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Permitted Facilities: Through the CalEPA Regulated Site Portal we can easily identify regulated facilities from five state databases and two federal databases. Data collected from agencies such as: U.S. EPA, State Water Boards, CalEPA, and Department of Toxic Substances Control. These sites are regulated due to their potential hazard to local communities. Health impact depends on the facility. 1,957 regulated facilities in Santa Ana according to databases listed above.

RMP Facilities: RMP (Risk Management Plan) facilities are managed by the CalARP program. These sites contain large amounts of extremely hazardous state regulated chemicals. These chemicals are regulated by the state due to their potential risk to the public. Gallade’s three sites in Santa Ana have high quantities of regulated chemicals. 2 RMPs in Santa Ana, Gallade Chemical Inc. is an RMP half a mile from Madison Park. Has not been inspected in three years. The BEHR Standard facility is the second RMP facility.

Metal Plating Facilities: Metal plating facilities use hexavalent chromium through the electroplating process and stainless steel production. Hexavalent Chromium can be released as an aerosol through chrome plating processes. “…hexavalent chromium should be considered a human carcinogen for which there is no safe threshold exposure level.”(California Air resources Board. 2022). There 112 metal plating facilities in Santa Ana that are regulated by the state. Majority of these regulated facilities are located in South East Santa Ana.

 Hexavalent Chromium Info links:

• Hexavalent Chromium - Overview | Occupational Safety and Health Administration (osha.gov)

• Hexavalent Chromium Factsheet (nih.gov)

Homeless shelter and support center: https://www.ocregister.com/2022/07/22/motorcycle-club-brings-hope-and-harleys-to-homeless-shelter. 

Is this center considered an asset by residents, or -- as in many places -- did they contest its presence in Santa Ana given so many other stresses there? 

From my notes taken during the MPNA-GREEN and UCI EcoGov Lab event on June 4, 2022

• Downtown Santa Ana (DTSA) Art Walk: "community-based arts showcase across downtown Santa Ana from 6pm-10pm on the First Saturday of each month." The showcase exhibits artists from the Santa Ana and wider OC community 
• Comunidad Unida Aire Limpio (Comité CUAL): One of the first of its kind in Southern California, this community monitoring air network in Santa Ana established as a grant by the California Air Resources Board has a network of over twenty Dylos air monitors which offer air quality data to residents for environmental justice characterization. 
• Community Resource Fairs & Walkathons: MPNA has hosted community resource fairs and walkathons, such as the 15th Annual Madison Park Neighborhood Association Walk-A-Thon in 2017. According to the resident who shared picture of a community resource fair, these events offer opportunities for entire families to exercise, bike, and walk, and overall having a festive time. 
• The Frida Cinema: Orange County's only non-profit arthouse and independent theater. The Cinema has a long history of partnering with social and environmental justice organizing for community mobilization. 
• Santa Ana Movies in the Park: "The Santa Ana Movies in the Park series will take place every Wednesday, beginning June 8 through August 31, 2022 at various City parks throughout Santa Ana. Pre-movie festivities will begin at 5:30 p.m. and will include exhibitors, jumpers, and arts and crafts for kids. Movie screenings will begin promptly at dusk. Free popcorn will be provided to the first 500 guests each night, while supplies last. Food vendors will also be offering affordable and delicious dinner and dessert options. The series is free to attend."
• ALMA Science Academy: "Aspire, Learn, Mentor & Achieve (ALMA) Science Academy is a STEM education and mentorship program for under-resourced Santa Ana youth grades 4-6". 
• Santa Ana College: Opened in 1915 for students from Santa Ana High School, this fourth oldest community college in California serves over 18,000 undergraduate students. 

Linked below is a data analysis on the CalEPA Regulated Facilities Portal, click on my annotation to view full analysis.

CalEPA Regulated Facilities Portal: Data Analysis | Disaster STS Network (disaster-sts-network.org)

META: Water seems to be one important medium through which NOLA envisions the “impacts” of the Anthropocene—scarcity, abundance, temporalities and spatial distributions, management of, and hazards that emerge in its context. Less is said about the causal or attributional aspects of the Anthropocene. How might water function as an entry point into the assemblages of local anthropocenics?

I found the NOLA Hazard Mitigation Plan for 2018, which frames the impacts of the Anthropocene as an intersection of weather extremes amid climate change and evolving vulnerabilities of its people. Four of seven items in the executive summary note water as central to local interventions: flood awareness, flood repair, flood mitigation, flood infrastructure. Too much water or water in the wrong places and the aftereffect of water on infrastructure and lives. One expression, then, is preparedness.

MACRO: Mitigation is an interesting analytic for the Anthropocene. In the US mitigation plans are shaped by the 1988 Stafford Act (which amended the 1974 Disaster Relief Act). Constraints on communities come through rules, regulations, policies, (dis)incentives, and surveillance by state and federal authorities. Much of this is bound by economic and administrative discourses.

