(Ab0ve): Unidentified participants at Asian American Pacific Islander Youth Rising Rally marching from Aquatic Park to the pedestrian 80 freeway over pass. (Shutterstock/Siliconeer)

Since March 2020, the web portal Stop AAPI Hate has logged 10,370 reports of hate incidents, 16 of which have been physical violent attacks. Elderly Asian-American women have been especially vulnerable. Just in the last month two middle-aged women, one young woman and one more middle-aged women, both were killed in New York.

At an Ethnic Media Services briefing, held Feb. 25, panelists—Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Executive Director, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum; Marita Etcubanez, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives, Asian Americans Advancing Justice; Michelle Kang, General Secretary of the Atlanta Korean Committee against Asian Hate; and Sasanna Yee, inspirational speaker and yoga teacher – discussed how communities have responded. A Siliconeer report.

(Above, left): Marita Etcubanez, Senior Director of Strategic Initiatives, Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC); Michelle Kang, Secretary-General, Atlanta Korean American Committee Against Asian Hate; Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Executive Director, National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum; and Sasanna Yee, San Francisco-based mindful movement instructor and community wellness activist. (EMS)

Song Yeon Choimorrow provided a historic perspective as to how we got here and why women are such frequent targets of anti-Asian hate. “The rise in coverage of the murders and the violence against our community, particularly Asian American women, we must note that while the pandemic and the rhetoric of the former president blaming China and Chinese people for starting the virus and the pandemic may have dramatically increase the incidences of hate against AAPIs, it’s certainly not something new. As Asian American women, many of us felt living in the United States, long before COVID, and my personal experience – I came to the United States as an international student and there are a number of times I’ve been approached by men in social gathering spaces who sexually harassed me because of my race.”

“Objectification of Asian American women is nothing new and the pandemic has just exasperated this for many of us. Asian American women, in particular, experience increased harassment because we are targeted both for our race and our gender, as Stop AAPI Hate has reported,” said Choimorrow.

“In America, we see the rise of the demonization of Asian women as ‘dragon lady,’ as seen in a movie and on the other hand Asian women are also depicted as submissive and referred to as ‘geisha girl,’ ‘China doll’ and ‘lotus blossom.’ These are not favorable terms but rather a way to hyper-sexualize Asian women that makes American general public think that we’re easy targets for sexual and other forms of harassment.”

“In 1966, sociologist William Peterson coined the term ‘model minority’ to describe Japanese Americans for their success after World War II. Peterson in essence says Japanese Americans are successful because their cultural values ​​and good ethics. This idea of ​​Japanese Americans then applied to different Asian and Asian American ethnicities. The stereotype that Asian Americans are smart, hardworking, and will be submissive and quiet, also leads to vulnerability and bullying which many Asian American students and workers faced even before the pandemic.”

Choimorrow also talked about the deadly Atlanta Spa shooting victims, the references made on US television shows like ‘Gilmore Girls’ and ‘Lane Kim,’ amongst some of her examples.

Marita Etcubanez of Asian Americans Advancing Justice spoke next discussing strategies the community has developed to protect itself as well as Federal legislation addressing hate crimes. “While hate crimes and hate incidents are still underreported, we have seen more people reporting both hate crimes and hate incidents, some to law enforcement, but also to community organizations like Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and our Stand Against Hatred website as well as Stop AAPI Hate.

“We have seen more people joining in demanding community-oriented solutions to public safety. It has become clear to us that people are very eager to learn about what they can do as individuals to help stop Anti-Asian hate and harassment. Since launching, our joint bystander intervention trainings in the Spring of 2020, Asian Americans Advancing Justice affiliates in Illinois, California and DC have reached and trained about 150,000 people.

“We are building a community of people who are trained, and ready to take action, and intervene, when they see or experience anti-Asian hate or harassment. We marked a victory with passage of the Covid 19 Hate Crimes Act, a Federal bill that passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

“It requires the Justice department to formulate guidance for law enforcement agencies and others on creating online reporting systems for hate crimes and hate incidents, including making those systems accessible for people with limited proficiency in English.

