Marty Walters
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Wildfire Insurance Problems

7/8/2019

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I spent part of the weekend catching up on a backlog of reading, including this document from the Governor's Wildfire Commission.

My stepdad's home insurance was canceled shortly after the Camp Fire, and his insurer also canceled policies of other people in our town. That started a conversation among my friends and family about how we cope with insurance, since our entire county is essentially a high risk wildfire zone. Some folks have just reduced their coverage level in order to make insurance affordable. Others are digging deeper to pay higher premiums. And of course getting cancelled is a big hassle while you are lining up a new insurance plan. My insurance company has signed me up for a risk mitigation plan, which I am guessing is a prelude to setting standards that I'll have to meet or else get cancelled. And almost everyone I know lives in an older home that doesn't meet the Chapter 7A requirements for building exterior wildfire exposure.

So what to do the experts say?

Generally the approach is that we have deal with the underlying risk, that it's not healthy to subsidize insurance to mask that risk. So there are not going to be any easy answers for me and my family and neighbors as we try to balance our finances and our safety.

Yet the number of people who live in the wildland urban interface (WUI) is very large and growing. According to the Hoover Institution, "In 2010, California had more people and homes located in the WUI than any other state in the continental United States—close to 4.5 million homes and 11 million people. The “fastest-growing land use type” in the continental United States, the WUI swelled by almost a thousand square miles in California alone between 1990 and 2000. Nationwide, sixty percent of all new home construction between 1990 and 2016 took place in the WUI. Across the country, the federal government owns or leases over 6,200 buildings located in the WUI, which President Obama sought to protect in 2016 by issuing a WUI building standard for federal facilities."
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Geek Alert: Transparent Wood!

5/2/2019

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Geek Alert: Transparent Wood!

Check out this article about some of the new wood science being done by engineers and scientists out there like Céline Montanari at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.  The idea of using the plant cells in wood and then filling them with a fluid that helps with temperature control? Will we be using transparent wood to provide light and improve passive solar properties of our houses in mountain climates? I can imagine now how much that would be appreciate during the short dark days of winter.

Sometimes people tell me I'm just too optimistic, with my head in the clouds over all these innovations. But as with all progress, we have to dream big and try lots of different ideas, knowing that not all will become big commercial successes. I love to celebrate the people who are dreaming about how to use wood products in new ways that will be reflect a new, low-carbon world.

Right now the State of California is developing a new wood products academic center of excellence, and I'll write about that when I learn more details about where it will be based and who will be directing this exciting new program.


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"Safe and resilient water supplies..."

5/1/2019

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Feather River Fish Barrier Dam in Oroville, California, March 15, 2019
and flood protection and healthy waterways for California's communities, economy and environment.  That's the goal and the promise of our newest state initiative.

This week Governor Gavin Newsom directed California's water agencies to prepare a resilient water portfolio that will meet California's needs for the 21st century.  You can read the order by clicking here.  One thing I really appreciate about this new order is that Newsom acknowledges that water infrastructure can and should include natural elements of our landscape, including forests and floodplains. He also calls for some effective strategies in developing our water portfolio of the future, including working regionally at the watershed level and incorporating successful strategies from different parts of the world.

Looking back at the history of western civilization in California, it's easy to see that we have done none of those things in the past 150 years.  Our water strategy is directly descended from the Gold Rush mining practices that started with gold panning, progressed to sluicing and then quickly leveraged new technologies to develop hydraulic mining.  That particular technological innovation ended up devastating river after river by dumping epic amounts of sediment and gravel that forever changed the way that water flows down from the mountains in the east, through the Central Valley and out through the San Francisco Bay. Hydraulic mining poisoned our fisheries with mercury and arsenic and forever stopped the riverboats from being able to navigate the Sacramento River to Marysville.

The Gold Rush is also responsible for our love of hydropower and dams, as our very first electrical grid in California came from hydroelectric plants and dams on the Yuba River. The Stairway of Power on the North Fork of the Feather River created a series of dams that eventually culminated in the Oroville Dam and Hyatt Power Plant. All that low-carbon and climate-friendly energy has powered homes and industries for many years, but it's also raised very serious questions about how we'll be managing these dams and reservoirs into the next century as they continue to fill with sediment and age well past their design lifetimes.

