A commission in charge of holding San Francisco accountable for its response to the drug and mental health crises hasn’t been able to hold a proper meeting for more than seven months as the city’s elected leaders neglect to fill its seats. 

There are currently only six active members on the 17-person Behavioral Health Commission, an oversight body with the power to draft policy and conduct reviews of programs run by the city’s Behavioral Health Department. The department has a $592 million annual budget and is responsible for providing mental health and drug treatment services. 

Because there are fewer than nine active members, the commission lacks a quorum and hasn’t been able to wield much of its power or hold meetings since February.

The term of the commission’s co-chair, Balham Vigil, expired 10 months ago, but Vigil continues to serve; the city has failed to appoint a replacement. The commission is required by state law, and 16 of its 17 members are appointed by the Board of Supervisors. 

A 17th seat is reserved for a member of the Board of Supervisors. But that seat has sat empty since January 2022. Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, who championed the creation of the Homelessness Oversight Commission, was the last Board of Supervisors member to fill the seat before Behavioral Health Commission members said he abruptly stopped attending. Safaí didn’t respond to a request for comment.

District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safai during the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Meeting at City Hall in San Francisco on July 11. | Source: Isaac Ceja/The Standard

“The supervisors are just not appointing people,” said former commission member Geoffrey Grier. “You’ve got a lot of folks who want to be on the commission but they’ve got to wait a year? Nine months?”

Victor Young, a clerk for the Board of Supervisors, told The Standard there are eight people who have pending applications to serve on the commission. However, he said it’s difficult to find qualified members for the commission due to the types of experience needed for each seat. 

Each of the 11 supervisors gets one appointee to the commission. The six other seats are appointed by the full Board of Supervisors, including the one seat designated for a member of the Board of Supervisors.

On top of that, there are other complicated rules. At least nine of the 17 commissioners are supposed to be mental health patients or family members of mental health patients. Two commissioners are supposed to be mental health “advocates,” two seats are designated for mental health professionals, and one seat is to be held by a person “serving the public interest.” 

The commission currently has three seats occupied by mental health patients or their family members, two mental health professionals and one advocate.

The Behavioral Health Department is part of the Department of Public Health, the largest department in the city with a $3 billion budget. The Department of Public Health has at least four commissions overseeing its work. 

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who is chair of the rules committee, which evaluates commission applicants, said he’s working on legislation that would shrink the commission from 17 members to 11. He told The Standard the commission’s stringent eligibility requirements have imposed barriers for him and other supervisors to appoint commissioners. 

Supervisor Matt Dorsey speaks at a press conference in San Francisco on June 29. | Jeremy Chen/The Standard

Do Oversight Bodies Work? Some Supervisors Are Skeptical 

In July, The Standard reported only one person working in City Hall was able to figure out how many departments, boards, commissions and advisory bodies the city has. A representative from the City Attorney’s Office eventually counted 53 departments, 56 boards and commissions, and 74 more advisory bodies, bringing the grand total to 183 different entities. 

The revelation frustrated many who said the city is plagued by too many overlapping bureaucracies. 

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, who is one of five supervisors with active appointees on the Behavioral Health Commission, said the city should fill the vacant seats but was skeptical whether it would move the needle on solving city issues.

“If oversight bodies led to good government, we would have the best government in the world,” Mandelman said. 

Supervisor Rafael Mandelman listens to public comment at a board meeting at the Supervisor’s Chamber at City Hall in San Francisco in May. | Justin Katigbak for The Standard.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani called the commission into question in April 2020 when she alleged the body’s nonprofit fiscal agent may have improperly submitted invoices for administrative costs and the salaries of two staff members. The commission seat holders are unpaid and the body has since moved under the fiscal purview of the health department. 

Some commission members have taken issue with working under the health department, contending it threatens their ability to independently provide oversight. 

“We’re being overseen by the department that we’re supposed to have oversight of,” Vigil said. 

‘Lives Are at Risk’

The city is in the midst of an overdose crisis that’s claiming over two lives every day, according to preliminary data from the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office. Meanwhile, people with mental illness cycle through the city’s hospitals and emergency services.

The Department of Public Health referred questions about the commission vacancies to the Board of Supervisors. Board President Aaron Peskin did not reply to a request for comment.

“They come out, dictate to us and leave,” commission member Liza Murawski said of the health department. “There’s no accountability.”

Murawski said she’s been awaiting data on the number of case managers in city-funded programs for several years, spending countless hours pleading with the department to no avail. She wants to know if the city has enough case managers to meet client demands and connect them with lifesaving services.

The commission is supposed to monitor contracts and outcomes of the city’s mental health services and report their findings to the Board of Supervisors and the state. However, commission members said the city’s reliance on nonprofit contractors has created a firewall that makes it impossible to obtain the data needed to evaluate the services. 

In April, former commission member Terezie Bohrer resigned in an email to the clerk, explaining she thought she could be a better advocate “on the ‘outside’ with less governmental constraints.”

Others have accused the health department of being purposefully unhelpful in helping them obtain information necessary to do their jobs. 

“They’ve been pretty much keeping us in the dark,” Vigil said. “People’s lives are at risk.”

The post San Francisco Drug Disaster Panel Hasn’t Met in Months appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

My grandfather died before I was born, and he remains to me a mostly mysterious figure. As is true of many people born poor who are committed to bettering their lot, his hours were taken up with work, family, and church; not much was left for that luxury item we call personality. A big man with paws for hands, in 1926 he got a job with the Consolidated Gas Company as a digger, busting up roadways and digging trenches for the laying of pipe. With his wife he raised six children in a two-bedroom apartment on 145th Street in the South Bronx. During his working life, he went to Mass on Sundays; during his brief retirement, he went to Mass every day. When I asked, people would tell me, “Your grandfather was a very good man,” and leave it at that. He left behind few stories.

But one story about him has stayed with me. He worked six days a week, but on some Sunday afternoons he would take the subway into Manhattan and visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He often went alone, because no one else in the family wanted to go with him. But his most frequent companion was my mother, who as the fifth child and fourth girl was perhaps the least regarded member of the family and wanted attention. After he died, she reflected on those museum afternoons.

“He didn’t say anything,” she said. “He would just walk through the galleries silently. He never pointed out particular paintings or statues, or expressed any particular enthusiasm. I wish I had asked him why he went—but I never found that out. He must have gotten something out of it, because he went over and over again. But he had no words.” My mother was to study at City College and become an elementary school teacher. She would visit museums all over the world, sharing her thoughts about art with anyone who would accompany her. I have her journals; they are about the art she saw. Art became a part of our family life. And behind it all was my mother’s unsatisfied curiosity about what motivated her father, the silent man in the museum.

There is always a residuum of mystery in individual choice. But I now see one obvious reason why my grandfather came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art: He had been invited. A group of wealthy men had built the institution in the hope that men like my grandfather—ditchdiggers, pipe fitters, bricklayers, and others who labored to manufacture, build, and repair—would learn of the glories of men and women who likewise worked with their hands: artists. But the story of the museum begins far away, in Paris, and with Richard Morris Hunt, the man who more than any other brought the fine arts to New York City.

Standing in the Place du Palais-Royal in Paris, you feel that you are in the very heart of Europe. The palace before you, with its arcaded gate and porticoed wings, was once known as the Palais-Cardinal. It was built for Richelieu, the notorious minister, who crossed this square again and again to consult with Louis XIII. Baptized anew during the French Revolution, it became the Palais de l’Égalité. Now called the Palais-Royal, it houses the Council of State as well as France’s Ministry of Culture. Facing it from across the square is the Louvre. Architectural historians, noting the rusticated columns, figured sandstone panels, and exuberance of the Louvre facade, will assign it to the reign of Napoleon III, who expanded and updated the Louvre. But to the average tourist, it might as well be Louis XIII. It features the same Lutetian sandstone, aged to a dark creamy yellow, as the rest of the Louvre. The columns, the framed and aediculed windows, the sculptured antefixes, all proclaim “French Classicism”—or in simpler terms, “old and glorious.”

The tourist assessment is basically correct. The Napoleon III additions to the Louvre are not just an extension; they are a continuation, a culmination even, of centuries of uninterrupted aesthetic evolution, the millennium-long tradition that makes France the most beautiful and most visited nation on Earth. Which makes it all the more remarkable that this facade—the Pavillon de la Bibliotheque, with its portal, whose mansard roof is studded with angels and acroteria, arched windows and columns, and half-dressed allegorical nymphettes holding up the attic—was, in part, the work of a twenty-six-year-old American named Dick Hunt. This young man, endowed with a hint of genius and old-fashioned American hustle, had entered the École des Beaux-Arts eight years earlier in 1846, the first American ever to be accepted at the school. Before being accepted, he had been rejected; when the rejection note came, he declared to his diary in a fit of defiant resolution, “Today we begin truly to study architecture.” He spent a year traveling, reading, and sketching in Europe, then sat for the exam again and was accepted. In his atelier studies—École students worked directly in master architects’ studios—Hunt became the favorite and protégé of Hector-Martin Lefuel, who would be named court architect to Emperor Napoleon III in 1853. The emperor wanted new personal apartments and an extension of the Louvre to the Tuileries. To be his assistant for this illustrious commission, Lefuel hired Hunt, assuring the self-proclaimed “Green Mountain Boy”—Hunt was from Brattleboro, Vermont—a fine career in the French civil service as a government architect.

One should not overstate Hunt’s contributions to the Louvre project. There are stories that Lefuel, to gratify his young assistant, let him design the whole of the Rue de Rivoli facade; but Lefuel was the prevailing creative force on the project. And yet Lefuel, writing years later, did not hesitate to credit his understudy: “My greatest work was done while my dear Dick worked with me, and he can justly claim a great share of its success.” Hunt would later be elected a member of the Institut de France, an immense honor previously accorded to only one other American: Benjamin Franklin.

Hunt’s work at the Louvre might seem a curious footnote to Parisian history. In fact, it was an enormously consequential event in the history of American architecture and the civic life of New York. Hunt held a government post in the Ministry of Public Works in Paris, and Lefuel begged him to remain. Hunt loved the City of Light. As a government architect he was expected to socialize with, and employ, painters and sculptors; the architect, in Beaux-Arts philosophy, was master and disposer of all the other arts. Imagine designing in Paris at the dawn of the Belle Époque, commissioning work from Monet and Renoir and Rodin to decorate the nation’s buildings! But Hunt wanted to go home. In 1856 he left the city of Victor Hugo and Charles Garnier and boarded a steamer for America, where, he assured himself, “there would be demand for a first-rate architect.”

