I’m going to take a diversion to write about a local story that’s been brewing for months. It’s long and a bit like a Sherlock Holmes mystery, bear with me.
Some WUWT readers have noted that my town Chico, CA has been well known for a few “crazy” things. Some people call it “Berkeley North”. There’s a t-shirt you can buy at the Made in Chico store that says “Chico: Where the Nuts Come From“. This pun speaks to the agricultural base around the community, which produces high quality nuts such as almonds, pistachios, and walnuts. There’s a lot of nut orchards here.
There’s also Chico State University, where there is a large sustainability group. They like to try out all sorts of new ideas on the townspeople, putting our tax dollars to work. Chico also has the dubious honor of having one of the most inane laws in the USA, you may have heard about it.
Chico has a city ordinance preventing storing or testing of a nuclear device within city limits, punishable by a $1000 fine and jail time. At left, here’s a newspaper clipping from 1983 talking about how it came to be. City municipal code section 9.60, Ordinance 1564 §2 says:
The city council finds and declares as follows:
A. That the possibility of nuclear war is a clear and present danger that threatens not only the health, safety and welfare of the citizens of the Chico community, but also their very existence.
B. That the use of nuclear weapons in the event of war, whether for the purpose of self defense or any other purpose, is totally unacceptable.
C. That even participation in preparation against nuclear war is inappropriate in that it lends credence to the belief that such a war is survivable when in fact it is not.
D. That by reason of the foregoing, the interest of the citizens of the Chico community will be best served by making the city a nuclear free zone in which the production, testing, maintenance, and storage of nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons delivery systems is prohibited and in which the appropriation or use of city funds or property for participation in or preparation against nuclear war is also prohibited.
…
No person shall produce, test, maintain, or store within the city a nuclear weapon, component of a nuclear weapon, nuclear weapon delivery system, or component of a nuclear weapon delivery system. (Ord. 1564 §2 (part))
So, almonds and walnuts aside, it goes without saying that my town is a little, er, “nutty”. On the plus side, it has worked so far, and there’s no nukes going off or kids experimenting with nuclear reactors in their basement that I know of in the town. Though, it appears that I myself am a danger to the town, as a member of the Chico Peace and Justice Center once labeled me as a WMD.
I mentioned that Chico State University has a large sustainability group that tries to impose all sorts of experimental ideas on local citizens.They are so gung-ho about this, they now observe earth month and fly Earth Flags around town every April on city owned streetlight poles:
What’s this got to do with the fire department? Bear with me, there’s a lot of backstory.
About three years ago I was asked by my local city councilman Larry Wahl to serve on the city of Chico “sustainability task force”. I accepted. More on the whole thing here.
The task force came into being when Vice Mayor Ann Schwab, along with a majority of the City Council, voted in favor of signing on to the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. This was something championed by Portland’s big green mayor.
Because energy efficiency is something I embrace, especially when tax dollars are involved, I was initially enthusiastic. But, the talk soon turned away from alternative energy solutions, to getting a city wide inventory of carbon emissions. The task force didn’t seem the least bit interested in solutions, but focused on tallying carbon emissions in town. That effort didn’t make a lot of sense to me then, since it gained the city nothing.
Now I know why. The “greenhouse gas” report they issued on September 2nd of 2008 had a number of oddball fees, taxes, giveaways, and edicts, such as a city wide gasoline tax, and even free electricity handouts to city employees for sustainable commuting. All of this while we are in an economic downturn and in a city financial crisis.
Link: cic-sustainability-090208
Let’s look at some of the suggested “community reduction” actions in this report presented by Schwab and her sustainability task force:
- A suggestion to pay city employees to give up their parking spot.
- Require energy audits on residential units at the time of sale.
- Increased fees on waste disposal.
- A local gasoline tax to generate local revenue.
- Forcing a lights out policy on local businesses after hours
- Free electricity and free parking for city employees that drive electric vehicles
- Free or reduced cost electricity and parking for citizens that drive electric vehicles
You can find these items in Appendix C of the report, near the end under “Community Reduction Measures” which are designed to meet a carbon emissions target.
But wait, there’s more. We had a big stink over the proposal for our local Wal-Mart to expand and it almost tore the town apart. It bled over into many things. Right in the middle of the big fight at the council chambers over the use of wood stoves and fireplaces councilman Scott Gruendl tried one of those “sustainability experiments” on the townspeople.
His suggestion was, that as a condition of approval, Wal-Mart be required to put down a million smackeroos to buy new low pollution efficient wood stoves for local residents as a way to fix our wintertime air pollution problem. Mayor Schwab piled on with demands that Wal-Mart be solar powered. Suggestions of extortion were raised. Needless to say they were both almost laughed out of town and Wal-Mart told them nicely, “no”.
Given these sorts of things that come out of our university influenced city government, it was no surprise to me then when about two months ago I heard a rumor in my local coffee shop, about some upcoming change to our fire protection system.
It seemed that there was a plan afoot to change out the fire hydrants in town. I asked around, but nobody seemed to know what it was about. All I heard was that it was in the planning stage and it had to do with water waste.
