Broken Coast Development

I live in California. I grew up near the Pacific coast, in a town a bit inland. We got daily fog rolling in that chilled our evenings drastically, cutting visibility to a hundred feet. There are MANY car crashes due to fog. People who refused to adapt to fog, died. This is a big part of why I'm so grim. The coastline north of San Francisco Bay, and south of it too, is smashed by waves, and crushed by earthquakes. This makes the ground brittle and erodes away, leaving unstable cliffs that suddenly drop in storms or heavy rains. Building a home there is a big risk. Cliffs fall into the sea. Sea spray ruins windows and water rises upwards into the windward side of homes. The trees slant sideways because the winds strip branches of weak twigs. It is a harsh environment. A few miles inland, it is massively green, lush jungle of giant redwood trees, laurels, oaks, and deep canyons with winding streams. Some farms struggle in the few flat places, but you find more dairies if there's pasture. Old rotting barns with rusting corrugated iron roofs, hand painted horse back riding rental signs, fruit stands, and souvenirs. Highly photogenic.

 

It is a wonderful place to explore via car (girl + Miata!) or motorcycle (girl on pillion), but the distances are a little much for a bicyclist. Some cyclists do it anyway, either hardcore or overnight touring. This was more common when the state still ran cheap campgrounds with an onsite manager willing and able to call the deputies to arrest rowdy fratboy thugs. Things really took a turn for the worst when campgrounds lost their managers. They turned into drunk parking areas for the disenfranchised 80's punks. Old War Veterans were great campground managers. Friendly but firm. I miss those guys.

 

On the California coastline, there's nowhere to build a private dock because there are no barrier islands to absorb the incoming Pacific breakers, commonly 6 feet high and perfectly capable of ripping its anchor loose and bashing a boat to pieces on the many rocks lining the shore. Owning a boat for pleasure use means living in the few harbors: Bodega Bay, Dillon Beach Marina, Noyo Harbor, Eureka Harbor, and Crescent City (famous for tsunami strikes).

 

That's all there is north of the SF Bay. The rest is narrow beaches, a few coves used by smugglers during Prohibition, and the Russian River which half the time is full of sand. So living on this coast is harsh, romantic, beautiful, and no place to make a living. It is too cold and windy to grow many crops thanks to the nearly constant fog and strong north wind. Most people living at the harbor towns ran serious bad-weather fishing boats. The fish are good there, or were. Canneries in Monterey and Eureka both shut down after the numbers of fish dropped thanks to taking too many. Those will come back, given a chance. An upside of Peak Oil is the cost of diesel fuel makes aggressive trawling thousands of miles from your home port a waste of time. So the folks violating international fishing catch laws will go away. And its going to take years before the locals build sail powered fishing boats, giving the schools of fish a chance to surge between the years with super-expensive fuel and the boats getting financed, built, crews trained to work with sail and electric winches, and launched into operation. And they still require anchorage in those few safe harbors on the North Coast of California.

 

The Central Coast has even less harbors. Between Carmel and Morro Bay there is nothing but 1000 foot high crumbling cliffs and the most scenic Highway in the world never visited by Top Gear. It is known as Big Sur. There are mansions there, including Hearst Castle. There are fewer storms than the North Coast.

 

The fog was very good for grapes, which is why I lived next to a ranch that was next to a famous vineyard. The ranch was run by a drunk, who rarely did any work. Ideal conditions for trespassing into the ranch to hike. I did that frequently. Never occurred to me I was breaking the law, but the statute of limitations is long past, so I can talk about it. Kids don't understand things like insurance rates. That property was steep, wooded, full of poison oak, and climbed nearly 2000 feet. When I was a kid, I thought it was a volcano, like in Lord of the Rings. Turns out I was right, despite the hippy-dippy teacher twit in primary school who said I was wrong because she hated children. Well, she did. Some people are unsuited to education or parenting, and she was one of them. So yeah, when I got my degree, I found that not only was the hill a climbed a volcano, but it was an ultra rare mature one possessing all three kinds of magma, which is highly unusual. This made the volcano in question valuable to the local Indians because it was a source of the extremely useful rock called obsidian. Obsidian is volcanic glass, and is used to make stone tools, cutting blades in particular.