After six months drafting for the U.S. Capitol expansion then under way, Hunt moved to New York City and hung out his shingle. “It has been represented to me that America was not ready for the Fine Arts,” he wrote to his mother. “But I think they are mistaken.”

Hunt made an impact immediately, building what would become one of the great places of nineteenth-century New York: the Tenth Street Studio Building, the first structure in the city custom-built for artists. Commissioned by James Johnston, a patron of culture whose brother John was to be the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it soon became the center of the city’s art scene and put Greenwich Village on the map. Large arched south-facing windows—a design later used for New York City public schools—brought light into the workspaces, half of which also sported residential accommodations. Saturdays were open studio days, which brought crowds—and sales—to the artists who set up shop there. All the apartments opened onto a central glass-covered court, where exhibitions were held. The whole was so superbly conceived and designed that it housed two generations of American art: Winslow Homer, John La Farge, Sanford Gifford, and many others became Tenth Streeters. A great deal of the art on display in the American Wing of the Met was produced in that building. Frederic Church held his famous 1859 exhibit of The Heart of the Andes here; promoters asked viewers to bring opera glasses, to examine the painting in greater detail. In a later exhibit, The Heart of the Andes hung opposite Albert Bierstadt’s Lander’s Peak. On the wall between was Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware.

Hunt was not the type to miss out on the fun. He rented a space in the building and set up his architectural firm, hiring as his assistants Henry Van Brunt, George Post, and later William Ware and Frank Furness, all of whom went on to storied careers. “Thus,” Van Brunt reminisced, “we together entered upon an era so rich, so full of surprise and delight, that it seems, as we look back upon it, as if once more in the world the joy of the Renaissance, the white light of knowledge had broken in upon the superstition of romance.” By bringing the French atelier system to America, Hunt, it is said, founded the first American architecture school. William Ware would later hold the nation’s first professorship in architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and then found the nation’s first university department of architecture, at Columbia. One can fairly say that architecture as a profession in America was born in Hunt’s suite on Tenth Street.

Hunt brought in commission after commission, giving his young apprentices much to do. “You have got to work,” was his professional advice; “you have got to work at day, and you have got to work at night.” Hating interruptions, Hunt perfected the eight-minute New York lunch—a chicken sandwich and a cup of tea. In order to submit designs for public monuments and open competitions, the master architect often worked through the night. “Work, work, keep on going,” he would say. “That is the best rest you can have.” But he was the furthest thing from stern. He was “irresistible in his vitality and unique and charming in his presence,” observed contemporaries, “a bundle of joyous energetic nerves,” and a “vitalizing and enchanting personality.” “He had the power,” wrote the sculptor Karl Bitter, who would provide the sculptures on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “to kindle enthusiasm in others.”

Apprentices and visitors were amazed by his capacity to express himself, not only in conversation, but on paper: Chiding an assistant for getting a curve wrong, he could lean over the paper and render any line with a single stroke. “Like this!” he would say. Anything he saw, or even remembered, he could draw. “A pencil in his hand,” said Van Brunt, “was a magic wand, which chastened the buoyancy of his imagination and made him a scholar.” And when work was done, the man’s vitality overflowed. He made his love of food and wine into a perennial cause for a feast, bubbling up his famous oyster stew and mixing his secret-recipe champagne punch. “Artist you are,” he told his fellows, “and like artists you should live, full of life and merriness.” He was a bachelor and not even thirty, but it seemed no one had lived so much. He had seen the barricades rise in Paris in 1848; hosted Daniel Webster, who in his old age would stay with the Hunts; sketched the reliefs of Cleopatra and Caesarion at Dendera on the Nile; encountered Bedouins, pistol in hand, when crossing Sinai by camel; spent Easter at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem; taken classes with the greatest architects of France, Garnier and Lefuel and Viollet-le-Duc; swum in the lakes of Switzerland; and gone to vespers in the Sistine Chapel. He had done it all, and in the excitement of a fine conversation, a notable restaurant, a good club, receptive company, or a productive artist’s studio, his lust for life could not be contained.

It was not all bliss, however. Architecture is the most political of arts, and politics is the art of the compromise. Hunt had work building houses and shops, but contemporaries suspected that American residential and commercial architecture was no place for a man of Hunt’s genius. In Paris he had worked on the Louvre; in New York he had to settle for drawing up a Coal and Iron Exchange for the Delaware and Hudson Canal Company (now long since razed to the ground). A staunch supporter of Lincoln (who lost New York City by almost two-to-one margins twice) and the Republican Party, Hunt had great difficulty getting commissions from New York’s Democratic Tammany Hall establishment. He entered a competition with a plan for a new building for the National Academy of Design and lost. He submitted drawings for the Robert Fulton Memorial, the Union League Club, the American Institute, and the American Museum of Natural History, and received none of the commissions. There was talk of converting the 62nd Street Armory—now Central Park’s headquarters—into an art museum under the auspices of the New-York Historical Society (then the possessor of the largest art collection in New York). Hunt submitted not only a design for a building facelift, but also a full master plan for a gargantuan museum, Louvre-like in look and scale. Part and whole were rejected. He would become the nation’s most famous architect anyway. His work on the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, that triumph of Beaux-Arts architecture known as “the White City,” made him a national hero. America’s grandest house, the Biltmore, is his work; so are The Breakers, Marble House, Ochre Court, Chateau-sur-Mer—the houses that make Newport, Rhode Island, America’s bastion of Belle-Époque grandeur. Denied most public commissions, Hunt became “the architect who gilded the Gilded Age,” the man who made private houses monumental. But his real project was to create a culture of fine art in America, starting with a great art museum that could promote it, the museum that would become the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1869, the aging Ralph Waldo Emerson met Hunt in New York and confided to his journal: “One remarkable person new to me, Richard Hunt the architect. His conversation was spirited beyond any that I remember, loaded with matter, and expressed with the vigour and fury of a member of the Harvard boat or ball club relating the adventures of one of their matches; inspired, meantime, throughout, with fine theories of the possibilities of art.” A glittering conversationalist, Hunt became America’s foremost public proponent of art, occupying the place in this country that Oscar Wilde would occupy in England a generation later. The differences between Hunt and Wilde were significant, however. Wilde, an Irishman, a poet, a homosexual, and finally an outsider in English society, viewed the arts as modes of personal superiority: art as idleness, genius, personal luxury. Hunt was a builder and a businessman, overseeing complicated projects that required hundreds or thousands of employees (two thousand men were employed to build The Breakers) and cooperation from bricklayers, stonemasons, painters, plumbers, lawyers, and many others. Art for Hunt was not lonely genius but effective collaboration. They looked their parts, too: Wilde had his long locks and silk scarves, whereas Hunt’s alderman goatee made him look like a fire commissioner borrowing his rich friend’s coat. Wilde became the aesthetic icon, but Hunt’s artistic model was probably more effective, and it had important social effects.

Winifred Howe, in her admirable A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, furnishes us with memoranda from the museum’s first organizational meetings. Hunt contributed a distinctive vision. “It is our aim,” he declared, “to have, at no very future period, a museum similar to the Kensington Museum in London.” The Kensington is now called the Victoria and Albert, but its very first name, from when it was an offshoot of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, is the most revealing: the Museum of Manufactures, drawing on the etymology of the term, facta (made) and manu (by hand). It was a museum of handicrafts, a visual encyclopedia of everything that human beings could make with their hands. It was conceived as an institution for working men, and its founder Henry Cole not only curated the collections but established the opening hours so as to be “most convenient to the working classes.”

Hunt had a practical reason for desiring such a museum. As a Beaux-Arts architect, he had a hand in every design feature of his buildings: His sketches specify bannisters, plumbing fixtures, lighting, window sashes, wood paneling, slate shingles, marble revetments, and more. He sketched the sculptures, stained glass windows, and paintings he wanted. But he depended on an army of artists and craftsmen to execute these visions. This necessity made the Beaux-Arts style the most social of all styles, one that required an entire society of workers. It is the democratic style, and not only because the ancient Greek democracies provided much of its visual language. Ordinary people love opulent buildings like the Metropolitan Museum of Art or Grand Central Station; they also play important roles in the construction of those buildings. Modern styles presume an architect working with machine-made parts, with human automata putting the pieces together; the Beaux-Arts style depends on laborers who rise to become artisans and artists, who acquire skills and, over time, dignity.

Hunt’s artistic vocation was inseparable from business; indeed, it was itself a business. And he had a group of businessmen by his side, working to establish the museum. William C. Prime, first vice president of the museum, opined in 1888,

The life blood of modern commerce and industry is the love of beauty. This mighty city, its wealth and power, rest on this foundation, trade in beauty, buying and selling beauty. . . . Consider for one instant what is the trade which supports your long avenues of stores crowded with purchasers. . . . Enumerate carpets, upholstery, wall papers, furniture, handsome houses, the innumerable beauties of life which employ millions of people in their production, and you will realize that but for the commercial and industrial love of beauty your city would be a wilderness.

That same night, the lawyer Joseph Hodges Choate, a friend of Hunt’s who had put Boss Tweed in jail, enthused that the plan was

gradually to gather together a more or less complete collection of objects illustrative of the history of art in all its branches, from the earliest beginnings to the present time, which should serve not only for the instruction and entertainment of the people, but should also show to the students and artisans of every branch of industry, in the high and acknowledged standards of form and of color, what the past had accomplished for them to imitate and excel.

The ambition to tutor craftsmen is still evident in the collections today. Have you ever wondered why the Met has so many “period rooms” filled with furniture? Hunt and his philanthropic allies believed that Americans needed to learn how to make fine furniture, and the Met was the place to learn it. Consider the Costume Institute and the Persian carpet collection. Hunt believed that the museum should collect textiles so that Americans could become expert tailors, designers, and upholsterers. In its earliest years, the Met held classes not only in drawing and painting and sculpture but in tile-laying, metallurgy, carpentry, and plumbing. Plumbing! It made sense: Hunt created custom designs for bath fixtures, but there weren’t enough skilled workers in lead, copper, cast iron, and other metals available to produce the beautiful kitchens, bathrooms, and laundry rooms he wanted. In his vision, the Met would be the place where plumbers would be trained to be artists capable of the most ambitious designs.

