Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
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Category: Disasters
Broken Water Main
Posted on March 20, 2014 in Disasters Neighborhood
The street was slick as if we’d had a good rain. The closer we drew to our light at the crest where Saddleback Ranch and Glenn Ranch met, the wetter the road. It was flooding near the top. A pair of police cruisers hedged off the road. In the darkness, I could see a blue-white geyser shooting into the air in a steady torrent. A firetruck stood at the ready. At the other end, more police cars blocked off the road. We splashed past our usual turn and made a left at El Toro. Lynn and I schemed about what we would do if our water was cut off by the burst. “The only water we’ll use is for drinking and flushing the toilet,” she said. “I have Gatorade on hand,” I added helpfully. When we got home, we turned on the kitchen tap expecting it to scream as empty plumbing does. But a stream bubbled into a glass and I drank it.
The Fall of America
Posted on December 1, 2010 in Civic Responsibility Disasters
Mark me a true patriot.
From 5.9 to 5.4
Posted on July 11, 2010 in Earthquakes
The USGS errs on the side of excess when it first estimates the power of an earthquake
Across the Recovering Chaparral
Posted on March 30, 2009 in Biomes Hiking Photos Santiago Fire Video
The mustard leaves spread like lettuce on a tree, shivering in a wind that blew up presumably from the sea. It dwarfed my dog. He didn’t trust it. Sometimes he hovered at the commencement of a stand of it, letting me go through first just in case a bobcat or skunk waited to mug him.
Lupines bent and danced, morning glories trembled. Only the coast paintbrush maintained it’s stiffness, choosing to splash red against the carpet of newly freed annuals. Here and there a knot that had been the trunk of a chamise or a buckwheat sprouted from the humps at the sides of the abandoned road. I was tempted to pull them just to see what rope tethered them to the earth. Christmas berry exploded from rootstock that had not been killed by the conflagration of two years ago. Scrub oak refused to abandon the trunks, though many wizened branches remained. A gully of Mexican elderberry, untouched by the fire, exalted in pale yellow. The greatest miracles were the many pale fronds of Our Lord’s candle that sprouted in the rocky areas. They had the gawky look of weak-stemmed asparagus. The only wildlife we saw were a pair of hawks hunting the mice who came to harvest the new-grown grasses.
More photos and videos in my Flickr photo stream.
Also check Paths of Light.
A Yawner of an Earthquake
Posted on January 9, 2009 in Earthquakes
For thirty seconds, I heard it moving about the condo, but saw very little.
The Quake of ’89
Posted on December 24, 2008 in Earthquakes Silicon Valley
I had felt it while driving and the telephone poles had bent over.
Little Shade: One Year After the Santiago Fire
Posted on November 25, 2008 in Conservation Santiago Fire
I finally let my feet take me into Whiting Ranch Wilderness Park, one year and one month to the day after the Santiago Fire ripped through. A few steps past the rusted steel obelisk, the trail descends the height of a man and all is green. Talking about the conflagration seems an idle joke until you go through a tube of foilage and see blackened skeletons sweeping up from the creekside.
From this point, the matter of the district’s history is ambiguous. Not everything has been scorched. Instead of blackened ground, what you notice (if you have gone this way before) is that the shade is missing for many strides. The slopes beneath the houses are scalped and covered with net. The grass is low except in the wet spots. Great old oaks have been reduced to mouldering rounds of lumber. Where the burn did not kill the roots and left a little green, the trees thrive or at least support one green branch. The thick leaf litter where skunks used to seek their insect dinners has been reduced to ash and blown away.
You feel exposed, in a steeply sloped vacant lot between housing developments, until you reach the end of the houses and then you just feel strange. A reddish yellow fuzz crowns the hills. A water-resistant soot covers the slopes where the chamise and the scrub oak grew. Any sense that is to be made of what was burnt and what was saved requires painstaking study. All I can say for certain is that the chapparal disintegrated along with the grass, but only the latter is coming back.
This haunts me: the buckwheat is gone. I miss its red cauliflower tops.
The Fires in Orange County
Posted on November 15, 2008 in Disasters Neighborhood
Things are not so interesting here as they were last year. The Orange County fires are on the other side of our mountain in the Santa Ana Canyon. We do have some light Santa Ana winds blowing, but they are northeasterlies which means we are well out of harm’s way. I stopped to watch the tops of the palm trees swing in a parking lot, but my nose and my eyes could not detect the slightest wisp of smoke. I can rest at ease knowing that all the land that might threaten us was burned over last year. This year Portola Hills is safe.
The best source for news is, again, The Orange County Register. We are also keeping our fingers crossed for the folks in Los Angeles County who are threatened by the fire in Sylmar. I have already heard of one Twitterer who learned that his house was lost in that blaze when he saw it burning on the TV news.
For my accounts of the Santiago Fire click here.
Earthquake
Posted on July 29, 2008 in Earthquakes
It was loud: buzzing through the timbers of our condominium up to the roof. I confess that I was still asleep, but it woke me. Not enough time to run for the doorway and I wasn’t sure how strong it was. Perhaps a stupid move on my part, but I was curious as to how big it was going to be. The vibration raced through the ceiling before petering out.