 

The local Indians were assholes, btw. This is not my opinion, this is what they say about each other. Having met and gone to college with one of them yes, that is true. They weren't warlike, because that would require effort. They were poisoners. They used the local acorns and buckeyes, both of which are naturally toxic like raw olives, and required lots of soaking to remove the tannins, then mashing and became their primary carbohydrates. Food illness was so common that the local Indians delight(ed) in poisoning visitors with these tanins. Never eat or drink anything they offer. It is a game to them, and they're clinical psychopaths. Greg Sarris documented his tribe in Grand Avenue, an HBO miniseries. Local indigenous food supply is also caused by geography. He is trying to improve his tribe's finances with the Graton Casino, and hopefully curb their behavior. I wish him luck.

 

When white people showed up, they started raising chickens, then selling the eggs to San Francisco. That first group were Jews escaped from the pogroms in Ukraine and Russia in the late 1850's. The sheds still exist in Penngrove. Another group from Switzerland built an idealized town north of Geyserville in the Alexander Valley, trying to raise crops using the water from the Russian River, flowing through the valley. It sort of worked, but it is hard to raise generations of kids to want to just barely make it when they can move to the city and be engineers instead. It is mostly a historical site now, and one of the state's oldest wineries.

 

About twenty miles west is the Pacific. The ocean rolls in with frequently rough seas, heavy breakers, few bays. Boats try to anchor in shallow coves if they must, but most head for San Francisco Bay, which is the safest alternative. The coast does have a few decent anchorages, though those tend to be full of sea lions and great white sharks, or uselessly shallow like Tamales Bay which is merely feet deep and goes half empty on low tide. The Longshore Drift (Alaska Current) flows down the coast from the North, along with the wind that drives it, which stirs up the bottom and gives the fish fresh nutrients via plankton feeding. This means the coast has good fishing, so restaurants serve lots of fresh fish. This is a big thing on the coast. Before Brown destroyed all the salmon off California, you used to be able to catch them just offshore and roast them on the BBQ grill. Excellent protein, went great with local IPA beer. Since hops were grown locally, because conditions were right for that crop, good beer is another local advantage. Wine, beer, excellent fish. See how it goes when you pay attention?

 

Also excellent sourdough bread, though that is temporarily gone thanks to cheap shipping bankrupting the bakeries. When shipping gets expensive, local bakeries will return. It is a good job for strong men who don't have much body hair. I have too much to do that. Bread dough rips out hairs. I hope that the heirs of those bakeries are keeping their starter alive, waiting for the big greedy corporations in Pleasanton to go bankrupt and drop support of cheap sourdough bread. Artisan bread is something like $5/loaf, which is a bit much for a delicacy that only keeps one day. In the old days it was $1.50/loaf. That was a good price for a nutritious bit of snack before dinner, something that goes well with the local cheeses and wine. There being ranches, there were also dairies. Closer to the sea, the fog is so thick the grass grows year round, so dairy cattle and sheep graze, leading to high milk production. Milk spoils fast, so any dairyman becomes a cheese maker for what they can't sell for a profit. Cheese is a long term investment, usually months of curing under supervision, but the result is dollars per pound rather than pennies per gallon, so the investment is often worth it. The Sonoma Cheese Factory has been on the Square for decades.

 

Olives also grow locally on the coast. And there's the bay laurels, commonly used for their leaves to season tomato sauce. Tomatoes grow well in the hotter areas, away from the fog. Places without summer rains. Surprise moisture splits the fruit. Seen it happen. You can still can those, if you pick them quick enough, but surprise rain tends to destroy crops.

 

So what can you do to further develop the North Coast? I have been thinking about this for years. So has Green Day, who is also from there like me. Most of them are from Eureka, hardest hit by Gov. Brown's attacks and the closure of the state hospitals, since San Francisco gave one-way tickets to the loonies for Eureka, dumping them there onto social services, assaulting kids, and dying in the woods of exposure. Terrible, vicious, hateful thing to do. Don't let people tell you that San Francisco is a nice place. They hate everybody but rich people.

