Okay, so now it's recording. All right, people popping in and popping out. One attendee. And there's attendee Bridget, do you want me to let her in? I was doing that now. Okay. Okay. With that part I can do some. I'm just glad we get to see who Amber Taylor is after getting I know. And all of my full partial remote learning at home with the kids glory. I just got an email from you today about the election thing. No, no, that wouldn't be me. That would have been somebody else. Oh, I thought it was you. Oh, no, there is. I think there's another Amber now up at town hall. So we're starting to populate. I'm trying to get the agenda to show up here. Okay, Henry, is this pretty much everybody you're expecting? Let me see. I'm on the trying to share the screen. So no longer know who's here. There's a couple more people, I think, but they should be able to join and I can let them in pretty easily. Okay, there's another attendee. All right.  Great. Thank you. Thank you. I get this. There we go. Hey, Julian, you're here. Hey, Henry. How's it going? Good. Bridget, are you on a phone or can you? No, this is my mom's computer. So it logs in weird. Okay. What's her name? My mom's name is Bridget. She's not in the meeting. I get it. Okay. Yeah, you got it. Because I'm sharing the screen, which I shouldn't do. I lost all the controls have disappeared. It should be there somewhere. If you hover your mouse around near the bottom. Also, if you hit escape so that you're not in full screen mode, then it's easier to see the controls. Well, I'm not in full screen mode. And I tried sharing. Can you guys see the agenda? Yeah, yes. Yeah, I've lost the agenda. And there we go. Okay, that's so weird. I'm going to get rid of the agenda. I have these things at the top, but it's. There's no, okay, being recorded. So, okay, there we go. I stopped the sharing. That's why I lost everything. Okay. So we have three attendees. I'm going to, oops, I just left. Sorry guys, I'll be there. Okay. We have three attendees who are Gina, remote to panelists. Marian, remote to panelists and Rana. Okay. There we go. So somebody else wants to keep track. Shoshana, maybe you can do that if there's more attendees that show up, promote them to panelists. Or Sarah, I don't know how to do that. Is there like some sort of thing I should be able to see on the screen that shows people show up or something? Maybe you're not co-host. Maybe you can't do, maybe I have to do it. All right, should we get started? I'm going to have to read an official thing first. Is Alan coming? I think so. Yeah, I believe he's here. He's here. I'm here. Oh, okay. Oh, great, okay. I thought she sent me the thing, maybe she didn't. Okay, so I can't read the official thing says, basically, pursuant to state law where I'm reading on Zoom and blah, blah, blah. So everyone knows how to do the Zoom things and everybody seems to be here. Oh, I will try sharing the agenda again. And then we'll get started. Did I see it? Yeah, is Becky here? I can't see everybody. Becky's not coming. So, Gordon, you're the second. Gordon's doing it. And there will be a transcript. The meeting's being recorded. So it'll be a transcript that might help you. I'll try to get you that link as soon as it happens. Well, welcome, everybody. How are you all? Invigorated by a great tree planning on Saturday. How's that? Boy, you said the right thing. Yeah. Anybody else? I second. Does everyone know Reina? Is that the plan thing and was that a meeting in person the year or so ago? Maybe you want to introduce yourself briefly before we go on? Hello, everybody. My name is Serana and I'm happy to be able to join you via Zoom. And I'm a longtime resident of Amherst. Many, many years ago, I went back to the tree store training. And I wanted to join this community for a long time. My work commitment is not allowed to make it in time, but luckily it's already. We're glad you're here now and we appreciated your help on Saturday. Yeah. And I think everybody knows everyone else. So all of your names on your probably be good if you showed your names on your Henry, can I add that a lot of people saw us on Saturday and then I was planting all that sod on Sundays till a lot more to do. But people came by, they they were just really pleased to have seen us and they asked questions about the shade tree and I have a very picky neighbor who told me, gosh, this is going to really help the neighborhood. But we were very pleased and talked about how much they saw of us and of the trees on the streets, got lots of good press for the for the group. Thank you. All right. So let's get into the agenda, which I can't see even though you guys can see. It's weird that you can't see it. Yeah, I don't know how to see it. All right. Whatever. What's next on the agenda? Someone else can read it to me. Announcements and public comments. Although that did we just do that? Actually, we sort of did that. All right. And then there's hearings. There's no hearings today on other no hearings that I'm aware of. OK. All right. And then there's approval of September minutes. Volunteer hours. OK. So we count hours as you don't know. And we record them for our Tree City USA application. So if we have lots of volunteer hours, that helps. But you guys want to give me your hours while we're here. Shauna, let's say six hours. OK. Sarah. For Julian. Six. Gordon. Just three for me. Gina. No, you did. So four hours for the meeting and for the planting of the other work you did. Right. So three at the planting, one for the meeting. OK. Marion. So three for planting another planting. But I wasn't included before. No, I didn't. OK. Rana. Sorry, I called you Rana before Rana. OK. I think I was there for two and a half hours for the planting. And I don't know how long is this meeting. OK. And Bennett. Seven. OK. And then I'll have to figure out my hours. It'll probably be about 12. OK. Oh, yeah. And our one would be three. Right. I always I've never counted Arwin's hours, actually. Right. OK. And then is everyone read the minutes? So there are any corrections to the minutes from September? Raise your hand if you read the minutes. I don't think I got the minutes. They went out to everyone in an email, at least all the official members. I try to send it to everybody. I'm feeling like I didn't. I don't know. Was it it's like so long ago that I read it and then I forgot about it. That I read it and could be. Because I did read it's like a while ago, like a long time ago. I think you did send them out like a week and a half ago or something. It definitely made me wonder if the meeting was coming up quicker than I thought. Yeah, I thought the meeting was like last Wednesday for some reason. And then I tried to log in and it was like, no, this meeting isn't happening right now. Hey, so anybody have comments about the minutes or should we approve them or should we go back to the drawing board and you guys should read them again and approve them at the next meeting? I know I've read whatever you sent and I didn't have any problems with it. So I'll assume that I'm just having pandemic time stretching this. Want to just revisit the question at the end of the meeting. Maybe we can scan it in the meantime. I don't want people taking time out of the meeting to read them. And the idea is if we read the minutes, get corrections before the meeting and then we can just rubber snap it and it doesn't take a lot of agenda time. That's my goal. So let's postpone it for now. And next month, let's try to get September and October minutes already ahead of time and we get here. You know that we're ready to approve. Sound good? Sounds great. Sounds good. OK, I'm going to stop sharing because I can't do the other controls. So I can look at that separately. So is anybody nobody's in the attendee list? So that's good. But now I can see the minutes. OK, so committee reports, the chairs report in the tree water and the treasurer. And I have a few things for you. After I left the planting, I drove down to Glendale Street, where this guy really wants us to plant trees in front of his son's new house. And I looked at that and I met his neighbor. The son's new neighbor and they want trees also. And I thought there's a few other spots and I thought maybe Glendale Road, the part closest to 116 would be a nice location for a spring. We can talk about that when we talk about second Saturday plantings. I've been in contact with somebody from the Brook who contacted Alan. And then I spoke to a few people at the Brook. I went down there. That's one of the apartment complexes off of East Hadley Road that we talked about trying to get trees in and their private roads. So I'm a little confused as to how to move on with that. You can talk about that a little later. I also put a call on to the boulders, but did not hear back from them. And I have a low battery, so I'm going to go charge, plug in my computer. The only other thing I have is I went up to the nursery, the future nursery with Marion, and we looked at the land. Marion, do you want to talk about that while I get my power cord? Oh, OK. Yeah. So there are various options in a field that I have that's not being used for anything but somebody's growing tomatoes there. But it's the rest of it has ample space. It's somewhat wet in the spring in the late spring. It still isn't that that dry. But I think, you know, it does dry out in the course of the spring. And a lot of trees are growing fine there. So I think I'd love to have it happen there. If you want to have it happen there, I think it'll be great. I just have to add that. Can you hear me now? You can. OK. A little later, I was it was really pouring rain when we were done. And a little later, I was inside and suddenly my dog got absolutely intensely excited and was trying to climb up the French door to go outside. And I looked at and there was a moose walking through the field. So that was my big excitement for today of a teenage moose. But pretty big. Just the same, pretty big. And then I was going to get my camera, which was upstairs and I missed it, couldn't get back in time. What part of town are you in? This is Amherst, North Amherst, on Mark Hill Road. Yeah, so it's right on the edge of the woods that goes down to the yeah, so there's a lot of stuff happening down there that we never see. Occasionally, somebody comes up that might be a bear. It's usually turkeys here at night. You know, it's very, very well-traveled. Well, I'm mad because I haven't seen a moose in 13 years of living here. Oh, I don't want to hear about your moose stories. Aren't you celebrating with me? Come on. You're right, I'm celebrating with you. You don't have to believe me because there's no picture to prove it. But it was really a good thing that you're seeing moose because if we plant trees here, the moose will. It's all trees. Well, I've never seen a moose or since, so I think that there. They do wander quite widely, I believe. Yeah, yeah. It could have just been passed through. There will have to be some fencing around them, though, because the deer are browsing. But, you know, maybe we can find people with old fencing just need more stakes. So there's some money involved, unless you had stakes. I have a mole of fence if you want it. Oh, yeah? Okay. Does anybody have stakes that are at least four feet tall? I might actually. My parents recently put a fence around an area for their dogs that's like real chain link fence. And I think they have like some extra actual fence and some extra poles. I'm not sure how much I can, I can find out. Chain length, this is.  