THINKWALKS

Tag: Storm of 1862

  • Atmospheric River Meditation in SF

    Here’s my 7-minute storm video, meditative and exploratory rather than my usual strict documentation.

    San Francisco was blasted by a few inches of rain in a single day on Thursday, Dec. 11, 2014. It was an ‘atmospheric river’ (AR) blasting at the coast like a fire hose. These “rivers” contain as much water as many Mississippis, wafting through the air about a mile above the sea from the equatorial region beyond Hawai’i.

    This one first blasted Canada and then Washington, then Oregon, then us (in essEFF), then Southern California.

    I’ve been researching the probable AR storm sequence of 1861 & 1862, as readers of this site will know, so I decided to go out and capture some images around town. It won’t appear especially dramatic to people from wetter climates, but the SF infrastructure and history of drought prepares us poorly us for this kind of thing.

    My friend John’s offices (Stripe) at Folsom and 18th Street are so flood prone they moved all the furniture upstairs! Last time a storm like this came, it flooded the area four feet deep. But he was spared this time!

    Music in this video is Aïya Aïya by Rachid Taha, who (quoting Wikipedia) is an Algerian singer and activist based in France. • Please support him and his brilliant work! •

    If you want to help do research on the AR of 1862, please let us know!

  • Volunteering with Thinkwalks

    In the recent past, a number of folks have generously volunteered their time to help with publicity, research, social networking, design and other aspects of Thinkwalks. If you have an idea of how you’d like to help, please let me know.

    Some of the clear needs at the moment are for people to help compile information either from bibliographies or from very old news articles on the Great Storm and Flood. And to distribute (to cafés) the wonderful flyers Martina D’Alessandro designed in her volunteer gig. Also, there’s a volunteer design project underway in mapping some of SF’s great public art locations, if you have ideas or want to help. If you have skill in FileMaker Pro, there’s some adjustment (or even data entry) to be done with the database. And some very nerdy research to do on fun subjects like finding schematics of an old bridge in GG Park, lawsuits from 1862 about a lake that is described but not reliably enough to be sure it existed.

    So if you have an interest in figuring out the past and/or microfilmed newspapers get in touch!

    Here’s Martina’s sweet flyer. It’s two sided, folded. It ends up 5″ x 5″—perfect for a self-standing table card or flapping protrusion from a bulletin board. Flapping protrusion! Is that racy or what!?