Thursday's Photographic Updatery!!!

issent the Blog is efficacious, baby.

Back in November, our own Rebel Girl offered a piece called "Twinkle, Twinkle, Trustee Tom" that highlighted the profound lowlights of the part-timer experience here in the district, a circumstance of which Trustee Tom Fuentes appears wholly oblivious. Wrote the Reb:

Take for example, the part-time faculty office in A-200 (please!). A modest hand-lettered piece of paper taped to the door affirms that it is, indeed, the part-time office. The otherwise unadorned facility serves, theoretically, the needs of some 60 or more part-time faculty and their students.


The office resembles a windowed closet..., tucked away between a mail box arrangement and the cheerful Howard Gensler Memorial Xerox Cubicle, its constant rhythmic sound and light show, a jolly mechanical celebration of the ingenuity, creative thinking, and can-do spirit of that clever fellow....

A quick survey reveals the bunker is equipped with two desks--that’s one for every thirty “star” instructors, teacher-to-furniture ratio-wise. The drawers of one desk are broken and splintered..., no use to anyone unless they are going to use their gaping cavity as some kind of “cubby” or public storage unit. Or maybe this is what the Martha Stewart-type magazines mean by “distressed”? (Nov. 19)

Well, guess what! Recently, matters have improved in the A200 part-timer office. I'll let a photo--taken earlier today--do the talking:


The office still isn't anything to write home about, but it is much improved. We appreciate the effort!


ecently, I noted that Irvine Valley College rests upon an enormous plume of toxin-contaminated groundwater and that, back in 1989, the Irvine Ranch Water District (IRWD) installed a solitary cleanup pump (called ET-1) across the street from IVC. I noted, too, that, about a year ago, the IRWD proposed building a much-needed second toxic cleanup pump, but that got NIMBYd into oblivion. According to the Irvine World News ("Woodbidge nix sends well back to drawing board"),

The Irvine Ranch Water District is back to re-evaluating options in the project to clean up the plume of toxins in the groundwater under Irvine. The Woodbridge Village Association board voted Feb. 4 to not allow the water district to drill a cleanup well near the community's North Lake Lagoon and to work with IRWD to find another solution in dealing with the "toxic plume." The board had initially agreed to allow the water district to use the Woodbridge Lake well to pump trichloroethylene (TCE)-contaminated water from the plume in groundwater that extends from the old El Toro air base. The well would have been part of the larger project, dubbed the Irvine Desalter Project, which would clean up toxins from the air base that seeped into the groundwater over a period of about 40 years. One such cleanup well [namely., ET-1] has been in operation at Irvine Center Drive and Jeffrey Road since 1989, but the water district says that one well is not enough...The plume also is headed toward areas in the aquifer that might be used in the future to supply Irvine with drinking water. And, the contaminated part of the water basin is a potential source of drinking water for the future...Some residents questioned why the project was named "Irvine Desalter Project," when it's a toxic plume clean-up....Without the cleanup well, the lake will continue to be filled with water pumped from the toxic plume by an existing well owned by the Woodbridge Village Association, as it has been since the lake was created.... (Feb. 12, 2004)

Earlier today, I walked across the street to ET-1 to check it out. Right away, I encountered a pair of signs. These prove that the people down at the IRWD have a wicked sense of humor:


The ET-1 facility is set back from Jeffrey a hundred yards (on one side), but it's pretty much right up against Irvine Center Drive (on the other), where it is surrounded by a ragged barbed wire fence. There's a sign that identifies the facility. Once again, something--maybe not a sense of humor, maybe something darker--is in evidence:



(Just for laughs, let's imagine how the sign would read in a less BS-impacted world:


Now, here's a fascinating factoid. About ten or fifteen feet from this facility--a facility used to clean toxin-contaminated water--is a strawberry field!


That tears it. No more strawberries for me!

I walked to the middle of the complex and peered through the fence. What I saw amazed me. I held my camera over the fence and took a cock-eyed snap. I felt like Warren Beatty in Parallax View! Here's what I got:


The picture doesn't really convey how deep and big that hole is. It appears that IRWD is constructing a super-duper TCE-sucking gizmo. Wow.

Well, what do you make of it all?

If you find out later that I disappeared under suspicious circumstances, do remember about this pic.

And remember: Klaatu barada nikto. --CW