“We were furious and frustrated over the attacks and killings of eight innocent people and six were Asian women in Georgia,” said Michelle Kang of the Atlanta Korean Committee against Asian Hate.

“Why we need to include Asian American history in K-12 curriculum? – In May 2021, to dispel the misunderstanding and lack of knowledge that Asian Americans are foreigners, there is a long history of Asian immigration into the US starting from the mid 1800s, we fight to ensure our voices as Asian, Black, Brown, Hispanic , Pacific Islanders and Native Americans are not forgotten within American history, and demand that each student have the right to see themselves in their school curriculum,” said Kang.

Sasanna Yee, inspirational speaker and yoga teacher, took to yoga to help victims who have experienced trauma, overcome their tragedy. Her grandmother was fatally attacked in a San Francisco park in 2019.

There are countless incidents, some reported but most go by unnoticed. It’s time to be American in the true spirit and embrace all communities as equal and treat them with equal dignity.

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SACRAMENTO COUNTY (CBS SF) – Cal Fire and local crews responded Monday afternoon to a bushfire that, according to authorities, has already burned five acres in Sacramento County.

The Cal Fire Amador-El Dorado unit tweeted about the fire shortly after 2 p.m. Monday.

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The vegetation fire called the Murieta Fire burns near Murieta Drive and Cantova Way in Sacramento County.

CAL FIRE is on the scene of a vegetation fire with Sac Metro near Murieta Drive and Cantova Way in Sacramento County. Full air and ground resources respond to the fast moving fire. The fire is about 5 acres and burns in the grass. # MurietaFire2021 pic.twitter.com/ucZ0MOFwcw

– CAL FIRE AEU (@CALFIREAEU) October 11, 2021

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Full air and ground resources respond to the fast-moving fire service authorities. The fire is currently about acres.

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This is breaking news. CBS SF will provide additional updates as information becomes available.

The post Cal Fireplace Crews Reply to Brush Fireplace Burning in Sacramento County – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

The pandemic has put San Francisco into slow disaster for more than a year. And it gives the city an unexpected chance to prepare for another type of disaster: the big one.

Exactly 115 years after one of the most devastating events in California history, the great 1906 earthquake and fire, city guides have learned lessons from their emergency response to COVID-19 that they can apply to the next major tremor.

One of them is to focus on equity and inclusion right away. Now that city officials have geared much of San Francisco’s approach to COVID-19 testing and vaccination to the neighborhoods hardest hit by the virus, they believe the strategy shouldn’t be limited to pandemics.

“What it looks like in an earthquake is you are not creating shelters for people on mission in another place as far away as Golden Gate Park,” said Mary Ellen Carroll, executive director of the San Francisco contingency management division.

Once the pandemic subsides, Carroll wants the city to hold regular meetings with organizations that serve Latino residents and other community groups to discuss earthquake preparedness and connections established over the past year of the pandemic response.

“We have never done that before,” she said. “It’s not that we never prepared for communities, but never as we understand it now.”

The 7.9 magnitude earthquake that struck San Francisco on April 18, 1906, remains the worst disaster the city has ever experienced. An estimated 3,000 people died and more than 80% of the city’s buildings were destroyed in earthquakes and fires.

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission’s supply of earthquake-proof pipes.

Nick Otto / Special on The Chronicle

But the pandemic, which killed more than 500 Franciscans and infected another 35,000, has tested the city’s civil protection apparatus in unprecedented ways, placing it in a constant state of emergency management. Some city workers have been diverted from their usual jobs to pandemic-related duties for more than a year.