There’s been lots of changes in our town infrastructure recently. Our green city council has added roundabouts to minimize traffic jams and idling vehicles, a good thing, and they work well. There’s also the not so popular “street bulbing” as a way to discourage vehicle traffic downtown. Many of these projects replaced other surrounding infrastructure such as sidewalks and sewers too.
So changing fire hydrants? I figured it had something to do with all that. Maybe some new model that keeps kids from doing stuff like this and wasting water?
Or maybe some sort of beautification/irrigation project?
Or art project? Chico is big on art.
Or maybe it was some sort of system that was better designed so that the city no longer had to regularly flush the hydrant system, wasting millions of gallons of water each year in a La Nina driven drought stricken state?
Or maybe it was something simpler. I could see a better designed hydrant that prevented slow leakage, like this “soylent green” fire hydrant?
I was intrigued by this idea. What could it be?
Fire hydrants aren’t really high on the list of city improvements. People hardly notice them, except when they get a ticket for parking in front of one. I thought maybe it had to do with saving money, since our city is financially broke, and salaries and benefits (including firefighters) have become a big issue the last couple of years.
I asked around. I asked people at the Rotary club. Nobody knew. I asked our local newspaper editor, David Little, who said he’d “sniff around”. He came up with nothing. I asked our local city government blogger, Lon Glazner, if he had heard anything. Lon’s got moles in the city offices that tell him things, secret things, and he’s scooped local media more than once on city issues that they’d rather not talk about. He couldn’t find anything either.
Yet the guy at the coffee shop swore he’d seen a draft plan to replace fire hydrants in town, and he only knew about it because one of his relatives worked for the fire department. He said they were pretty steamed about it.
I asked a council member. He didn’t know but said he’d look into it. I even asked somebody who was running for council, Mark Sorensen, one of the sharpest guys I know. He hadn’t heard anything either but also said he’d ask around.
I was stumped.
Then I thought, ya know, maybe this has something to do with sustainability. So I asked one of our local sustainability gurus. Yep he’d heard about it. In fact, he pointed me to the document that had the specs.
Remember when I mentioned the City Council voted in favor of signing on to the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement which had its roots in Portland?
Turns out there’s a spec for sustainable fire hydrants.
That’s right, the City of Chico is going to replace all of the standard fire hydrants with “low flow” fire hydrants in an effort to save water and money while at the same time being “sustainable”.
Where could they get such a crazy idea?
@ur momisugly peterhodges (10:43:35) :
“…1300 calls is a LOT…”
Yeah, this district has the crossing point for THE major 4 lane that bisects the county and an Interstate. Plus two separate rail lines, an ex Monsanto (now Solutia) plant, plus, through a mutual agreement with a district in the next state, covers calls almost all the way to the first exit over there. It’s a time of response sort of thing.
Even though it’s gone paid, I still monitor Fire and Rescue out of habit and hear some really wild engine to accident assignments. They kept the same station numbering and I just have to stare at the radio when I hear an engine based 6 miles away dispatched to a call a half mile from the nearest station. Sure, it may have already been in service and in the area… but I keep hearing stuff like that more and more often.
Got to love bureaucracies.
That should be “There are”, not “There’s”…
Takoma Park Maryland is also a nuclear free zone,
http://www.takomaparkmd.gov/committees/nfz/nftpcord.htm
The irony is Takoma Park MD is directly north of Washington DC, inside the Washington Beltway and depending on the size of the bomb inside the blast zone as well.
Blast zone radii information at
http://www.carloslabs.com/node/16
I live in a town that declared itself a nuclear free zone and the local airbase just happened to have aircraft armed with Genie missiles. You can’t legislate against stupidity but you can vote them out – and that’s what eventually happened.
In a fire-prone state such as Cali and you mean they are literally going to put the citizens more at risk with this nonsense???
What is the point of owning real estate of value when your municipality cuts out your feet from under you???
After listening that venom-laced email barrage last weekend from “professor Mark”…all I can say is….there must be something in the water [Anthony must be using a purifier of course]…but geez.
SO…government’s HIGHEST obligation to the public…is life safety…and they would have the gall to try to enact this INSANE change???
Total, total, backwards, retarded incompetence.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
REPLY: Chris, it’s my April 1st essay. – Anthony
Where’s Harry Tuttle when you need him?
Arcata is the genuine Bezerkeley of the North State. They also have a Nukie Free Zone. Not a sign proclaims it though because the City gave up posting it on the city limit signs as the Humboldt kids kept stealing the signs for room decorations. Wonder if anyone knows it is illegal to build a dirty bomb (ala 24 this season) in Arcata? I always wanted to build a component for a nuke, trigger or whatever, and be the first to be arrested under their idiotic ordinance, but I was a forester not a nuke engineer and never could pull it off.