Flood control from dams and levees have carved out great sections of land in the Central Valley that have become productive farmland and made our farming families wealthy, and water is moved great distances to the enormous cities of Southern California. But we should always ask ourselves who is benefitting from this enormous water infrastructure and who is paying the cost?  When the dam spillway fails, it's the rural residents living downstream who are at risk.

So when Newsom directs our state agencies to embrace new technologies and innovation, I add that we need to be very cautious in evaluating these new options.  All too often, we fall in love with technology and forget about how we're paying for it, whether it's our fisheries, our navigable rivers, or our clean, drinkable water. My first recommendation is to analyze what elements of a new technology are being externalized - who or what will have to live with the byproducts or labor or degraded environment?

I've been falling in love with simpler technologies that are associated with smaller infrastructure projects distributed more widely across the land, so that when a failure occurs it is not catastrophic. I'm falling in love with projects that incorporate ecological systems from the very beginning of the design process. I'm already committed to doing more than plan and build water infrastructure but commit to generations of monitoring and assessment of projects so that we can learn from them, study projects in a changing climate, and make adjustments and improvements as we go along.  Ask anyone who lives in Oroville: a dam is not a static, motionless monument but is a dynamic system in motion that requires huge commitments of time and money to maintaining and monitoring.


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Affordable Housing

3/6/2018

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I often speak at public meetings about the state of affordable housing in our region. In both our rural and larger towns, we’re seeing many of the same challenges as large urban areas:

  1. The cost of housing requires a large percentage of many people’s household incomes. Many people in our region can only get part-time, low paid, and/or seasonal work that leaves very little room for living expenses after housing costs.
  2. There is not enough low cost housing units in our region, so even when we have public agencies helping people with housing, they often cannot find affordable apartments or houses in any nearby community.
  3. Transportation is a huge challenge for rural areas and prevents people from being able live too far from work if they do not have their own car.

What is the federal role in affordable housing, and how can we make improvements?
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The federal government has a housing subsidy program, called Section 8, that provides housing vouchers that can be associated with a renter or with a particular housing unit. In our region of California, like many other places, the program is not working very well.  There are also federal financial incentive programs to encourage development of affordable housing, but in many rural areas, we are not seeing any new housing development, much less affordable housing development, so these programs do not have much impact on our communities. In the end, much of our less-expensive housing units are old, dilapidated, and may contain hazardous building materials or mold that is not healthy for tenants.

I think we can develop innovative programs that can help coordinate federal, state, and local programs and laws to improve affordable housing.

  1. Support existing incentives and develop more financial incentives like tax credits and deductions for property management and rehabilitation of older affordable housing, including removing hazardous building materials. In the process, we also need to support and encourage more people to become responsible landlords.
  2. Support, defend, and improve the Community Reinvestment Act that applies to banks and ensures financing for low income housing.
  3. Provide communities, through social service and community development agencies, with technology tools to support a wide range of tenants and landlords in transparency, accountability, and problem-solving so that we have a better path from homelessness into temporary housing and long-term housing while helping both tenants and landlords comply with legal requirements and financial responsibility.
  4. Focus on increasing the voucher values for Section 8 housing to expand the universe of housing units that can participate in the program and work much more proactively to increase the number of dedicated Section 8 units in every community across our region.
  5. Expand our rural transportation capacity by coordinating county senior transportation and regional bus/van networks so that they can run more often and connect up to each other to more effectively support people going to work or appointments throughout the day.
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Forest Lands and Watersheds

8/4/2017

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This week I spent several days with representatives from the Maidu community, government agencies, non-profits, and academia in Genesee Valley, Plumas County. We camped in a beautiful stand of trees during the hottest day of the year and got drenched in a thunderstorm and talked and laughed and learned together.  It was an honor to be invited to participate in this gathering.

I learned so much that it’s hard to capture in a short article.

