Shiftworks

Exploring that interplay between landscapes, science and design

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Value in Disaster

Disaster is a frightening word. Hear it and premonitions of the apocalypse arise, visions of fire falling from the sky and the earth swallowing us whole into darkness. Open the newspaper, and there’s much to spark those scary thoughts. Fires raged across a drought-stricken California this year, destroying thousands of homes. A recent New York Times article is one of many detailing how the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster and faster, laying the groundwork for rising seas and increasingly violent climates. When faced with these facts, we understandably grow fearful. The magnitudes of change that would arise were Greenland’s glaciers to melt entirely are frightening.

But maybe it’s not all gloom and doom. Could there any benefit to facing disasters? Look back in time and you can find examples of countries and cultures changing in valuable ways in the aftermath of devastation. These benefits often take the form of what researchers call ‘cultures of coping.’ In northern Germany, for example, regular flooding along the North Sea motivated settlers of from late antiquity and the Middle Ages to develop technical and social strategies to adapt. This widespread cultural understanding of the risks of flooding across the region is part of what has made northern Germany a modern leader in dike construction and planning. Such stories aren’t particular to northern Germany. Across the globe, regions regularly hit by natural hazards not only often develop more innovative technologies, but also acquire more generally accepting attitudes towards change.

This attitude aspect is important. When a group starts to cope with the effects of a hazard rather than avoid it, the chances for improved standards of living in the event of disaster multiply exponentially. Take the San Francisco Bay Area. In the 20th century, the two most devastating earthquakes to hit the region happened in eighty-three years apart. The 1906 quake, which devastated the city and left hundreds of thousands homeless, catalyzed a new era of earthquake research and planning. Come 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck, the effects were far less damaging. While the 1989 event was slightly smaller in magnitude and duration than the 1906 quake, improvements in zoning, land-use decisions, building codes and citizen outreach in the intervening years created a stronger built environment, more responsive governing bodies and a better informed populace. The Bay region had become more resilient.

That these changes are possible illustrate the fact that natural disasters are not by themselves disastrous. In areas of light human presence, an earthquake might cause trees to shake, land to shift and animals to flee but very rarely inflicts permanent damage. Hunter-gatherer societies of the past, like the Ohlone peoples who lived on the shores of the Bay Area until the Spanish arrived, likely viewed earthquakes with curiosity and wonder. Their seasonal houses could be rebuilt. Their food gathering practices would have suffered minimal impact. Only when streets crumble, houses fall and bridges tumble down, do people die and an earthquake becomes disastrous. The disconnect between a culture and the dynamics of the land in which it grows is what sets the stage for destruction. The more we appreciate and understand the hazards that can head our way, the more proactive and motivated to address them we become. Pushing for positive change becomes a collective value that brings people together to improve the places in which they live.

Sadly, we often stop there. Understanding more about the dynamics of earthquakes has yet to make the Bay Area region the more cooperative, coordinated and inclusive place it could be. The collective motivation and political will to improve building codes and promote public understanding of earthquake safety has yet to extend to issues like public transportation or housing. San Francisco now ranks second in traffic congestion problems, just behind Los Angeles, and is more expensive to live in than Manhattan.

But it’s a place to start. When we choose to stop looking at natural disasters as obstacles to overcome, the conversation shifts. They go from being harbingers of doom to motivation to develop new technologies. They become opportunities to strengthen our connections to the places in which we live and the people we live alongside. They become inevitable partners in the ongoing process of how we shape society. The magnitude of the hazards headed our way thanks to the uncertainties of climate change are likely greater than what we’ve known in recorded history. But they also pose potential for us to develop new and better ways of coping, to deepen and grow our cultures of coping into attitudes that not only accept but embrace the changes to come.

[shiftworksdesign-blog]

High Points

One of my favorite walks takes me into the hills. East of the San Francisco Bay, above the houses and trees that coat the flatlands and lower slopes, I walk a trail that snakes through some of the East Bay’s remaining hilltop open space. For most of the year, the ground is yellow and cracked, covered with tall trees and dry, brambling brush. The trail is always steep. I have to keep my eyes on the ground to keep from falling. But after twenty minutes of walking, when my breath is getting ragged and beads of sweat are forming on my upper lip, the tree-line ends. The path widens, and I can stop, catch my breath.  I can lift my eyes from the ground beneath my feet.

