Skatepark filled with 37 tons of sand after skaters ignore No Trespassing signs | Hacker News Reader

Skatepark filled with 37 tons of sand after skaters ignore No Trespassing signs

losangeles.cbslocal.com

44 pointsspking50 comments

All over the world, I see people trying to stop people from being outdoors, regardless of the health and safety implications. In the UK, police are issuing citations to people in parks. NYC has set up a tip line to report "social distancing violations" and is closing some parks.

I don't understand it. I understand the imperative for social distancing, of course. But it seems like enforcement has been targeted at relatively low-risk activities (hanging out in large, public outdoor spaces) and not at all at the high-risk ones (e.g. where I live in Brooklyn, half the laundromats have closed and the remaining half are constantly crowded).

I can't help but think that part of this impulse comes from a certain sour-grapes mentality that sees people trying to enjoy themselves during a trying time and wants to take it away from them. A real public health intervention would ensure that all necessary activities - getting groceries, doing laundry, going to work - are just as safe as going to the park.

Washington State has a more measured approach, the Governor has told people they can still go outside for walks, just stay apart.

A lot of hiking trails did get shut down after people crowded them, parking lots were overflowing when people were supposed to be social distancing, so that didn't go well. But the majority of city parks and trails are still open, only the children's playgrounds are closed.

I live close to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, which ordinarily is a good place to get out into nature and wouldn't be hard to follow social distancing rules. But it's owned and run by the University of Minnesota, and the Governor ordered the university closed. They won't even let you walk into the place anymore.

I also live in WA. Many parks (except playgrounds) are officially opened, but the parking lots are mostly closed. See [1] for:

> "Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office announced Thursday that the city will allow major parks to remain open through the weekend [...] Parking lots at larger parks will remain closed, and additional rules are in place for Green Lake, Seward Park, Alki Beach, and Golden Gardens such as no fire pits or picnics, no gatherings or beach activities, and loop trails remain open to pedestrian use only. You'll also notice new signage at Seattle parks about social distancing and the #KeepItMoving initiative. Seattle Parks and Recreation will also be deploying 60 new "Social Distancing Ambassadors" at major parks who will remind people to socially distance."

I've gone to some parks to walk my dog, and you have to park in the surrounding neighborhood instead of the big parking lot at the park, which puts additional strain on the community. It's kind of weird, but entirely legal and within the established rules.

The weather in Seattle is ridiculously nice right now. I'm going to go skateboarding this afternoon, somewhere that won't be filled with sand by self-righteous assholes.

[1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washin...

King county has closed all the county parks, which include the Burke gilman trail. Of course that hasn't stopped people.

My main method of exercise (surfing) was cut off due to rules & fines. Honestly after 2 months of this I feel like I am withering away.

I feel like if I get sick, the disease is going to take me out.

And yeah, it's absolutely ridiculous. Nobody who surfs ever wants any other person within 10ft of them. That's highly discouraged under even normal circumstances.

> My main method of exercise (surfing) was cut off due to rules & fines

Yeah, it's unfortunate because I had hoped to score some waves. But, after the stay at home/social distance order was issued along with schools closed, the beaches turned into July 4th weekend every day.

Surfers don't go near each other in the water, but they do meet on the shore, ride to the beach together, get other people grouping together on the beach watching them, etc. Not to mention if the authorities allow one activity people will believe their chosen activity should be allowed too, regardless of numbers.

If you can't forego something for a few months to save, potentially, thousands of lives then you are incredibly selfish.

Sorry, I don't buy it. None of the things you listed are a) required to surf or b) unique to surfing. Those activities are certainly violations of social distancing, so _cite them_. Surfing can absolutely be done while respecting social distancing.

This is like saying "people like to watch movies together, they like to drive to each others' houses to watch movies, therefore movies are banned". The pathological behaviors are only related to the banned activity in the loosest possible way.

EDIT: The fact that we're bikeshedding over whether a couple of surfers are less than 6 feet apart while there are wholesale parties, religious congregations, and non-essential businesses operating at normal capacity is mindblowing to me. How many outbreaks have been traced back to any sort of outdoor activity?