I don't know if I could handle that. That's all. Okay. Well, we could use the poles if you didn't want the chain link. Yeah, I won't say no. Maybe in my neighborhood association, I could put post something about stakes and fencing needed. Marion, there's also this website. I'm on it. It's called buy nothing Amherst. That one, people are giving things away, but I've also seen people write in search of. Yeah, I'm on that group.  Yeah, I just got rid of something I wish I hadn't. I'm like, if you're re-gifting it, remember me. I want to ask Alan a question. Do you think the fact that the field is pretty wet, will that be a problem for the nursery? It will be if we want to dig the trees in the springtime, we can't, it's too wet to dig. I mean, that's usually when we're going to be digging them is in the springtime. Like what, how early? Preferably before they leaf out. Yeah, so. Well, I think maybe we can put them in that, not in the place that was too wet. I think that'd be possible. A lot of trees are happily growing there. You know, it's up and planted a lot of trees and they're very happy. It'd be nice for not having to water them a lot. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That was one question that came up. If I were to go away, since I'm just here and there's no strong man anymore to help me do that kind of thing, could I call on members of the committee to come up and water if I go away? Was that something that people could see doing? I mean, I only go away, you know, once or twice a summer for a week. I'd come up. Yeah, I could too, in the two-four. I'll send out an email and I have to get more hose. I have quite a few hundred feet of hose, but it's nice to have something that's already just in place. So I could try for that on the by nothing site. I have 25 feet of old hose that I don't need anymore if you want. I just, it has to be pretty sturdy hose, that's all. It has a leak. I don't want it. Okay. High hose too. What? You, the committee can buy high hose too. If the site's not going to work because we can't dig the trees in the spring. So you have dryer spots that you didn't show me today. Well, I don't, I'd have to go inspect it. When are you going to plan them soon? We're hoping to do a November work day to get the trees started. Yeah, I think you should trust that it will be possible and good. I really do. I'm not just saying it. Okay. I wouldn't, I wouldn't worry. And I'll, I'll talk to my tomato growing person and see what he thinks. Okay. So should we plan that? Alan? Okay. Yeah. Are we going to do that as our second Saturday planting experience? Well, that's an idea. November, yeah. Unless we want to go a week earlier because it's Saturday to get cold in November. It does. Well, we haven't ordered the trees yet. So we have to see if they're available and bear root and can get them. Okay. Do you want me to call Amherst Nursery to do that or are you going to do that? I can talk to John. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I'd say let's move ahead and maybe just hold off on the date, figure second Saturday for now and see if we can get the trees in time. Sound good? Mm-hmm. Okay. All right. Next on the agenda is a tree warden's report. They're going to be hopefully closing West Palmaroy for a waterline project this week. So we hope to get on there with the tree crew walls closed and do the crown lifting and removal of dead trees while the road is closed. It's a very narrow, very fast road that is very difficult to work on when it's open to the general public. So let's start that on Thursday, hopefully. We've got four more trees going on East Hadley Road, well, closer towards the Hadley line, four Linden trees going in there. So that's helped to continue that planting we did. We were able to get some funds to rent a crane from Northeast Crane, Northeast Tree Service.  So without doing any damage to the cemetery, that was a big help and big time saver for us. Let's see, obviously the big event this past week was the storm, the windstorm, which lasted all of five minutes and caused extensive damage, mostly in North Amherst, Central and North Amherst. We had three town trees that actually failed. There were probably, you know, seven significant trees that failed around town and that closed roads, you know, for more than 12 hours. Some of those roads, excuse me, that closed roads for upwards of 12 hours. And then there was another five, three roads that stayed closed for, you know, over 12 hours, almost 24 hours, because every source and the cable and Verizon weren't able to get their lines out of the road. So the road stayed closed due to that, not because we couldn't get the tree damage taken care of, but the fact that the trees were wrapped up in their infrastructure or the infrastructure was still physically in the road and nobody could touch it. So we'll be probably spending some time this week cleaning up a few of those areas, now the wires are out of the way and going around and cleaning up odds and ends that people have called in since the storm and need to be taken care of. Other than that, DPW is updating its web page, including the Trees and Grounds web page, which really hasn't been updated probably for eight years, seven years maybe. So we'll be going through that process of getting rid of old links and updating it and trying to make it more functional for users. That's pretty much it. Do you want some help with the planting on East Hadley Road? I think we'll do it. I have some time with my staff to do it and it's four trees, we should be able to get it done. But thank you. Anybody have questions for Alan? All right, Sarah, our new treasurer, do you want to check on the balance on that stuff? I have a question. I'll go ahead, Julie. Sorry, how's Nani doing? She hasn't been in our meeting recently. Yeah, I saw her, we went on like a little tree adventure and we had fun. And then she, a couple of days ago, dropped off all the stuff that she had for the tree committee, like some cards and stationery and envelopes and stuff with the tree committee's information on it. Then I guess it should go to the next treasurer, perhaps. So is she no longer a member of the committee? Yeah, her term limit came up. Oh, okay. Thanks for updating me. That's a good transition. I need treasurer orientation so that I know how to do that job. I would suggest you call Nani, but she didn't really do all that much. So I think the basic thing is once a month, you just check the balance by calling town hall. And if there's less or more money, try to figure out where the money came from. And then you have to sign off when we do purchases as a form that the chair and the treasurer both sign. And then maybe it's holding on to the stationery, which is mostly cards we send out as thank yous for gifts and things like that. Sure. So I didn't call town hall because I didn't understand it was that simple as making a phone call. And I will update you next month. Yeah, the person you want to talk to is Holly. Okay. Henry, we need to, unless you already sent it and I don't remember getting it, we need that form for the t-shirts to purchase the t-shirts. I thought we signed the form a while ago and I gave it to you. I don't remember getting it. That doesn't mean you didn't give it to me, but how longer would that have been? I don't remember. Quite a few months, I remember. When we voted on it, it was quite a while ago. Okay, so then I have it. And then I'll do it. Do you have the one for the placards? I have a request for the t-shirts. We have the quote for the t-shirts. I haven't gotten anything for the placards yet. But you have a form for the placards. Oh, I don't know. You, the Shady Committee has the forms. No, I know. I filled out a form for both of those things, gotten on a signature and gave them to you quite a while ago. Okay, then I guess I had to look through my records and see because I don't remember getting them. So I apologize. If not, I have more forms. I can sign them and then get them over to Sarah to sign. Okay. But you got the request for the t-shirts already? I have the quote. The vendor is currently the town vendor. So that makes that simplified process. And I just need the form. Yeah, let me know right away if you can't find it. I'll give you a form over to Sarah. I'll check tomorrow for it. Okay. Great. So then next is second Saturdays. We did good considering we started late, but we had two good plantings this year. And I'm looking forward to doing the new nursery. And then, you know, figure out locations for 2021. We have a few that are that we thought about that we haven't got to. And then I'm suggesting Glendale Road and possibly if we can do something at the Brook and the Boulders. Alan, I'm not sure how, since the Brook and Boulders are private roads, I'm not sure how we go about that. I know we did plant in Colonial Village, which is also private. The trees that we used at Colonial Village were donated trees. From Hanley Garden Center. That's why it's kind of an odd mixture of trees. So what I would recommend is, you know, if they're interested in doing something that the association, the condo association or whatever it is would purchase the trees and the committee can provide the labor, which is actually, you know, as one of the biggest costs of planting trees is actually the labor. It's not the tree. So that would work in favor and it would be a partnership and it would show that they're invested in the trees and making sure they live. Yeah, I spoke to them and, you know, there's a few people who live there. One is a tenant, the others are owners, but only the owners have a say on the board. But they were not sure the board would agree or have the money to afford the trees. So I told them we would provide the labor. They said exactly that. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, they would have to come up with the money for the trees or the tenant or the committee would need to find some, somebody donate the money because I can't use town funds to plant on private properties like that. You know, for getting trees and have the garden center this year? No, I don't think we are. Or from whatever it's called now, gardener supply. They have not reached out to us. That might be something one of us could do is reach out to them and say, hey, you guys used to donate trees that you couldn't sell at the end of the year. Are you still interested in doing that? I could do that. Okay. So I don't know who's in charge at, you know, garden supply, but you had the garden center did donate trees. So. Okay. Has Wanzik ever donated? What's that? Has Wanzik nurseries ever donated? Not that I'm aware of. They grow them, most of their trees. So how the garden center buys theirs in and they have no place to really overwinter them. So they want to get rid of them. Well, we could check with Dan Zomek who he used to work at Hedley Garden Center. Now he's at Wanzik. That's well, that was the connection I was making. Yeah, I think that, let me take it as I know Dan, I will reach out to him and see what he can do anything. Great. Thanks. And then we can use those trees to things like this where it's on private property. Yep. Sorry, what was Dan saying? Dan. His last name is Z-I-O-M-E-K. Sorry. Z-I-O-M-E-K. Oh. Zomek. Zomek. Yep. It's all over town. