Hanson

So this is what happens when you put things aside - the mainstream media gets hold of a story before you get around to talking about it.

I've been meaning to post about the Hanson Dam situation. Sacnoth has been doing a good job keeping up with it, but then, living in the Green River Valley, he has a vested interest in the entire situation.

Here's the story. The Green River flows out of the Cascade, north through the valley to the sound. Once it was joined by the White River near Auburn, but after a flood, that river changed its banks and now flows towards Tacoma. And it was once joined by the Black River, which disappeared when the level of Lake Washington dropped with the Montlake Cut. So it does not have the force it once did.

However, it does have a lot of force, and I've seen pictures of the early days when the local farms and racetrack was inundated by floodwater. In the early 60s, the Howard Hanson dam was installed upstream of the valley to regulate the floodwaters, and in addition, the river itself was dredged and banked with a series of levies, changing its flow from a ever-changing meander to its present course.

And in the wake of that control development spread through the valley floor, including the huge mall (still called by the locals Southcenter, though it is really now officially Westfield) and a lot of light industrial and residential growth.

Which is all well and good as long as the dam does its job. However, after the flooding of last year, the dam began to leak. Waters usually held back have found other paths, and the integrity of the dam is threatened. As a result, the dam will pass along water that it would normally hold back, or else risk failing. And that excess water passes downstream to the developed valley.

The current plan is to inject a grout curtain to stem the leakage, but this is at best a patch, and the results of the patch won't be known until the rains come again. So everyone downstream is getting a little nervous.

And they are looking towards the levees. There have been a couple failures in the past few years creating localized flooding, but the idea that there will be a systematic flood is making all the valley residents very concerned. In the wake of Katrina everyone started looking at their infrastructure, and a lot of levees came up, pardon the pun, short. Here's an article from USA Today that noted levees that were in such bad shape that, if they failed, the Army Corps of Engineers would provide funding to rehabilitate them. A lot of them listed in Renton are for the Cedar River (which is another valley, and I suppose a discussion for another time) but there are candidates on the Green as well. And mind you, these are just the ones that are so bad that the Army Corps doesn't want to deal with them. Not included are those that will be overtopped during a major flood.

All this puts local politicians in a bind - spend the money for levee improvements and get castigated if the floods don't come, or holding tight and being villains if Kent and Renton go underwater. I am in favor of the improvements (and the eventual replacement of the Hanson dam - no one seems to be talking about it, but its not like its going to get better over time). In the meantime, those on the valley floor should be thinking about flood insurance and go-bags, at least until we know the patch is holding and that the levees are up to snuff.

The local media has picked up on all this, and noted that the new Kent courthouse is ready to move at a nonce and the King County Elections Offices have already relocated. However, there is this large MALL right where the Black River used to flow into the Green which has just completed major renovations (and is not going anywhere), along with the new US Mint building and, oh, the Olympic Pipeline Hub nearby as well. Not to mention companies that range from Wizards of the Coast to biotech startups throughout the valley floor. So yes, the dam is the first line of defense, and the levees are the second, but should all watery hell break loose, this could be a major disaster.

But for the moment - flood insurance and go-bags.

More later,

Theatre: Drop Me In The Water

The Breach by by Catherine Filloux, Tarell Alvin McCraney & Joe Sutton, Directed by David Esbjornson, Seattle REP, through February 9, 2008

So as a playgoer, I'm a bit of a booster. If the play itself isn't up to snuff, praise the actors. If neither are up to the task, say something nice about the set design. If all else fails, praise the theater for taking a chance, even if it doesn't work.

But sometimes it all falls apart, and The Breach does exactly that. Three weak one-acts crosscut into a theatrical collage on the aftermath of Katrina. And collage is the correct word - a mosaic takes the pieces and makes a greater picture out of them, while a collage retains all the big identifiable chunks and challenges you to see if there is any connection.

And there isn't much, other than the hurricane and the failures that followed it. Three plays with very different styles, and, taken apart, are very slender threads. Addition does not make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Piece one is Mac the wheelchair-bound bartender, who escapes his flooded house but is plagued by a personification of water, who is two parts legend and two parts DTs. I never personified Katrina as anything else than a savage bully of nature, so re-branding the storm as a witty, lovely, athletic black woman with a British accent (on a mike and amplified) just loses me. And why are delusions always more witty and intelligent than their creators? It is the best of the group, yet it is struggling against its own pretensions.

Piece two is a New York writer going South to chase down rumors that the levees were blown up on purpose, a story prevalent amongst a black community that for the most part was ignored and savaged by the storm. Not that reality spared his community much, but this snippet concentrates on the Internet-borne rumor that followed. Yet most of the story seems to be about the writer being unable to explain clearly who he was and what he wanted. Not a good sign when the audience knows the "right" answer from the outset.

Piece three actually got me irritated. Three survivors trapped on the roof of their flooded home - Grandfather, grandson, and seven-year old granddaughter. The older version of the granddaughter (dressed in the "military fleece poncho" look that will be popular in 2035) narrates. The storm is pretty much secondary - this is three people trapped together and the emotions that fly. Worse yet, this is the third play in the row where we have the "sacrificial gay character" - who is punished for his sexuality. Is this a theme for the season? Will there be a gay character in "Imaginary Invalid" who catches a bullet in act one?

The actors were, well, not bad, for the most part because I know them from earlier productions - veterans of Birdie Blue, Gem of the Ocean, and The Blue Door are all here, reminding me they were better in the other plays. The stagecraft was tough - how do you flood a stage in a traditional theater (Initiman pulled it off with Metamorphosis, but that's theater in the round - we're all looking down). Pieces moved effectively on and off, but capturing the nature of bleakness after the flood is tough.