Once the doors opened, the Museum was celebrated as “a great thing for the working-men, artisans, artists, and art-lovers of New York.” We find reports of this sort: “The Trustees take especial satisfaction . . . in observing the number of artisans who visit the Museum.” The museum prided itself on its “school of design for arts and trades.”

Today, perhaps too much under the influence of the Oscar Wilde theory of the arts, we split the arts from the trades, just as we tend to split the Beaux-Arts architecture of men like Richard Morris Hunt from the progressive Victorian era of social improvements in which it developed. But it is no accident that the same era that produced labor laws and public sanitation and free schooling also produced buildings like the New York Public Library, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the San Francisco City Hall, and so many other remarkable buildings. Many of the same people championed both tendencies, and considered themselves allies.

A utilitarian-minded person beholding the New York Public Library regards the opulent design as wasteful excess. Could not the public libraries and museums have been simple brick barns, with more room for books? And the extra money given to the poor? The short answer is “no.” Beauty was part of the Progressive Era. Progressive leaders had the works of John Ruskin on their shelves. They saw too much of life dominated by the machine, and their answer was to humanize with nature and beauty. They recognized that machines could provide steel frames, uniform bricks, and square-cut ashlar. With the time and money saved by the industrial process, they aimed to reinvest the fruits of progress. Every visible surface was to be coated with human handicraft: paintings, carvings, mosaics, tapestries, words. They saw humans choked and paddocked in suffocating cities, and they supplied nature, parks, and suburbs. They saw man’s day mechanized by work, and they answered with leisure. Everywhere they sought balance, redressing the deformations of machine society. Le Corbusier and others would come along and say that none of this was acceptable. We live in a mechanized society, and there is a steel frame behind every Beaux-Arts facade, so, they insisted, we should strip away the sculptures, the paintings, the inscriptions, the mosaics, to see the naked steel and industrial concrete, and be satisfied with a screen of industrial glass. Men of the machine age should have nothing made by hand, only machine-made things. But this is stupidity, not honesty. We need beauty, nature, craft. Everywhere one looks today, those who can afford to do so live where beauty, nature, and craft thrive. Those without means live where everything is made by machine.

The Progressives wished to elevate the poor and address inequality. Skilled labor—the bedrock of the Beaux-Arts movement—was an important instrument of this kind of progress. The arts were not a philanthropic diversion from moneymaking, but rather a part of the same human expressiveness that drives commerce. For this reason, the Met embraced art, labor, craft, and commerce, the whole sweep of human activity. To return to Choate: “It is this same old-fashioned and exploded idea, which regards all that relates to art as the idle pastime of the favored few, and not, as it really is, as the vital and practical interest of the working millions, that has so long retarded its progress among us.”

This democratic vision led the trustees to offer classes at minimal cost; to expand opening hours to make the museum available to working people; and most of all—a policy in recent years vehemently opposed by the museum’s very different modern directorship—to make admission free. More than anything else, this policy carries with it the bouquet of the founders’ original idealism. As Hunt said, “By the Great Caesar, if this country doesn’t take up art, we’ll make it! We’ll educate it! We’ll show it what a great and glorious thing it is!” Free admission exemplified this spirit of evangelization on behalf of beauty. (In 2018, to their shame, city officials authorized a required entry fee for the first time in fifty years, exempting only residents of New York State.)

As one of the founding members of the Museum’s board, and the country’s most famous architect, Hunt might well have expected, when the board planned a building to house the museum during the 1870s, that he would design the structure. He was disappointed. By the terms of the museum’s charter, the city would build the museum on city land in Central Park—and the city would choose the architect. The city chose Calvert Vaux, the architect for most of Central Park. Vaux’s efforts to blend the aesthetics of the Alhambra, Central Park’s Dairy, and a New England brick factory created what James Jackson Jarves called “a forcible example of architectural ugliness.” Renovations have exposed some elements of Vaux’s original structure, so visitors to the Met can make up their own minds about its merits. A second building, by Theodore Weston, attempted to blend Vaux’s brick walls and Ruskin-inspired arches with Classical details. The design was effective but unspectacular. Meanwhile, Hunt looked on with increasing exasperation as Weston, a civil engineer with minimal architectural experience, struggled to manage the project. Luckily, like the city and its wealth, the museum continued to expand. By the 1890s the board realized that it needed a world-class building, which required a world-class architect. A change of law allowed the Met’s board to hire its own architects, instead of receiving them from the city’s Department of Parks, and Richard Morris Hunt became the third architect of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He was sixty-six, only a year from his death. But he had long thought about the museum, and he designed not only a new Fifth Avenue entrance, with its Great Hall and Grand Staircase, but a new master plan, which remains the basic plan in use today.

We can marvel at Hunt’s achievement, the grand building that contemporaries described as “his monument.” His Fifth Avenue facade is imposing but beautiful, its elements familiar and yet exotically exuberant; the deep bays, low arches, and oversized acroteria are all unusual. The long climb to enter a building whose interior is entirely screened evokes aspiration and mystery; entering through the doors and stepping into that Great Hall, one has the feeling of stepping through a magical portal. The Great Hall is both a soaring temple and a homely, darkened cave; grand and comfortable, it remains to this day both the museum’s entrance and its heart. It offers an architectural presentiment, as Hunt intended, of just how great and glorious a thing art is.

In Hunt’s hands, it was a great and glorious thing, a civilization-wide effort. He rallied the era’s robber barons, whom he called “the New Medicis,” and encouraged them in their responsibility to create enduring beauty that would enrich the life of the city. And he enrolled the apprentice stonemasons, who would at first carry and place the stones, and then in time learn to shape them with greater skill and command a greater wage. Hunt’s student Frank Furness created my favorite image of the Great Hall of the Met: a simple charcoal sketch that shows the space as it was being built, with brawny men lowering the giant limestone rails into place on booms, as the newly formed arches rise up above them. That great museum, in other words, was built by—and for—people like my grandfather. It is a sad sign of our times that the museum just recently published a book titled Making the Met, with reams of information about directors and curators and favored minority groups and famous exhibitions—and not a single word about the builders, the blue-collar workers whose skill made the place such a thing of beauty, and for whom the museum was originally founded. They were elided, forgotten, supplanted by the managerial class and its preoccupations.

We can be sure that Hunt would not have forgotten the men who built the Met. He died in 1895, at the age of sixty-seven. Overwork—he had written on his tombstone Laborare Est Orare, “to work is to pray”—almost certainly contributed to his death. His final years saw him working obsessively on the Biltmore and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago (both with Frederick Law Olmsted), on the American Academy in Rome, and on his master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His death produced a unique tribute, worth considering at length. It came from the workers at the Biltmore and reads as follows:

Whereas, the great Architect of the Universe has in his wisdom removed our fellow laborer, Richard M. Hunt, from this earthly mansion to a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens; and
Whereas, his fame as an artist and his devotion to and his accomplishments in his profession are known to the world, but his generosity, sympathy, and services in behalf of the worthy laboring men of all classes are only known to those whose good fortune it was to be under his immediate supervision;
Therefore we who have worked under him, deeming it fitting that we record our love for and appreciation of him, have
Resolved, that in his death our country has lost its greatest architect, and our skilled workmen, artists and sculptors have lost a kind, considerate and constant friend; for neither his great fame nor his wealth ever caused him to be forgetful, indifferent, or careless of the rights and feelings of his fellowmen and laborers who were aiding in an humbler way in erecting these beautiful buildings, which, only marvellous genius could have imagined and planned;
Resolved, that to him more than any other man of our time all the representative workmen of this country are indebted for the elevation of their trades and arts to the position which they now hold in the ranks of the great army of skilled workmen.
Resolved, that we tender his afflicted family our deepest sympathy and that a copy of these Resolutions be sent to his widow.
Dated at Biltmore, N.C. August 1st, 1895.
B. Worth … for the carpenters
J. Miller … for the stone carvers
J. O’Neill … bricklayers
J. C. Thompson … painters
G. Bartigate … stone cutter
L. Bowen … electricians
S. J. McKeon … plumbers
E. D. Holt … tile layers
R. J. Miller … marble cutters
P. F. Jones … coppersmiths and slaters
S. C. Gladwyn … wood carvers
J. Mortimer … plasterers
P. McNiven … stone setters

We can add to this tribute the name of my grandfather, Frank Costello, signing for the diggers and the pipe fitters.

John Byron Kuhner owns Bookmarx Books in Steubenville, Ohio.

Image by Store Norske Leksikon, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped. 

The post The Males Behind the Met by John Byron Kuhner | Articles appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

A year ago, in the middle of the night, crashes of thunderbolts shook millions of people in the San Francisco Bay Area out of their sleep. They didn’t know history was about to happen.

A storm swept over a region baking under record heat and dryness. Instead of rain, though, the storm sent thousands of lightning strikes, and by the time the sun came up, hundreds of wildfires crackled in the hills. They would combine into four major fires and consume more wildland than any event in state history, destroying over 4,000 structures and killing seven people.

Amid the devastation, one blaze left an extraordinary mark.

The CZU Lightning Complex, as it would come to be known, had immediate consequences, burning down almost 1,500 buildings, forcing the evacuation of 77,000 people and killing a 73-year-old recluse named Tad Jones. One citizen of the forest will feel the effects for ages. The fire delivered a scorching blow to a shaggy and mysterious tree called the coast redwood. The world’s tallest living thing — and one of the biggest — the coast redwood is also spectacularly old, with many specimens born before Jesus Christ.

The CZU fire complex burned more of these trees than have ever been burned, in a fire hotter than ever known among coast redwoods. How this tragedy came to be is a tale of how heat, mismanagement and climate change are transforming the West. On a swiftly changing planet, it raises questions about whether the oldest and toughest things can survive.

This is the story of that fire.

The mountains

Cal Fire’s Dan Bonfante stands at the base of the Mother of the Forest, one of the famous redwoods damaged in the CZU Lightning Complex. | Courtesy of Dan Bonfante

For most of his life, Dan Bonfante has fought fires in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

He started at 17 as a fire department volunteer. Now 37, with black sideburns and a broad mustache, he’s a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire. A heavy-equipment specialist, he runs bulldozers around fire hot spots.

He grew up here, in a fog-drenched town near the coast called Felton, and loves it too much to leave. As a kid, he would play on a half-acre by the creek and at the base of a most unusual backyard tree.

The bark was red. It cloaked the tree in great jagged plates, as if whittled by a cosmic knife, but under his hand it felt soft and a little fuzzy.