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Yeah. I think he's also the bird called guy, right? Yep. Yep. Okay. Well, that's good. Anyone have other ideas for locations for next year's plantings? I will say, I don't have a specific recommendation, but I will say that generally speaking, I asked a lot of people to come plant on Lincoln. None of them came. About half of them said, why would I go plant trees on Lincoln? No offense, Gina. It's just a street that's known for, it's a very leafy, nice street. It would have been easier for me to, I think, get people to go to, and I didn't do this in the previous planning, but I think if I had, people would have been, it would have been easier to get people to go to a place where you're like, I, you know, it's not as, not the leafy, shady streets, lots more, you know, just kind of construction going on, lots of apartment buildings. That would have been the easier sell, I think. So my vote is for, it's just places that are often overlooked, I would say. One place that jumped out at me is in our neighborhood up here, that's the intersection of Pine and North Pleasant.  I don't know, Henry, if you know what I'm talking about, by the Korean restaurant. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that area is scheduled for redesign on the immediate corner. So not a good time to plant, you know, directly in that area. Why is that?  Oh, okay. That's not a big problem. We wait till they plant, till they tear it up, and then it gets delayed, and then we find the plant, and then they do something different, you know. Yeah. It's a bit of a challenge. I'm kind of a, you know, pollinator tree plant. I have a passion in that zone, and I wanted to know what kind of trees in the pollinator line could be introduced into the new collection of trees will make available. Linden and basswood are good pollinator trees. They have to meet certain specs that make them not too delicate. Yeah, you want to show you that is, you know, resist hardy, drought tolerant, can grow in compacted gravelly soils, and salt tolerant, salt spray tolerant. Yeah. So is it, I just want to check and see if I really know this that you are thinking about pollinator plants when you plant trees.  I do take it into consideration somewhat. I mean, most of my consideration is based on survivability and not, you know, conflicting with the surrounding infrastructure. So something that can grow in the available root zone, something that can grow without having to be, you know, constantly pruned severely to avoid wires, buildings, roads, signs, street lights, pedestrians. So if I don't want to be annoying, but I just want to be sure that, I mean, if I have an idea, would you sort of give an opinion on it? I don't. I mean, if you suggested a species that were very beneficial to pollinators, I would definitely add those species if they're not already in my mix, then I could, you know, if they're growing conditions, meet the site conditions, then I could definitely site them. Okay. Thanks. Yeah, I mean, we do think about that. And, you know, most of the trees are actually beneficial to different pollinators. Some have more species of pollinators that are suitable for, but others provide pollination for, you know, rarer, rarer, like for instance, you could plant oaks, which have a lot of pollinating habitat, but that wouldn't help say the rosy maple moth. You need a maple for that. So the diversity of planting and the other considerations, we generally plant native trees as much as we can. Yep. It's also important. So we're thinking about that, but in broader terms. Okay. Well, yeah, anyone on the committee could definitely suggest, you know, the favorite tree or the most pollinated, friendly tree or whatever, to add honor to the committee and we'll definitely consider it. Okay. And in terms of locations, Bennett, and others, you know, drive around town and see a location that looks pretty sparse that you think would attract your friends to help plant, you know, that you would like to plant in, and we could do that. A recommendation would help from me. Like, you're right. Just go and find a place that seems suitable, yeah. Yeah. Any other comments about second Saturday plantings? All right, let's move over to the ordinance. I'm sorry, I do. Henry, are we going to do planting? Well, we'll find out from you if we're going to plant in November at Marion's for the nursery. We'll find out later. And I know you all had to check to see if the trees were even going to be available. Mm-hmm. Yeah, let's put it on our calendar and then, you know, we can count on it. There's the time. Yeah. I had one other thought on that subject, which is it might be easiest to protect them from deer if we plant them in groups in the most favorable places and like five, you could fence in five, not here and five there. Does that be too strange or could you see that? Because the deer are as much of a problem as the... They'll be fairly close together anyways, because they're only going to be in the ground for years. Right, right. So we could do that. I mean, I think the need for fencing is more of a threat than a water problem because the deer are very, very excited about the young trees. But all my... Since Alan told me about the six-foot radius and, you know, it worked like a charm, but I didn't know about that before and I lost two chestnut trees, not because of... That's actually, yeah, someone moved them down. What's the six-foot radius thing? Oh, fencing. Oh, fencing, okay. I know it's three all around, so six-foot total. A diameter. Okay, should we move on? Sarah, placards. I went and visited the extra trees to increase the number of placards and I can turn those around. I have to put the data into iTree to get all the numbers to plug in for the flyer, but the ones that are done are done and I believe we approved them. So once they're printed, Shoshana and I can coordinate time to go put them up. Okay, so right now I have eight final ones. Yep, and I've got a couple others that I went out and measured and I did and I just need to put it into iTree to add to the bunch. Okay, so I'll wait for that and then I'll make sure Alan has the form filled out from us and then I'll go order them at Amherst Copy, which is a vendor, so that's good. Great, I will, I'll get into you by the end of this week so that we can get those up. Excellent, great. Anything else about the placards? Okay, actually what was next on the agenda and got mixed up is the ordinance, which is also Sarah's ballywig, so go ahead. Yeah, so I got comments from a couple of you and there's still time if anyone wants to read it and send in any comments. I think the biggest thing, which a number of people brought up is just to clarify issues around approved removals and what the replacement or payout is gonna be for that versus an additional payout or replacement required for not approved removals. So I think we're just gonna have to revisit that language to make sure it's really explicit and clear in the document itself. If anyone has other ideas or specific wording or some concerns they wanna bring up around that topic and more specifically, we could talk about it. Yeah, it didn't even occur to me when I was reading it that there should be a difference between the fee and the fine, essentially, depending on how you cut down the tree. Yeah, I think that language is actually a really good way to kind of specify those two different actions. And so that's what we're, I think that's the thing to work out. Anybody else have anything they want to share about that or we could open up to any other specific ideas and questions? I had one general question about the requirement for a plan, site plan. I was wondering if somebody wants to remove a big tree on their property, I thought the wording was such that they would be required to have some kind of site plan. And would they need a plan just for removal or is the ordinance really just for like construction and projects that have plans? That's a good question. I don't think it was written to imply that you needed a removals plan just to take down trees. I think it's just approval. And that seems to make sense to me, obviously, if they would have a significant construction plan where they're going through like the zoning or the planning board, then they're going to have a selective removals plan and that'll be something separate from this. I don't know, what do you guys think? I don't want to make, and this is to one of the points that Bennett raised when he sent in his comments was, we don't want to make this too difficult so that there's a lot of pushback in getting it passed and also just as residents and amherst and property owners, home owners, we don't want to make this too much red tape, too difficult for people to do. It's really supposed to protect the trees. It's not supposed to be more unnecessary legislation. So what do you guys think about that point of having a plan or flagging or a way to have a specific demarcated approval? Any ideas or opinions? If the idea is that you don't have to have a plan for a removal, I just wonder if it's slight wording in that section or approval of the tree warden or something like that, I think of minor, or maybe I'm the only one who had that confusion, I don't know, but it seems like a small change in the language where just some kind of approval is mentioned in a non-dependent clause on the plan part. Might do it. I think I remember this cropping up before too, that we didn't want to have too much put on Allen's shoulders. I think that's probably where that originated. There should be a tree preservation plan. Once someone, there's going to be some kind of application or notification and there's going to be a review process that's just going to be myself reviewing is this part of a larger project where they're already going in front of the planning board and they're already holding a scenic road hearing. And we've been talking about individual trees that haven't triggered multiple other things that will already be triggered in the town, whether it's a curb cut permitting process or someone has a sewer line they need to replace, they're putting an addition on the house. It's an historical district. Whatever gets created has to be merged into the larger kind of permitting process the town has. And to make it so it's not overly burdensome on the applicant. Is that something the ordinance that we're writing should say? Or is that something that? I think it should be discussed in the order and somewhere in there that, you know, this is part of the process because it's already very confusing if you're a property owner and you want to do a project or your developer or your construction worker and you're trying to get a dig up a utility somewhere. You know, there's essentially two avenues to go through. One is through DPW, one is through planning and they try to end up at the same place but they trigger different things. So we're adding another layer to trigger, you know, outside of Chapter 87 tree hearings and things like that. And I did have other, you know, thoughts I want the committee to think about the, you know, limiting the size of this to, you know, the downtown area that either the bed area or maybe some of the historic areas in town and starting small and seeing how it works and then expanding out from there in the future if it's needed and the committee is gonna need to work on a very professional and detailed presentation that's going to need to be given to a lot of different people and boards so that everybody can understand why we need this in town. So we need a really, you know, professional looking, especially PowerPoint presentation with talking points and with the data that shows why this is needed so that it can move forward. I think that's a great point, Alan and I'm happy to head up that presentation. I could certainly use some help if anyone wants to just be like a sounding board or a partner, someone I can bounce ideas off of. It's always helpful just to have a second pair of eyes on something that's gonna be public, like a presentation but I'm happy to get that started. And- With the presentation, I'm happy to help. Great, thanks, Bennett. And I think that Alan, your other