens should have to petition to force a vote on a change being forced on them by a relative few in government is insulting. Could that have anything…
July 25, 2006
Answer the question. The operations will all be under one roof if contracted out to the same over-the-hill outfit. Why consolidate with a sick, mismanaged, neighboring district first? My past examples of much smaller communities with their own independent fire protection districts are not "magic"; they are all over the place in California. Only a dogged urban mindset that won't look at existing situations separates some people from realizing this. Want slurbia? It's just over the hill for those who…
July 25, 2006
Who was it who said Americans have an amazing capacity for keeping two opposite points of view in mind at the same time. In one breath it is said we coastsiders are all part of one community, that our interests are common ones, that we are all in the same boat, and in the next breath the same people argue that Point Montara citizens should continue to pay a parcel tax four times as high after consolidation of the districts. Oh yeah, lots of rationalizing blather about HMB vs. county taxation and…
July 18, 2006
Leonard,
It's a lot of rain, usually about three continuous weeks with no off days for drainage along the way, that puts enough water in the slide mass to add weight and reduce friction to the degree that part of it moves downhill a foot or three (on the surface). Looking at the dates of past slide outages (which have taken place every 10 to 15 years, usually in El Nino years), you will find this condition is not necessarily late in the season.
Carl May
July 18, 2006
The basic geology of Montara Mountain (including the extension known as san Pedro Mountain, where Devil's Slide is found) is well known, fairly simple, and need not be the subject of wild speculation. The decomposed granite is primarily on the surface--due to weathering. A few feet down the granite is as hard as one imagines for granite anywhere. (This gets into one of the many miscalculations Caltrans made when trying to justify the bypass--much more expensive blasting of the hard rock would have…
June 23, 2006
There are a number of definitions of "natural," but the consideration in play for a wetland (or any other ecosystem) has that word as the opposite of "artificial." In this sense, something is natural to the degree that it is not artificial (and vice versa). An ecosystem might be considered essentially natural if its interwoven ecologic and evolutionary processes operate freely and, overall, stably in the absence of human technologic inputs (past or present). So, over time, what was set up artificially…
June 22, 2006
One can construct a wetland, but one cannot construct a natural wetland. Not enough is known about the biologic and geologic complexities, especially on the crucial microbial level. This is why, when it comes to mitigations, nothing created artificially truly compensates for damage to natural wetlands. On the other hand, it is easier to argue the appropriateness of well-designed mitigations for damage to wetlands that were created artificially in the first place.
Carl May
June 20, 2006
If I entered every foot-shooting contest in fundraisers to benefit stalking horses for development on the midcoast, I would have been out of feet decades ago. Leonard, you missed at least one front for development when you omitted the old navy property on the east side of the highway at the north end of Moss Beach. The Stuporvisors did their best to grease it for over-the-hill developers (I seem to recall Jack Foster, Jr.) maybe 15 years ago by lowering the percentage of "affordable" units required…
June 19, 2006
CDP? We don't need no stinking CDP. We are fronted by a sympathy-engendering cause, so we are above regulations and zoning.
There will be a joint fundraiser hosted by the Boys and Girls Club and Big Wave on July 4. Bring your gun for the foot-shooting contest.
June 22, 2006
Ray, The proposed tax that was just defeated was to be on parcels, not on incomes. Consequently a focus on income is irrelevant with regard to the specific measure. *Average* income is an indicator of nothing when it comes to the incomes of the individual people voting. One might hypothesize that people with higher incomes tend to be the people who "own" property and that property owners voted disproportionately against the parcel tax; but you don't know that. That is why better data is needed if…
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