Change in Oregon

A RULING.pdf via a Federal District Court on Oregon Marriage has some personal notes in it. The judge is my younger brother. He reminds us how it once was:

"Generations of Americans, my own included, were raised in a world in which homosexuality was believed to be a moral perversion, a mental disorder, or a mortal sin. I remember that one of the more popular playground games of my childhood was called 'smear the queer' and it was played with great zeal and without a moment's thought to political correctness."

"On a darker level, that same worldview led to an environment of cruelty, violence, and self-loathing. It was but 1986 when the United States Supreme Court justified, on the basis of a 'millennia of moral teaching,' the imprisonment of gay men and lesbian women who engaged in consensual sexual acts."

Bombs to Wine in the Horse Heaven Hills

A portion of the south slope of the Horse Heaven Hills south of Prosser was for a time used as bombing range during WWII and into the 1950s. The use as a bombing range was discontinued and the land use switched to new range - for cattle and dry land wheat. Irrigation has converted the land yet again to vineyards and further south to orchards.

Notes on the Demise of a Port

John Stark at the Bellingham Herald did a story on how at least part of Bellingham's Port is failing as a port: bellinghams-waterway-cleanup-plan.

Overtime the Whatcom Waterway has silted in such that deep draft ships and not so deep draft barges are unable to dock where desired. A problem at many ports near large rivers. Silt entering the Bellingham Bay from the Nooksack River has partially filled in shore line areas that were previously dredged as harbor areas.

The silt deposits have effectively buried mercury contaminated sediments from past use of the Whatcom Waterway and Bellingham Bay as discharge points for mercury tainted wastewater from the former paper mill in Bellingham. The Port would prefer to leave as much of the buried mercury contaminated sediment as possible where it is. That policy is clearly at odds with some of the shippers that would like to use the waterway.

Mike Stoner, the Port of Bellingham Environmental Director notes in the Herald article that the waterway had been a small barge facility in the past and will remain so. He also noted that dredging  would delay the cleanup of the waterway years and would add a cost of $10 million dollars to the cleanup.

Clearly there is now a demand for a larger barge facility now and the Port is not providing an alternative. The demand for gravel or aggregate shipping in Bellingham should be expected to increase as the area gravel pits near the city are nearly exhausted and there are no other land based sources to replace them. The lack deep draft barge loading will be an added costs to road and construction projects  throughout Bellingham until barge shipping is improved.

In terms of the added costs and delays to cleanup, it should be pointed out that the Washington State Department of Ecology approved a cleanup that included dredging the entire Whatcom Waterway in 2002 - any delay 11 years on now has been purely the result of the Port of Bellingham's actions as the Port very purposely derailed that cleanup plan by moving to condemn the location where the dredged sediment would have been disposed of. I will add that the claims of increased cost of $10 million sounds  bad, but again the original cleanup plan approved by Ecology was estimated at $23 million. The Port of Bellingham's plan is over $100 million. Hence, costs concerns are by no means the driver of this Port turning its back on the very purpose it was supposedly created for.

I have previously posted rather obsessively posted on the cleanup schemes for the Whatcom Waterway:
 bellingham-bay-cleanup-planning-15 years on
bellingham-bay-cleanup-death-of-Alternative J
bellingham-waterway-and-bay-cleanup-Port-Alternative
mtca-funds-proposed-for-marina
bellingham-bay-cleanup-how-is-port's-cleanup-plan-doing
asb-to-marina-and-state-toxics-account

Elephant Seals

This picture is not from Washington State but the mainland shore of California. What is not captured in the image is the smell. Lots of urine!

This unexpected encounter adjacent to Highway 1 does cause some contemplation of our interactions with sea mammals. These must have represented a huge protein source at one time. Other predators must have been influenced as well. These seal were hunted later to near extinction and their presence on mainland beaches is relatively new behavior.

For regular readers, posting is limited and will be for a while. 

Slaughter Houses and Policy

The New York Times had an interesting editorial on slaughter houses awhile back:
support-your-local-slaughterhouse.

Whatcom County Council has been struggling with this issue mightily. The Council recently expanded the areas where slaughterhouses could be located with the idea of allowing small scale slaughterhouses for local meat processing. The process turned rather bumpy and has not yet been entirely resolved two-years-on as there are now appeals and the County Council with a different make-up is considering some adjustments to the rules (whatcomcounty/council/agendabills/ab2014-060b.pdf).  