The tree was also tremendously thick, several yards in diameter, and ramrod straight, as if someone had placed the column of a European cathedral in a California backyard. It was so tall, the young Bonfante had to crane his neck to even see the branches. He wondered how the firefighters would ever rescue him if he got caught up there. And though he couldn’t yet grasp it, the tree had been there a very long time. Bonfante now estimates that the tree is in late middle age, at least 1,500 years old, meaning it sprouted in this misty patch about the time the Roman Empire fell.

The tree is a coast redwood, and it defines the mountains.

Felton is one of the small towns that lie between the beach town of Santa Cruz, with its hippies and surfers, and the inland empire of Silicon Valley, with its coders and capitalists. Steep and windy roads connect towns like Ben Lomond and Bonny Doon, named by nostalgic Scottish immigrants who came to fell these prize trees before the Civil War. The entire human population, unified by the woods, numbers only a few ten thousand.

The mountains experience a soggier version of Northern California’s Mediterranean climate. The winters are cool and send downpours. The summer days in a redwood grove can be as crisp and blue-skied as anywhere in the Golden State — unless the fog is on the march.

Redwoods peek through the fog. | Courtesy of Emily Burns

The Pacific Ocean, which laps at the foot of the mountains, manufactures heaps of fog. It begins offshore in the deep ocean canyons. The water down there is frigid but, like any beachgoer, is beckoned by the California sun. It wells to the surface, and the wind pushes it landward. They tumble together, the cold water and warmer wind and sun and salt, and by the time the combination reaches the beach, it has clouded into a thick white meringue. The fog blots out the sun, plunging the thermometer and scattering the sunbathers.

The fog continues to climb. It surges into the mountain canyons laden with moisture. The droplets festoon the ferns in the creek beds, cover the knobby roots in moss, make the forest floor glisten where yellow slugs slide. This is cloud forest, dripping and primeval.

A banana slug crawls along the thick forest duff in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. The creature is found only on the damp Pacific coast from Alaska to California. | California State Parks

And through the whiteness looms the trunk of a coast redwood, absurdly red and fat. Some specimens reach over 350 feet tall. It is the second thickest tree, second only to its cousin the giant sequoia, which lives farther inland in the Sierra Nevada. An elder is around 2,500 years old. The coast redwood exists only where misty mountain adjoins deep cold sea, in a thin band from central California to the Oregon border.

Any schoolchild knows that trees drink from their roots. The coast redwood is one of a few that also sip from their tips. Its short and dense needles snare the droplets and drink them. Then, when the sun breaks out, a different job: The thick shanks reach for every photon of light, creating a profound shade on the forest floor.

“You look up and the branches have fingered together,” Bonfante says admiringly, “and you can’t see the sky.”

The thirsty beast has another trick, which scientists think is related to the redwood’s extreme height. It shoves its head into the mist above the lesser trees and gathers droplets like a sponge. Then it deploys them. On a foggy but rainless day, you can walk a dry trail and suddenly find your boots caked in mud.

Look up and it is a coast redwood, creating its own rain.

The storm

Early on the morning of Aug. 16, 2020, a tornadolike downdraft of wind jostled the house and woke Dan Bonfante.

A volatile weather system had arrived under cover of darkness. Far south in Baja California, Tropical Storm Fausto had spun off a plume that now moved over Northern California.

Summers in the Santa Cruz Mountains grow hotter each year, thanks to the worldwide mass burning of fossil fuels that power civilization. The resulting carbon dioxide gets trapped in the atmosphere and heats the Earth’s surface like a greenhouse. When this storm appeared, the heat had been acute for a week. Felton, where Bonfante still lived, reached 98 degrees Fahrenheit that Sunday, and the air was exceptionally dry. Bonfante knew a storm could cool both the forest and the air, reducing the risk of fire. The redwoods reached their needles skyward, waiting.

Instead came lightning.

Sleep evaded Bonfante, who instead watched the sky strobe. When morning broke, he got into his Chevy Silverado pickup and drove to a promontory called Eagle Rock. Climbing to its summit, he saw columns of smoke from five or six small blazes rising into the sky.

Lightning forked over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge on Aug. 16, 2020, as the storm passed over Oakland, Calif., across the bay from the Santa Cruz Mountains. | Noah Berger/AP Photo

The ridges and steep valleys are part of CZU, the code name for Bonfante’s unit of Cal Fire. The unit oversees 400,000 acres of mountainous terrain from Santa Cruz, to the south, and north to the border of San Francisco. Bonfante could see but a patch of it. Reports on his radio indicated that lightning strikes had sparked fires everywhere, a stunning 27 in all. Never before had CZU confronted so many blazes at once.

In a typical season, soggy, foggy CZU might see a couple of little flareups of 10 or 15 acres, usually in September or October when things had dried out a bit. CZU staffers were used to Cal Fire colleagues razzing them.

“We were coined as an asbestos unit,” says Nate Armstrong, CZU’s deputy chief, “because it doesn’t burn.”

Rare though they were, the knee-jerk reaction among Bonfante and his colleagues was to stamp such wildfires out, even if they didn’t immediately threaten people’s homes. That’s true everywhere in the West. A wildfire is dangerous, an unpredictable risk to humans and their property, a threat that only increased as Silicon Valley prospered and pushed into the woodlands.

That constant snuffing changed the forest’s character. Studies of tree rings suggest that prior to the arrival of Europeans, mild fires swept across these slopes as often as every four to six years. The spark might have been lightning, or more likely Native Americans, who set fires to flush out prey or encourage new plants to fruit. A typical forest grove was made up of young, short brush and saplings, punctuated by a few ancient redwood columns whose branches were beyond the reach of fire.

When white people arrived, two things changed: They clear-cut the massive redwoods, which now exist in just 5% of their historical range. And when the trees bounced back, the foresters forbade fire.

Today’s Santa Cruz Mountains look very different. The giants are gone, except for the 10,000 acres where the old growth still stands. The redwoods that replaced them are crowded together — most are stunted and small. “Doghair,” loggers call them. Roots tangle for too little water; branches fight for too little light. Fire doesn’t topple the weak. These redwoods don’t soar because no one tree can win.

A huge, old-growth coast redwood at Big Basin Redwoods State Park in 2012. | California State Parks

While CZU’s fires are rare, they are exceptionally hard to put out. The slopes are crowded with thorns and bushes, and the empty air that once stood between brush and the redwood canopy is filled with middling trees. Firefighters call them “ladder fuels.”

“Dense and difficult to penetrate” is how Cal Fire describes the landscape.

A primary difficulty comes from the ground itself. Many swaths of this redwood forest had never, in the memory of anyone living, experienced a wildfire. That fits with the U.S. Forest Service’s approach to forest management, which since its founding in the early 1900s put a premium on suppression. In recent years, Cal Fire, too, continued to fight all fires even as evidence of their necessity to a healthy landscape piled up. Meanwhile, a pileup of a different sort — fallen trees, branches, needles, cones and leaves — accumulated underfoot, thicker each year, untouched by fire, until the forest floor was as springy as a gymnasium mat.

Last August’s heat wave brought dry air, with just 25% humidity, a third of normal. Moisture fled from redwood tips, from the ladder fuels, and even underfoot, where the rot quietly turned into tinder.

The complex

Bonfante spent Sunday at the wheel of his truck, directing Cal Fire staff to nip fires in the bud.

Over 18 years at Cal Fire, he had steadily risen up the ranks, reaching his current station as battalion chief after the 2020 season, while also volunteering for years with the local Felton department. Bonfante has largely played behind-the-scenes roles, capturing attention once in 2019 when a local website reported on an Instagram post he wrote that called for people in Felton to bypass law enforcement and “get the posse together” to find a homeless man accused of assaulting a girl.

“I wasn’t really thinking clearly when I posted it,” Bonfante says now. “Would I do it again? No.”

That Aug. 16, Bonfante’s focus was on flames that menaced homes. Cal Fire managed evacuations from the mountain communities, while keeping a nervous eye on another threat.

To the north, lightning strikes had started three of the largest fires in the CZU. A few hundred acres each, they formed a rough triangle and crackled on in rugged, ridged country, inaccessible by road and far from any town. It seemed likely they would join forces. When several blazes work the same forest, firefighters call it a complex. Multiplication makes the fight harder and raises the risk they will roll into a conflagration.

Dangerous as the trio was, that part of the CZU Lightning Complex would have to wait. Commanders had a critical manpower shortage.

The lightning siege, as firefighters call it, required action on a massive scale beyond CZU’s borders. To the east, the SCU Lightning Complex raced through 393,000 acres, on its way to the record books as the third largest wildfire in state history. The LNU Lightning Complex, in the wine country north of San Francisco, grew to become the fourth largest. Farther north, the August Complex blackened more than 1 million acres, earning the dubious distinction as the state’s largest ever. (This summer’s Dixie Fire has since crashed the record books, becoming the second largest fire, moving some of these blazes down the list.)

Firefighters strive to protect a home in Napa County, Calif., as the LNU Lightning Complex fires burn on Friday, Aug. 21, 2020. | Noah Berger/AP Photo

In mid-August 2020, all these fires burned at the same time, and each deserved to be an all-hands emergency.

Pleas to Cal Fire for reinforcements to CZU’s force — 200 year-round regulars plus 100 seasonal recruits, two bulldozers and 13 fire engines — mostly went unanswered. CZU would have to make do.

By midday on Tuesday, Aug. 18, an exhausted Bonfante headed to a hotel room that Cal Fire had assigned him in Scotts Valley, a town near Felton. Overnight and the prior day, he had led the skeleton crew that contained the Warrenella Fire, a 300-acre blaze to the south. He had not slept for more than 48 hours.

About the same time, the wind made a subtle change. It shifted from northwest to northeast, and began to strengthen.

Bonfante had just gotten out of the shower, thinking of the pillow, when his cellphone went crazy. He hustled out of the hotel room and saw a massive plume of smoke darkening the sky over an area known as Big Basin.

The park

Big Basin is a last stand, both literally and figuratively, for the really old and big redwoods in the San Francisco Bay Area. It is also the cradle of a movement.

The Gold Rush of 1849, which set California on the path to prosperity, was a disaster for the coast redwood. Strong and straight, redwood timber built San Francisco. Resistant to rot, it was the tie of choice for the railroads. By 1884, the region’s sawmills were producing 34 million board feet of redwood lumber a year, and the trees that had stood for millennia were rapidly disappearing.

