Environment
West Oakland residents, business owners and city leaders openly refer to their neighborhood as the city dump. Although the mounds of trash may not be as prevalent as it once was thirty years ago, illegal dumping is still a large problem. Every year, Waste Management, the city’s waste removal company, continues to haul away tons of trash from streets and sidewalks. Although the city has a law that fines dumpers $1,000, it’s difficult to enforce.
Dubbed as America’s worst urban fire since the Great Chicago Fire, Wednesday marks the 19th anniversary of the Oakland firestorm which left 25 people dead, 150 injured and over 3,000 homes destroyed. To honor those who fought and those who were lost, the Firestorm Community Mural Project was erected in 1994. Located outside the Rockridge BART station, the mural features over 2,000 hand-painted tiles. [This video and timeline are no longer available.]
Listen to how Oakland residents spent a day surveying conditions of the city’s parks and other recreational areas, many of which have fallen into disarray.
They squawk, they eat your scraps, they lay your breakfast, they bathe themselves with dirt: what more could you ask from backyard tenants?
The 15th annual Creek to Bay cleanup day drew hundreds of Oakland volunteers Saturday to more than two dozen watery sites, where they yanked weeds, bagged up Styrofoam cups, and pulled golf balls and plastic bags from the water.
An aquarium, everyone knows, is a glass case that holds fish. A terrarium is the same thing without the water, so it holds plants, along with the occasional lizard or tarantula. What, then, might be found inside an eight-foot, 3,000-pound sphere called the Wonderarium? Two Oakland artists are trying to decide—and when they do, they want to put it in the middle of Lake Merritt.
There’s nothing finer on a Saturday afternoon then a garden full of toilets.
Trees, plants, benches and grass (or something like it) popped up around Oakland on Friday on stretches of concrete usually reserved for cars.
Oakland City Attorney John Russo joined other law enforcement officials in front of Oakland City Hall today to declare support for the marijuana legalization initiative Proposition 19, which Russo argued would give Californians “a chance to take drugs off the street corners and out of the hands of children.”