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Life & Times Transcript

02/15/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

They lost everything in a matter of minutes. How will the Laguna landslide victims reclaim their lives?

Tripp Meister>> Let me tell you, you stand in my shoes and when someone hands you a dollar, it's not so easy to say that that's not very much anymore because every dollar helps me get closer to being whole and have a normal life again.

Val Zavala>> And then, local boy makes good. Orange County native, Tiger Woods, improves the lie for needy kids.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> It was about nine months ago when a mudslide wiped out the homes of a group of families in Orange County. Since then, they've been without homes, but still stuck with their mortgages. So what will get these thirteen families through? FEMA or friendship? Roger Cooper went back to Bluebird Canyon in Laguna Beach to see how these families are faring.

Roger Cooper>> It still seems amazing that no one was killed that morning in Laguna Beach.

Jill Lockhart>> In the middle of the night, I started to hear noises, popping and cracking sounds, and then at about 5:30 I started hearing them again coming from all over the house.

Roger Cooper>> That morning back in June in Bluebird Canyon when a rain-soaked hillside suddenly began to disintegrate. Jill Lockhart was in her house when it happened.

Jill Lockhart>> I knew right away that the house was sliding, so I grabbed the kids and we ran outside. At that point, we realized that it wasn't just our home that was sliding. It was the whole hillside that was coming down.

Roger Cooper>> Tons of earth and some twenty-one houses went racing down the hill that day, homes that ended up smashed and broken in the canyon below. Jill Lockhart's was among them. Walking the area back then, I was on a road so buckled that no car could pass and surrounded by red-tagged homes too dangerous to enter.

That street I walked last June with its broken pavement is now gone as are most of the houses that went down the hillside that day. They're replaced by machines that are trying to make this hillside like it once was. Since June, a major construction project has been underway to shore up the slide site and stabilize it before any big rains arrive this year. They're also getting it ready for the day when homes can be rebuilt. "Mayor, it's a bit different than we saw last June." Laguna's mayor, Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider, took me in to see it.

Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider>> I think we're getting it done. I'm really proud of how much we've accomplished in just a very short amount of time.

Roger Cooper>> "Lots of work. How much earth is up there, do you think?" But not all of Laguna's recovery work is at the disaster site. There has been an equally big effort by the community to help the thirteen families who still have no homes to go back to. The city has arranged for some slide victims to stay free in mobile homes placed on this donated lot. These are temporary homes to people like Tripp Meister and his two-year old son, Ty.

Tripp Meister>> "Oh, yeah. That's my big boy."

Roger Cooper>> Citizens of Laguna have also organized an "Adopt a Landslide Family" committee. The community has kind of adopted you.

Tripp Meister>> Not kind of. They have absolutely adopted us.

Roger Cooper>> The Adopt a Family committee has staged an ongoing series of concerts and fundraisers to help the thirteen families, including this citywide benefit party during the Super Bowl which raised eight thousand dollars.

Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider>> The group donated the space, donated the big screen TV and we invited everyone in town to come. We had several hundred people show up and we raised some more money which we're going to again distribute to the thirteen families.

Roger Cooper>> Donations are all the more important when you consider these families were not insured. So even though their homes are gone, they still have to keep making mortgage payments.

Jill Lockhart>> Our mortgage is still there, yeah. Still there. And in order to rebuild, we'll have to get a construction loan on top of our mortgage to finance that.

Roger Cooper>> Fellow slide victim and now mobile home resident, Diane Stevens, who's in the same boat.

Diane Stevens>> Well, we're more settled because between June 1 and mid-October, we moved ten times. We were house-sitting because we didn't want to take on rent because we have a full mortgage payment. To be able to live in one of these trailers rent-free is huge.

Tripp Meister>> Let me tell you, you stand in my shoes and when someone hands you a dollar, it's not so easy to say that that's not very much anymore because every dollar helps me get closer to being whole and have a normal life again.

Roger Cooper>> Laguna architects are pitching in too. Morris Skendarian has led a volunteer effort that gives each slide family the free services of an architect and time to guide them through the recovery.

Morris Skendarian>> It's been fantastic. I think Laguna is an interesting place. In spite of the fact that it's pretty sophisticated and it's, you know, well-known around the world as a resort and destination spot, the people who live here still look at this place as a little small town village.

Roger Cooper>> The man in charge of slide recovery, Bob Burnham, says Laguna has had to fight the perception among some that everyone in Laguna is wealthy and doesn't need to be helped. What do you say to that?

Bob Burnham>> I probably can't say it on camera, but it's definitely untrue. The people that were directly impacted by this landslide are a large number of retired folks who have lived here and it's a wide variety, a very diverse, group of people, absolutely none of whom are wealthy by anybody's standards.

