Guest View

One of the perks of working for the local newspaper is being able to sponsor and participate in wonderful community events and fundraisers. On Sunday, The Morgan Hill Times – and many other local businesses – sponsored the 30th annual Wildflower Run.  If you aren’t familiar with this event, it is put on by the America Association of University Women, which provides scholarships to local girls. The Wildflower run includes a 10K run, 5K run, 5K walk, a 2K run for children 5-10 years old, and new for 2013 a “stroller run”.

Dennis Kennedy’s water article listed Santa Clara Valley Water District’s efforts for weathering the drought. The term “weathering” implies that plentiful times will return. I disagree; I and others believe this is not a cyclical weather phenomenon but a rude awakening of our future of climate change. It is so important that we look at this drought with that ominous perspective.Climate change is here. I visited Glacier National Park in August 2014 and the glaciers are gone. Nine of the 10 hottest summers ever were recorded in the last decade. You have to go to the weather extremes to be visually impacted by its effects. Yet what happens outside Morgan Hill can and will affect our needs and it is not limited to just water.At the moment SCVWD relies on 55 percent of its water from sources outside our county. When those resources dry up (literally), you might have to buy water from as far as Canada, and even arctic glaciers under the Golden Gate Bridge. There are even considerations to build a dam under the bridge just to prevent delta salt water incursion as the oceans rise.The City of Morgan Hill is paving over farmlands for housing and considering adding 30,000 new residents in a mega effort of urban sprawl. We will add more residents to Morgan Hill in the upcoming decade than we did in the previous century. Where will you get the water to support that growth and the growth throughout the county when we don’t have water to sustain what we have? Sure you can build salt water desalination plants but those require great amounts of electricity. And where does California get 33 percent of its electricity? We get it from the sierra snowpack in the form of hydroelectric power. That snowpack is gone and unlikely to return to previous levels for any sustainable time.This drought does not mean that we temporarily water our lawns less or import our water from other resources such as Bakersfield as Dennis Kennedy suggests. It requires an entirely new approach to water conservation and management. It is going to require a change in our lifestyles, values, public policies, and a major investment in new projects and infrastructure. It requires a different way of thinking, a new mandate with different people leading that effort.To begin, we need an Adaptation and Mitigation Plan (AMP), which almost no one has or even understands. The AMP identifies how climate change will affect our region and city. It is not just greenhouses gases or a look at higher temperatures but a comprehensive view of all the effects from our economy and jobs to the invasions of insects and diseases which will prey upon heavily distressed flora and fauna. The plan helps us to understand and deal with the devastating effects of climate change. We can’t prevent it but we can adapt and mitigate its effects if we act now.Our elected officials are lost in translation and rely on myopic approaches with pleas of conservation and higher water rates. Doing more of what we are already doing is not going to solve this problem because it is not solvable. It is a new way of life. Adding 30,000 new residents to Morgan Hill in a sprawl approach would only exacerbate the effects of climate change. This is a foolish growth policy by the Morgan Hill City Council. A policy based on hope that rains will return is just as foolish. Hope is not a strategy, and urban sprawl that destabilizes our community is irresponsible leadership. Mark Grzan is a longtime Morgan Hill resident, former City Councilmember and Mayor Pro Tem.

This guest view is the first in a periodic series of upcoming op-eds on tips to prepare for wildfire season, which officially starts May 1 in Santa Clara County.Most people believe that wildfires ignite homes through direct contact with flames, but it is rare to have a home ignite this way. Thanks to effective defensible space campaigns, very few homes are in direct contact with traditional wildland fuel models (e.g., uninterrupted fields of seasonal grass, flammable brush or tree canopies). The collective experience of our wildland firefighters suggests that homes most commonly ignite from airborne flaming brands and embers.Flaming brands and embers can travel a mile or more ahead of the active front of a wildfire. Scientific research finds that up to 60 percent of wildland/urban interface home ignitions result from embers landing on flammable materials such as roofing or landscaping materials, or ember penetration into concealed spaces through vents and other structural openings.Most of the activity that makes a home less vulnerable to ignition focuses on the home and its immediately surroundings. Defensible space preparations are part of the equation, but they do not address the ember threat. Our Ember Aware campaign is intended to educate people on the risks of ember cast and the actions they can take to reduce those risks, to encourage residents to harden their homes against embers and/or to maintain those ember-resistant features, and to practice ember-safe housekeeping and landscaping. You can learn more at emberaware.com.In the coming weeks, we will provide a series of articles and tips on the topic. Make changes now to reduce the ember threat to your home. Tip number one: Stop shaking.• The most reliable way to predict which houses will survive a wildfire and which will be destroyed is by looking at the roof.• Houses with wood shake or shingle roofs are many times more likely to be destroyed during a wildfire. Using wood shakes or shingles for roofs in high fire hazard areas is like stacking hundreds of pounds of kindling on top of your home. During the hot summer months, the shakes or shingles can be nearly bone dry and easily ignited by embers. The embers come from pieces of burning material that can be lofted high into the air during a wildfire and travel a mile or more from the actual fire.• Unfortunately, there is no effective, inexpensive long-term solution to the ember threat to wood roofs. We recommend replacing wood shake or shingle roofs with a rated, fire-resistant roofing material, such as asphalt composition shingles, metal, or concrete or clay tile. Although this can be expensive, it may well be the one thing that saves your home when the embers arrive.Fire Marshal Dwight Good serves the Morgan Hill Fire Department and South Santa Clara County Fire Protection District and the CalFire Santa Clara Unit. He has 24 years of fire service experience. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Open letter to the esteemed residents of Morgan Hill and surrounding communities: As 2024 draws near its conclusion, so too does my journey in public service, culminating in a fulfilling 12.5 years dedicated to our cherished community. On Wednesday, Dec. 11, I will participate in my...