They might have disappeared entirely if not for a fire.

In 1899, a photographer, Andrew P. Hill, visited Big Basin to take pictures for a story about a redwood fire extinguished with wine from a local vineyard. As he attempted to photograph one of the gargantuan trees, the grove’s owner waved Hill off, saying he intended to convert the forest into railroad ties. The owner demanded the photographer’s negatives.

Hill, disturbed by the experience and the menace to the trees, returned home to San Jose. There he started a group called the Sempervirens Club, dedicated to preserving the remaining redwoods. The club made a startling proposal to the state Legislature: How about setting Big Basin aside as a park?

Members of the Sempervirens Club posed for a photograph during an exploratory trip to Big Basin in 1900. Two years later, the California Legislature made the area into the first state park. | Santa Cruz Public Libraries

It was a cutting-edge idea. In 1902, the California Legislature voted to make Big Basin the state’s first park. Just one year later, President Theodore Roosevelt and naturalist John Muir would camp at Yosemite Valley and lay the foundation for the National Park System. Meanwhile, Big Basin’s original 3,900 acres would grow over time to more than 18,000 acres.

In modern days — until the fire, at least — Big Basin and its rotund red citizens had rewarded Silicon Valley’s laptop wranglers with a singular sort of experience.

They took Highway 9, and beyond Saratoga the road got curvy. The strip malls and subdivisions gave way to pines and oaks. Shade dappled the roadway. Google said to turn right onto State Route 236.

The road got narrower, and curvier, and shadier. Cell signals faded away. Each turn became a hairpin, and the tree shade created a midday twilight. Suddenly, visitors found themselves at the headquarters of Big Basin Redwoods State Park.

The main attraction was the Redwood Loop, a stroll among some of the park’s most massive trees, with names like the Animal Tree, for the forms one could see in the burls, or the Mother of the Forest, which was the park’s tallest tree until a storm lopped off its top a few years ago. But the first things to command a visitor’s attention could be seen from the parking lot. One was the headquarters building, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Supported by stout redwood beams, with a redwood shake roof and a stone chimney, it satisfied the archetype of a cabin in the woods. Generations of visitors walked up its steps since it was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1936.

And then there’s the Auto Tree.

Two facts dominate the mind about the Auto Tree: It is unbelievably big, and somehow incomplete. A huge triangle of its trunk is missing. The gap is so big that people used to back their cars into it.

The Auto Tree in Big Basin Redwoods State Park is one of the first marvels that visitors see. | Big Basin Redwoods State Park/Facebook

The void within the tree is black and charred because the Auto Tree survived something dreadful. A fire, or a succession of fires, at some point in the unwritten past ate through the tree’s foot-thick bark, destroyed part of its foundation and consumed its heartwood.

Yet the tree kept growing.

The ridges

The river bottoms and slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains are wet and verdant, but not the ridges.

Rising to altitudes of 2,500 feet, they often stand above the fog. Few redwoods here; instead drier species thrive, like manzanita and knobcone pine, full of resin. On Tuesday, Aug. 18, when the wind shifted and strengthened, the three northern CZU fires merged into one, just as Cal Fire feared. And then, with roaring confidence, the blaze mounted the ridgelines.

Aided by the wind, the fire began an express commute from tree to tree. The combustion of one ignited the next. Embers the size of baseballs broadcast on the wind, starting other spot fires. At Eagle Rock, where Bonfante stood two days earlier, flames leaped 300 feet in the air. A wildfire typically climbs uphill, following the rising air. This fire, however, started chewing its way downhill and into the shady hollows.

On this downward creep, CZU transitioned into something new to history.

In recent decades, as the Bay Area became hotter and drier, a few severe blazes in the Santa Cruz Mountains managed to leap into the redwoods’ lofty crowns. Crown fires are the most intense and fast-moving kinds of fires. But in redwoods, they never spread quickly, or very widely; at least in recent memory, the foggy dampness always broke the fever.

The CZU Lightning Complex Fire grew rapidly from a trio of remote blazes into a conflagration that consumed almost all of Big Basin and much of the Santa Cruz Mountains. | Claudine Hellmuth/E&E News (graphic); Datawrapper (basemap); wildfire.gov (data)

But last August, the fever was high. As the CZU Lightning Complex dropped from the ridges, it climbed the ladder of lesser trees and into the crowns of the giants.

The fireball rolled from one treetop, to the next, to the next. The CZU Lightning Complex became something thought impossible in coast redwoods: a running crown fire. From less than 6,000 acres on Monday, the fire mushroomed to more than 43,000 acres. The biggest inferno ever recorded in the world’s tallest trees raced toward the center of Big Basin on the speed of the wind.

From the other direction drove Dan Bonfante.

The inferno

To Bonfante, the outing was just another assignment. He had worked the Santa Cruz Mountains longer than just about anyone, and his expertise was needed. Cal Fire, realizing the gravity of what was transpiring at CZU, had assembled an elite crew led by outside experts to manage the response. Could Bonfante show them around Big Basin headquarters?

Of course he would. About an hour after sunset on Aug. 18, he headed up Highway 236. The plan was to meet at the visitor center with a strike team leader and three engine crews cutting brush and spraying foam on the park’s structures, including the historic headquarters building.

Then danger closed in, when it was too late for Bonfante to turn back.

His truck’s headlights suddenly met a wall of smoke. He couldn’t decipher the road ahead by more than a few feet. The heat grew intense; the air in the cabin of his truck rose to 120 degrees. He smelled burning plastic, the synthetic parts of his engine turning to vapor. He turned the air conditioner on full blast, which filled the cabin with smoke.

Eyes burning, Bonfante navigated the hairpin turns by sound. If the tires were quiet, he was on road; if he heard crunching, he had veered off. “I honestly didn’t think I would make it out,” he says. “My last rites kind of thing.” Flaming trees and branches littered the road. He four-wheeled over them. The roadside was full of not just flames, but something he had never witnessed at a wildfire: cascades of white sparks.

“It looked like legit sparklers,” he says, “like at a wedding.”

After perhaps a mile and a half of this, he burst through. The approach to headquarters was clear. He made it to the parking lot, which was the safest place for miles. Bonfante staggered out of the cab, threw up, and joined the dozen men on the scene.

Never one to stay in one place for long, though, Bonfante got back in his truck. He wanted to head north, scout how things looked from that direction.

He had driven only a short distance before figures appeared in his headlights. Two people, a man and a woman, and three dogs on leashes. They had walked 4 miles from Last Chance, a community burning to the ground. Bonfante loaded them all into his truck and drove back to the headquarters, where the crew gave them water and Gatorade and turned their attention back to saving the buildings.

And then the fire arrived.

“Suddenly the wind picked up, not sure where from,” Bonfante says. “Every tree that was around us started to torch off.”

It seemed to encroach from all sides, from all levels. The ground fire slowly ate the duff, hypnotically, like lava. Bonfante was used to that. More worrisome were the fully engulfed 250-foot-tall monster trees around them.

Bonfante and the woman hunkered in the cab of his truck, peering out the windshield at the hellscape. “You hear a ting ting ting ting, and it’s firebrands and branches hitting us,” Bonfante recalls. They were being smoked and roasted, but the air conditioning made it cooler than outside. They watched as flames slowly ate the roof of the headquarters building. Inside her shirt, the woman cuddled a white parrot. It didn’t make a sound, and the dogs in another truck didn’t bark. Explosions rippled from the forest, one after another. Trees collapsing.

A video of the Big Basin Fire in 2020. Click on the picture to watch the video. Produced by Mountain Parks Foundation.

Squeals interrupted the background crackling soundtrack. The noise came from the 250-gallon propane tanks that stood by each of the buildings. They sang to release the built-up pressure caused by the tremendous heat, deferring the moment of explosion.

For an hour or two, the trucks paced, driving slowly back and forth across the lot, like hot potatoes shifting from hand to hand. The fire engines sprayed the edges of the parking lot with water, which created slightly cooler pockets. At 3 a.m., a big tree nearby toppled. This was no longer the safest place. They’d have to make a run for it.

Bonfante and the strike team leader stayed in the parking lot with the civilians while the engines forged a path down 236. The crews set their chain saws against burning logs and pushed them out of the way. A route that usually takes 10 minutes to drive took them an hour and a half. But they made it.

When Bonfante arrived at safety with the woman and her parrot, it was close to sunrise. Bonny Doon, a town he knew well, was on fire. He drove there straight away and spent the next 20 hours leading a strike team. He finally stumbled home by noon on Thursday, to his hometown of Felton, which was under an evacuation order but would remain out of reach of the CZU fire complex. He had been awake since the lightning strikes on Sunday morning.

And he slept.

The aftermath

Days passed before anyone not a firefighter dared to enter the fire zone. But that was as long as Nadia Hamey, a local forester who manages San Vicente Redwoods, a conservation property south of Big Basin, was willing to wait.

Animal bodies littered the roadway.

“Furball, furball, carcass,” she says. “All these critters — bobcats, bunnies, wood rats, squirrels, a coyote, snakes, rubber boas, all these things, it seemed, had run into the road on fire, and laid down and died.”

The forest was unrecognizable. The grottoes, formerly under a canopy of leafy shade, were naked under a smoke-orange sun. The ground was white, covered in a layer of ash. Amid the white, the redwoods had turned black.

The charred canopy of coastal redwoods burned a year ago in the CZU Lightning Complex at Big Basin Redwoods State Park. | Nic Coury/AP Photo

Adjoining San Vicente is Swanton Pacific Ranch, a 3,200-acre demonstration forest. Run by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a state college, it is one of only three centers that study coast redwoods. All of its 40 structures were destroyed, from a historic house dating to the late 1800s to its brand-new conference facility.

The shady groves of redwoods that students had spent years of their lives measuring and observing were transformed.

Many had their bark burned off and the branches amputated. The ground smoked from root fires. The soil was crisscrossed with red veins where embers had baked it to clay. Even the muddy riverbeds — the “dank zone,” as Hamey calls it, where vegetation grows thickest — were blasted with sunlight, stripped to matchsticks and bare dirt. On nearby Swanton Road, on the fire’s western periphery, all that was left of homes were concrete foundations covered in 18 inches of ash.