I guess what is frustrating is what was unsaid, or rather skimmed over in passing - a brushing touch and then on to other matters. Semi-addressed was the fact that Katrina was a disaster, but what happened next was even worse. That neglect and corruption laid the groundwork for what happened to New Orleans, Biloxi, and the Gulf Coast, and the fact that we don't seem to have learned anything. We succeeded in making government small enough to drown in a bathtub, and then were surprised when it was washed out to sea. Such that in the post-Katrina years, with brushfires and flooding in Chehalis, no one is really counting on the national government to ride to the rescue.

We need a good Katrina play. We don't have it yet.

More later,

Hole in the Heart

So I am in New York City. The whys and wherefores do not matter, and, to be honest, I can’t discuss what I’m up to at the moment. But the discussions and meetings had a hole, about three hours in size, large enough to allow a trip into the frigid outside world beyond the hotel. I had not been in the city for about a decade, and while much is the same, some things have changed - more flatscreens everywhere, the Toy Building is going condo, and Times Square is more brilliant and gaudy than ever.

So I went to Ground Zero to pay my respects. It’s been a decade since I’ve been here.

When I came into the city earlier in the week it was just after twilight, and the Empire State and Chrysler buildings were lit up, dominating their neighbors. I’ve never been a native New Yorker, but New York is in the national blood – its locations are familiaf to us. The city and its various districts and boroughs belong to the national consciousness (unlike LA, where all of its locations are punchlines, but that’s another tale). Anyway, coming into the city from JFK I could not help but smile from the strange warmth and familiarity that it gave off.

And then I looked towards the south, and there was a hole in the skyline, and my throat got thick and my eyes watered a little. There is still a hole in the heart of Manhattan.

I got on the E train to go downtown this afternoon. “We don’t give change” said the woman at the booth. “I’m new here,” I said. “You go to that machine and you can get a single ride pass. It costs two dollar. We don’t give change. The machines work. Those idiots say they don’t, but they don’t know nothing. They work, just follow the directions.” And the machines worked and spat out a ticket and I descended into the subway and caught the E train to the last stop.

Now a decade ago I would be shameless in my open distain, even hatred, of the World Trade Center. And I would not be alone in that opinion – they were ugly buildings, buck teeth planted at the end of the island, far from the true heart of Manhattan. They weren’t elegant in appearance, like the Empire State, or even novel in design, like the Sears Tower in Chicago. They were ugly. brutish buildings, and to make matters worse, their first movie appearance was with Tom Hanks in the horrible, horrible movie “Mazes and Monsters”. So I have no love for the towers. But now they are gone and the hole is left and I miss them.

And subway let out right on the edge of the construction. A heritage sign along the road still talks about them in present tense, as an engineering marvel. The site itself has been excavated, and the foundations and infrastructure are already going in, including the rail lines. You can navigate around the entire site, so I paced around it, alongside a damaged building still being deconstructed, along the various fences and windows, through the Winter Garden, and along the north side. I was not alone - there were others, still surprised, and shocked, and angry and sad, who came to see and picture the structure as it was and as it may yet be (and just a note – the models of the planned structures look a lot better in three-dimensions than the artistic renditions I’ve seen).

And in the end I got back on the subway going north and a pair of hiphoppers danced and panhandled and got out at the gaudy Time Square where a group of young girls under watchful police eyes were waiting for someone named Hillary to finish taping an interview with MTV. But there was one other thing at the site.

On other of the pedestrian overpasses, an artist had put in an installation called “Floodwall” It was nothing but drawers – simple drawers, wooden, warped, and water-damaged, from chests and closets that once held simple things, all on end, all along the length of the passage. The only thing odd about these peeling, bleached, wooden drawers was that they were from New Orleans, rescued from the rubble of Katrina, brought north and laid out in a vista along the side of Ground Zero.

There is a hole in the heart of Manhattan. There are other holes in the heart of America.

Update: It has been noted that actually, the 1976 version of King Kong predates the 1982 release of Mazes and Monsters (Thanks, Bradon!). Rather than just make the change above into "one of the first film appearences" or something similarly weaselly, I will just not the change here, since it allows me to state again that Mazes and Monsters really blew chunks.

Make Levees, Not War

So I have been very, very busy of late, both in the office and on my own time, and haven't done a lot of posting. But I came across this, first on the Pittsburgh Press site, then at the P-I (though nothing from the Seattle Times). In short, it says that a lot of levees need repaired.

The article, pretty much identical in the Press and the P-I, makes a passing reference to the fact that a lot of the sites are located in Washington State, though this seems to just be passed on without much comment by our local press. This is particularly interesting since, if you check out the pdfed list, you find that a lot of the areas of concern, where maintenance of the levees has been turned over to local authorities and since lapsed, are along the Cedar and Green Rivers.

These rivers are very close to here, like just down the hill from us. And indeed, both are rivers that had historically different and often random paths before the authorities channeled and leveed them into submission. The Green is particular was known for frequent flooding, and the region now occupied by WotC, the big Southcenter Mall, and the upcoming Federal Reserve Bank, were all regularly flooded (there was a racetrack in this area once, and I have seen pictures of it underwater).

But just because the local waterway was once tamed does not mean it stays tamed, and the heavy rains of the past few years have given concern. Now the feds are voicing the same concern, to the tune that the locals either have to get on the ball, or those in the floodplains will have to pony up for flood plain insurance.

Given that a lot of large businesses (commercial and light industry) are now in the path of the Green, I have a feeling that we will be hearing about this again in the near future.

More later,