EDIT2: Also, 100% cite people that are in violation of distancing, and if an area has above a certain rate of violations over a time period, close it. Just... gather the data first.

I think the point of these hamfisted rules, intentionally or not, is to push responsibility for the spread of the virus onto the public and provide scapegoats to point to when it continues to spread. Or else people would start to blame lack of government preparation and action.

Where I live we have had more citations issued in the past two weeks than new virus cases, about three times more. At a certain point, it is not even the gov being heavy handed - unclear rules just take the shackles off petty authoritarian cops.

I think it has to with practicality of enforcement. With some common sense there is definitely some leeway with the social distancing rules. The thing is that rules need to be simple and we can't study all special cases. Also people will cut corners.

It's the bureaucratic, nanny-state version of bikeshedding. It might be the tiniest part of the problem, but at least we have some idea of how to deal with it, so deal with it we will!

Won't this clog drains and after few rainy days create permanent mud?

Control-freaks will use any excuse to act unreasonably by abusing their authority to control other people when no risk exists. It's usually people who lack control in their own lives, so they fail at MYOB and seek to impose their will on others.

I'm honestly so surprised to see stuff like this -- from a logistics standpoint.

It's so easy -- free even! -- to just not do anything.

But someone said, "We have to stop these skaters." And brainstormed ideas. And came up with "sand". And figured out how to acquire that much sand, and how to truck a literal ton of sand to the park.

I'm not disagreeing with what they did. I'm just surprised that someone considered the cost/benefit to be worth it. Even more surprising if this was a government action instead of a private skatepark owner -- surely this must be a private skatepark. How many committees would it take to figure out this whole sand thing?

Also worth noting the video says that a non-profit manages the skate park, but the city dumped sand on it without informing them of the plan.

going to be interesting to see if they ever reopen it or write it off because of the costs involved.

to be frank, this really borders on someone being an asshole, there are less destructive ways to eliminate use.

Sand is something I expect the road department to deal with in large quantities often. It was probably 2 hours from idea to done. Clean up may not take long either given normal road equipment fits

>I'm honestly so surprised to see stuff like this -- from a logistics standpoint.

Why? This is basic human behavior. There are people who get off on enforcing rules against eachother.

The kind of person with a bland indifference to rule enforcement beyond accomplishing the goals those rules are explicitly designed to accomplish isn't the kind of person interested in, or is hired to, enforce rules.

Anyone who still thinks this is about 'protecting' people from themselves is just deluding themselves. When there's footage of children being harassed and arrested by cops for selling lemonade in public or old folks being dragged off trains by groups of cops for not wearing a mask and talk from governments of allowing law enforcement to enter people's homes on suspicion of 'being sick' there's something seriously fucked up going on.

I don't give a shit how many people get sick from covid-19 at this point, I'm not going to accept living in some fucked up dictatorship because people are scared of dying.

People die all the time. I don't care, get over it. That's what life is, you live and then you die. Everyone living right now will die some day. Period. Living your life like a prisoner because some authority tells you you need to be scared of this is unacceptable to me and.in all honesty I would rather be dead then live in a world like that.

> Living your life like a prisoner because some authority tells you you need to be scared of this is unacceptable to me and.in all honesty I would rather be dead then live in a world like that.

Stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines are meant to be temporary until

1) treatments for Covid-19 are available

2) a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 is available

3) and/or immunity is widespread.

Your rhetorical posture makes sense if you live in a dictatorship and are confined from now on. However, if you live, say, in the US (which I do), such posturing and impatience seem counterproductive.

>Stay-at-home orders and social distancing guidelines are meant to be temporary until

It's funny how quickly the goalposts moved from "flattening the curve" to "vaccine or widespread immunity." Unless we move back to a "let everyone get sick at the fastest rate that doesn't overwhelm the hospital system" then I'm stuck inside based on lies, by a government that likes flexing it's muscle more than providing the liberty they're ostensibly be principled upon.

> It's funny how quickly the goalposts moved from "flattening the curve" to "vaccine or widespread immunity."

There has been no "goalposts moved".

Flattening the curve has been and continues to be effective to maintain hospital capacity. Period.