  • Defining healthy forests can be thought of as starting with wildlife refugia - where intact old areas of growth still exist, and then expanding outwards to encourage recovery of forest ecosystems by managing succession of different tree species.  But the small plants are also so important! I learned about huckleberries and other edible plants that used to be abundant in this area of the Northern Sierra and consumed by the Maidu.
  • The divisions and connections between urban and rural are not so simple, and we need to move beyond this kind of dividing line to focus on the role of the mountain watersheds in California’s future and success, regardless of where the water from our region eventually goes.
  • Managing a forested landscape can combine multiple objectives, like fire resilience, wildlife support, lumber production, or restoration to a different mix of tree species.  Bob Beckwith is gradually returning his property in Genesee to an oak-silver pine woodland using a lot of labor to thin out the fast growing pines, carefully choosing weather conditions for prescribed burns, and providing refugia for wildlife by leaving dead standing oak trees in place.  He’d like to see the Forest Service use more prescribed burns on the ridge above his property to remove excess biomass.
  • Communication is enormously important in both planning and monitoring the effects of projects that treat forest areas to make them more fire resilient.  Forest collaboration groups do the very hard work of figuring out what works at the ground level, from project to project, with the hope that we can identify broad sources of funding to expand these smaller projects across all of California’s upper watersheds.  Furthermore, the language we use to describe ecosystems and watersheds can shape our thinking about these places.
  • I also got a chance to hear lots of details about the Sierra Institute’s work on developing a pilot scale project using biomass to generate electricity and heat.  I have a lot of thoughts about that to share in a future article.

We talked and talked and talked about future projects that balance fire resistance with timber production and ecosystem restoration. These kinds of meetings are critical to California’s future, and we need to talk a lot more about how to best model the way and scale up projects to cover our entire forest landscape. ​

For more information about Genesee Valley and forest planning, visit these websites:

http://www.geneseefireplan.org/news.html

http://www.plumasaudubon.org/genesee-valley.html

http://www.frlt.org/conserve-land/success-stories/heart-k-ranch

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Demolition and Redevelopment Series:  Should We Dismantle or Demolish Old Buildings?

8/6/2014

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Photo by Ruslan Khadyev on Unsplash
Since I’ve had a chance to live and spend time in Japan, the United States, and Mexico, not to mention all the time spent in industrial facilities all over the world, I’ve been able to see a number of different approaches to razing buildings.  I love the term “razing,” because it can encompass a whole range of different techniques.

The most elegant work I’ve seen is in Tokyo, where space constraints and very strict waste management rules means that buildings are not demolished but are dismantled piece by piece.  Here is a great little video that shows some of the challenges and solutions of working in Japan.

I’ve inspected many recycling facilities and building sites in Japan, and I will forever be in awe at the degree to which waste materials are separated and recycled, to avoid creating waste that must go into scarce landfill space.  We could all learn a lot about recycling from Japan.

There is even one technique, Daruma Otoshi, that involves removing a floor at a time, starting at the bottom of the building.  This remains one of my favorite ever demolition videos, especially since I’ve spent a lot of time inside the Prince Hotel before it was closed down.  

And another short video that does a great job of showing Daruma Otoshi in time lapse.  

With our excess of space and cheap landfills in the United States, we’re not quite so careful.  In fact, we’re famous for our method of imploding buildings, which has spread to other areas of the world.  There are even highlight reels of annual building implosions, including this one. 

Of course, we still demolish most buildings with heavy equipment and a lot of time and effort.  Two of the most common methods are with a wrecking ball (old school) and with a high reach excavator (newer school). 

Building demolition in the U.S. can create a huge amount of dust, and cleaning up afterwards is really just picking everything up and trucking it all to a landfill.  That means you have to remove any hazardous building materials before any demolition starts. Hazardous building materials can include asbestos, both in insulation and in everything from wall board to floor tiles.  Use of friable asbestos was phased out before 1980, but asbestos can still be found in a wide range of building materials at relatively low concentrations. Lead-based paint has a similar story. It is still used on some exterior applications and was used quite a bit on interiors before 1978.  Before polychlorinated biphenyls were banned in 1979, they were used extensively as insulation in liquid filled electrical equipment ranging from transformers and capacitors to small fluorescent light fixture ballasts. PCBs were also used as a plasticizer in paint (mostly in places like ships), and caulking.  All of these hazardous building materials are strictly regulated as wastes and must be separated from other kinds of demolition waste. Asbestos gets landfilled in specially designed landfills where it can be sufficiently contained. Lead debris gets stabilized by mixing with concrete so that it won’t leach into the groundwater when it is landfilled.   And all PCB waste gets incinerated at facilities that are designed to destroy these persistent organic chemicals at a 99.9999% destruction and removal efficiency.
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Cleaning up HazMat in California

