> Yes, but this problem has only affected the city like this for the last 2 years or so (to this extent).
As someone pointed out with an infographic on Twitter recently, before the Clean Air Act really began to take effect, the air quality was always like this in California summers, fires or not.
>Oakland Fire is actually totally fine, which is weird.
Remember the Oakland Hills Fire? A direct result of complete incompetence of the Oakland fire department.
Hundreds of homes burned in Oakland. Barely any in Berkeley. (For those not familiar with local geography, driving along the ridge it's almost impossible to tell when you've left Oakland an entered Berkeley; the fire certainly wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.)
You could see the line of destroyed homes right up to the Berkeley border, where the Berkeley FD was able to stop its progress.
Oakland had completely broken infrastructure: Fire took out power, which then prevented any pumping stations to get water up the hill. Oakland had refused to update their fire hose connectors to a standard size, so the Berkeley fire trucks wouldn't work in Oakland even if the water were pumping, and other area trucks (probably a dozen cities sent help) were similarly useless. Trucks FULL OF WATER sat unused at the base of the hills because of lack of communication.
And the ENTIRE FIRE happened because the fire chief violated the department's policy: A brush fire they'd put out the night before the BIG fire was what flared up and caused the tragedy. This was a windy season, and their policy states that any such brush fires should be monitored for 24 hours after they've been put out to ensure that they don't flare up again, because of the dangers of fire when the winds are that bad. Story had it that the fire chief (a crony appointment of a useless mayor) told the crew to come home because it was Saturday night.
So if Oakland Fire is actually good now, it's certainly improved from utterly incompetent. Granted the loss of life wasn't bad considering the size of the fire (7 people died, if memory serves), but my sister lost a good friend to the fire, and therefore to Oakland Fire's incompetence. So maybe I'm a bit prejudiced.
Regardless, that die is cast, and I've left California entirely for the time being.
The entire city, if you’re asking what started the fire ruptured gas mains caused quite a few.
> Has anything relevant changed since then?
The city is full of Lithium Ion batteries that can burn uncontrollably when crushed or punctured. These fires cannot be extinguished quickly unless special chemicals are used.
> So it was that while running, but not so much as to force my body into open rebellion, I noticed something odd. When I was heading down the gently sloping hill on Peter Coutts Road towards Stanford Avenue, I turned right as usual to head back home, passed along the edge of a grassy area, and smelled...cookies. But not really cookies. Raw cookie dough. Outside.
> Subsequently, a pipeline in San Mateo area exploded, a dozen houses burned to the ground, and several people died.
I recall the San Bruno gas explosion[0] you're referring to. It happened at a time when I regularly drove down that leg of Skyline to access Pacifica and Ocean Beach coming from south bay via the peninsula/280.
We clearly need better solutions for how such utilities are delivered and their businesses operated. Though in the case of residential gas lines, we should probably just stop the practice, especially in seismically active regions like the bay area...
> It really looks different from what you see from cars. It's like a haze.. sorta like fog, but more gray. But it's very uniform and everywhere.
Cars can cause it too. Long time Los Angeles residents can attest to that. The fuel efficiency and smog requirements in recent decades have made it much less likely though[1].
If memory serves, the contaminants in Flint were introduced after the water treatment, and could have been identified if the community had said "this is weird, come test it". That being said, if memory serves, there were also several points of corrupt/incompetent leaders who failed their leaders.
This is generally viewed as anomalous. To be clear, what happened to the residence of Flint ABSOLUTELY SUCKED. It should not have happened anywhere to anyone, and as someone who pays federal tax dollars, I'm very disappointed that my federal government let them down. I'm also suspicious that similar problems are happening in other places, but I'm not sure how to detect it.
> YMMV but some people are crazy. The EPA is however not. But what the EPA say and what the woman claims are disparate.
To complicate it further, this woman did in fact live on top of an industrially-zone area which had industrial contamination on site. The apartments are very new (finished construction in ~2019) and they had to agree to a ton of cleanup to get permits to build.
There are so many confounding factors that mean she could still have been poisoned by toxic industrial byproducts and the factor next door could still be innocent.
> been one of the most open minded places in the country
What if you want to ride a Google Bus to work, and have the audacity to think that you don't deserve to be shot at or have bricks thrown through your window? [1] [2]
> We should follow the paper trail of independent tanker-trailers leaving solar manufacturing plants in California. One driver has been heard to claim that he dumped cadmium-tainted water at the roadside culvert somewhere in Rhodes Island then went back to California for more pickup.
Spelling error aside, even minimal knowledge of US geography suggests that that’s... unlikely.
This is a major issue in parts of Oakland, not South Bay but not far away [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_contamination_in_Oakland
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