suggestion to limit it to the bid district and focus on the downtown and kind of run that and see how it goes is a good idea. Anybody else? Yeah, I'll help with the presentation also. I'm thinking I'd rather not limit it to the downtown but make the size of the trees really large so that it would be fewer trees and to be really a more clear reason, like the tree on Southeast Street. That was a huge tree. So people can really look at that and say, wow, that's really special, it's worth saving, that kind of thing. So that was the initial intention when this was written was to identify two distinct areas and I don't think it came through in this but the first area is extending the, it's not an extension of the right-of-way zone but it's creating a secondary right-of-way zone along the road sides. So in that zone, and we could call it 20 feet but I think there was reference to some case studies that Ryan and AJ did to kind of figure that out and it's not clear but the initial intention was to have a zone that's like 20 feet from the right-of-way and in that zone along all public ways the DBH would be smaller because having street trees are beneficial for all these reasons and in some areas where we don't have room for street trees, we would have a smaller definition of what's significant on private property in an effort to create more of a street tree kind of street. Second area is anywhere that's on any private property than it would be quite a large DBH. So that was the initial intention and I don't think it's particularly clear in reading this, so we could definitely clarify that point or we could just make it more simple and not do any sort of right-of-way, extended right-of-way planting and just have this like, Henry, like you were saying, a larger DBH all private property and just keep it at that for now, addendums possible but what do you guys think in terms of clarity should we try to divide it into those separate zones or? Well, is the street tree zone already covered by another thing, like, because that's already a thing, like we have to have our like meetings about the ones that are on the side of the road. So I feel like it's possible that that's already taken care of but maybe it needs said again in this one just so that it's clear the difference between, you know, our street trees and people's backyard trees. Yeah, so. And 20 inches seems big to me, I don't know. This is in the section three, definition of a significant tree. Trees within a 20 foot offset from the right-of-way. So what we currently have tree hearings about are trees that are in the right-of-way and this is meant to like expand upon that, expand 20 feet upon what we currently have under jurisdiction. And then the second line item, is only if they are farther than 20 feet from the public right-of-way, then it is increased to 20 inches. I think, you know, and admittedly, I haven't read the document, sorry, but would you have some kind of table in there? Because, okay, I'm thinking the right-of-way and I know Alan explained it to me, then I have to add 20 feet onto that and then we've got the 20 inches. If it's in this spot or in this spot, I don't know, some kind of table where you could say, with the definition and these are these sizes or something like that, because at least my listening to you all now, I'm trying to envision it and I can't. Or maybe like a sample map. Yeah, a cross-section. Here's your road. But maybe to kind of Henry's suggestion, do we want to even try to do that two different, DBH trigger sizes in two separate areas? Or do we want to just go with the simpler, larger DBH? It seemed like keeping it simple would be a big plus. But I don't know what the other ramifications are. Are there any things like, I mean, if the town is, I guess when we're reading this, one thing that came up to my mind a lot was damage to trees and damaged trees. If a tree is damaged and somebody needs to take it down, is that, do they have to go through this whole process? Or if the tree is damaged, might they point to the town and say, hey, I couldn't touch this tree because it's a significant tree. Therefore, hey, town of Amherst, it's your liability. The fact that the tree fell in my house or whatever it is. So I don't know if those are significant concerns or not, but maybe those are already addressed elsewhere. So that, I mean, that's certainly something that I was thinking about in terms of liability. We don't want anyone to not do their due diligence of assessing tree health and protecting their personal property and then blame the town. Nani was originally helping me with this and she was quite adamant that all other avenues be explored as options before tree removal was granted like any sort of tree pruning or maintenance or anything else that could be done to prolong the life of a significant tree as opposed to just, oh, it's losing branches so we need to cut it down. So that is a little bit reflected in the attempt to try to preserve trees if at all possible. But it says clearly that if it's sick, it can come down without repercussion. Right, so I mean, we didn't, I wanted to make sure that people weren't going to try to blame the town and obviously trees have a lifespan just like everything else and it's a much longer lifespan than we're used to thinking about, but eventually they do get sick or die or reach the end of their life and need to be managed, especially in an urban context. So I don't know if you think there needs to be more kind of non disclaimer legal information about that. I imagine before it goes to be voted on by town or whatever, it'll probably have to go to the town lawyer, right, to get looked over. Yes. That's great. Cause I could certainly use help with that sort of legal language. So tell me what you all think, I'm sorry about background noise. I like the idea of having it where in some districts, like downtown or historical districts, we could have a certain DBH and then a different one for outside of those districts and for the rest of the town, like what Henry was saying. Maybe set one at 15 inches in historical districts or the downtown and then outside of those districts, it could be 2025. So, Julie, and I'm not sure if you had a chance to read it, we don't currently have it broken out by zoning and we did that kind of on purpose just so that this isn't tied to zoning regulations and lives a little bit separately from that. The attempt was made to try to do right close to the street, all the private area and the DBH minimum requirements were determined based on prior study. So what other towns in particular North Hampton have done so that we could use them as an example, similar towns, similar place in the world ecosystems. Yeah, I haven't read it, I'm sorry. No, that's okay. So that is something that we talked about. And if that's something that other people want to see added, but even more specific requirements, I think in the end we determined like with what Ryan and AJ were doing for their class requirements, they decided to not go with tying it to the zoning, but that's certainly something we could explore if we want to research that further. Yeah, thank you. Henry, you're muted. I was just saying, oh, I'm muted, as you said. These are good questions and we need to make decisions about them. So let's just maybe do a show of hands right now who favors the simpler one and who favors the separate, but who favors the area near the road close to the right-of-way to add that as a separate section. Raise your hand if you support that. The difference between near the road and people's backyards. Right, and that's how it is currently broken out. So support keeping that and clarifying it or simplifying it to just the larger DBH everywhere, I think, is that what you're getting at, Henry? Yeah, okay. So all in favor of having the area along the road protected, raise your hand. Definitely. We can't have people chopping down our trees that we just planted. Only bristle, every time I look at this, I bristle at the significant trees or six inches in diameter by height.  Like when I think of significant trees, I think of, you know, ancient towering oaks and that sort of stuff. And that could just be my, you know, like I'm, this is, that one I don't, it seems like a hard one to enforce. What if we called it the street tree and or street and significant tree ordinance? So it differentiates between right in the title of like these street trees are protected extra and the big guy in the backyard somewhere is also protected. Well, I think the six-inch is too restrictive also, but Bennett, trees don't grow as big here as they do in Louisiana. But yeah, I would say maybe 16 or 18 inches for trees near the road and 30 or 36 inches for trees in your backyard. I mean, I would make it pretty high. So it's not that many trees come under the thing. And those feel more significant to me for sure.  So, you know, I don't know how far a field we are kind of norms. I just don't know. Shouldn't we be consistent with our ordinance that we already have with our street trees, right? Like, because we already have like our parameters that we did like a couple of years ago about the DBH and when that kicks in. The public shade tree, you know, La Massachusetts brings in a lot of trees because it's, you know, anything from, you know, well, I think in our ordinance, for reimbursement's sake, we said six inches, I think, for any kind of removal and reimbursement. But this is, you know, the title of this ordinance that we started out with, I think is a significant tree ordinance. So we're trying to capture those trees, which are large. You need to find what a large tree is, a significant tree is. We keep trying to bring in more and take more oversight. We need to stick to significant trees and pick a size. So we could look at Northampton. We could look at Springfield, you know, other communities that have significant tree ordinances and those are what will get trigger the ordinance. The Northamptons is 20 inches in diameter. I think Springfield's around there somewhere too. And that's where the 20 inches came from. Does Northampton have the setback separate? No. Okay. Not that I, no, not under this document that I've reviewed. I don't know if they have some, if they broke it out separately into like two separate documents, because I didn't review their street tree, just the significant tree ordinance. It seems like we following other towns would be important. If people feel like we're going out on a limb in any way, it seems like we'd get more of a pushback. That's a very wrong analogy. Yes.  