4/27/2014

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Photo by Aleks Dorohovich on Unsplash
I am often asked about why cleanup activities in California are more complicated than in other states.  The quick answer is that California has several different laws that could trigger cleanups, and there may be a number of different regulatory agencies involved depending on the source of the contamination and the extent of contamination - whether soil, groundwater, surface water, or sediment is affected.
California is like other states, in that you must identify all the exposure pathways and address risks for human health and environmental receptors in order to close out a hazardous substance or petroleum release site.  Background levels for metals can be used to support a finding of no release. Each agency has its own closeout checklist that is completed as part of the final assessment prior to regulatory closure. Engineering controls and institutional controls are used to supplement cleanup remedies and may remain in place in perpetuity through deed notices and deed restrictions.  The process for completing remediation varies from one regulatory program to another. The key regulatory programs include:
  1. Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) Site Mitigation program under the Hazardous Substances Account Act
  2. Water boards who oversee leaking underground storage tank (LUST) cleanup programs
  3. Water boards who oversee cleanup programs under Porter-Cologne Act
  4. DTSC Corrective Action program for hazardous waste Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) facilities (these include treatment, storage, and disposal facilities as well as tiered permit facilities)
  5. Various brownfield programs and statutes, which are implemented at all different levels within California, including state agencies, county agencies, and cities.
  6. Federal Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) programs for polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) regulated under that federal law.
All decisions are made by state and local regulators, and decision making authority is established at the federal and/or state level and formally delegated down to state/local agencies.  Cleanup activities must be performed by professional geologists or professional civil engineers. There are two key regulatory agencies who set cleanup standards in California – the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) and the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB).
DTSC uses soil cleanup standards that are geared toward human exposure and are developed by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA):
http://www.oehha.org/risk.html
DTSC also has its own method for assessing risks from soil vapor intrusion:
https://dtsc.ca.gov/SiteCleanup/Vapor_Intrusion.cfm
The SWRCB is a state agency, with Regional Water Quality Control Boards (RWQCBs) for nine regions across California.  Water protection, for groundwater and surface waters, fall under the authority of these agencies.
Environmental Screening Levels (ESL) were established for a wide range of exposure pathways and environmental conditions, and they address both human and environmental receptors.  These are updated quite frequently, most recently in 2013. The Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay regional boards put these together, but they are applied across the state.
http://www.waterboards.ca.gov/rwqcb2/water_issues/programs/esl.shtml
In order to properly apply the ESLs, it’s critical that the applicable basin plan be consulted to identify all beneficial uses of surface and groundwater for the subject site, as these beneficial uses will drive the selection of screening criteria.
For complex sites where screening levels may not adequately address multiple contaminants or synergistic effects, USEPA’s CERCLA risk assessment methodology may be used to set cleanup levels for a cleanup project.
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Managing Stormwater at Industrial Facilities in Arizona

2/23/2014

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Photo by Michael Trimble on Unsplash
In Arizona, there are three regulatory paths for stormwater discharge at industrial facilities:
  1. Tribal lands, where all stormwater discharges are regulated by USEPA under their federal permit system.
  2. Stormwater discharges into municipal separate stormwater systems – either large or small.  These discharges must meet the multi-sector industrial permit programs, which are implemented by the state, but they are also subject to pollution prevention programs and reporting as required by various municipal codes.
  3. Stormwater discharges into other receiving bodies.  These discharges must meet only the state multi-sector industrial general permit requirements.

This program falls under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) stormwater program of the national Clean Water Act, as applicable to the state and local jurisdiction where the subject property is located.  States adopt general permits that cover a wide range of industrial and business activities.

A permit must be obtained for facilities where stormwater is considered “contact stormwater”, from either the state or the city, depending on where the stormwater is discharged.  However, some industrial activities are not covered or exempted under general permit standards.

Non-contact stormwater flows on an industrial property means stormwater that does not come into contact with industrial operations or loading/unloading activities.  