“The sheer level of heat as it was passing through the stands at incredible speeds was horrific. When you think of redwoods, you think of green, lush, moist. In the course of a day, they had been turned to black, dusty, dry and dangerous,” says Matt Dias, who until last month was the head of the California Board of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Dias studied here on his way to his current position. Shortly after the fire, he and other Cal Poly graduates gathered to tour the damage. Like Dias, they had to take moments to stagger off by themselves and grieve.

“As a forester, you feel lost. As a member of the community, you feel lost,” says Dias, who also spent time in the area as a child. “Economic and ecological impact, social impact. Long-term carbon sequestration. You name it, and it all is a loss.”

By the time CZU was contained in late September, it had engulfed 86,000 acres. Within the burn scar lay 97% of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, and virtually all of its 4,400 acres of old-growth redwoods.

At Big Basin, about 100 structures were destroyed. State Route 236 resounds with the buzz of chain saws, felling damaged trees considered dangerous to the public. In May, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) pledged $186 million to fully rebuild Big Basin, with money cobbled together from federal disaster assistance and the state’s general fund. The park is closed indefinitely. Only the chimney of the headquarters building survived, its hearthstones splintered by the heat.

Big Basin’s historic headquarters building, before and after the CZU Lightning Complex. | California State Parks

The rebound

Four months after the havoc, Hamey walked by the banks of Big Creek in the weak December sun to take stock of what comes next.

The forest floor, formerly a teeming mass of blackberries, roses, azaleas and ferns, was bare dirt. But blushes of green could be seen. Little pompoms of fresh shoots erupted from the bases of the madrones and tan oaks. This is how they regenerate after fire.

The redwoods put on the same kind of show, but bigger. New growth was already muscling straight out of the trunks. Some of the younger ones were clad in little green buds their entire height, like fur, or like a bottlebrush. Redwoods are one of the few trees that do this trick, called epicormic sprouting, and it advantages them in the post-fire race for sunlight.

“They’re weirdly adapted to their environment in ways we don’t totally understand,” Hamey said.

Hamey, wearing a torn red flannel shirt and a pink utility vest, stopped and dug a finger into the charred bark of a young redwood. She wanted a glimpse of the cambium, the sleeve between bark and wood where nutrients and water travel. “I can see the brown in here, and that is healthy cambium,” she said. Amazingly, a redwood can survive with just 10% of its cambium intact.

Nadia Hamey digs into a charred redwood in a search for healthy cambium. | David Ferris/E&E News

The other name of the coast redwood is Sequoia sempervirens. The second word in Latin means “evergreen.” Its tactics are legendary. Knock over a redwood and it is not dead. A circle of new redwoods, called a fairy ring, will grow around its wide base. The tree has cloned itself, and Big Basin is full of redwoods formed in rings, starting life in the ruins of death.

Scientists are only beginning to penetrate the genetic mysteries of the coast redwood. Take its chromosomes. Humans have two sets of chromosomes; some plants have three. Coast redwoods have six. Scientists don’t know why, or what the purpose is of the plant’s colossal genome. It is made up of 27 billion base pairs, nine times that of a human. Only one organism on Earth, an endangered Mexican salamander called the axolotl, has more.

A sprout pushes its way through the bark of a burned redwood. The coast redwood is one of few tree species that regenerate this way. | David Ferris/E&E News

The redwood’s capacity for bouncing back from trauma prompts its human caretakers to ask philosophical questions.

“The whole notion of what death is for a redwood is really tough,” says Joanne Kerbavaz, a senior environmental scientist for California State Parks who works at Big Basin. “What’s an individual, and what is dead?”

The response

One year later, some of the damaged red sentinels of the Santa Cruz Mountains still smolder. The fire was declared extinguished in December, but firefighters keep stumbling across smoking redwoods, as embers glow in their dry hearts.

A normal wet winter would have extinguished these slow burns, but this wasn’t a wet winter. Just 20 inches of rain fell, not the usual 60 or 70. The drought continuing to break records from British Columbia to Arizona includes these mountains.

In January, a hundred acres of fires broke out — previously an unthinkable event — and the normal riot of growth that follows a fire is feeble, with herbs and vines historically dry and paused at kneecap height. Nonetheless, most of the surviving redwoods are still sprouting green.

On one hand, the CZU fire complex wiped decades of forest mismanagement off the ledger by burning up the old fuels. On the other, the blackened branches and trunks of last year’s fire are strewn everywhere, charcoal awaiting a spark.

The whole trauma — an epic fire followed by an epic drought — seems to be etching a new outlook into the minds of the forest keepers.

“The main shift that has happened is that we have to change to a living-with-fire mentality,” says Justin Garland, the redwoods program director at the Peninsula Open Space Trust, a nonprofit that acquires land for conservation.

Justin Garland of the Peninsula Open Space Trust examines the stump of an old-growth redwood cut down long ago, and the smaller redwoods that now populate the area. | David Ferris/E&E News

Garland has come to a now common, but still stunning, conclusion: The wet, cool, asbestoslike climate the Santa Cruz Mountains inherited from history is gone.

“There’s going to be fire,” he says. “Every October, there’s going to be red flag warnings from here on out.”

The new reality is prompting a hive of new activity at Swanton Pacific Ranch that will resonate all over California and the West.

In this burnt-out palette, “the research opportunities are abundant,” says Dias of the state forestry board. Researchers from two universities, alongside the U.S. Geological Survey, are studying the soil.

The work is also driven by worry, particularly about catastrophic mud flows. Over the winter, Cal Fire prepared to evacuate whole communities if a big rainstorm caused steep, rootless slopes to give way. The dry winter prevented — or at least delayed — that kind of tragedy. But Swanton is becoming a center for understanding how stable the ground remains after fire sweeps through.

Fog drifts over the barren landscape of Big Basin after the CZU fire. | Nic Coury/AP Photo

Meanwhile, a revolution is underway at agencies like the Forest Service and Cal Fire. Agencies founded on a credo of suppressing fire are coming to the conclusion that the only way to save the forest is to regularly burn it.

But prescribed burns, as they’re known, are tricky. Firefighters wait for a window in the cool season when the wind is light and predictable and the humidity is low. They walk slowly through the woods, dribbling flames from a drip torch, and stand ready to direct the flames. The idea is to use modest fires to clear the understory and avoid infernos. Sensible as it sounds, a prescribed burn makes locals anxious, and politicians too.

But that is changing. After last year’s fire season consumed more than 4 million acres in California, the state and the Forest Service agreed to control fuels, including prescribed burns, on 1 million acres a year. At the federal level, the “Energy Infrastructure Act,” a part of the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure package, includes $500 million over four years to fund prescribed burns.

“The conversation has shifted,” says Dias, the former state forestry official. “I think prescribed fire will become a much more consistent and accepted practice across the state.”

Cal Fire, which oversees prescribed burns on the lands it is responsible for, chose Swanton Pacific Ranch as the center for a new $4 million, four-year project to train firefighters across the state in techniques to subdue forest fuels. Another grant, worth $4.7 million, will plant 55,000 trees at Swanton and another nearby forest, and bring in members of a local Native American tribe, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, to collaborate on fire management.

It is possible that from the ashes of the 2020 California fire season, a new set of practices will emerge, combining ancient knowledge with the latest scientific research, and the forests will eventually enter a new state of balance. It is also possible that no amount of money can fix a century of mismanagement across millions of acres — or that the new climate is so dry that there is no window to safely conduct those burns. In fact, new Forest Service Chief Randy Moore recently restricted burns for the time being in national forests, partially citing the weather conditions.

The question remains: In a climate-changed world where each year gets hotter and hotter, can the coast redwood survive?

“I really struggle with climate change and how it’s going to impact the redwoods. It’s an existential question,” Garland says. “Mother Nature is resilient. It will probably, eventually bounce back, but if we keep — boom boom boom boom! — hitting it with these fires, we lose it. We lose the forest.”

It is too early to tell whether any individual redwood damaged by CZU will pull through. The famous denizens of Big Basin, like the Animal, Auto and Mother trees, have serious damage but also green sprouts. The most likely scenario in a warming world, ecologists say, is the redwoods eventually retreat. They could flee to the river bottoms, or endure on California’s wet and lightly populated north coast while petering out in the south.

The future

Joanne Kerbavaz stands at the base of one of the giant trees on the Redwood Loop in Big Basin Redwoods State Park after the CZU fire. | David Ferris/E&E News

One day in December, Kerbavaz, the Big Basin scientist, stood at the Redwood Loop. Before the fire, it was a broad path where tourists shuffled, necks craned back and mouths agape, under green shadow, taking in the spectacle of the world’s tallest and most stately trees. On this day, it was a wreck — the ground a chaos of fallen branches, the foliage burnt orange as autumn, the ruddy bark charred black, the landscape splashed with sun because the canopy that the redwoods rely on for water and photosynthesis is gone.

But Kerbavaz, a short, brown-haired woman in the khaki shirt and green slacks of a park ranger, seemed unfazed.

“A perturbation like this is not out of the range of the ordinary,” Kerbavaz insisted. “It’s going to take a while for these to come back, but they will come back.”

The evidence is written in the charred center of the Auto Tree and others among the ancients that bear black scars. Severe fire has been here before, and more than once. Across the CZU burn zone, the eye picks out trees that are still green, that somehow evaded the fire’s wrath and stand as if it never happened.

“An ancestor of the redwood was widespread 200 million years ago. A closer ancestor was widespread in the West 50 million years ago. Fifty thousand years ago, coast redwoods were living in Los Angeles and were found in the La Brea tar pits,” Kerbavaz continued. “They are survivors. They were here before the Mediterranean climate got here. They got to California before California had vaguely the climate it has now.”

Kerbavaz’s perspective is echoed by other redwood experts. They know the severity of the CZU fire complex and the inevitable hotter summers to come. Yet they believe the coast redwood is just too tough, too resourceful, to go extinct. The tree’s vast timescale seems to imbue its caretakers with patience. Knowing they are but rabbits, entrusted with the care of a tortoise, seems to fend off doomsday thinking.

Less certain is what happens to the rabbits.

As the forest burns every year, the humans who live near the redwoods will experience heat waves, and evacuations, and blackouts, and droughts, and mudslides, and smoke hanging in the air. Creatures that don’t measure their lives in millennia could find their life spans nastier and shorter.

The shaggy, patient trees that form an unbroken living line from today’s Silicon Valley to the times of the Bible are in ruins. The sprouts bursting from their trunks suggest that the shaded cathedrals could return, though the healing may take so long that no one now alive will see them. Today’s adults will take their children to Big Basin, and to landscapes across the West where once-verdant forests have been withered by fire. They will point and talk, not of the desolation that is, but of the Eden that used to be — and could be again, one distant day.