As an exercise to try to appreciate the job of County Council try to read the ordinance and fully understand all its nuance. The one take-away regarding motivation is that there is only one USDA approved beef slaughter/packing facility north of King County open to the public (Finding of Fact 9)and that facility can only process 2,000 animals. Given Whatcom County's cattle population is 95,000 cattle.

My own following of this process the County has been going through is that in trying to do what should be considered a good thing got really strange fast and turned into a proxy policy wonk battle about Ag land, property rights, animal rights and a host of other afflictions. The County Planning Commission appointed by the Council to try to resolve these types of contentious issues before they get to the council managed to throw gasoline on the fire making the whole thing even more crazy.

The current council seems to be coalescing around a general concept and perhaps the problem will be resolved Tuesday. I wish them well.  

Not So Cuddly Otters

Sea otters, not to be confused with otters, were an important part of the early trading history history of the Pacific Northwest with first English traders and later, American and Spanish traders. The sea otter brought profound change to the Pacific Northwest.

I have seen river otters on numerous occasions while doing field work. It is tempting to assign anthropological values to them (river-otters-and-seal). But Dylan Mathews at Vox provides The Case Against Otters.

The Good and Bad of Parcel Search Tools

During my County Council Whatcom County presentation on geology hazards (HERE) I put up this slide at the very end regarding policy and geology hazards.

 

 

The one area I was critical of the county was regarding the county online property and parcel map search. Ralph Schwartz was in attendance and picked up on the issue (bellinghamherald.com/geologist-whatcom-parcel-map and bellinghamherald.com/whatcom-exec-goal-to-have-new-county-website).

I used Jefferson County as an example of a parcel search tool. 

Click this link http://www.co.jefferson.wa.us/assessors/parcel/ParcelSearch.asp and you get this:

Typing in the address or the tax number will take you to assessor data information about the property in question, but if you click on maps you get this page:

The page gives you a choice of maps. Click on the Critical Areas map and you get this:

 A county map with a tool bar and layers that can be turned on or off depending what your interested in. So if I turn on LiDAR towards the bottom of the layers list and zoom into an area I am interested in I get this on the Toandos Peninsula along the west shore of Hood Canal.

This great for geologists, but the images also help any perspective property owner or an owner wanting more information about the lay of the land. The north-south glacial striations can be seen as well as deeply incised ravines as well as some deep-seated landslide activity. The tool bar allows one to measure distances and click points to find the elevations.

If you prefer not having a bare earth image from the LiDAR you can click on an aerial image from several dates typically going back to the early 1990s. And if you want to see where streams might be located click that.

A forested landscape showing the location of the lots and streams including streams thought to have fish. Important information when in the early stages of thinking about developing a property.

But how about the geology hazards? Click off the aerial photo and click on Landslide Hazard and you get this:

Yellow is low landslide hazard, orange is medium and red is high. Green are lots where a landslide hazard has been identified. No color means the location is thought to not be in a landslide hazard.

The designations are not absolute. The map is meant to be a screening tool to alert someone that there may be an issue. There is no doubt that the screening tool could be improved, but the green zones indicate that as information becomes available the County tweaks the map. Those green lots have all had some sort of geology investigation or report or observation that there has been landslides at those sites. The landslide activity only impacted a portion of the properties.

In my own notes as a geologist I have already tweaked this map using LiDAR plus some on the ground work and would add a bit a red swatch across some of the yellow area.

Another layer to try is Parcel Tags. These are parcels that have got some attention and could be viewed as worth a careful look at the permits.

If you click on the lot with the "i" (information tool) you can get some information as to why a parcel was tagged.

In the case of one of the red parcels, the parcel was tagged as having a geotechnical report. The report places some constraints on the lot as to where the home can be located, how storm water is managed, septic location etc. The idea is the potential buyer can see the report'

The Jefferson County system is by no means perfect, but it allows property owners to be much better informed. The above example relates to a recent small project I did. i buyer was looking at a lot in the area and noted that there were red tagged lots with geotchnical reports. He called me because I had written one of the reports or two or three (kind of my niche area). He was already well informed and the fact that there was deep-seated translational landslide on the property he was interested in was not a surprise.

There are other very good parcel search tools. I have been using some for so long that I am not sure how easy they are to use as I have them kind of figured out. But I have always like the Jefferson system. Clallam has essentially the same program, but has even more information on the maps. King County I Map is very good and Thurston County has a nice system as well at least for my purposes. And yes, Whatcom is terrible as is Island.