Now here is a true advocate of eateries
Some politicians have paid lip service to help keep restaurants afloat during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sunnyvale Mayor Larry Klein has put his stomach where his mouth is.
Asoflast week, Klein had visited 175 restaurants, coffee shops and food trucks in Sunnyvale, to shine a spotlight on them in hopes that they will attract more takeout and delivery customers so they could keep their doors open. For a while, he was hitting a new place every other day, but Klein has gone back to some old favorites as of late. But he keeps track of them all with links to his Facebook posts on Klein’s Sunnyvale Restaurant Project website, larryklein.com/restaurantproject.
“I still get comments from residents months later that they just tried a specific restaurant discovering it through the webpage,” Klein said. “Especially with the new restrictions, highlighting what places are available for takeout/delivery is really helpful.”
It all started when the first stay-at-home orders did on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. Sunnyvale’s historic Murphy Avenue didn’t have its normal revelry, so Klein ordered a corned beef sandwich at Fibbar MaGee’s Irish Pub to let people know that places still were open for takeout.
“The feedback from residents was positive, so
I started to do a daily restaurant review,” he said. “It’s been a great project, and I’m actually happy to see the number of restaurants that have survived. It’s also opened my eyes to certain areas of the city that I rarely went.”
Indeed, Klein’s list is like a culinary tour of the globe, with Japanese eateries side by side with Indian restaurants, Mexican cantinas, pho shops, cheese-steaks and pizza. Not a bad way to discover the hidden gems of your city, wherever you live.
GOOD DEED DEPARTMENT >> Volunteers from the
San Jose Sharks and
SAP spent the afternoon on Dec. 15 distributing food, toys and gift cards to about 200 households at Esperanza Middle School in San Jose’s Santee neighborhood. The fin-tastic folks bought and donated everything through virtual toy drives staged during the holiday season and gave it out through CityTeam Ministries’ drive-thru mobile pantry.
By the way, this isn’t just a holiday deal for the team. A community assist grant provided by the Sharks Foundation and SAP also funds the mobile food pantry program’s bi-weekly visits to Esperanza for the whole year.
But you don’t have to be a hockey team or a tech company to make a difference around here. Quynh Nguyen, a secondyear student at Evergreen Valley College, started a nonprofit called Hope Hearted with three students from other schools she met while volunteering at O’Connor Hospital. They partnered with local shelters, building a team of 150 volunteers to put together care packages filled with soaps, deodorants, masks, hand sanitizerandmoreforunhoused people.
Hope Hearted has distributed more than 2,000 of the care packages, and Evergreen Valley College is partnering with Nguyen and Hope Hearted to distribute the hygiene kits at one of the drive-thru food distribution sites it hosts for its students. More than 450 community college students receive food and groceries through the program, supported by Second Harvest of Silicon Valley.
KNIGHT FOUNDATION BOOSTS THE ARTS >> We’ve all seen performing arts groups innovating this year to deal with the challenges presented by the pandemic. The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced $750,000 in grants Thursday that should help four San Jose arts groups continue to reach new audiences.
“Artists in San Jose have long been affected by the city’s high cost of living,” Priya Sircar, Knight’s director of the arts program, said in a release. “Add to that the side effects of business closures and it’s visible that they have been faced with a nearly unbearable situation.”
The San Jose Museum of Art is receiving $250,000 to relaunch its art and technology exhibition series next year with a yearlong presentation of Hito Steyerl’s “Factory of the Sun.” MACLA is receiving $250,000 to launch the MACLA Studio and an Artist Fellowship program aimed at technology. The School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza is receiving $150,000 to work with CreaTV to build the digital skills of multicultural arts groups — MACLA, Teatro Vision, Chopsticks Alley, San Jose Taiko and Sangam Arts — that will produce minidocumentaries and digital art about the impact of COVID-19 on their families and community. And San Jose Jazz will get $150,000 to create the Break Room, a pop-up music venue and digital content production hub in downtown San Jose.
Anderson Reservoir, the largest in Santa Clara County, is nearly empty.
The Santa Clara Valley Water District, which owns the reservoir located east of Highway 101 between Morgan Hill and San Jose, said Dec. 15 that its crews have finished draining nearly all of its water — leaving it just 3% full — as part of a historic, $576 million earthquake repair job.
Draining began Oct. 1. Construction workers now can begin a 10-year seismic safety project to rebuild Anderson’s 240foot earthen dam, which was built in 1950. The reservoir will remain nearly empty until 2024, water district officials said, while a 1,700-foot-long tunnel, up to 24 feet in diameter, is built on the north side of the dam. It is expected to increase by fivefold the rate at which water can be released during major storms or after an earthquake that could damage the dam.
After that, the rest of the water will be drained out for six years, until about 2030 or 2031, while the dam is rebuilt to more modern standards. During that time, most of Anderson Lake County Park will be closed.
Seismic problems at the dam first were identified 12 years ago. But the district’s delays in beginning the repair work prompted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in February to order the reservoir drained.
For the past three months, the massive lake was drained at the rate of about 200 acrefeet, or 65 million gallons, a day — the equivalent of 98 Olympic swimming pools every 24 hours. The water wasn’t wasted, however. Most of it went to drinking water treatment plants and was served to the public, some was percolated back into underground aquifers for storage and some was released into Coyote Creek for fish.
Federal regulators criticized the water district for taking so long to undertake the project. The agency first learned of the seismic problems in 2009, and subsequently released engineering studies showing that a 6.6 magnitude quake on the Calaveras Fault directly at Anderson Reservoir, or a 7.2 quake centered 1 mile away, could cause the reservoir’s huge earthen dam to slump and fail.
Although the chances of that are extremely slim, if such a disaster had occurred when the reservoir was full, it could have sent a 35-foot wall of water into downtown Morgan Hill in 14 minutes. The waters would have been 8 feet deep in San Jose in three hours, potentially killing thousands of people.
Coincidentally, on Tuesday morning, two earthquakes occurred 1 mile east of Anderson Reservoir on the Calaveras Fault — a magnitude 3.7 and 3.5. No damage was reported. Some local residents wondered whether the draining of the reservoir, which had been 18% full Oct. 1, caused the earthquakes by shifting the amount of weight on the nearby fault.
No, said federal geologists.
“The recent earthquakes occurred along a known fault patch that typically has several similarly sized, naturally occurring earthquakes per year,” said Rob Skoumal, a research geophysicist, with the USGS Earthquake Science Center at Moffett Field.
When full, Anderson Reservoir holds 89,278 acre-feet of water — more than all other nine dams operated by the Santa Clara Valley Water District combined.
The district, which serves 2 million people, will make up for the lost water during construction by pumping more local groundwater, using recycled water, and importing water from the Delta and from the Semitropic Water Storage District in Kern County, where it has been storing water underground for years.