“In my lifetime, yeah, it’s not going to look like it used to look,” said Kerbavaz with a shrug. “But in the next lifetime, probably.”

The post When the hardest bushes met the most well liked hearth appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

A construction worker walks on what will be the top of a new home being built in Brick, N.J. on July 10, 2023. Government pushes to move buildings and vehicles away from burning fossil fuels to help address climate change are generating pushback in New Jersey and around the nation, with opponents worried about the cost of switching. (AP Photo/Wayne Parry)

BRICK, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey is pushing an ambitious agenda to move its more than 9 million residents away from natural gas and gasoline to heat their homes and power their cars, in favor of electricity to do the job of both.

But like many other places in the country, the moves, designed to lessen the harmful impact of burning fossil fuels on the planet’s climate, are garnering significant opposition from foes who warn that the government is coming to take away your stove and your car.

New Jersey utility regulators on Wednesday approved a series of “decarbonization” measures designed to incentivize buildings to switch from natural gas heat to electric. Participation in the programs is strictly voluntary, according to the chairman of the state Board of Public Utilities, who lashed out against “misinformation and lies” being circulated by opponents.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy has said he wants only “zero-emissions” vehicles to be available in the state by 2035.

Taken together, they represent aggressive steps to move away from fossil fuel use.

“We build upon our nation-leading record of bold climate action while delivering on our promise to utilize every tool at our disposal to combat the intensifying climate crisis,” Murphy said earlier this month in announcing the requirement that manufacturers ramp up their production of electric vehicles, reaching 100% by 2035.

“No one is coming for anyone’s gas stove,” the governor said. “No one is walking into anyone’s kitchen. No one is going to be forced to do anything, in any way.”

But to opponents, the moves represent serious and costly government overreach, which will inevitably need to be enforced by bans.

“New Jerseyans are learning that the ultimate goal of ‘building decarbonization’ and Gov. Murphy’s extreme green energy plan is the elimination of affordable natural gas and the extremely costly replacement of gas stoves, furnaces, and hot water heaters,” said Republican state Sen. Anthony Bucco. “They’re realizing there’s no way to fully electrify the entire state without bans, mandates, expensive conversions, and higher energy bills.”

The programs approved Wednesday by the Board of Public Utilities include goals and targets for buildings to install heat pumps instead of natural gas cooling and heating equipment.

These devices move heat between the air inside a home and the air outside a home, while ground source heat pumps transfer heat between the air inside a home and the ground outside a home. Low-income households would qualify for financial assistance to purchase and install them.

“Without a doubt, this will kick-start to the next generation of energy efficiency in New Jersey,” said the board’s chairman, Joseph Fiordaliso. “We are encouraging folks to move to energy efficiency. Notice I said ‘encouraging.’ We are not requiring. We are not mandating anyone to give up their gas stove. I cannot emphasize more that we are not mandating anything. So, enough of the misinformation out there.”

Decarbonization of buildings is a critical component in New Jersey’s energy master plan and is the focus of an executive order by the governor to install zero-carbon-emission space heating and cooling systems in 400,000 homes and 20,000 commercial properties, and make 10% of all low-to-moderate income properties electrification-ready by 2030.

It’s already happening in places like Berkeley, California, which in 2019 voted to ban natural gas connections in all new construction. San Francisco and New York City soon followed.

But other places, particularly those with Republican-led governments, are resisting. As of June, 24 states have adopted laws prohibiting natural gas bans. They call the laws “pre-emption” measures.

New Jersey’s business community is concerned with the cost of Murphy’s proposals, which some opponents have put at more than $1 trillion.

“While we should all work to reduce carbon emissions, the ban of gas-powered cars in such an expedited time frame does not take costs or feasibility into account, and it is likely to result in a major increase in New Jersey residents who actually won’t be able to afford to drive,” said Ray Cantor, an official with the New Jersey Business And Industry Association.

“The governor’s plan will make new cars virtually unaffordable for working and middle-class consumers and will severely limit vehicle consumer choice,” added Jim Appleton, president of the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers.

But the state’s environmental community strongly supports the switches.

“Building electrification is environmental protection from the inside out,” said Anjuli Ramos-Busot, state director of the Sierra Club. “Modern electric technologies are crucial to making our communities more resilient to extreme weather and are far more efficient than fossil-fuel alternatives. Our clean energy transition not only happens out there on our grids, but also right here in our homes and shared spaces so that we can all breathe easier while taking action to reduce harmful climate pollutants.”

___

Follow Wayne Parry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

The post Clear power push in New Jersey, elsewhere met with warnings the federal government is coming on your range appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

BRICK, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey is pushing an ambitious agenda to move its more than 9 million residents away from natural gas and gasoline to heat their homes and power their cars, in favor of electricity to do the job of both.

But like many other places in the country, the moves, designed to lessen the harmful impact of burning fossil fuels on the planet’s climate, are garnering significant opposition from foes who warn that the government is coming to take away your stove and your car.

New Jersey utility regulators are to vote Wednesday on a series of “decarbonization” measures designed to incentivize buildings to switch from natural gas heat to electric.

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy has said he wants only “zero-emissions” vehicles to be available in the state by 2035.

Taken together, they represent aggressive steps to move away from fossil fuel use.

“We build upon our nation-leading record of bold climate action while delivering on our promise to utilize every tool at our disposal to combat the intensifying climate crisis,” Murphy said earlier this month in announcing the requirement that manufacturers ramp up their production of electric vehicles, reaching 100% by 2035.

“No one is coming for anyone’s gas stove,” the governor said. “No one is walking into anyone’s kitchen. No one is going to be forced to do anything, in any way.”

But to opponents, the moves represent serious and costly government overreach, which will inevitably need to be enforced by bans.

“New Jerseyans are learning that the ultimate goal of ‘building decarbonization’ and Gov. Murphy’s extreme green energy plan is the elimination of affordable natural gas and the extremely costly replacement of gas stoves, furnaces, and hot water heaters,” said Republican state Sen. Anthony Bucco. “They’re realizing there’s no way to fully electrify the entire state without bans, mandates, expensive conversions, and higher energy bills.”

While Murphy said the electric vehicle rules do not impose any obligations onto consumers or car dealerships, Brad Schnure, a spokesman for Senate Republicans, said there is no way New Jersey can reach the governor’s stated climate goals without mandates.

A spokesman for the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities said the agency will not comment until after it votes on proposed decarbonization measures on Wednesday. Those steps include goals and targets for buildings to install heat pumps instead of natural gas cooling and heating equipment.

These devices move heat between the air inside a home and the air outside a home, while ground source heat pumps transfer heat between the air inside a home and the ground outside a home. Low-income households would qualify for financial assistance to purchase and install them.

Decarbonization of buildings is a critical component in New Jersey’s energy master plan and is the focus of an executive order by the governor to install zero-carbon-emission space heating and cooling systems in 400,000 homes and 20,000 commercial properties, and make 10% of all low-to-moderate income properties electrification-ready by 2030.

It’s already happening in places like Berkeley, California, which in 2019 voted to ban natural gas connections in all new construction. San Francisco and New York City soon followed.

But other places, particularly those with Republican-led governments, are resisting. As of June, 24 states have adopted laws prohibiting natural gas bans. They call the laws “pre-emption” measures.

New Jersey’s business community is concerned with the cost of Murphy’s proposals, which some opponents have put at more than $1 trillion.

“While we should all work to reduce carbon emissions, the ban of gas-powered cars in such an expedited time frame does not take costs or feasibility into account, and it is likely to result in a major increase in New Jersey residents who actually won’t be able to afford to drive,” said Ray Cantor, an official with the New Jersey Business And Industry Association.

“The governor’s plan will make new cars virtually unaffordable for working and middle-class consumers and will severely limit vehicle consumer choice,” added Jim Appleton, president of the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers.

But the state’s environmental community strongly supports the switches.

“Building electrification is environmental protection from the inside out,” said Anjuli Ramos-Busot, state director of the Sierra Club. “Modern electric technologies are crucial to making our communities more resilient to extreme weather and are far more efficient than fossil-fuel alternatives. Our clean energy transition not only happens out there on our grids, but also right here in our homes and shared spaces so that we can all breathe easier while taking action to reduce harmful climate pollutants.”

Doug O’Malley, director of Environment New Jersey, called the BPU proposals “a necessary step toward reducing emissions from our buildings, the second-highest polluting sector in the state, while delivering clean air and healthier homes.”

___

Follow Wayne Parry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

Follow @ktar923

The post Clear vitality push in New Jersey, elsewhere met with warnings the federal government is coming in your range appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports

Carlo Correa became a New York Met overnight…literally. We all know the story by now, but when something this big happens, you can’t help but talk about it for days, right? Well, we’re here at Metsmerized. We’re still So excited about this signing and we wanted to share all of our excitement about this addition with all of you.

John Sheridan

As Mets fans, we knew we were owed all the years we endured with the Wilpons, but this far exceeded our wildest dreams. It’s as if Steve Cohen thinks Mets fans deserve better, and he knows it as well as anyone because he is one. More than that, it shatters every untruth we’ve ever been told about the economics of baseball.

Cohen didn’t get where he was by frivolously wasting money and/or on vanity projects. He will scale these heights because he knows it’s a financially sound and wise decision in the long run. No, not every team might spend that much, but it’s far more than you think, with myriad sources of income both in this game and in tangentially related trades and profits that come with owning and running a team.

Cohen didn’t just get Correa to win as part of this spending spree. He also did it because he and almost every major league team can do it. He’s pretty much the only one who ignores the unnecessary obstacles to doing what needed to be done.

Rich Sparago

Correa’s acquisition is truly a Christmas present for Mets fans. Correa was to be introduced as the San Francisco Giant, and hours later, in the middle of the night, he was a Met in a fit of holiday magic. Baseball Santa had snuck down the chimney in his sleep, leaving us a big surprise. No, not a bike, but a third baseman who will lock the position for more than a decade.

Cohen was right when he said the Mets needed another play. They had to add more offense to avoid a brownout like in the Wild Card series. Not only did they get this racquet, they got an All Star that’s still in his prime. The cost was high, but Cohen didn’t blink and made good on his promise to do whatever it takes to win. Yes, the Mets payroll went from insane to absurd. That would only matter if Cohen let it. He’s more concerned about delivering a championship than staying under a tax threshold, and to us Mets fans, that might be the greatest gift of all.