REPLY: Just buy an old vacuum tube on eBay and tell em you possess a krytron tube, used to trigger the nuclear bomb compacting explosives, that should do the trick. – A
George E. Smith (14:18:08) :
It used to be that there was a mutual defence treaty/pact called SEATO, or South East Asian Treaty Organisation; which was basically the USA, Australia, and New Zealand co-operating both Navally and otherwise in defence, in that part of the world.
As you can see, none of those three countries has any conenction to South East Asia, so I don’t know how they got that name.
Those were just the three nations providing the heavy hitters, George. The UK and France were also members, and the *Asian* members — the Philippines, Taiwan, Pakistan (East and West), and Thailand — grew up and now have sufficient firepower for self-defense, although SEATO itself disbanded when the PRC decided to tone down exporting revolution after Mao went down.
In the interest of full disclosure, I would like to apologize to Australia for drinking its entire annual production of Victoria Bitters during one hazy week in 1969.
Murray Carpenter (05:12:15) :
Just when Arctic sea ice is about to go into “the black”……..NSIDC as predicted,go off line!!
Well, it’s a full day later and sea ice data is still offline.
Must have really shook someone’s core beliefs!
Someone at the University of Colorado at Boulder must be saying “Get that crap (truth) off the web fast before the media sees it and find someone to blame it on!”.
Got me! Anthony-you are as bad as my wife, I didn’t even look at the date!
George E. Smith: I believe you are thinking of the ANZUS treaty. SEATO was mostly Viet Nam and neighbors.
George E. Smith: Now, now. In Colorado we ski or drink beer. Sometimes both. (we have the highest ratio of micro-breweries to population of any state) I do not know what they do in Missouri.
Art Buchwald said it was hard to write good satire, as reality had become so strange. I can see the ecos reading this and saying: “low flow fire hydrants? Why didn’t we think of that?”
The unintended consequences of this could be severe.
Thanks for the excellent April Fool story.
There really are low flow hydrants. They look the same as regular hydrants.
The color code near the start of the article tells the story. It is a low flow hydrant
because it is fed by a smaller than usual pipe. The color tells the fire fighters
that they might have to find other hydrants to fight a fire near the low flow one.
Once you outlaw detonation of nuclear weapons within city limits only outlaws will detonate nuclear weapons within city limits!!
From the info above, Chico isn’t outlawing the (deliberate enemy or accidental) detonation of nuclear weapons within its borders, just their storage, production, maintenance, and testing. They outlaw presence, not use.
“No person shall produce, test, maintain, or store within the city a nuclear weapon, component of a nuclear weapon, nuclear weapon delivery system, or component of a nuclear weapon delivery system. (Ord. 1564 §2 (part))”
I really like those fire hydrant photos, especially the soylent green one.
I been living here long enough to believe anything.
I keep trying to go to those Sustainability meetings, but, a little voice in the back of my head says, “oh no you don’t, you get out there and turn over that compost pile/hang that laundry/pull those weeds.”
Spring is here. I saw my first black butterfly last week and found the first wigglers yesterday.
Here’s a fun activity for your kids: put some wigglers in a jar and put a sock on the top, with a rubber band around it. Watch them turn into skeeters, it’s a-may-zing! But you know what, I had to let ours go – I couldn’t kill them after I’d known them as babies!
yep Chico’s full of nuts. A blog a day, that’s all we ask.
Here is another idiotic Greenie law.
In Massachusetts it is illegal to add anything to your compost heap that did not originate on your land. No store bought lettuce leaves allowed, thank you very much. I could not give my neighbor my horse manure for her garden, I had to truck it up to New Hampshire to a guy who bred roses.
Some poor guy I met had a winery. After the law was passed he was told he had to dispose of the skins and seeds left over from pressing the grapes as “HAZARDOUS WASTE” normally they are composted and put back on the fields. The cost drove him out of business.
And yes those are true stories, unfortunately.
Those strange looking low flow fire hydrants look surpricingly similiar to the variety one sees in the upper reaches of the Sierra Foothill Towns, hooked up to a Sierra hamlet’s “somewhat reliable” water system ( Long barn / Slide Inn on Sonora Pass Hwy. 108 is a good example of this ) Sounds like one of those good ideas that’re utterly useless if not downright dangerous in the real world. Especially when the protection of a town is at stake!!
As far as that ban on any use or transport of a Nuclear Device or Fuel through town. That stems from the days of the Reagan Administration having their grubby little friends and allies within the Academia Nuclear Physics World research and develop new and outlandish ways to kill people ‘en masse during those sad days of the Missle Build-Up between us and Soviet Russia. This ban was supposed to keep any and all individuals who worked for “The University”, I would suppose from working with the “Dept. of Defence” on any Nuclear/Atomic/ Hydrogen / Ballistic Missile “Technology” of any sort whatsoever. This also would supposedly carry over to where Hwy 99 and the Southern Pacific Railroad Mainline ( now Union Pacific ) comes through Chico City Limits from ever being utilized to transport this technology either. I’m sure the railroad and trucking companies, as well as military convoy transports have most likely ignored this part of the law and used Hwy 99 and the rails many times on their way from North and South. No doubt Interstate 5 sees much more of this traffic though.