Goals are set in this document—broken out by timelines, activities, priorities, and capabilities. Another expression is classification of anthropocenics by subfields and accounting metrics. How do we measure progress and what is deferred to the future, 5-10 years out from today, a goal that has no tangible accountability but is named and acknowledged. What are the practices of naming, responsibility, and making (in)visible in the Anthropocene?

BIO: One new initiative, Ready for Rain, in particular is of interest to me as it highlights the more neoliberal vision for how the public should self-regulate risk and mitigate harm. I hear this as an extension of a government agency program to make the nation Weather Ready. Other bullets highlight “green” buildings, energies, and infrastructures. These could be examples of how the city envisions the Anthropocene feedback loop of humans changing/planning for climate alterations, which is a fairly typical lens.

Some questions: What does the water do? What does the water know? If we trace water in all its instantiations (e.g. historical water, flow of water, chemistry of water, application of water, temperature of water), what do we learn about the future imaginaries of what NOLA will / could / ought to become?

Resilience is a term that is widely embraced by many in city management and planning. It holds the positive gloss not just of recovery but bouncing back better. To my ears, it has become one of many anthems of the Anthropocene, a kind of restrained tempo thrumming along through communities that will adapt to climate change (or seasonal-to-subseasonal climate variability post Trump). They will mitigate, innovate, transform, strategize in order to endure unanticipated shocks, both chronic and acute.

NOLA is one of 100 Resilient Cities named by the Rockefeller Foundation sometime in 2013. Like others selected across the globe, the city of New Orleans would benefit from the resources of a Chief Resilience Officer (CRO), an expert in resilience to be hired to work within city governance to develop a strategic plan; NOLA's was published in 2015. Selection of the cities for the "100 Resilient Cities" initiative was difficult, a competitive bid for resources based primarily on a city's recent experience with disaster, usually connected to a weather or climate extreme (e.g. hurricane, flood, etc). Resources were provided via the hierarchy of the CRO, sometimes to hire staff, develop training for the community, and create working groups and to write the stratetic plan. As one former directer of NOLA RC said of this opportunity provided by Katrina, the disaster that qualified NOLA for Rockefeller monies, it demonstrates the need for an the age of resilience. In what ways is resilience measured, accounted for, adjudicated and managed through or in spite of this strategic document? 

The language of resilience includes many terms that I think of as a collective imaginary of utopian preparedness, a vision for a nation that is--in the parlance of the weather prediction community in which I work--weather ready. Through the filter of resilience, then, vulnerability (another problematic term) is eradicated through individual action, community engineering, and adherance to strategic policies like 100RC. Yet how does this image of NOLA, one of "mindful citizenry" engaged in "partnerships" around the city (terms used in their summary video), match with the realities of living in NOLA, today and in the everyday future?

Resilience is also a term widely critiqued in STS and the broader social science and humanistic disciplines. For good reason. Common questions in this literature: What counts as resilience? Who decides? At what costs? Resilience against what? What does resilience elide? How has the discourse of resilience reframed individual and community accountability? What is the political economy of resilience? I'm interested in the discourses of preparedness and planning, and "the eventness" of disaster, as Scott has highlighted many times. But my concern is not just to critique and tear down concepts like resilence (or vulnerability). I worry that we then evicerate common lexicons of hope and imaginaries of the future that do some good. How are we as field campus participants and those who re-envision or reveal the quotidian reflexive? How do we triage the Anthropocene amid our own state of compromise--as scholars, participants in Capitalism, in post colonialism, humans? What are our ethical commitments? How do we make good? 

Byron Good, Ph.D., is a professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His primary area of research is mental illness and how social perceptions evolves around these issues, in terms of both treatment and social acceptance. Dr. Good has several works on these issues, including several that explore the perspective of bio-medicine in non-western medical knowledge, the cultural meaning of mental illness, and patient narrative during illness. His publications including several papers, books, and edited volumes; he is regarded as a major contributor to the field of psychological anthropology. 

The article primarily asserts that how a patient narrates or describes their medical history is deeply rooted in their native culture. As such, physicians must be aware of how an individual's medical experiences can be altered based on this. In turn, physicians must recognize the importance of story-telling and anecdotes when receiving information directly from patients. Narratives project the patient's experience and events through their perspective, granting professionals a glimpse into their thought processes and action patterns.

The author, Byron J. Good, is a Harvard professor in the department of global health and social medicine. He is the director of the International Mental Health Training Program, and has significant experience with field research that has led to many publications.

The article’s main argument is that the narration of an illness is founded in the emotional connection it has to the sufferers life, the place from which they view the illness which includes individual and cultural aspects. Furthermore any lack of factual accuracy is an indicator of the social and cultural environment in which the illness presents itself and is revealing as to how it will be perceived and treated.