For facilities that are not planning discharge pollutants into the stormwater system, there are two ways to proceed:

  1. The No Exposure Certification.  This certifies that all industrial activities are protected by a storm resistant shelter and that no pollutants are being discharged due to no exposure. The certification is signed by the facility owner and is supported by answering 11 questions, all of which must be answered “no” in order to qualify for the exemption, typically by inspecting the facility and documenting the outfall configuration, facility activities, potential sources of regulated pollutants, and any protections that exist on site.  It’s also important to check the state regulations to ensure that the facility is covered under the Limitations of Coverage section of the general industrial permit.
  2. Zero Discharge.  There is a concept called “zero discharge,” which is not in the regulations but is used to support the case to the regulatory agency that an industrial facility is not subject to any of the stormwater regulatory requirements.  The Zero Discharge concept does not have any regulatory definition, but essentially certifies that the facility doesn’t meet the criteria for discharge of a pollutant. Some of the city stormwater management plans have requirements that apply to a claim of zero discharge, including having it certified by a registered professional engineer or professional geologist.  A zero discharge certification should be supported by inspecting the facility and documenting the outfall configuration, facility activities, potential sources of regulated pollutants, and any protections that exist on site.
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Nuclear Power to Offset Climate Change:  Can China Make Nuclear Power Work?

2/21/2014

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Photo by Johannes Daleng on Unsplash
Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter... It is not too much to expect that our children will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.
Lewis Strauss, chair of the Atomic Energy Commission

Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.
David R. Brower, environmental activist and founder of the Sierra Club

I just started following The National Interest’s blog, and I’m enjoying the international perspective and diversity of contributors.  I’m always interested in alternatives to carbon-based energy, and recently John Quiggin, an Australian economist, wrote about why he thinks that China’s nuclear program could work for them (Link:  http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/china-can-make-nuclear-power-work-9815).

I grew up in a time when nuclear power was going to solve all our energy problems, making electricity too cheap to meter.  But Quiggin points out that even by the time the Three Mile Island meltdown occurred 1979, the nuclear plant building boom in the United States was nearing an end.  Long delays, cost overruns, and public opposition resulted in no new nuclear plants being completed after 1980. In contrast, the French were successful at building a large number of nuclear reactors, in an effort to convert completely to nuclear energy in the wake of the 1970s energy crises.  Arnulf Grubler, one of my favorite professors at Yale, pointed to four key factors in the success of the French:
  • strong political support
  • a state-owned electricity monopoly endowed with [substantial] engineering resources
  • high regulatory stability
  • efficient coordination resulting from long-term organizational arrangements.
Since the 1970s, these factors have changed in France, and their more efforts to build new reactors have run into the same kinds of problems we’ve seen in the United States.
Could China, which seems to have a lot in common with 1970s France, make nuclear power work for them to reduce the amount of coal they are burning?  Quiggin seems to think it’s a good possibility and would be beneficial for everyone on our planet. He points out that “China is ruled by a modernising elite that’s procapitalist but happy to exercise state control over the economy, and to ignore or crush public opposition. Like France, China seems likely to standardize on a single Westinghouse model, the AP1000. So, it’s unsurprising to see Chinese nuclear projects being completed on time and on budget while similar projects in the US and Europe are floundering.”  Of course, it might be difficult for those conditions to be sustained in China into the future, and if renewables become economically competitive, nuclear could be less attractive.
I’ve spent a lot of time at all kinds of factories in China, including a number of coal fired power plants, biowaste facilities, and co-generation plants at large industrial plants.  I’ve audited solar panel fabrication plants, transformer factories, and all kinds of factories making manufactured goods like CAT scan machines, escalators, and refrigerators. What worries me about nuclear power in China are the two things I see in common with all these facilities:  not one of them had bothered going through the effort to get all their environmental permits in place, and not one of them had an appropriate operations and maintenance program to ensure that conditions at the factory when it was built would be sustained for more than a year or two after completion.  And that brings me back to David Brower’s quote. Given the complexity and inherent risks associated with nuclear power, its success rests on the people and their ability to understand and maintain the equipment they are working with. I’m not sure any government or company can manage that for nuclear power over the lifetime of the plant and the waste it produces.
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Optimism

2/4/2014

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My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.

Henry Rollins, heavy metal rocker, civil rights activist, and actor

Linky:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_rollins
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Photo by Syd Wachs on Unsplash
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    Marty Walters

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