California public health laws - 18 March 1988

It’s odd to sit here when the sun goes down in a city that hasn’t seen a cloud in two weeks and hear the weathermen recite their nightly lament “Sorry people but the news is still bad – no rain in sight.”

Most of California has been suffering from a winter drought and since January and February and early March are the times for the rains, the prospect for the summer is, from the natives’ point of view, bleak.

This doesn’t mean that the high sierras are not piled with 20 feet of snow but in a state three times the size of England, a sizeable part of which is close to desert, the run-off from the mountains provides nothing like enough water to maintain the bulk of the population which lives along the 800-mile coast. The essential rain has to come in from the west, from the Pacific.

The official definition of the present drought is "critical" and that means critical for the livestock and the prodigious variety and supply of fruits and vegetables and dairy products, everything from avocados to olives, from cotton to wine grapes. The Salinas valley alone, its lettuce rows reaching to the arc of the horizon, is known as the “salad bowl of the nation”.

There was a ferocious drought in the middle '70s and the loss of revenue to the state took years to make up. Of course in a land this size every part has its own climate and its own hazards. The other night my stepson, who grows wine grapes about 80 miles north of San Francisco in the beautiful Alexander Valley, he went to bed early and put on a special alarm clock which goes off when the temperature starts to drop into the 30s.

The two threats to his livelihood are always floods and frost and a sudden visitation of either can ruin his crop overnight. Well the other night the air was menacingly sharp and the thermometer was dropping down to 40 and the local radio and television warned the growers that there was a possibility of a frost.

When the temperature hits about 34 the alarm goes off and he’s up in the night and turning on the wind machines or the water machines that prevent the freezing. Laymen always say surely there’s an alarm that would itself automatically turn on the machines, but my stepson presents you with a simple grim bit of arithmetic. You have, say, 50 acres in Chardonnay which will produce a crop worth a quarter of a million dollars. No computered automatic frost prevention system is yet perfect and computer error could leave the vintner fast asleep, 250,000 dollars in the red.

Well, it didn’t happen last weekend and he had his sleep and he does not expect, as the spring comes along, to be haunted much longer by frost at least. There is, however, at the end of the summer a new spectre on the horizon.

By federal law, by an amendment to the immigration laws beginning next November everyone, every cattle man, every farmer of every sort from the wine growers and vegetable producers down to the employers of what they call stoop labour on strawberries and escarole, every employer must be able to show documents for the hired hands attesting to their status as legal immigrants.

When you consider that there are something like seven million illegal Mexicans in the country, more than half of them in California, you can guess at the series of headaches that’s about to inflict the employers of farm labour. For generations most of the stoop labour of California was done first by Japanese then, and now, by Mexicans whose right to be in the country was something the employer chose not to bring up.

However in the matter of frost and flood there’s a bright light at the end of that tunnel into which all farmers peer almost every day of their lives. It’s the tunnel which hides still the secrets of dependable long and short-range weather forecasting.

The night light bears the initials HMPS and I imagine that before long somebody will add a vowel or two and coin an acronym which will pass into the language before you can say cat scan. It stands for Hypercube Massively Parallel Supercomputer. Not another super computer – well yes, but up to now the word super has been used about computers in commercial ads or in the conversation of enthusiasts as in “a super girl”.

This invention has just been announced by scientists at the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. It’s not a promise; it’s already a fact. It consists of 1024 processors, each the microchip equivalent of a single ordinary computer which – the ordinary computer – has one processor, normally a single microchip that faces a complicated problem and goes to work on it stage by stage.

Parallel computers begin by splitting the problem up into smaller separate parts and then assign each part to one of many processors which work – and here’s the key word – simultaneously. The usual example to show off the superiority of parallel computers is the building of a house where the single builder lays the bricks, does the plumbing, the roofing, the wiring, one thing at a time. The parallel computer sets many processors doing all the necessary jobs at once.

Well the new HMPS – a useful memory aid might be on Her Majesty’s Parallel Service – the new super computer has, as I mentioned over a thousand processors. To give you an idea of its formidable talents let me say that the Sandia supercomputer was confronted with what is a standard problem – to calculate the detailed stresses and strains throughout a solid metal beam under a load.

This may not seem much of a problem to you and me jumping up and down on a narrow bridge. Apparently it’s a problem of fiendish difficulty and would take an ordinary computer with a single microchip about 20 years. Now, of course, there are in existence experimental computers with well over 200 processors which have speeded things up by as many times as there are processors but nothing like the Sandia computer and its thousand-odd processors had been envisaged or at least developed.

The stress test I mentioned just now, which the ordinary computer can solve in 20 years, was finished by the Sandia in one week and several computer scientists around the country have commented that the Sandia machine disposes of their own established belief that there’s a limit to the speeding-up process possible with parallel computers.

What they see ahead for the use of the Sandia is such a problem as the way pollutants are dispersed in the atmosphere and beyond the atmosphere, but the prospect that could mean a great deal to farmers, and the whole economy that’s nourished by them, is long-range weather forecasting.

We’re always hearing that one way or another it’s been solved or it’s close to a solution but I think any honest top meteorologist will tell you that nothing could be more hideously complicated than the thousands of separate or linked continually-changing phenomena that go into long-range forecasting.

For the time, I suppose we shall have to make do with the five-day forecast which is a regular feature of our nightly news and which has a remarkable record of accuracy but only about the sequence of moving systems, not the timing.

If a flooding rain that’s expected on Friday night arrives on Wednesday night and you live in the Alexander Valley, bang goes your Chardonnay and a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I hope, so does my stepson, that the Sandia supercomputer will lay off calculating those stresses and strains through the solid metal beam – after all they’ve just done that in a week – and get down to helpful matters like when will a 100-mile-an-hour storm descend on Kew Gardens and what’s the prospect for next Tuesday night in the Napa, Sonoma and Alexander Valleys?

In the meantime, California goes ahead like no other state, possibly like no other nation, putting into law and threatening to put into law more and more restrictions on industries, manufacturers, products that can be thought to imperil the public health.

California has just started to enforce a law passed by referendum in last June’s election which requires all manufacturers and suppliers to report all substances used in their product which are on a lists of dangerous substances issued by the state. If their product contains any of them the names of the substances must be printed and posted on signs affixed to their factory or shop entrances.

They have one year to reduce the toxic level of these substances or risk prosecution and a jail sentence, which does suggest the looming likelihood of thousands and thousands of law suits from anybody and everybody who works in a factory or a shop so endangered.

And also, by this autumn, every wine and spirits dealer in California, every shop and pub, must post signs warning of the risk of birth defects in the children of mothers who drink liquor, wine or beer. The business world spent close to a hundred million dollars to forestall all this legislation but was beaten by the voters.

For the time being the state proceeds city by city with the humbler business of passing laws requiring all restaurants to set aside smoking and non-smoking sections. San Francisco is, I believe, the first city to ban all smoking in public buildings, post offices, bus stops, so on, and in all offices. The restaurant rule is by now absolutely routine. You cannot call to book a table without the man at the other end of the phone asking “Smoking or non-smoking?”

In fact the awareness of the link between cancer and smoking is in this state now so dinned into every diner out, every citizen who shops or works, that there’s a story going round about a man who walked into a drug store and shouted “Two packs of condoms – [then whispers] and a pack of cigarettes."

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