Roger Cooper>> But Laguna's recovery has been far from easy. At first, FEMA refused to consider the landslide eligible for federal disaster relief.

Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider>> Fortunately, we have Diane Feinstein in Washington who is very powerful. I called her directly and said, "We need help." She said, "Tell me exactly what it is you want." I said, "I want you to find out why FEMA turned us down, get it turned over and get us some money so we can rebuild this hill and get these families back into homes." She said, "I got the message." Two weeks later, she was here and, three weeks later, we had an overturn of the denial.

Roger Cooper>> FEMA is now providing about five million dollars to pay for part of these repairs to city streets, hillsides and storm drains. On top of that, local taxpayers kicked in. Laguna voters approved a half cent sales tax to pay what FEMA doesn't. The sales tax revenue will also be used to build a Super Fund for future disasters, something victim Todd McCallum appreciates.

Todd McCallum>> Benefits are going on all the time. We have nothing but support even when the sales tax increase came out. There was very little opposition, at least voiced publicly, and it passed pretty cleanly.

Roger Cooper>> The FEMA and tax money will go to rebuild the hill and infrastructure, but none of it goes to individual families. That's where neighbors come in.

Jill Lockhart>> Oh, the community has been great. I don't know what we would do if we were in any other city besides Laguna Beach because the community itself has been amazing.

Roger Cooper>> Ask Diane Stevens what she learned about her community during this disaster and her emotions well up.

Diane Stevens>> And people just come in droves to do something, you know, whether it's dropping off clothes or food. The people I work with, you know, I guess the feeling I have is, one, my family is going to survive this. We are strong and, if we can do this, we can do anything. But also that I'm not alone. and I'm going to be more responsive to other peoples' needs and make sure I pay attention because it made all the difference in the world to our family.

Elizabeth Pearson-Schneider>> We're continuing to ask for donations. We're continuing to hold events and I'm getting ready to start selling Laguna Beach items on the city website so that we can use another creative way. Any way that I can raise money that I can. So that's what we need. We need money for the thirteen families.

Bob Burnham>> When you say when will it be back to the way it was with homes and landscaping and families living, probably not until another three years from now, I'm guessing.

Roger Cooper>> Until that day, workers at the slide site have put up a big flag and a sign beneath it. The signs reads "We'll keep the lights on until you're home." In Laguna Beach, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> What if I told you that spending a dollar bill could help chart the path of epidemics and follow the spread of disease? How does that work? Take a look.

Lars Hufnagel has a PhD in Physics at UC Santa Barbara. We met him at the UCSB Ventura Center. The question he set out to answer was how do epidemics like SARS or the flu spread across the country and around the world? His research produced fascinating maps like these that show the path an epidemic would take as humans move from city to city, state to state, country to country. But how did they track the movement of millions of people in a reliable way?

Lars Hufnagel>> One traditional way, and that is what people used in animal studies, how animals move around, is to attach little radar devices onto humans like they do on animals. But in principle, you could just attach it to humans and then ask the humans to travel around and the radar device would record their position and you could follow humans.

Val Zavala>> Theoretically.

Lars Hufnagel>> Theoretically. But it's very impractical because you'd need lots and lots of humans to participate in this study. You would need thousands of volunteers to participate.

Val Zavala>> So you thought of a very clever way to do it and it was because of a website that you discovered. Tell us about that.

Lars Hufnagel>> Yes. About a year and a half ago, someone brought our attention to this very nice website called wheresgeorge.com. That website records movement of dollar bills within the United States.

Val Zavala>> This is the "Where's George" website. It's been operating for about seven years. Anyone who finds a dollar bill with the words "Where's George?" written on it can go to the website and type in key information about that dollar bill. We're not supposed to write on dollar bills, but people do.

Lars Hufnagel>> That website is collecting the history of millions of dollar bills and there are many users participating in this game. So any time you see written "Where's George?" on a dollar bill --

Val Zavala>> -- you should go to the website (laughter)?

Lars Hufnagel>> You should go to the website and record the position.

Val Zavala>> So if I were to find a "Where's George?" dollar bill, what do I do?

Lars Hufnagel>> So you go down here and there's the little form where you can type in the denomination and then you can type in what year that bill is. Then you have to type in -- which is important -- the serial number.

Val Zavala>> Be sure to be careful to get the right serial number.

Lars Hufnagel>> Yes, these are ten or eleven digits. And then your zip code is also very important so the system knows where you are located at the moment.

Val Zavala>> Now is there any other information on this website like where the dollar bills are?

Lars Hufnagel>> Yes. For example, this is the whole history which is recording.

Val Zavala>> Of this one dollar bill?