 

The obvious thing is to start with the harbors. They need to be dredged out so they can hold deeper hulled vessels. Their port facilities need to be improved, possibly adding cranes able to lift shipping containers at some point in the future. The roads wash out in winter storms. Hwy 101/1 closes often. You need a sturdy alternate route, particularly since the cheap gasoline isn't cheap anymore, and the distances involved on those roads are most of a day's drive from Eureka to the closest metropolis: either Redding or Santa Rosa. By plane it is an hour. By Car or truck or bus, about 6 hours. And that's if the roads aren't closed by downed trees, rockslide, landslide, washout, down bridge, serious head on collision wreck, or flooded road. Conditions up there are PRIMITIVE. They might even justify the Enduro motorcycle, only it rains so much that's miserable.

 

For alternate freight transportation, the North Pacific Railroad needs to be restored to operation, complete with electrical overhead wiring to run freight and passenger rail up and down the coast. That is going to cost real money, but it needs to be done. California can't afford to waste significant real estate with sufficient water supply to allow housing. All those people in LA need to go somewhere when the aqueduct system gets diverted for Fracking. Especially since these are places without tornadoes or hurricanes, so loss of life to weather is minimal. Unlike, say, the entire Midwest and East and South. The area could potentially develop a lot of hydroelectric and farming, if the locals terrace, and are strict about erosion control so the reservoirs don't fill up.

 

As I have pointed out before: California is for tourism and agriculture. Both industries require maximum protection and development. Every other industry in California is either serving those two, or entirely secondary, possibly irrelevant like the "high tech" industry. Most of that is going out of state. Costs are too high here. They don't have to be, not for everything. If erosion control were actually effective, it is possible to build a huge reservoir, then run an aqueduct through a tunnel to a banana belt west of Red Bluff, currently dry desert, and open a huge territory to agriculture. Doing so would be extremely valuable long term, since the mountains above it stop rainfall. No surprise rain, 5 crops a year. Big money agriculture. And the North coast can spare that water. The Eel River is one of the highest sediment load (erosion term) rivers on the Eastern Pacific, from Alaska to the tip of Chile. So controlling erosion there will be a serious engineering challenge.

 

Why do it? LA has to go somewhere. So does most of the population of the Bay Area. Their water is going to be diverted to fracking for the next 50 years. The aquifers and reservoirs will be poisoned with benzene for the next 1000 years. It can't be stopped or avoided. If we try, we'll get invaded by China and suppressed while they do it anyway. They need the oil, and we're unlucky enough to be living on top of it. The solution is not live on top of it, and extract it knowing this is coming in advance. Time to invest in safer housing.

 

Even with the earthquakes up at the Triple Junction (Eureka), it is safer than being in the way of Chinese security teams guarding directional drilling sites. Their people have thousands of years of deliberate provincial genocide in their history, and the thousands machine gunned in Tianamen Square, and the arrests and slavery since that suggest they haven't changed their position on the value of human life. We are in their way. Best to move before they remove us.

 

Waiter/waitress, chef, hotelier, linguist, tour guide: these are serious careers with growth opportunities. So is vintage automotive mechanic. Vintage car rentals for your vacation up the coast? Sure. If you are rich, you don't care what gasoline costs.

 

Otherwise, take the ferryboat. I suspect we'll get coastal ferries again. Probably sail powered since the north wind is so reliable. Use electric winches to run the sails, run radar, tack using GPS so it still works in fog, and you're golden. Once those little ports are deepened by dredging and have dock facilities restored (they had them before, remember), that's financial value. Since the North Coast has plenty of rain water, the only part of the state that does, they are viable for long term settlement.

