Home & Real Estate $320,000 1095 Channing Ave. Roman Catholic Bishop of San Jose, demolish modular kindergarten, $24,000 3431 Hillview Ave. VMware, temporary construction trailer, restroom, $4,000; temporary trailer “A,� $8,000; temporary trailer “B�, $8,000 2501 Embarcadero Road City of Palo Alto, improve existing household hazardous waste station, $305,000 3408, 3412 & 3418 Alma Village Lane Trestle Partners, for lot 4 & 6 at Alma Plaza, $412,413; for lot 5 and adding 494 sq. ft. with attached garage, $392,170 3488, 3468 & 3500 Ramona St. Trestle Partners, for lot 26 at Alma Plaza, $330,890; lot 25, $342,296; lot 27, $342,296 909 Alma St. Ross Trust, 4,144 sq. ft. tenant improvement, $200,000 3185 Kipling St. N. Buzi, construct new two-story single-family residence with two-car garage, $547,000; construct a new 120sq.-ft. accessory building, $22,000 1435 Channing Ave. J. Hou & M. Liang, new two-story home, $457,223; one-car detached garage, $10,692 417 Seneca St. D. & Y. Law, new one-story, 2,852-sq.-ft. singlefamily residence with 2,794-sq.-ft. Basement, $1,050,000; new onestory, 712-sq.-ft. detached garage/ shop, $60,000 382 Curtner Ave., Bldg. A & B Century Grand Properties, LLC, new three-unit condo building and attached garage, $605,188 967 Moreno St. G. K. Reagan, sewer drain pipe bursting 30 ft. long, $n/a 754 Holly Oak Drive F. Banuelos, new gas line, firepit, barbecue and fireplace inserts, two electrical lines for landscaping, plumbing, $n/a 3000 Hanover St. Stanford University, non-structural interior demolition, $36,000 2781 Ross Road F. Shumacher, replace tile and dry rot in master bathroom — tub and curbless shower, $12,000
Positively Green Water: the good news and the bad by Iris Harrell
W
ater is vital to our very existence, and yet, it is a constant battle to try to plan and create man-made solutions that counter nature’s ability to make water show up in the wrong place at the wrong time. For us locally, this problem is more prevalent in the winter months when we receive most of our rain for the year. Recently, our church’s kitchen flooded yet again. The building is tucked up against a steep hill that is becoming more and more saturated with moisture each year, not only from heavier rainfall than when it was built 50 years ago but also from excess water accumulating from the neighbors’ elevated backyards that sit behind the building. The original drainage system for the church building is woefully inadequate to handle the amount of water that comes from surface drainage as well as hydrostatic pressure from saturated soil under the hillside. All of this water heads towards our church building with immense pressure and speed during a storm. We are currently planning a new drainage system for quickly dispersing the water away from the building. The climate here has changed in the 27 years I have been here. We are getting so much more water in
1%
storms, that our company routinely installs gutters and downspouts twice the capacity of prior decades. Our local storms over the holidays this year were so fierce with rain and wind, my own (fairly new) roof had a small leak by one of the kitchen windows. We were away but fortunately, I had a house sitter staying in the home and she noticed the leak quickly. She put a pot out to collect the water and called our roofer right away. Even a little bit of water entering the house can cause quite a bit of damage if it is not stopped and dealt with quickly. The other issue with unwanted water besides damages to home interiors is mold, which can be toxic to our health. The good news for us was that we improved our home’s drainage plan in 2008 when we completed a large remodel and increased our basement footprint. My house is also at the bottom of a hill just like my church, so we not only upsized the Frenchdrain system to collect fast-moving hillside water, we also had three sump pumps in place as backup sys-
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tems, along with a special sealant/ drainage material behind the retaining walls where the collection drains were. We had a completely dry crawl space even during the terribly wet storms over the holidays. With weather becoming more extreme and unpredictable due to climate change, homeowners and communities need to start proactively planning for more “worst case� scenarios. The tsunami in Japan and Hurricane Sandy in the Northeast have proven that even though we have made many advances in the 21st century, we are going to have to build improved infrastructure systems to protect ourselves, our homes and our communities. FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) has been redrawing and enlarging maps of what our flood zones are, and more local residences are now in this circle of potential hazard. With the potential of sea level rising over the next few decades, our communities will need to decide how building codes should be adjusted and what infrastructure we will need to plan for to keep our areas of low-lying land from disappearing under the sea. Ironically while we worry about having too much water in many circumstances, we will at some point have to worry about not having enough fresh water for all of the Earth’s inhabitants including humans. We have seven billion people on our little planet today and are expecting nine billion by 2050. We are by far the largest consumers of water. As Americans, we have viewed
water as an infinite resource when it comes to having easy and inexpensive access to clean drinking water. That attitude will need to be modified with impending climate change. One-fifth of the world’s inhabitants suffer from water scarcity and onethird of humankind does not have access to clean drinking water. Climate change will have significant impacts on water resources worldwide. Rising temperatures increase evaporation and lead to increased rainfall. And while the global supply of fresh water may increase, droughts and floods will become more frequent along with dramatic changes in snowfall and snow melt in the mountains. While we ponder whether our cumulative human activities are having a serious impact on life as we know it on this planet, we are more and more vulnerable to water showing up in all the wrong places. Getting even local communities to agree on a proper proactive plan of action, let alone nations on different continents to act in unison, is a daunting task, but one that cannot be avoided. Martin Luther King pointed out “we may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.� And I would add, the level of water our “boat� is sitting in is rising. ... N Iris Harrell is CEO and president of Harrell Remodeling, Inc. in Mountain View (www.harrellremodeling.com). She can be reached at 650-230-2900 or irish@ harrell-remodeling.com.
Michael Repka Before you select a real estate agent, meet with Michael Repka to discuss how his real estate law and tax background beneďŹ ts Ken DeLeon’s clients. Managing Broker DeLeon Realty JD - Rutgers School of Law L.L.M (Taxation) NYU School of Law
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