It was given to us by the UMass students. And I, in the first round of edits, I specifically asked them to use a lot of references and references that would be appropriate for Amherst. So things that are local, sounds of the towns of a similar size and similar geographic location. So there is a list of references and an appendix of the draft, which I haven't read all of them. But I did specifically ask them when they were drafting this for Amherst to be a workable document that we needed to use a lot of references and basically not to propose anything that was too controversial or experimental, even if it was based in good research, you know, like scientific studies or something that's important, but that also it has to be based on similar legislation. So I asked, I put in that request in the initial drafting of this, but I didn't draft it myself. So I'm not sure how closely that has been followed. And there's not specific references in the, that specific definition of a significant tree section. There are references to the other data in other parts, but not in that specific part. So we could include more references there too. Substantiator claims. Well, how should we proceed? I mean, I'd be happy to sit down, Sarah, and talk with you about it and work through those details and come up with a new draft to present to the committee or the committee can make a decision now. I mean, I definitely think it needs some editing. I'm happy to go through and do incorporate the edits everyone has sent in so far and the concerns we raised this evening, and then I can send out another draft. It would be really helpful, I think, to this effort if we did kind of a crowdsource editing, like if everyone took time to really read through this and get in there and do a hard edit with adding specific languages anywhere that it seems unclear, whatever other information you feel is necessary to really make this a well-researched and thoughtful document before we bring it to anyone else in the town. So I'm happy to do the next round of edits, but then I really think getting in there and just being very detailed and specific in reading through and commenting and editing, even to the choice of wording and all of that stuff that's kind of been brought up, but really just to crowdsource it to our entire committee would be helpful, I think, in making this the best it could be. One thing I found when reading it was that it was hard to come up with, like I came up with a lot of questions, but they're complicated answers, so I didn't feel right just like putting in, you know, Googling it and then sticking in my answer. Like it seemed like they all needed discussion. Yeah, and just because we meet so infrequently, that's what I was kind of hoping to address with crowdsourcing it, if it's a Google Doc and everyone can kind of answer. Ask questions, answer questions, respond in more of a real time, as opposed to we wait a month and then everyone forgets what we're talking about. That sounds good so we can put it in comments back. So if I'm happy to do like the next round of edits incorporating everything so far, but I think if we did more of a natural crowdsource edit question, answer and let it develop a little bit, with more eyes on it would hopefully get to get to some of those answers in a way that's more efficient. That sounds good. Yeah, Sarah, thanks. I have a question. I'm used to working with SharePoint like for work. So when you say crowdsourcing, is that you're putting it on some share drive and we all go in and you can see who's working on it at the same time. How does this work? I would just put it on a Google Doc and share it with everyone. Yeah. So we would be able to see Gina that you're in the document. When I'm in the document and I can see that you're make, I can see your edits as if I'm kind of looking at, as if it were. All right, so it's the same. I just haven't used it through Google. Okay. Yeah, it's just, it's on the internet so you don't have to have a specific software or anything. Okay, I would be happy once, you know, like you have a lot of things and I would be happy. You probably need at some point, some people sit with you and just like go through it. You know, like, yes, no, not permanent. You know, just boom, boom, boom.  So if you do decide at some point that you want some people just to be with you while you're going through all these comments, deciding which one's valid or whatever, I'd be happy to sit with you and maybe I'll just be cheering you on. But happy, happy to be there. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. Great, so Sarah, why don't you get it out to us the edits from today and that you've received so far. And everyone really, it's like reading the minutes ahead of time. I know I've said this before, but people don't generally do stuff like that. So let's really support Sarah in this and support the note-taker and thing by reading the minutes so we can get all that stuff done timely. Yes? Thumbs up? That sounds good. I think we'll send out the next draft and I would encourage everyone to ask questions, Gordon, to your point. I think even if all you have are questions, just putting them in will help us figure out where we need to cite references or something like that. Just if any of us have questions, other people will have the same questions and probably things we haven't even thought of. So any sort of comments or questions, even if it's not the answer or you don't know the answer, would just be really helpful because then we can start to kind of plug the holes in to make this a really well researched and meaningful document. So I'll send this out. And then anytime you get to it during this time before next meeting would be great. I would love everyone's continued feedback. So thanks for everything so far. Oh, did you get my comments? I don't know if it sounds like maybe you didn't. I did, I did. Okay, good. There was one thing that came to mind which was that it seems to me the conservation, I was worried about another committee staking the claim on private property. And it sounds like the conservation committee already does this. And I was just wondering, is that, and I don't know if people, I guess that's something I could discuss in the document, but it seemed, well, I'll put it in the Google Doc and do it from there. We should move on now. Okay. Well, T-shirts is next to the agenda but it sounds like we're all set. I gave Shashana the list of what I think we should order and I'll just make sure Alan gets the form signed by me and Sarah, if he doesn't have it already. Web design. Ben, are you starting to get in there or are you? Yeah, I have, I haven't heard back from, I sent a note to Sean, Hanon, I think at the town about asking basically what can we do? Are there guidelines for it? I haven't heard back from him. I do have, given the time, probably not the right time to do it, but I've started to think about assuming that he, my guess is he's gonna come back and say, well, you don't radically reinvent this, you can change the menu items, you can change a number of menu items and you can change all content within those pieces. I've started to think about well, what menu item should we have when you go to that page? And I have a draft of that, which is really the architecture for whatever it is that we want to end up doing and it's different than what we currently have. And so maybe that's probably something I should share or I mean, I could present it at the next meeting or share it after we get off this call just for feedback on what the, specifically what I would be looking for is, are we missing anything with these menu items? Is there anything here that shouldn't be here? So just by way of example, and I'll shut up, I added a make a donation tab and I removed the request a tree tab because I understood that there was a time when we had a lot of trees to give away and that's no longer the case. And for the make a donation, it's not a big part of what we do or how we get our funding, but maybe it, people might want to get for that. So things like that, those are the kind of questions that kind of go into how we might rethink what we've done on loan. So yeah, maybe with nine minutes left, I should either share it after this meeting or probably share it in advance of the next meeting and then spend 15 minutes actually talking about it. Yeah, share it as soon as possible. And then there was doing with the document, we can get between meetings and get information back to you. Okay, great. Call it to present. Great, thank you. All right, we talked about a junior tree committee and then Julian found out that you don't have to, there's no age limit to join our committee. So I encouraged him to apply to join the committee himself and Arwin could do that unless people think a junior tree committee would be useful in itself, which it might. Well, I'll read you exactly what he wrote to me, Paul Backelman, so that it's in the minutes. So we have this documented. From Paul Backelman's office, it says, there is no formal subgroup like this when I was asking about a junior developing a junior group. They can join as members. There is no minimum age or they can continue as valued volunteers. Paul Backelman, town manager, town of Amherst. Thank you, Shoshona. I remember you told me about that earlier, so I really appreciate it. But after learning that information, I guess I see the need. I can still see why there might be a need for a junior tree committee. However, I think it might be more effective, just in my personal opinion, to do an outreach type of thing where we say, here's the open seats and try to advertise that, whether that's in the schools. I can reach out about it on my friend group and see if we can get some members. Well, that's you, you're the committee who are younger. And I already filled out my community action form just last night. And I'm hoping Arwin can join and that would fill all the seats that we have. So yeah. Yeah, I wrote back to Paul, thanking him for his response and then told him that you were to expect your bid. Awesome. Where's the seat there? And said that you were a good kid and all that. Thank you. I have a question. You said you filled out the citizen activity form. Yes, I just filled it out before the meeting actually. Rhonda's still on, although she's not in video, but I think she filled out a different form. So I'm a little confused. Where do you find the citizen activity form? I got it on the town website. It's pretty clear there. You just click, how do I volunteer? And then it pops up is an option. Okay, Rhonda, are you still here? She's in the list of participants, but I'll email her and say, make sure she's filled out the right form. Because I know she's interested also. All right, anything else on this? No. I think that's all we have. So we can do a quick checkout round. What do you think of the meeting? Anything else we're missing? Let me just look at the agenda one more time. I feel like there was something else. Well, a new tree inventory, but that's and statewide efforts, but those aren't really happening for us. So let's just table that. Any other comments or issues not anticipated? Sure, this isn't really an issue. I just wanted to comment. I know we had a tree down on our street or not a tree. It was just a limb across our street and a tree up the road. And the prompt response from Alan and his crew to make sure everything was done. It was done right, done well. And I just want to say thank you for that. There's definitely a lot of good work that's been going into prepping for incidents like that windstorm. And I think everybody notices it. I know some of my neighbors even commented, wow, that got cleaned up quick. So we really appreciate it. Thank you for that. That's good to hear. Appreciate it. Other comments. All right, so let's adjourn the meeting and let's respond to Bennett and Sarah's emails with the projects they're working on and respond to the minutes when I get them out to you. And yeah, Alan and I will talk and we'll make further plans for the nursery and see if we can get it for that second Saturday date. Sounds good. I wasn't able to unmute for a second there, but I wanted to thank Sarah and the whole group for putting so much thought into this significant tree ordinance. Cause I just happened to have a neighbor who just went roaring through the trees around his place. And you know, not that he didn't ask if he could. I don't know how significant they were, but I just think it's really, really important at this point in our history to make trees have a high profile in terms of their value. So this is a good thing. Yeah, thank you, Sarah. That's great. All right, thank you everyone. And we'll be in touch by email and then we'll see you next month. Have a good evening. All right, bye everybody. Bye.