Lars Hufnagel>> It started in Dayton, Ohio and then was spotted in fifteen different places. Here you can see a little map of how it actually moved around. It started here in Dayton and then you can see it trapped a little in Texas and now it's back up north.

Val Zavala>> But then it hopped to Utah and now it's way over in Michigan.

Lars Hufnagel>> Quite a journey.

Val Zavala>> So a website designed to track dollars just for fun turned out to be a valuable research tool.

Lars Hufnagel>> So now that we quantified how humans move, we can marry this disbursal term to an epidemic model.

Val Zavala>> And here's what the spread of an epidemic would look like if it started in Omaha, Nebraska based on the flow of dollars.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Just for comparison sake, they produced a map of a hypothetical epidemic from, say, three hundred years ago before cars, trains or planes. It looks like this.

[Film Clip]

Lars Hufnagel>> People moved around three hundred years ago just on a horse. They were really limited how far they can move. You can see that the epidemic spreads in typically wave fronts which just crawl across the country. That has to be compared to how epidemics spread nowadays when people are allowed to use aviation traffic and they can have this non-local jump from one city to the other while here they were just basically very localized.

Val Zavala>> Compare that again to a current day epidemic.

Lars Hufnagel>> And what is really characteristic is that you have this local wave front, but once in a while jumps to another big city and, from there, another wave front expands. So you have this non-local effect of how people move around. That, you can also see in the spread of epidemics.

Val Zavala>> And, obviously, much faster.

Lars Hufnagel>> Yes. I mean, people can move much faster in the United States now, so it will also spread faster.

Val Zavala>> And on a global scale, here's a map showing airline travel.

[Film Clip]

Lars Hufnagel>> What is color-coded here is the number of passengers that actually travel along that route. Dark red is fewer travelers and yellow and white is actually lots of travelers. So what you can see here is that you have a lot of traffic within the United States. It's just coming around here.

Val Zavala>> There's Los Angeles.

Lars Hufnagel>> And there's Los Angeles pretty close to where we are now. Then there's New York.

Val Zavala>> The whole idea being that, where passengers travel, so do viruses and bacteria.

Lars Hufnagel>> Yes. Viruses spread with humans, so they are carried by humans from place to place.

Val Zavala>> So was this a good model for how SARS spread?

Lars Hufnagel>> Yes. It surprised us. We did some study on how SARS spread and the study showed that, knowing what the aviation network looks like, you can predict a fair amount of how an epidemic spreads. So it originated in Hong Kong somewhere around here and then it basically spread very fast around the world to many countries, thirty different countries.

Val Zavala>> Now this also shows you where you might be fairly safe if you wanted to avoid --if you're a hypochondriac --

Lars Hufnagel>> -- yeah, there are certain places where you can hide from an epidemic. If you want to live in Siberia, that's a good place to live. Maybe northern Canada is also quite safe, and Africa. There's also not a lot of traffic there.

Val Zavala>> With the exception of the AIDS epidemic. That's a different thing.

Lars Hufnagel>> Yeah. So there are other disadvantages of some regions.

Val Zavala>> So ultimately, the data that you're putting together in the models and the maps will be used by public health officials?

Lars Hufnagel>> Well, I hope so. I mean, that is the ultimate goal we're heading to. So to have a very detailed and quantitative model which doesn't really depend on lots of parameters you have to put in, and just incorporate the very basic movement of individuals. So the epidemic part is well quantified so that people know how all these infectious diseases have been studied a long time and how they spread from person to person, but what was missing actually was how people move around.

Val Zavala>> The big picture.

Lars Hufnagel>> Yes, the big picture.

Val Zavala>> That is fascinating. Well, congratulations.

Lars Hufnagel>> Okay. Thank you.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> This Chinese New Year has ushered in the Year of the Dog, but at one gallery in Camarillo, it's also the year of the artist. We went to the Studio Channel Islands Art Center in Camarillo and talked with gallery director, Michele DePuy Leavitt, about their exhibit of local and international Chinese artists.

Michele DePuy Leavitt>> It came about because one of our founders realized that we have a strong Chinese community here in Ventura County. Not only strong in terms of its leaders, but the artists in Ventura County. So in this show, we have actually I think around twelve artists that we have included, all of them born in China and only one of them still living there. The artists live currently all the way from Orange County up to about San Luis Obispo, but most of them live here in Ventura County.

I would like to talk about a couple of specific pieces in the show. It being the Year of the Dog, we have a wonderful painting of a dog here by local artist, Tiger Wang. He used to be most well-known for his paintings of animals and he did them in the most -- he had this certain technique of using almost like calligraphy, you know, with ink, like very gestural, quick, ink drawings and, in just a few strokes, completely capturing the essence of a puppy.

