Curator Melinda McCrary stands next to a clunky antique radio that’s perched on a classic wooden stand in the Seaver Gallery at the Richmond Museum of History. She signals for me to shut up and listen, then flips on a switch. Immediately the room fills with the voice of a sports commentator, and I am transported to the 1950s, listening to blow-by-blow accounts of the ups, downs and heartbreaks in a classic baseball game. This subtle but powerful use of…
Last week, BART officials launched a five-day pilot program to see if bikes and people could fit comfortably onto its trains at all times. Now they are asking the public to complete an online survey that seeks to measure whether the experiment was a success.
Richmond Arts Center has been holding holiday arts festivals for more than 50 years. But this is the first time its festival has gone green, thanks to volunteers who spent a week in November making decorations for the Dec. 2 festival out of old newspapers. This shift from new to recycled materials is innovative, cost-efficient and environmentally friendly. And it represents a more dignified final use for newspapers than serving as birdcage liner for the family parrot. “People have donated…
Richmond City Councilmember Tom Butt makes no bones about the fact that he keeps a menagerie on the 5 acres that surround his property in Point Richmond. For a decade, Butt has shared anecdotes, sometimes humorous, sometimes sad, about his various goats, sheep, dogs and bees on “Tom Butt’s e-forum,” an electronic forum where he also posts articles about more pressing matters of concern to his constituents, such as preserving historic railroad crossings and investigating the Chevron fire. Perusing these…
Chevron will replace all piping in the damaged sections of the Richmond refinery with chrome alloy, the company said in a letter Wednesday to the city of Richmond and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. The move comes six weeks after Chevron announced that it believed the Aug. 6 fire may have occurred because of thinning and corrosion in a piping component that may have had low silicon content. “Before the restart of the crude unit, Chevron will complete…
On the day after the election, as folks were picking themselves up after a night spent celebrating or grieving, Nutiva CEO John Roulac, a major financial supporter of the failed genetically-modified-food-labeling Prop. 37, was putting his best GMO-free foot forward. “Obviously, I would have loved to have won, but 47 percent is respectable and demonstrates that 47 percent of Californians want the right to know what’s in their food,” Roulac said, referring to the 4.3 million Californians who voted yes…
On a sunbaked October afternoon, as shoppers munched on sliced apple samples and children dug into bags of kettle corn at the Main Street Farmers’ Market at Nevin Plaza, artist Malik Seneferu took a break from daubing paint on canvas to explain why he plans to vote for the state’s Proposition 37, which requires labeling food that is genetically engineered or contains genetically modified organisms. “People may say that GMOs are safe, but safe and healthy are two different things,”…
The Craneway Pavilion on Richmond’s marina harbor echoed to the sounds of steins clinking, beer pong balls pinging, Bayern Maiden’s guitar twanging and dirndl and lederhosen-clad dancers from the Golden Gate Bavarian Club delivering stompingly hot performances of peasant dances at the first East Bay Oktoberfest on Saturday. Amy Higgins, who was manning a booth as community manager for Google + Local, estimated that 1,000 people turned out for the fest. Across the cavernous room, attendees were being given free…
“This one is called Laser,” said Flora Ninomiya, stroking the smooth petals of a small yellow rose she cultivates in a greenhouse along Brookside Avenue.
The Aug. 6 refinery fire was caused by corroded pipes and that Chevron technical experts were aware of the potential danger.
More than 800 volunteers, many of them teenagers, broke coastal cleanup records in Shimada Park Saturday.
Chevron failed to check pipes despite internal policies. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board has found that sections of pipe that were measured following the August 6 fire at Chevron’s Richmond refinery had thinned in thickness by 80 percent. Chevron would have had to replace those sections to comply with its own standards, but the company did not inspect these sections in November 2011, despite internal policies to check all segments, CSB’s Don Holstrom said Tuesday night at the City Council…
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says investigations into Chevron’s August 7 fire in Richmond will take at least a year, and it’s premature to discuss prosecution or fines. At an August 27 public briefing on the investigations, Dan Meer, the assistant director of the EPA’s Region 9 Superfund Division, said the EPA would prosecute to the fullest extent possible if it finds that Chevron violated the law. In an interview this week Meer qualified his remarks. “It is very early in…