 And suddenly I see where I am. I see the hillside falling away before me, morphing into the houses, streets, hospitals and parks of Oakland and Berkeley. I see the morning traffic gridlock of commuters moving slowly onto the Bay Bridge. I see massive tanker ships moving international goods in and out of the Golden Gate. I see the peaks of San Francisco and Marin rising across the water, dark against the sky.

 I see these things and realize I’m not just trudging up a hard-packed dirt trail. I’m standing on the undulating ridge that edges the eastern side of the Bay Area. I’m next to one of the biggest estuaries in the world, a place where sweet meets saltwater, where the mixing of dissimilar things has been happening for a long, long time. I’m standing at the edge of the North American Continent, staring at the expanse of the Pacific. It’s this kind of seeing, so particular to high points, that helps me understand again where I am in the world, how I fit in the bigger story of life in this region, this country, this planet.

 It’s often too easy to forget. We’re visual animals – if you can’t see it, it’s akin to not existing. Living as I do in the flatlands, where there’s no clear view to the waters of the bay, where the colors of the sun setting against the horizon are blocked by highways and buildings, it’s easy to stay focused on my small corner of the world. The extents of my apartment, the annals of my commute to work, the contours of my street – those become my frame of reference for how the things operate. But the places we live in are more complicated than that, shaped by forces – physical, temporal, social -- greater than what I can see and understand from my day-to-day life.

 Which is why these high places are important. By physically raising us up from the day-to-day, they shift our perspective. They help us get outside of ourselves, to remember that we’re part of a larger system, a bigger story of the give and take between humans and the lands we live in.

 And then it’s time to come down, back into the maze of daily life. I walk slowly down from the high point, the imprint of the larger view vivid in my mind as my eyes turn back to the ground before me.

[shiftworksdesign-blog]

Paragliding + Atmospheric Rivers

A friend of mine is crazy about paragliding. When we go out for a beer or catch a sunset, the conversation inevitably turns to the feeling of flying through the air, rising up on shafts of swirling air. I like listening to him describe these adventures because they remind me that air is three-dimensional, a substance that we have to navigate. With water, the connection is more obvious. The resistance it gives as we try to swim through it, the weight of it as we drink it down our throats – we can understand water has heft and substance of its own. If you’ve ever stood at the edge of the ocean and seen that blue mass filling the farthest expanses of the horizon, its easier to appreciate its importance, how it dictates so much about our weather, the shape of our daily lives.

With air, that’s harder to remember. We spend our lives in it, depend upon it to breathe, have to lean against it when a cold wind blows but, because we can’t easily see it with our own two eyes, it’s easier to disregard. While we have to drink water to survive, doing so is a voluntary act that one must decide to do. Breathing is second nature, a reflex we don’t have to think about. And like many things, what we don’t have to think about is so much easier to ignore.  

But air and its movement across our planet isn’t something we should gloss over. On a macro-scale, humans are able to exist only because of the layers of atmospheric gas hugging Earth like a protective blanket against the emptiness of space. Zoom closer into the Earth’s surface, and those layers of air become thicker, filled with more oxygen and moisture that’s evaporated off the world’s oceans. And these layers of air are always moving. The ways they flow and shift across glacial terrains versus the hot tropics shape regional climates, give birth to hurricanes, turn breezes into hard-hitting gusts.

Areas where much of the power of these pathways is concentrated are called Atmospheric Rivers, moving through the sky a mile above sea level. Compared with the size of the atmosphere, these airborne rivers are relatively narrow, pushing water vapor from hot equatorial regions to higher latitudes in bands roughly 250 miles wide. Like rivers of water flowing on the ground, they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are smaller, less forceful flows that shape reliable rain and snow patterns. Others are more like seasonal rivers, that run dry for much of year but suddenly become heavy with moisture, creating extreme rainfall, flooding and storms.