San Francisco also needed to ensure that critical infrastructures such as water and electricity worked smoothly despite physical distancing and distant work situations. Community organizations that are not normally responsible for emergency response have campaigned for pandemic aid, including through the Resource Hub of the Latino Task Force in the mission. The city turned the Moscone Center into a mass vaccination center and before that into a homeless shelter – a possible use after an earthquake.

“It really helped us to stress test some of our systems,” said Brian Strong, the city’s chief resilience officer, of the pandemic.

At the state level, emergency managers received a crash course last year in order to react to not one but several disasters that overlap at the same time. As the virus spread wide and quickly, forest fires also raged out of control, burning a record 4.2 million acres.

The same thing could happen if a catastrophic earthquake occurred while massive wildfire was already burning. In such a situation, officials in the affected area would rely heavily on aid agreements from other cities, counties and states. Other countries could also come to help respond, as they have done with fires before.

“We’re making our stuff here in California on the assumption that we could have more than one major event at a time,” said Christina Curry, assistant director of the governor’s Office of Emergency Services. “We designed things with this possibility.”

Curry said she also learned many lessons from the pandemic that could occur during an earthquake – especially when it comes to rapidly changing work systems.

“An earthquake could turn a business center in a big city into something we won’t have access to for a while,” said Curry. “How can you restore government and industry and keep the state running if you cannot access your facilities as usual? For another reason, many places had to switch to a different way of working during the pandemic. “

Experts cannot predict the next earthquake in San Francisco. Peggy Hellweg, operations manager in the seismology laboratory at UC Berkeley, compared the underground situation to a stretchy rubber band – after all, the band will break and cause a severe earthquake like the one devastated in San Francisco 115 years ago.

“We really don’t know how much we need to stretch it before the next big one happens,” Hellweg said. “It could happen tomorrow. It could be 50 or 100 years. “

Compared to San Andreas, which runs through San Francisco, the Hayward Fault in the East Bay “has expanded for a long time,” Hellweg said. The last major earthquake in this fault occurred in 1868, and millions more people now live along the fault zone.

But population growth alone does not mean the fate of everyone who lives on the Hayward Fault.

“Houses of all kinds that have been built in the last 20 or 30 years are much safer in an earthquake than houses that were built before 1970, simply because of all the things we have learned from (past) earthquakes,” said Hellweg .

Just because a building remains standing does not mean that it will not be irreparably structurally impaired.

“The question of whether this housing can be used after an earthquake has a completely different answer,” said Hellweg.

San Francisco has tried to solve this problem by requiring upgrades to some of its most vulnerable homes. The 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged many of the Marina neighborhood’s soft buildings, characterized by wooden frames and wide street-level openings that often house garages or commercial space. City officials have ordered seismic retrofits for about 5,000 such buildings, and the program, due to be completed this year, is more than 80% complete.

After quiet stories, San Francisco’s next priority is targeting concrete buildings, said Strong, the city’s chief resilience officer. Within the next year, city officials plan to have a better understanding of which concrete buildings are vulnerable and which are not as they ponder new local rules.

“Unlike soft stories where you can drive by and tell, these concrete buildings are a lot more difficult,” said Strong. “You really have to go in and take a closer look at them.”

Parts for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission earthquake-proof pipe supply.

Nick Otto / Special on The Chronicle

The city also protects critical parts of its water system from a major earthquake failure. This summer, workers at College Hill Reservoir in Bernal Heights, which supplies water to San Francisco General Hospital, will be installing new pipes with flexible connections. The pipes, made by Japanese company Kubota, can move horizontally and vertically like a ball, said Katie Miller, director of water capital programs at the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.

“When the earth moves from the stresses of an earthquake, the entire pipe network can react and move with it instead of the joints pulling out,” Miller said. “You can hold back these forces and stay there even if the ground completely collapses around them. This is really great.”

The work, slated to begin in June, aims to replace approximately 4,000 feet of aging pipe. It’s part of a multi-year project that should cost about $ 50 million in total.

JD Morris is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @thejdmorris

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