Michael Garaffa

It still hasn’t really struck me that Carlos Correa is a New York Met. A little over a year ago I made a list of my favorite non-Mets players by position, and Carlos Correa was my shortstop.

I’ve loved watching him play since he rose to stardom with the Astros. I love the passion he plays with and the fire he plays with. I think New York is the perfect place for such a fiery player. He longs for the big moment and welcomes it like the winner that he is. I can’t wait to see him play every single game in front of 45,000 screaming fans.

Andrew Steele-Davis

Carlos Correa is a statement signing in every sense of the word. This addition, more than any other this winter, underscores that owner Steve Cohen means business and won’t stop until the Mets are a consistent winner. Correa was the ultimate fantasy option, and he could be the piece to propel this team over the top. The shortstop, now third baseman, will give this lineup the big hitter they desperately need, he’ll provide excellent defense and the infield is looking scary. Also, an underestimated factor of Correa’s signing is the lineup flexibility it offers the manager Buck Showalternot to mention the depth this team now has with the likes of Edward Escobar, Luis Guillome and interested parties like Francisco Alvarez, mark winch And Brett Baty. The Mets are a much better team with Carlos Correa and that lineup is strong and versatile now. I’m looking forward to seeing Correa hit a walk-off home run at Yankee Stadium in the Subway Series.

Jay Biggerstaff-USA TODAY Sports

Dan Chinon

Everything about Correa’s signing was just incredible. I was awake when Jon Heyman tweeted it, and I was more confused than anything as he had the full details of a deal with the Mets before we even knew Scott Boras was talking to other teams about Correa again. I had to quadruple verify that it was the real Jon Heyman account. When it finally became clear that this was really happening, I was in disbelief.

Now the Mets have made a team that looked like a force on paper significantly better. The Mets get a great defensive shortstop to slip into third place for their other great defensive shortstop. His approach to the plate aligns perfectly with what the Mets are doing so well, and he can add 20-25 home runs while maintaining his high OBP and low K-Rate. And the best thing about Correa is that he proved he can go one better in October.

The Astros have been the paragon of consistency for the past half decade, and the Mets’ offensive approach is almost identical to Houston’s. The Mets’ offense was very good with this approach last year, but lacked the home run power that the Astros have. With Correa a key part of much of Houston’s success in those years, the Mets could see an Astros-like run of success in the years to come.

Matt Mancuso

Carlos Correa was the dream I never thought possible. The final stretch to the best infield in the major leagues. A capstone to an $800 million free agent bounty.

This move completely turned every fan’s idea of ​​a successful winter, especially Mets fans, on its head. It’s not what the Mets can buy anymore; The only question that remains is what can’t they?

Chris Bello

Mets fans have long been accustomed to missing well-known free agents. What Steve Cohen has done over the past two offseasons, particularly with Carlos Correa, has been nothing short of amazing. For me, Correa was the final piece that put the Mets above the Phillies and the Braves. He’ll slot into the middle of the lineup, outfitting the Met with a right-handed secondary power bat.

Correa also brings postseason experience to the Mets. He’s been to three World Series in his career, winning in 2017 and has a career .849 OPS in the postseason. While his stellar numbers speak for themselves, Correa has also solved an internal problem for the Mets. The team has since had a revolving door of third basemen David Wrightand none of them have recorded an OPS+ above 111. In Correa, the Mets will have another superstar to hold the position for more than a decade.

However, signing Correa will have consequences. Several executives have anonymously reported that MLB owners are baffled by Cohen’s spending. With a new CBA due in 2027, the future of spending in MLB could look drastically different.

The post MMO Roundtable: Carlos Correa Is A New York Met! appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / June 8, 2022 / Oncology Pharma Inc. (OTC PINK:ONPH) – Oncology Pharma, Inc. (“The Company”) is pleased that the initial feasibility stage is complete and results have met the threshold to move forward.

The formulation under development consisted of the active pharmaceutical ingredient (dactinomycin) encapsulated in a saturated lipid and combined with various emulsifiers, surfactants, and stabilizers. The specific identity and ratios of these ingredients, along with the processing methods and processing parameters utilized, lead to formulations with very different characteristics. Various qualitative assessments (described in the previous section) were performed on the various iterations of the formulations and included:

• Test for drug incorporation
• Test for release over time

The most promising formulation candidates (ie, those which demonstrated acceptable feasibility using qualitative assessments) were forwarded to an analytical laboratory for initial characterization, which included:

• Test for physical properties
• Tests for formulation drug concentration

During the feasibility stage of this project, the company sought to acquire research and development equipment, establish an early-phase formulation laboratory, verify the capability of developing lipid nanoemulsions, and identify some promising formulations for further development. All goals were successfully accomplished. The data provided a high-level overview of the various formulations that were created and evaluated during this feasibility stage.

Essentially, all of the specific aims under the scope of this project were met. The capability to formulate nanoemulsions that incorporate the active pharmaceutical ingredient, dactinomycin, was demonstrated. Specifically, the Company identified two formulations feasible for further development based on the following:

• The nanoparticle size was approximately 200 nm, which would improve drug delivery at the tumor site.
• The nanoparticles did not aggregate during storage at 40 C, which enables commercial viability.
• Dactinomycin incorporation in the nanoparticles was approximately 100%
• Drug release-over-time study showed about 50% of the drug is retained at 3 hrs.
• There is 1 mg dactinomycin in 4 ml of nanoemulsion, which is within the range of standard dose administration.

The capability to be able to innovate and make progress in this early stage demonstrates the company’s ability to identify developmental goals and overcome formulation challenges to produce a drug formulation with suitable characteristics for further, formal nonclinical development. These characteristics include the ability for the nanoemulsion to incorporate the majority of available drug into the lipid nanoparticles, a demonstrated release-over-time profile, and stability during storage. Additionally, test methods were established at independent contract laboratories to support basic formulation characterization and accurately detecting the drug concentration in control and test formulations in support of future nonclinical studies.

Oncology Pharma is committed to finding the path to further development of our licensed technologies and developing the financial model to see this through to the next phases. The Company is reviewing feasibility of some initial applications to the FDA that could enhance the development process.

ABOUT ONCOLOGY PHARMA, INC.

ONCOLOGY PHARMA, INC. (OTCPK:ONPH) (the “Company”) is currently engaging in research and development of therapeutics for oncology and prides itself for having a world-class Advisory Board that keeps the Company in the forefront of developing technologies in cancer research, biotechnology, and healthcare.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENTS

Certain of the matters discussed in this announcement contain forward-looking statements that involve material risks to and uncertainties in the Company’s business that may cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated by the statements made in. Such risks and uncertainties include risks related to licensing arrangements and joint ventures, including the need to negotiate the definitive agreements for the relationships; possible failure to realize anticipated benefits of business relationships; and, costs of providing funding to these business relationships. Other risks and uncertainties relating to the Company include, among other things, current negative operating cash flows and a need for additional funding to finance our operating plan; the terms of any further financing, which may be highly dilutive and may include onerous terms; unexpected costs and operating deficits, and lower than expected sales and revenues; uncertain willingness and ability of customers to adopt new technologies and other factors that may affect further market acceptance; adverse economic conditions; adverse results of any legal proceedings; the volatility of our operating results and financial condition; inability to attract or retain qualified senior management personnel, including sales and marketing personnel; our ability to establish and maintain the proprietary nature of our technology through the patent process, as well as our ability to possibly license from others patents and patent applications necessary to develop products; the Company’s ability to implement its long range business plan for various applications of its technology; the Company’s ability to enter into agreements with any necessary marketing and/or distribution partners and with any strategic or joint venture partners; the impact of competition; the obtaining and maintenance of any necessary regulatory clearances applicable to applications of the company’s technology; management of growth; and, other risks and uncertainties. This is not a solicitation to buy or sell securities and does not purport to be an analysis of the company’s financial position.

CONTACTS:

For additional information, please contact the Oncology Pharma at:

One Sansome Street, Suite 3500
San Francisco, CA 94104
Phone: 415-869-1038
Fax: 415-946-8801
website: www.oncology-pharma.com
email: info@oncology-pharma.com

SOURCE: Oncology Pharma Inc.

View source version on accesswire.com:
https://www.accesswire.com/704272/Oncology-Pharma-Announces-Initial-Feasibility-Study-of-the-Nanoemulsion-Drug-Delivery-System-is-Complete-and-Results-Have-Met-the- Threshold for Moving Forward To the Next Steps of Development

The post Oncology Pharma Pronounces: Preliminary Feasibility Research of the Nanoemulsion Drug Supply System is Full and Outcomes Have Met the Threshold for Shifting Ahead To the Subsequent Steps of Improvement appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

Where should those whose only home are on wheels be accommodated? There are growing concerns among some residents of the Bayview-Candlestick Point neighborhood.

Local residents said their community has been overrun with recreational vehicles and people who live in cars – and now the city wants to make them permanent.

A number of RVs and cars used as homes can be seen throughout the Hunters Point Expressway.

“These unhappy brothers and sisters currently facing economic disaster is a problem for the city and county of San Francisco,” said Anthony Alan Simon, a San Francisco resident. “It’s not a Bayview problem.”

During the pandemic, people lost their jobs and the number of uninhabited populations skyrocketed. But neighbors said the problems increase as more RVs move in.

A local resident reports a pile of medical waste and needles that he has to walk through in the neighborhood.

Local residents said there were real concerns about conditions with generators running all night, propane tanks, landfills and trash. Now, neighbors are concerned about a proposal for a vehicle triage center or secure parking lot with 150 spaces at Candlestick Point State Recreation Area in a challenging community.

“Until we have rebuilt Candlestick and the issues listed above are not resolved, we will not be able to organize or organize a vehicle triage center in the Bayview ward,” said Cynthia Bell of San Francisco.

San Francisco Board of Supervisors President Shamman Walton, who represents District 10, said the proposal addresses the reality of the situation with so many people living in vehicles.

“We’re not going to move people in the middle of a pandemic and send them back onto the streets. What we’re suggesting is a vehicle triage site, ”said Walton.

Walton added that the site would have restrooms and plumbing, 24/7 security, and janitorial services. The proposed triage site would also work with organizations that connect people to homes, according to Walton.

The goal? “Do what we can to get people back on track where they don’t have to live in vehicles,” said Walton.

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