You can make a difference to the hurt being caused by climate chaos and the great extinction event in your town or your city! How? Reuse, repurpose, and recycle this information. You can push your local politicians to act. It will make a difference!
This is the letter for week 192 of a weekly climate strike that went on for 4 years in front of San Francisco City Hall, beginning early March 2019. For more context, see this story. For an annotated table of contents of the topics for all the strike letters, see this story. Meanwhile…
STRIKE FOR THE PLANET
Like solving riddles?
This week: HOW IS SF GOVERNMENT LIKE THE GOP?
On the GOP’s first trial, they failed spectacularly
And it’s not like it was a particularly difficult task, either.
With a tiny majority in the House, in lieu of running roughshod over our rights and democracy, Republicans are instead gunning for the record set in 1855 of longest time/most votes to select a Speaker. They yelled and screamed all through elections season about lies and corruption and how they’re going to take action as soon as they get to D.C., but when they arrived they couldn’t even vote in a Speaker let alone deliver on their rhetoric.
On SF’s first trial, we failed just as hard
SF talks a good game re. the climate (if you don’t listen to the actual words being said), but when our first climate chaos crisis hits, a crisis predicted in great detail, days in advance, when that happens, SF fails spectacularly.
“What crisis are you talking about?”
Saturday, New Year’s Eve, the storm. Erosion, downed trees, slumping hillsides, floating refrigerators, geysers in the street, flood damaged businesses and homes, power outages, roads shut down and intersections impassable — all easily predictable and mostly preventable if SF had just acted in a timely and appropriate manner in response to the multiple storm warnings.
“Timely and appropriate how?”
Blackwater and grey water recycling, increased permeability requirements and actual enforcement of the permeable surface regulations already on the books, bioswales, massive planting of native trees, timely and useful communication of accurate and useful information to the people of SF, community systems for aide and resiliency, sandbag distribution at flood zones before flooding starts, strike teams on hand for quick responses to flooding and other damage as it happens, not building in areas that will flood, organized retreat from land that will be inundated, and so much more.
Let’s get specific, shall we?
SF flooded in multiple locations on Saturday. All the locations that flooded are marked on extant flooding hazard maps, so the fact that these locations flooded isn’t news. The storm warnings, forecast using the European Model, gave accurate and actionable information as to time, duration, location, and precipitation amounts. Yet SF city gov’t did nothing to prepare. There was one, ONE, notification about hazardous conditions, sent from Supe Walton (thank you) that was a pass on of an SFFD communication. This came late, but it was something.
And that was it. That was the whole city’s preparation and immediate response to a predictable and massive climate change-fueled disaster.
Does SF learn from its mistakes?
No. We’ve got another, possibly bigger, storm hitting in a few hours, and what have we done to prepare for it?
- Walton and Preston sent out warnings, and it looks like Preston’s staff managed to round up a decent compendium of resources and information. Unfortunately, the available help listed there is grossly inadequate: a few sandbags if you have a car to get to a distribution site (there are right now only 2 in the city that I know of), shelter locations for the unhoused (with nowhere near enough beds available, there was an announcement that SF would be giving out rain gear to the unhoused), a reminder that libraries and drop-in centers can help while they’re open, and instructions on how to document damage.
- SFUSD made a mass robocall to tell everyone that schools will be in session today.
- NERT leadership sent out an email to help members prepare for the storm.
And that’s it.
I live in a flood zone. There are no sandbags out here, there was no distribution, there are no signs posted to warn people, there has been nothing to tell tourists to be careful or avoid the area, there has been nothing done to help local businesses prepare (even those that flooded on Saturday), the co-op nursery school a half block away is full of kids today — it’s all business as usual even though we know, we absolutely know, that business as usual doesn’t work.
How is SF government like the GOP?
Big talk, no real plans, incapable of acting on facts, woefully unprepared to govern, setting us up for disaster after disaster after disaster.
Is that your goal?
Because so much worse is coming. Actions speak so much louder than words. So why aren’t you acting? Again, this is not a rhetorical question; I expect an answer.