Hello, my name is Amos Meeks, I'm a member of the steering team of Clean Heap for Arlington and today I want to tell you about warrant article number five Which asks to file a home rule legislation that would allow the town of Arlington to create a bylaw amendment that would prohibit fossil fuel infrastructure in new construction and gut renovations First some background on this bylaw So our goal is to reach 100% clean energy by 2050 And this is mandated by both a state law the global warming solution act which commits us to reduce our emissions by 80% by 2050 And in 2018 when the Arlington Select Board voted to set a goal of net zero by 2050 Fortunately the recipe for reaching 100% clean energy is relatively simple. We electrify everything and we green the grid So if we look at Arlington's total emissions We see that the vast majority of our missions about 60% come from buildings residential buildings and industrial buildings And of this the vast majority of this is space heating. So we want to focus space on space heating as a place to start Fortunately electric solutions for space heating exist in the form of heat pumps Heat pumps are very different from electric resistance heaters that you might think of which are expensive and inefficient Instead they're more like an air conditioning unit that can heat as well as cool And because they just move heat around in terms of heating efficiency. They can be incredibly efficient Something like 200 or 300% efficient In addition cold climate air source heat pumps work in our climate They're rated to be highly efficient down to five degrees Fahrenheit and many of them work down to negative 17 or even negative 22 degrees Fahrenheit and it simply does not get that cold around here And they work as the sole source of heating in 2017 a large portion of new homes in Massachusetts Used heat pump as the only source of heating and cooling and even in Arlington in Arlington There are many buildings that use heat pumps as their sole source of heating without backup heat Heat pumps are also affordable. So this study in 2018 modeled a house being installed with gas and electric air conditioning compared to a house using an electric air source heat pump and Heat pump hot water heating and what they found is that the installation cost differed by less than a thousand dollars Which in the case that they were looking at of a large single family? House newly built can newly constructed house This difference cost difference shown in this red slice here is tiny compared to the overall value of the house In addition, they found a small difference in annual operating cost But again for a new 3000 square foot home if you look at the monthly Expenses and compare that difference, which is this red sliver at the top here. It's pretty much negligible So in the case of these large new new construction single family houses the difference in cost ends up being more or less a wash But of course, some people can't afford to pay anything at all Fortunately affordable housing is already leading the way on heating electrification These are some examples of buildings outside of Arlington that use heat pumps as their sole source of heating and cooling But even within Arlington all of the affordable housing construction projects that are being planned or built by the heart housing corporation of Arlington use heat pumps as their sole source of heating and cooling and this is often because for the sort of High density high efficiency new construction being built for affordable housing heat pumps are just already the most economical option So to get into what this bylaw actually proposes we would prohibit new fossil fuel piping in new construction and gut renovations This would not affect existing buildings that are not undergoing some kind of Gut renovation it would not affect kitchen renovations or other sort of renovations that are not Literally stripping the entire inside of the building down to the studs and rebuilding it and it would not affect additions We also include a number of practical and common sense exemptions this bylaw would affect only the customer side of The fossil fuel piping all gas cooking appliances are exempted Backup generators are exempted since it deals with fossil fuel piping. It would not affect propane fossil fuel cooking such as outdoor grills Hot water for large buildings is exempted due to technical reasons and in addition research and medical facilities are exempted also due to technical reasons and of course repair of Existing and unsafe piping is exempted and to be clear this only affects fossil fuel piping So any modification can be done to the water side of a water heating system without this bylaw coming into effect however, this may not account for all cases and and so in order to avoid any sort of undue expense or burden Anyone can seek a waiver for the bylaw and the waivers would be Granted by the building expense inspector potentially with consultation with town staff and local energy experts and Finally as a quick clarification the reason this needs to be a homeworld petition is due to conflicts with existing state law So over the summer of the Attorney General Maura Healy found for a similar bylaw in Brookline that while she Strongly supported the policy of this bylaw It does conflict and is preempted by existing state laws However, homeworld petitions are a very common way to deal with these kinds of kinds of conflicts as you can see in articles 11 through 15 of this special time So with that from me and everyone else at clean heat for Arlington We hope that you will join us in supporting warrant article number five and we'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have


three men enter a room to clear an obstruction in an industrial facility. It is the 5th of February 1989. Not long after working in the area they begin to experience headaches and feel ill. The men are working in an industrial irradiation facility just outside San Salvador and they are experiencing the first symptoms of acute radiation sickness. Within six months the three men would undergo multiple surgeries which would result in amputations, skin grafts and for one of the unlucky trio death. The event may sound familiar you might think but this accident was the ignored warning which led to the Sarek radiation event just one year later the San Salvador radiation event. Irradiation facilities are an important tool for the sterilization of a multitude of different products including the food and medical industries and today's story we'll be talking about the latter. You see most countries have some sort of radiation facilities be it commercially or government owned and El Salvador was no different. One such facility was built in 1974 being commissioned in 1975 based near the country's capital city San Salvador. It was commissioned and owned by a Mexican Salvadorian Costa Rican consortium the facility housed a model JS6300 gamma sterilizer designed built and supplied by atomic energy of Canada limited and those of you who have been taking notes during my videos will know this company has come up a few times before. As part of the installation process three staff were trained by the Canadian company in how to properly operate the machine. This model of a radiation device makes use of a rack for multiple pencils of which contain radioactive source elements in this case the gamma ray emitting cobalt 60. At the time of installation the total reactivity was four petobeccules but this reduces over time necessitating semi regular replacement to ensure reasonable irradiation times. This is held in place by a hoist and guide cables. When not being used for irradiation duties the rack is lowered into a water pool for shielding by pneumatic hoist working the hoist cable. The whole irradiation machine is housed inside a concrete shielded room accessible via an area called the maze protected by an interlocked door. The radiation room door can be opened from the inside so that personnel cannot be locked in. An emergency poolway cable was also provided mounted along the walls of the radiation room and the entrance maze. This actuates a stop switch that lowers the source or stops the startup operation. Materials to be irradiated are usually placed in cardboard or fiberglass boxes. These containers are then themselves placed on a metal tray. Pneumatic pistons push the boxes along a set path over two levels each time exposing a side of the box to the source. The path the boxes take results in 29 irradiation positions and the time in each position was around 2020 minutes. During an irradiation cycle access to the room has to be restricted because of the high risk of exposure to the Cobalt 60. The irradiation room had a number of controls to prevent A access to the room when the source is out of the pool and B the source being raised when someone is in the room. This was designed into the system by AEC Limited and a vital part of this was the machine key. This was used to open the irradiation room door, operate the control panel and actuate a time delay switch inside the room and only one key was used as an extra method to prevent activation of the irradiator when the room was accessed. To enter the room the operator must go to a monitor test panel next door. There they would have to initiate a monitor test by pushing the appropriate button. This will take reading of the radiation levels in the room by using a sensor probe installed near the irradiation machine. But once the button is released the probe must again be able to read background radiation levels before releasing the interlock allowing the door to be opened. On top of the hardware and force safety proper administrative controls are also meant to be used. This also ties back to the important machine key and on this key a radiation monitor is meant to be attached. This is meant to make sure that upon entry to the room at least one method of dose rate monitoring is provided. This is meant to be calibrated before any entry on a known low radioactive source within the door frame of the entry door. Now as the basics of how the operation was meant to happen let's return to reality starting in 1975 as multiple levels of safety controls would break down and be forgotten over the following years. Not long after operation had commenced the facility would experience its first incident. In 1975 facility experienced a product jam and product boxes obstructing the movement of the source rack. This caused the rack to deform allowing the pencils to fall out. But a staff on site who had been trained by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited dealt with the incident with no major issues. In response the supplier investigated the issue with the machine and repaired it accordingly. The facility would change hands later on in 1975 when it was sold to a consortium in the United States of America and during the change of ownership the originally trained staff would be let go. This resulted in new staff being trained verbally and not from the original equipment supplier. The facility like many other establishments in the country at the time would fall victim to the El Salvador Civil War. Beginning on the 15th of October 1979 the conflict would run for over 12 years and as such the facility fell into disrepair as economic hardships gripped the country. Because it was feared the facility may become a target in the civil war nothing on site was written down and even the location of the plant was not made public knowledge. The owners were fearful of allowing officials from the government on site and any new employees were told as little as possible including the dangers of the materials used by the machinery. The source needed to be replenished by the beginning of the 1980s. This was due to the natural decay of the Cobalt 60 but costs meant it was left as it was. Eventually in 1981 the owner of the plant reached an agreement with the supplier for replenishment of the source. A representative travelled to San Salvador only to turn back at the airport due to the escalating civil war. Another side effect of the civil war was the lack of safety inspections from the supplier. All of this led to a gradual misunderstanding of the equipment safety features as staff trained new staff verbally resulting in variations way beyond what the original supplier would have given. Another component was that governmental radiological administration was also lacking. Understandable due to the political issues at the time but this would result in regulatory legislation being non-existent. The situation wouldn't get much better throughout the 1980s with the facility making do and mending the machinery including modifications that the manufacturer would never have approved of. The lack of maintenance resulted in the vital monitor probe failing. In order to keep using the radiator it was removed but you might wonder how the operators would gain access to the radiation room.  