[Film Clip]

Michele DePuy Leavitt>> I would love to talk about Jenchi Wu. She's a sculptor that does very cutting edge, avant-garde ceramic work and it sort of confounds the expectation of traditional ceramic sculpture because each of the elements of the large cube are actually traditional pots thrown on a potter's wheel, then all assembled and collapsed into a form. Then she has this raw piece of wood sort of referencing a fulcrum or almost like a teeter-totter. Then the other end, we see the white cube, and that white cube is the same size as the negative space on the large cube.

[Film Clip]

Michele DePuy Leavitt>> We have the one-quarter life size historical figures by George Stuart. He was not born in China, but he has this fascination right now with the Manchu Dynasty and he has been making these historical figures for over fifty years and he's the curator of them at the Ventura County Museum of History and Art. He himself gives long monologues about each era that these figures are from, about the details that went in to making each one and, of course, for this show we chose his Chinese figures.

[Film Clip]

Michele DePuy Leavitt>> Tesie Dong is a seventy year old little Chinese woman. I had the pleasure of visiting her in her studio. At her studio in the hills right outside of downtown Los Angeles, she has all of her own facilities for welding, for bending the steel, for actually bending the light tubes of the neon light. She actually went and took a welding class and learned how to weld. She was making her designs in 3-D and it wasn't enough. She wanted light in them and then that's what led to using neon light in her work.

[Film Clip]

Michele DePuy Leavitt>> So I'm glad you've enjoyed this exhibition and I welcome you all and invite you all to please come out to Studio Channel Islands Art Center on the campus of California State University Channel Islands.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Tiger Woods is a superstar, but he knows there's more to life than golf and he's proving it by opening up an educational center for under-served kids in Anaheim. Roger Cooper has the story.

Roger Cooper>> He's the Orange County native who grew up to become one of the best golfers in the world. Tiger Woods was born in Cypress, attended Western High in Anaheim and perfected his putting and powerful swing here at the Dad Miller Golf Course. Now his desire to give back to his community has produced this, the twenty-five million dollar Tiger Woods Learning Center in Anaheim.

Tiger Woods>> "Well, I think it's certainly one of the greatest things that has ever happened in my life. Everyone knows how much I love golf and I love to compete, but this is certainly bigger than golf, bigger than anything I've ever done on a golf course, because we are able to help lives, influence lives, shape lives."

Roger Cooper>> The Tiger Woods Learning Center is thirty-five thousand square feet of classrooms and computer labs where fourth through twelfth graders, many from under-privileged backgrounds, will be given the chance to explore new interests and career paths. A full-time staff of educators will teach in such fields as robotics, graphic design, creative writing, video production and music recording, augmenting what's available in their regular schools.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> And, as you'd expect with Tiger, they'll have the chance to learn a little golf out back. But he insists that golf is not the major emphasis here.

Tiger Woods>> "This is far bigger, far bigger than any putt I've ever made."

Roger Cooper>> Tiger says his decision to build a learning center grew out of the 9/11 attacks. With all flights grounded, he had to drive home from a tournament in St. Louis.

Tiger Woods>> "I drove back down to Florida and I had a lot of time to think about life and reflect and I thought about the foundation quite a bit. It didn't hit me until probably about a month or two afterwards that we needed to build something substantial, something that kids could touch."

Roger Cooper>> After four years of fundraising, including six million of his own money, the Learning Center now stands on fourteen acres provided by Orange County, ready for five thousand area students a year, students who will apply by writing an essay on why they want to attend. To dedicate his Learning Center, Tiger would call on two people he knew: former president Bill Clinton and California first lady, Maria Shriver, who met Tiger's mom.

Maria Shriver>> "But I just spent about fifteen minutes with Mrs. Woods and my entire speech went out the window because I just learned that everything I'm doing in parenting four children is a mistake (laughter). She never let him go play golf until he had done his homework. If he came home one minute late, she didn't care what the excuse was, he was down, out."

Bill Clinton>> "The third reason I came is because I'm impressed that Tiger Woods decided to do this when he was thirty instead of when he was sixty. It's important for us to understand that there has never been a time in all of history when private citizens had more ability to do public good."

Tiger Woods>> "All of a sudden, from a dream, here comes a thirty-five thousand square foot facility where kids now have opportunities to create a future for themselves and, more importantly, feel safe. Feel safe to learn, feel safe to grow and, more importantly, it's theirs.

Roger Cooper>> The first classes of young people are already attending the Tiger Woods Learning Center on a street just renamed Tiger Woods Way.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> Tiger promises that this is just the beginning. There will be other such centers around the nation and the world. In Anaheim, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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