Rhubarb Pie

A pattern!

Or maybe you see a pattern in my recent reading:

Human system responses to disaster : an inventory of sociological findings / Thomas E. Drabek

Strategies for coordinating disaster responses / Thomas E. Drabek.

Facing hazards and disasters : understanding human dimensions / Committee on Disaster Research in the Social Sciences: Future Challenges and Opportunities, National Research Council

I have to admit that I don't curl up with this stuff quite as readily as I do something with swords and horses, but I've been indignant recently that my department doesn't give the human sides of disaster response the same attention it does the physical system.  I decided that at least someone in the department should know how humans evacuate and what makes them build in the path of disaster and whether they will always go back.  So I poked around and it turns out that way smart people already know this!  I do not have to make up answers from scratch (although I totally would).   

Seems like Dr. Drabek is the Grand Old Man in the field. I tracked him back to the University of Colorado Natural Hazards Center, where I signed up for their newsletter and want to go to the conference SO MUCH.  Anyway, I will read his books and find out if there is any hope of getting people out of the way of floods.  Then I will go to Boulder in early summer and maybe see some of you there.

If you are very lucky...

I liked these pictures about historic structures emerging from Lake Shasta as water levels drop during this drought.  I haven't been water blogging as much, and figure we have a different audience now.  But maybe I'll put a long post about whether California should build new dams under the fold later this evening.

WARNING TO ALL READERS:  The only thing below the fold is a very long post on whether California should build new dams.  That's all.  There's nothing else under there.  If you click through, I will get the impression that you like such things and it will only encourage me.

Why are you looking for other soul sisters? I'm right here.

Honey, I like your thinking so much better than mine.  Your thinking sounds nice.  It is about gentle things or beautiful things or things that will matter to people.   I wish my thinking were like that. 

My thinking just churns and churns and buzzes all the time.  It starts turning in my head and while the making connections part of it is interesting, most of the topic is worrying.  I never solve things; I just reach a temporary end, a marker for the beginning of the next session.  People can't tell I'm following some thought, so it makes me seem abstracted or spacey.  And it is so hard to talk to other people about it.  Once you're more than a little way down the thought, other folks don't have the same context.  It takes a while to fill them in, and by the time you get to the new parts, it all seems like a lot. 

Margie and Dave are so good about listening to me.  Poor Margie.  I see her at lunch and some days I remember to ask her about herself first.  But as soon as she's done, I bust out with some fact trilling recital of a whole morning's thought.  We talk about it at the ends of the pool, or if it is really crucial, get out the kickboards.  Dave just smiles and asks me what today's theme is.  If he asked me today, I would tell him:

1.  I finally figured out that I don't like the appropriative system of water rights because it is based on the same model as Original Sin, and I reject the concept of inherited guilt or virtue.
2.  What must it be like for Sunne McPeak to sit on the task force that is going to decide what to do in the Delta?  She started her career by fighting the Peripheral Canal, and she has enough integrity that I bet she supports it this time.  But what does that feel like?
3.  Has the agency I work for realized yet that the number one technique that we recommend for dealing with drought (pricing water to encourage conservation) was made unconstitutional by Proposition 218?  Maybe we should stop telling water districts to do illegal things.  Should I bring that up?

Yeah.  See.  You think about nice things, crushes and how to be gracious and whether the sky will clear.  My thoughts don't go so well.  It helps to write them down.  Then I don't have to hold the whole thread in my mind when I go on to the next step.  I put some of them in an essay below this.  But it'd be easier if they didn't ride me so hard in the first place.

It doesn't come up all that often.

You mean like those Abercrombie and Snatch ads where all the models are half-dressed and lounging about a culvert? And I laugh and take it right over to Margie, who is all, "What? Did they photoshop the baffles out of that culvert?!" And I'm all, "Yeah! Hah hah hah, that's crazy!"  And Margie's all "Dude! Think of the velocities through there at high flow! Without baffles, you'd have no stillwater refugia at all!" And I'm all "Your juvenile salmon passage rate would be, like, zero! This ad is ridiculous!" Then we realize that they didn't photoshop the culvert at all, and we remember that most of the culverts in the state still need to be converted and we choke back quiet sobs.

(More to come. I haven't decided whether to talk about peeves or things that delight me.)