Albany Bulb Eviction Happening Now (Monday, December 9)

updates please? i am out of town

Albany action on Bulb angers protesters
By Damin Esper
Correspondent
Posted: 12/10/2013 02:52:12 PM PST | Updated: about 20 hours ago


ALBANY -- Workers with the city's Public Works Department, accompanied by Albany police officers, removed what the city called "abandoned" encampments at the Albany Bulb on Dec. 9, drawing reaction from protesters who oppose plans to remove homeless residents there before turning the Bulb over to the East Bay Regional Park District.

A report on the website Indybay.org claimed the campsites that were removed were not abandoned, and that a woman named Doris lost her "home."

Albany City Clerk Nicole Almaguer denied that report.

"There were not any evictions (Dec. 9) at the Albany Bulb," Almaguer wrote in an email. "The work done by city Public Works was to remove two abandoned encampments as the people staying in the encampments found housing via the assistance of the city in conjunction with Berkeley Food and Housing Project."

Almaguer said the items removed were "general debris and trash." A bulldozer/backhoe was used and can be seen in photos posted at Indybay.org.

The workers and police left the Bulb after removing the encampments and a Bay Area News Group reporter who went to the waterfront site that afternoon found no signs of further activity.

The city had issued a news release Dec. 5 that announced that three people had been relocated from encampments on the Bulb into rental housing. The Berkeley Food and Housing Project and Solano Community Church have been conducting outreach to find housing for the residents.

It's estimated that about 60 people have been living on the Bulb. The Albany City Council voted in May to begin enforcing the city's anti-camping ordinance on the Bulb beginning in October.

The city also allocated funding for programs to find housing for the residents of the Bulb and provide temporary shelters nearby for those who cannot find housing. The city has not begun enforcing the ordinance, according to Almaguer.

"The encampments in question were utilized by the three that chose to relocate to housing, and worked with staff to confirm the location of their encampments, agreeing that the abandoned encampments could be removed," she wrote. "It is possible that others in the area may have chosen to utilize the abandoned encampment after the three moved to housing."

A freeze warning was issued in many parts of the Bay Area on the weekend of Dec. 8 and at least four homeless people in the Bay Area had died in the cold that weekend, according to news reports. There were no reports of deaths at the Bulb that weekend.

Protesters have fought the removal of the encampments since the City Council vote to enforce the ban.

Current protests have focused on the fact that Bulb residents have built makeshift homes on the former garbage dump out of pallets and other reclaimed materials and that evicting those residents would lead to them having to sleep on the streets and be subject to the freezing weather.

The city has planned for some time to turn the land over to the regional park district to become part of the Sylvia McLaughlin Eastshore State Park. Plans for the park addition began decades ago. The regional park district will not accept the land until the homeless population is removed and the land is cleaned up.

The Albany bulb is mildly toxic to people who spend moderate amounts of time out there, but I would be worried for the health of someone living out there. I'm not speculating on this, but people who have camped there have reported bad health. It is on a landfill and probably has some heavy metals. More worrisome is the highly toxic waste in the Richmond field station across the water inlet from the north side of the bulb - this was a battery factory, and there was even radioactive waste illegally dumped in the area.
http://richmondconfidential.org/tag/radioactive-waste/

In Berkeley, there are a bunch of rooming houses that have 25 rooms. It would be more inexpensive for the city to move homeless into a dorm with small efficiency rooms than to devote this multiacre site as a homeless release valve.

In this case, it would have been possible to severely hamper the eviction at a non-zero but minimal risk to humans by digging shallow pit traps that would catch wheels of the vehicles used in the eviction, or preferably catch and hold the entire front end in a pit too deep to drive out of but too shallow to cause a dangerous crash from walking speed.. Other obstacles would have been required to force all vehicles to walking speed as a safety precaution. The trap tops would have to be boards that would hold the weight of a pedestrian or animal but collapse when driven over by wheeled vehicles, then covered with earth to blend ito the environment. Some of the traps should to be long enough and wide enough to stop tracked vehicles like dozers, others could be small, quick wheel traps to plug the gaps between the bigger pits.

Probably the initial eviction would have stalled as workers decided they did not know what other defenses might or might not be encountered. One or more military veterans on the crew would probably declare the whole scene too risky to even enter, and the crew would leave. This is similar to firemen refusing to enter police situations where there is risk to them from the enemies of the police.

Contractors would then spread stories about this situation and probably embellish them. After a week or so, talk in the bars would be "the whole camp is booby-trapped" and police would find that no non-police, non-military work crews would be available to assist them.

Needless to say, the crew digging the traps would have to approach from outside in full mask and disguise protection, do the job, leave, and de-bloc before returning singly due to the risk that the DNS Nazgul would seek to file extreme charges.

The govt. Has been needing to turn this area into a real public park for a long time. Keep up the good work!