With global warming and climate change, the importance of these rivers flowing in the sky is increasing. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more water vapor, giving rise to more and more atmospheric rivers. These warmed, vapor-rich airborne rivers will create more rain, falling harder for longer periods of time.

Shifts in our atmospheric rivers means big shifts for our lives on the ground. Yet, for most of us, they’re largely invisible, flowing through the clouds unseen. In this way, they’re perhaps best understood through touch. While riding in an airplane exposes you atmospheric pressure changes through the jolts and jumps of turbulence, most of us do so within an insulated box, separated from the air out there. There’s something about flying in the open at lower altitude, as paragliders and hangliders do, that makes the shifts in air flows immediate and relatable. Move through the world in a paragliding rig and you have to pay attention to the thickness of the air, its density as it touches your skin, the way it whistles past your ears and hits your eyes. These moments of contact are the signals you learn to read, the signals that let you fly above the earth’s surface, soaking in the shadows and undulations of the land as it rises and falls on its way to meet the sea.

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The Palace of Fine Arts, originally built for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, stands like a kind of time travel machine, a symbol of that period where SF worked so hard to pave over its past to built its ideal future. 

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Time Travel in the Marina

Lately I’ve been working on a radio project that makes me time travel into the past. Specifically to the fall of 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake struck San Francisco. I was small when the earthquake hit. I remember only the floor of my parents’ house shaking beneath my feet and the green lamp that fell and shattered on the ground in front of my hiding place under my mother’s desk. I don’t remember the highways that crumbled. I don’t remember how the quake shut down Game 3 of that year’s World Series.

But I remember the Marina District. The devastation that appeared in newspapers and replayed on television showed a city broke open. Asphalt streets are torn up in angry spires and strips. The walls of four story buildings are crumpled as if smashed under the foot of a giant. Doing research for this radio project, I parse through one image of destruction after another, of toppled telephone poles and houses swallowed by the ground below. What’s most haunting are the faces of the people in the photos -- their arms crossed, eyes downcast, brows furrowed with fear and sadness from what the earth beneath them had done to their lives.

Their sadness is heartrending but also makes me curious whether they knew that their neighborhood was always doomed to destruction. The Marina district rose out of the tidal lagoons and soggy wetlands that once edged that part of San Francisco’s northern shore. Filled in to create land for the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) -- a massive event created to commemorate the opening of the Panama Canal and the city’s re-emergence from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake -- the land of the Marina district was made from mud and sand and dredge scraped from the bottom of the San Francisco Bay. When the exposition was over and its structures razed, the Marina’s buildings and streets immediately began to rise and spread.

Building on this kind of land in earthquake country like San Francisco is a dangerous process. When an earthquake begins, it creates seismic waves that move through the ground. If the waves move through solid rock, the material doesn’t allow for much side-to-side shaking, so the wave can pass through quickly. With softer materials, however, particularly fill like sand and mud, each particle can be shaken every which way. More energy from the seismic wave goes into the shaking, making it both stronger and longer lasting. If the filled in area is close to a high water table, as it was in the Marina, water and fill are mixed together into a kind of apocalyptic quicksand.

Looking at the devastation of the Marina in 1989 through the lens of these origins, you can’t help but see the irony. The area was filled in for an exposition designed in large part as a symbol of San Francisco’s rebirth from its 1906 destruction from another, greater earthquake. That 1906 event reduced most of the city to rubble, set off fires that lasted for days, and left nearly ¾ of the city’s population homeless. As Jack London wrote at the time, “Not in history has a modern imperial city been so completely destroyed … Nothing remains but memories.”

The way the city worked to celebrate its survival and re-emergence on the international scene set the stage for future devastation of an all too similar kind. In the decades following the PPIE event, the Marina district continued to grow in size and population atop the artificial fill. Despite the lingering memory of the hardships caused by the 1906 quake, the vulnerability of the land built out in its wake was largely ignored, until the next one struck.

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Tracking densities of water vapor in atmospheric rivers across the Pacific Ocean for 5 days in 2012. Adapted from NOAA research.