 

San Francisco which gets its water from 250 miles of aqueduct and pumps. The Bay Area doesn't get its water locally. It all comes from Tracy or Hetch Hetchy. It will take many solar panels to power the water pumps. And by many, I mean a million big panels. The maintenance on those will require a small city of workers. All of whom must be paid, fed, given medical care, schools for their kids, hospitals for their wives. This becomes a ridiculous expense. Particularly if you live in the Bay Area yet are not involved in shipping. That's sort of the primary value of the Bay, a place for ships to anchor out of those big waves and such on the coast. Realistically, the Bay Area went off the rails thanks to cheap oil pumping water. Now that oil isn't cheap anymore, the Bay Area will need to re-evaluate costs, and there's already a strong movement to keep things so expensive the poor and violent are being pushed out. The poor are retaliating by flipping over Smart Cars in SF city.

Smart cars are expensive toys only bought by snarky arrogant rich people who want to feel superior. Normal people can't afford such limited value vehicles. They are a legitimate target for outrage. Thing is, San Francisco really should JUST BE for rich people. Everybody else should leave. They have a $10/hr minimum wage, but you can't pay rent on an apartment there with that. It is still too little to live on. Only a lunatic would try. So leave the City to rot, leave the rich to pick up their own trash and sweep their own street and put out their own fires and fix their own broken water mains. Leave town. Only the port facilities really matter. San Francisco was dirty at the best of times. It is grubby and crass and falling apart. Stop pretending it matters. With the damage to the new Bay Bridge looking at years of delays to break apart the road surface and replace all the steel thanks to damage by the Chinese workers, there will be years of delays and higher taxes to pay for that boondoggle. It will be smarter to move your business out of downtown SF and go somewhere those taxes are not your problem. Really, there is little reason to run a headquarters there. And once the big companies start bailing out of SF city, more will follow. Some are already moving to Austin Texas, which has lower taxes and a smart population able to work in high tech. And they don't have a rusting bridge that needs to be rebuilt for a couple billion dollars taxes coming from your bottom line. Duh!

The entire reason for having companies in city of San Francisco was bragging rights and access to smarter workforce. That workforce is a myth. Bay Area workers are just as dumb and lazy as everywhere else. And you can only brag about your company profits, so moving to wherever those are highest is best. Even if that means Omaha Nebraska or St. Louis or Toronto. Just, not San Francisco because the city is populated by conceited retards who are always wrong and throw away money. The Bridge debacle is a case in point. Its three times as expensive as it should have been, delayed 10 years by arguing, and now needs another two billion to repair. And it will still fall down in an earthquake, something we're overdue for and get reasonably often. So odds are this is wasted money in the first place. Do you want to pay for that? Do your shareholders think you deserve that big salary if you can't see how that's stupid? And will you be replaced as CEO because you won't move your site to somewhere rational, somewhere not in the Bay Area disaster zone, doing its best to follow Detroit into bankruptcy?

 

Yep, the North Coast has potential, even as San Francisco is going to implode from water prices. Funny how that is. Maybe those "green wall" planters and solar panel buildings the hippy nutjobs blather on about has a future after all. If the pumping is damaged or diverted due to flooding this fall, San Fransico may find itself watching Crystal Springs Reservoir (their entire drinking water supply cache) go empty very fast. Idiots.

 

The biggest problem with this? It takes time and deliberate effort to develop a place, to put in the infrastructure and public utilities. While there are lots of middle class people retiring to the north coast and dealing with the foggy weather and wind, driving up local housing prices and keeping out the loonies and junkies and pot growers and burglars with gates and armed guards, they aren't making the locals like them much. But they have money, and they spend it at the grocery stores and shops and it is keeping these towns alive despite themselves.

 

All this work needs to start being done now to give the SF bay residents somewhere to move to. Elsewise they will be leaving California if they can't take the heat of the Central Valley. It is 100'F there in the summer, all summer long. I was just there. This is normal Summer weather away from the SF Bay's cooling fog. You still get that cool fog up the coast. There just needs to be housing a jobs to move to. Without development, there isn't, and the Bay Area remains crowded, at the end of a long supply chain that will suddenly bankrupt thanks to the cost of energy. Maybe fracking gas will be diverted to the pumps, but how much will be needed to pump that water? And how many court orders will be applied to keep turning those pumps off for fish? No part of this situation is cheap. And no part of the decision is easy.