Doggy and the cats didn’t freak, but everyone is now following me around the house. This was nowhere near as exciting as the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake but there’s the possibility that this was a foreshock to something greater.
Here’s the official USGS website for the quake complete with maps (yes, they are fast.)
And here is what it looked like on the seismograph.
Cal Tech has this cool video representation of the shaking. Frankly, it makes it look worse than it was.
I expect the usual “Oh, I couldn’t live in California because I am so afraid of the earthquakes” litany, but I’ll retort as usual that I’d rather have earthquakes than tornados or hurricanes.
[tags]earthquake, earthquakes, Carbon Canyon, Southern California, Greater Los Angeles[/tags]
Coat Weather
Posted on March 3, 2008 in Neighborhood Santiago Fire
Rabbits have begun to appear in the coyote brush that fringes Portola Hills. I saw three on a short walk around Concourse Park in the fog yesterday. In the spring, they will breed more, and then the offspring will discover that the burnt-out district is quite free of predators. So this year will be a good year for rabbits, at least until the bobcats, the coyotes, and the hawks find places to hide or to perch.
It was foggy until this morning. The hills are bright green where the grass is coming back, a pale green where they were sprayed with a hydroseeding compound, and brown in the places where neither Nature nor Humankind made provision. People still come to gawk: on my Saturday afternoon walk in the park I saw a cluster of tourists led by a man who was pointing. The rabbits paid them no heed. I just hurried home, holding my coat close.
High winds made it coat weather even with the sun.
Tiger at the San Francisco Zoo
Posted on December 26, 2007 in Disasters Zoos
At the San Francisco Zoo, it’s our mission to connect people with wildlife, inspire caring for nature and advance conservation action.
The [[San Francisco Zoo]] had been a sad place for a long time, in my opinion, the cages woefully out of date and the number of animals forever dwindling. Cold fogs blew in off the Pacific, right across the street, making it hardly the habitation for anything other than musk ox — which disappeared in favor of an out of place African veldt exhibit.
I’d often wondered about the pits that kept the lions and tigers and bears away from the general public. One by one they emptied and nothing was ever put back in them. Tatiana, the killer tiger, lived in a gray moated enclosure. You trusted that pit, assumed that it would keep its inmates inside, away from your succulent limbs. You also hoped that the zookeepers kept their charges fed. Some years ago, they used to feed them inside the lion house. It was a shocking show: lions and tigers roared at the top of their lungs while keepers tossed haunches of meat to them. The large room shook as the beasts waited their turn. I could never spend more than a minute or two in their carnivorous presences.
The Terrace Cafe, where they shot the beast down, is about a three to five minute walk from the moats. I can imagine the staff locking the doors, staring out the window as San Francisco police officers emptied their .40 pistols at the monster.
Last year, you may have heard, this same tiger mauled a keeper’s arm. Cal-OSHA cited the zoo for a faulty cage design, but nothing was said about the tiger or the dangerous disrespect she had shown. It surprises me that she had not been put down then. But we are speaking of a rare beast and I don’t doubt that the rarity of her kind in the wild influenced the decision to let her live.
Incidentally, I used to go to an endodontist who assisted in performing root canals on lions, tigers, leopards, and babboons at the zoo, a plaudit that he advertised via a photo album in his lobby. They used a regular 1/4″ drill bit and lots of anesthestic to keep the creatures comfortable and the dentists safe. I used to attest to his skill by pointing out that none of his patients had ever killed him.
I had an odd experience with a tiger once at the Los Angeles Zoo. My niece and I were hunting for the animal. We went up to a side window. The tiger came right up and uttered a deep throated “meow” or chuff. Who was he talking to, her or me?
Web Links:
- This Silicon Valley Mom was at the Zoo yesterday
- San Francisco Zoo
- [[Siberian Tiger]] – Wickipedia
- The San Francisco Chronicle
- The Guardian
- Inside Bay Area (San Mateo County Times)
- San Jose Mercury News – Zoo is a crime scene
- ABC News – Third attack this month
- Los Angeles Times – How did it get out?
- Associated Press – List of Maulings by Captive Animals
I’m betting that these guys had been teasing her.
[tags]tiger, tigers, Tatiana the Tiger, zoo, San Francisco, San Francisco Zoo, Bay Area, San Francisco Bay Area, California, Northern California, disasters, zoos, Siberian tiger, conservation[/tags]
Webcam in my Neighborhood
Posted on December 4, 2007 in Neighborhood Santiago Fire The Orange
The USGS just launched a new webcam which is positioned about a mile from where I live in Santiago Canyon as a means of monitoring post-fire floods. It should be quite the thing to watch on Thursday Friday.
Wouldn’t it be fun to stand in front of the camera for a picture?
Read more about it here.
[tags]disasters, groundwater, water, California, Southern California, California wildfires, wildfires, flood[/tags]