Access could be gained to the room by depressing the monitor switch and repeatedly cycling the buttons on the panel of the radiation monitor. This method became the usual procedure gaining access to the radiation room even when the rack was in a deadly up position. Regardless of the now non-working interlock the access door had become badly fitted due to lack of maintenance which resulted in it being openable by force or by using the blade of a knife to slip the catch. And this leads us to February 1989 and a series of events that would lead to an exposed source not being discovered for six days. It is Saturday the 4th of February 1989 and one of the operators starts his night shift. As was the norm for the facility he had to deal with a number of power failures and problems with the pistons but after some wrangling he managed to restart operation each time. At about 2 a.m on Sunday the 5th of February during a much needed coffee break a fault occurred which caused the source rack to be lowered automatically from the irradiation position. Needless to say this would be a problem. Lowering the source caused an alarm to sound that indicated that the rack was neither up nor down. The operator returning from his break heard the alarm and promptly went to the control panel to try and perform the reset procedure but this failed. The next step in the operator's repertoire was to leave the building go outside and climb onto the roof to try and force the source hoist down. This was done by detaching the normal regulated pressurized air supply and applying an over pressurized supply. This was to force the source into the fully raised position hoping that this would free the rack and permit its descent into the storage position. This non-manufacturer recommended procedure also didn't work. The alarm continued and in order to trick the system the operator pulled on the cable until it left the hoist mechanism. After this he fed it back down which activated the micro switch telling the system the source was down. The operator returned to the control panel. He found that the red general failure light and source up light were still on. He went back to the roof and managed to manipulate the micro switch so that upon returning to the control panel the green source light down was now on. To gain access to the room the operator now performed the other non-standard procedure which ever since the monitor probe had been removed a few years before meant that access to the irradiation room was achieved by rapidly cycling the buttons on the radiation monitor panel while turning the key in the door switch. This simulated background radiation readings thus allowing the radiation room to be entered even though the source rack was in the up position. The operator knew the rack was in the up position but it seems like he was not aware the dangers this posed as his next move was to cut power to the radiation machine and enter the room. He did not check the radiation level once he reached the machine and guided by torchlight only he started removing product boxes gradually working his way closer to the source rack. Near the source rack he found five boxes jammed into the space of four. He removed two of the boxes one of which was wedged against the lower of the two source modules in the rack. This took several minutes leading to an extended exposure time unable to fully clear the machine he left the room restore power and sought out assistance from some of his colleagues. The operator returned shortly after with two assisting members of staff. The trio now sought out to re-enter the room at around three in the morning. The two staff members roped into assisting the operator had no training in radiation and the irradiation machine. The operator assured his helpers that the machine was safe if the power was switched off. The three men entered the radiation room and started to remove product boxes from the third row on the upper level next to the source so that the rack could be freed from above. In order to free the source rack it needed to be lifted. The rack which was around 60 kilograms needed all three for the effort. Standing on the upper level product tray one of the men pulled the hoist cable. The other two lifted the source rack. After being freed the rack was then lowered into the pool. The men were surprised at the chairing cove glow that greeted them. The operator seeing this as something to be worried about hurried the men to leave the room. Clearly by now he had realised there was indeed some kind of hazard. Not long later the operator started to feel dizziness and nausea. Classic initial symptoms of acute radiation sickness. The trio went outside the building to sit down and the operator continued to feel increasingly ill. At about 3.30 in the morning he began to vomit blood and two of the men went via taxi to seek medical help. The men made it to the emergency room of the Primero de Mayo Hospital. Upon arrival the other worker began to feel ill at the same time and the third worker who by now had returned to his original working post also began to feel ill and he also went to hospital. The company was not made aware of the accident and instead had put the absent workers down to a sick note exclaiming that they had food poisoning. At around 6 o'clock in the morning a new worker booked on for duty. He was confronted by the mess of the night shift. He straightened the boxes and started up the facility. When the first operator did not return for his next shift this worker remained and operated the facility for another shift. But this day one exposure event wouldn't be the last of this old deal but we'll have to come back to that in a little bit. By now all three of the original exposed men were vomiting. The men were misdiagnosed with food poisoning and given three day sick leave certificates and were discharged at about 6 o'clock in the morning the same morning they had attended at the hospital. The first operator would return to hospital on Tuesday the 7th of February with nausea and vomiting and also burns on his legs and feet. After he explained to the doctors of the events of the Sunday he was diagnosed with radiation burns from acute exposure to cobalt. His symptoms were treated but his condition continued to worsen. The decision was made to transport the patient to another hospital for more specialized treatment. He arrived at the Angeles Dell Pedrigo Hospital in Mexico City on day 24 post exposure Tuesday the 28th of February. He had lost 20% of his body weight but would make gradual improvements over the next 100 or so days. The amputation of his left leg looked likely as well as a high probability of him developing leukemia. By day 173 Thursday the 27th of July his condition was considered to have improved enough for him to be returned back to San Salvador but his condition would continue to deteriorate. On day 197 after multiple surgeries damaged to his lungs and a progressively worsening condition he passed away on Sunday the 20th of August 1989. The other two exposed workers would fare a bit better due to them only being in the radiation room once. The second patient who went to the hospital the operator returned to work four days post exposure but was sent home due to his poor health. He again returned to work on day nine post exposure Monday the 13th of February but was unable to lift heavy objects. With discomfort in his feet he returned to hospital where he was then admitted for radiation exposure. Like the operator he was two sent to Mexico City for treatment where he would have his left leg amputated due to necrosis. He returned to San Salvador on day 173 where he would then have his right leg amputated but luckily for him from there his condition improved. The third victim was the least exposed at the three. He was two transferred to Mexico City but spent less time there receiving treatment for ARS. Upon returning to San Salvador he had main off work sick until day 199 post exposure or Tuesday the 22nd of August 1989. The operators mean body dose was 8.1 grey. For reference five grey as a whole body dose can be lethal and he had more than that with his torso receiving an estimated 10. The other two men received 3.7 and 2.9 grey respectively. Back to the aftermath of the exposure after the first operator never returned to work on Monday evening. Well the company just kind of carried on as normal. What the operators didn't know was that the source rack had been bent and it was only a matter of time until another incident which would come on the Wednesday after the initial incident where the rack became jammed again but this time it was released by the over pressure trick. Thursday the 9th day five after initial exposure some of the source pencils escaped the rack and fell into the pool and the irradiation room. This was discovered on Friday day six post exposure after quality assurance discovered the products had been irradiated less than normal. All workers would enter the room after checking the dose rate on a beeper style detector just outside the door which was essentially a pointless endeavour as the dose rate outside the room would have been 30 times lower than inside. Upon entering they were exposed to one of the pencils which had escaped the rack but their exposure was low ranging from 0.22 to 0.09 but this could have been far worse if more pencils had escaped. This now left a massive headache for the owners how to make the irradiation equipment safe and secure this forced management to finally request the supplier's assistance. Two experts from the supplier arrived at the plant on day nine Monday the 13th of February. They succeeded in determining by means of a remote television camera and an iron chamber device sent into the irradiation room attached to a product carrier that there was an active source pencil on the upper level. They drilled a hole in the roof of the irradiation room and on day 11 Wednesday the 15th of February using a remotely controlled tool succeeded in picking up the pencil successfully lowering it into the pool. At 1930 on the same day the experts confirmed that the radiation in the irradiation room was at normal background levels. Due to the poor status of facility the supplier disabled the machine and a full count of the source pencils was photographically undertaken and confirmed all were in the pool in November 1989. The incident was caused by a jam of the fiberglass boxes. By 1989 many of these containers had become cracked resulting in a higher chance of getting caught within the machine. The boxes were forced against a thin steel bar in the frame in which the source rack is raised and lowered. The deformation of this bar was enough to cause the source rack to become stuck in the raised position. The main issue of the incident was down to the actions of the staff on the day. If the product jam had happened just after the facility had been opened it is likely the issue would have been dealt with safely but two decades of neglect and poor training resulted in the dangerous actions of the staff at the facility. The operation of the facility safely was greatly hindered by the political and financial situation in the country as the supplier did not have the ability to send out the staff to inspect the plant due to safety concerns. The plant was refitted with a new radiator in the early 90s and subsequently had its safety procedures and safety systems overhauled. This video is a plain difficult production all videos on the channel are creative comments attribution share alike licensed plain difficult videos are produced by me john in a currently dark and cold south-eastern corner of london uk help channel grow by liking commenting and subscribing check out my twitter for all sorts of photos and odds as sods as well as hints on future videos i've got patreon and youtube membership as well so if you fancy checking them out please do and all that's left to say is thank you for watching