Social distancing and shelter-at-home prevent viral contagion. Eliminating social distancing and easing shelter-at-home restrictions may spike the infection rate, which would undo efforts to flatten the curve. Hospital capacity would diminish or possibly disappear.

Your objection about "goalposts moved" makes no sense in light of the basic logic that flattening the curve is ongoing until the virus can be nullified.

No, they were meant to exist only to avoid hospital overflow. The vast majority of hospitals haven't come close to overflow despite a strong belief by governments that they would even with social distancing, ergo, the predictions justifying the lockdowns are invalidated and it should be ending already.

It's funny to see a skate park so close to home. I play softball in a men's league across the way from it. This seems like a lazy solution that will be very hard to clean up after the fact though.

Crude, but effective.

I wouldn't be too concerned about cleaning it up afterwards - 90% can be dug out quite rapidly, the rest calls for half a dozen skaters with brooms or an industrial size vacuum cleaner. (Think: a trailer with a beefy diesel engine on it to power the suction pumps - I watched one clean out a drydock once. Never thought I'd find cleaning up a mess so fascinating.)

Can you tell if there is actually 37 tons of sand there? 37 tons seems like... well.. a ton of sand for lack of a better phrase. In the video it seems like there was only few inches over a moderately sized park. It doesn't seem like its really 37 tons. Maybe though it just doesn't show the whole park, or I'm just bad at estimating.

Sand weighs ~100 lbs per cubic ft.

37 tons = 74000 lbs or 740 cubic ft

3 inches of depth gets you 4 sq ft of coverage

740*4 gets you 2960 sq. feet.

The city says the park is 14,000 sq feet. [1]

In the video you can see they avoided spreading it in a lot of areas because they didn't have nearly enough!

Conclusion: Sand is heavy

[1] https://www.san-clemente.org/Home/Components/FacilityDirecto...

To put that in context: 1 cubic foot of flour is 37 lbs; of sugar, 50 lbs; of water, 62 lbs.

If you've ever tried to pick up a sack / large bucket of any of these things, it's like that but even denser. Compound that by the usual "volume varies as the cube of a side" thing, and this gets really heavy fast.

image search for one ton of sand, you'll see that it fits in a large bag.

one ton of sand is about a 2 foot cube, so 37 tons would be about 12 feet by 12 feet by 2 feet deep, they really only need to fill in the bottom part of the skate park to render it mostly useless.

The easiest way to estimate/visualize it is that the normal dump trucks you see on the road are 20 ton dump trucks. So at a maximum it's two dump truck loads, which doesn't go very far. In reality sand is pretty dense/heavy so it's even less than that.

Maybe, but it's a fast solutions. Social isolation is important enough to be imposed, like, now!

Skateboarding is de facto illegal. You can't stop kids from skating without making it physically impossible because they are already dismissing the law and its enforcement. Notice the sand has already been cleared in enough areas to start skating again.

To be scrupulously fair, while laws against (or de facto against) skateboarding aren't legitimate, this seems to be more about enforcing quarantine for coronavirus, so as long the people doing this clean it up when the quarantine ends, I don't think this particlularly unreasonable.

I look out over our skate park, and its buzzing since spring is arriving (Sweden, largest skate park).

37 tons is about one truckload? It will be mostly brushed away quickly when quarantine ends. Wish they did the same here, but the skate park is the least of our social distancing problems.

> 37 tons is about one truckload

Sand is 1.5-2 ton per cubic meter, it depends on how wet it is.

A decent truck can be loaded with about 10 cubic meters and it’s trailer a little more 10-15 cubic meters. Based off a DIY project, so someone may know better.

With sand axel weight is the limit not cubic volume.

37/2 = 18.5 tons which around the payload limit for a standard triaxle dump truck, So 2 truckloads.

This is the insanity of overreaction. Let's shut down all outdoor activities and force people to huddle in tightly enclosed spaces. Sounds like a great health policy! So draconian and unnecessary.

Florida's beaches are one step ahead of this.

Did they build skate parks on them because people kept going to the beach?

Sour grapes are the worse thing about this situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com