My talk subtests are the best if you were expecting something else. This is what you're going to get. My name is Dmitri Chukin. I work at the Cactus Group as a backend developer. I have been working there for a couple years previously. I worked as a math teacher and I spent a couple years learning Python, doing free online tutorials, working on some projects with friends. Now I'm at Cactus. Cactus, for those who don't know, is a web development company in Durham, North Carolina. We specialize in web apps, projects using Jingo, as well as a few other projects not specific to Jingo. So that's what we do. Okay, testing is important. So testing is important because we want to make sure that the code works. We want to write tests that are actually there for a purpose. We want to make sure that our actual code runs the way that we want it to. We want to make sure at Cactus we write lots of tests. We want to make sure that when we upgrade to new libraries, we know when deprecation warnings tell us something's going to be deprecated. We want to use tests so that we know when something actually breaks without having to rely on the users in production code. Plus, if I can catch a bug in my code, then I'm not using somebody else's QA time to actually find a bug and I'm not relying on users because then nobody's happy. So testing makes our code more efficient and it reduces our technical data. Great, so we all agree testing is important. We should all do tests, but this talk isn't actually about tests specifically. I'm talking about subtests. So I'm going to get to that in a minute. One more thing about testing. So the rest of this talk is mostly going to be about how tests, good tests are readable, thorough, and dry. So number one, readable. We want to make sure that other developers who are getting to our tests actually understand them without having to spend a lot of time digging through them, checking each line, making sure they understand what each of the variables mean, things like that. We want to make sure that they're thorough so that we're testing our functions, our classes, our endpoints. We're just checking that they exist, but they actually work the way they're supposed to. And we want to make sure that they're dry. So we don't want to be writing the same lines of code in multiple places. By the way, these principles are taken from the Zen of Python, like readability counts. Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. And there should be one, and preferably only one, obvious way to do it. So the rest of the talk, I'm going to talk about why subtests make our tests more readable, more thorough, and more dry. Okay. Number one, readable tests. This is an example. Let's say we have a site with users, they each have profile, and the profiles can follow each other. So we might want to write a test that, in our model, we can have, that we have correct statistics for this. So as you can see, let me see with my pointer, there we go. So at the top here, I define some profiles, and I have a bunch of asserts that when profiles are created, then no one's following anyone else. So okay, that's easy, that makes sense. We should probably add a section where people actually follow other people. So in our test, we might add another section. So a lot of lines of code. This is our original section from the previous slide, and then we've added some followers here, and we have a lot of asserts for those followers. By the way, I'm not expecting that we're going to be able to go through each of these lines right now and say that, okay, this makes sense. The point of this section is just about readability, and so we're going to work on this test to get more readable. Before we do that, we should also add a section about unfollowing, because we want those statistics to be good and correct as well. So okay, here's a section about unfollowing. Now we can see this test is getting really long, and let's say someone else is coming to this test, they need to update something. They probably don't want to look at this and try to figure out what is happening. So to make it more readable, one thing we could do is we could split it up into different sections. Four sections. Here's the setup here where I create the profiles. Here's some asserts about followers at the beginning, adding followers and asserts, and then removing followers. So that's a little more readable. To do to make it even better, I can add a comment at the top of each of these sections. So I'm creating three profiles. This one says no followers. Several profiles follow other profiles and removing followers. That's a little better. With some tests, it looks like this. So that second comment is actually a comment here in subtests. And I think from a quick look at this test, it's a lot easier to say, okay this is a test about followers. It looks like there's some setup at top and three sections. And then in each section there are comments about what's happening and what we're asserting. If one of them fails, then the failure will have this comment. So this is a great opportunity or this is a great way that we can use subtests to make our tests more readable. Because as I mentioned, if someone new is coming to our test suite and wants to know what's happening, this is a much easier test to understand what is actually happening. Okay, so readability is important because we want to know what's happening, especially if I come back to this test in six months, 12 months, two years, or something like that, or if a new developer is coming to this code. I don't want to spend the time reading through it line by line trying to figure out what's happening. I'd rather spend my time fixing it or updating it. For companies, this means employees are actually more interested in what they're doing because they're getting code. They're not deciphering someone else's complicated tests, which means that they end up having better projects and more efficiency, so more money. Okay, one question. Why not just break up that test that I had, that really long test? Why not just break it up into three different sections? Yes, we could do that as well. However, one reason you might not want to do that is because that means we have to have the same setup for each test. And in some cases, it's not really a big deal. In other cases, if we have to create some objects, some instances of one model, some instances of another model, if we have any money to relation, add some things there, that becomes complicated and ends up being not dry if we have to repeat that over and over. Yes, I guess my, so my thought was you could theoretically break it up into separate tests. In exactly like that, no, it would not work. Yes. Yeah, you could do it a few different ways. Yeah, thorough tests. Okay, it's important to have thorough tests. Another example, let's say we have a function here called isUserError. And it returns true for any user error, meaning any status code that's a 400 level status code. Okay, this is one way that we could test it. So we test for the 400, 401, 402, 403, and 405 status codes, and then some other common ones, 200, 101, 500, 503. This is okay. For running code coverage, this would tell us that our function actually has 100% coverage. But this is actually not complete because there are other status codes that we're not testing here. So one way to make it more thorough is we could write a line for every single status code between 400 and 500 and all the 200 ones and so on. But that's a lot. No one wants to read 100 lines of assert true. So we could do it in a for loop like this, where we just loop through all the status codes or all the integers between 400 and 500 and assert that this function returns true. We could do it for all the 200 ones, all the 500 ones assert that it's false. That's fine, that's our row. But if something fails, then we get something like this. It just says assertion error false is not true. And so we're left wondering what failed? I don't know, something. With subtests, we can change the test that I just mentioned with the for loop. There's the same for loop and we just add put subtest status code equals status code. And this parameter ends up being spit back out when something fails. And our failure looks something like this. So we would say assertion error false is not true and that happens on the status code 405. Question should, can't we just do that with custom assert messages? We could, but if we write custom assert messages then it's more maintenance because we would have to write that same message for each assert statement. And then if we ever want to change it then it ends up being more complicated rather than just putting in one parameter. Also another thing to note is that subtests run independently. So if we have multiple failures then we get all those failures back at once rather than just getting the first one like we would in a regular test. So if status code 403 and 405 both failed we would get something like this. And so we see them both at once. This can be really helpful in diagnosing what the problem is in an application. So for example, this is a different test. I haven't told you what it's about. I haven't told you what it does. But if we have an assertion error here we can see that we are expecting Jane open parenthesis close parenthesis and we're actually getting an empty space there. So we're off by one space for some reason. So that's without subtests. If I had put in the parameters into subtests we might be seeing something like this where it says first name is Jane, last name is empty string that fails, first name is empty string, last name is Smith that also fails. So in conclusion our code does not handle empty strings. And so that's it's a lot easier to see that when we have all the failures right next to each other rather than trying to figure it out from just the first failure. So not having actually okay it's important to test all the parts of a function not just one part of it. And some tests allow us to do that as well as having useful error messages for each failure within our tests. Okay section three dry tests. Another example let's say we have an API endpoint we want to make sure that the right fields are required. So we have three fields each of them is required at this point. It's first name, last name, and address. And in this test it looks like we are posting to this endpoint and we're doing it once here, we're doing it a second time here, and we're doing it a third time here. Really we're just doing the same thing three times. So we could ask ourselves is it clear what's being tested? Is this dry? Can we improve it? Yes we can improve it. For example we could put comments on each section it does improve it it makes it more readable. But still we're doing the same thing three times. So one way you could do it one way you could improve this with subtests is like this I defined a function up here it's get minimum required data and it returns first name, last name, and address. These are all the required fields and so I could have a test that make sure that those required fields work. Down here I define my missing subtests and this is a tuple of a field name and the subtest description. So each of the field names are here first name, last name, and address and we have a description for each of them. Sorry which one? Oh the big one this would be in the test case. So this is just the helper method for the test case and then this is a test within the test case. Yes it looks like the underscores for some reason got cut out here. There should be an underscore in each of these spaces. I apologize for that. We loop through each field name and subtest description. We get the data, we take out the field name and then we post to the endpoint and make sure that the status codes 400. So why is this better? It's better because if something is required or if something has changed about the required fields like for example if we add a new one all we have to do is just add one more line here and then this test continues to work. We don't have to look through several different sections about where these things are defined in our test suite. If one of these fields becomes optional then we could just take it out or if the endpoint ends up having 15 different required fields then we can just add to our tuple of tuples. Also since things are defined neatly it's more readable. If someone else wants to look through all the fields that are required they're just right here. So having dry testing code is important. Less code. It's less code for me to read through. It's less code for other developers to read through. Similar to as how I mentioned before if a new developer is coming to this test suite and trying to update tests I would rather have them just read through one test rather than having to look at the same thing define multiple times or looking through different posts within the test within different tests or within a test suite. It's easier to maintain because we just define things in one place and subtests give us a great way to write code that is dry. So in summary readability matters since someone's going to have to read through a test. It could be me, could be somebody else and subtests allow us to have readable tests. Subtests allow us to be more thorough and to have messages when things fail that are actually useful for us. So we can have code that's thorough as well as really useful when things fail. Subtests allow us to be dry because they're another way another tool for us to have dry tests. Where I work at Cactus we strive to have good code, good testing, good accommodations and subtests have been really helpful for us for doing that. So did they solve all of our testing problems? No, they did not. There are still lots of ways that people can write bad code. You can have bad comments or no comments. You can have confusing variable names. You can have huge amounts of setup as well as other things. But subtests are a way for us to have good tests. There are another tool that we can use to have tests that are readable and dry and thorough. Can you do this with other testing libraries? Absolutely. If you like using Nose or PyTest, sure, you can use those. But you don't have to because subtests are now a part of the Python standard library. As of Python 3.4, they're just there. So if you don't want to go through and learn PyTest, then you don't have to. You can just write subtests as long as you have Python 3.4. So whether you use them or not, they are there for you for writing readable, thorough and dry tests. So this is my concept information.