One advantage of Alcatraz over Treasure Island and other landfill development is that Alcatraz is, IIRC, solid rock. This is beneficial in earthquake country, as solid rock is nowhere near as susceptible to liquefaction as landfill. As far as sewage and fresh water, while it wouldn’t be inexpensive, I think it would be trivial engineering to lay pipelines to Alcatraz from San Francisco city proper for those purposes. Probably could run electrical conduits to Alcatraz too. The oil and gas industry does this sort of thing everyday, in much deeper water and worse weather. Or you could set up a windmill/whichever green power scheme you’d like. Land in the SF Bay Area is ridiculously expensive. MLS searching for towns like Tiburon yields price per acre in excess of 5 million dollars. Granted, some of that is for the house (assuming you aren’t doing a tear down), and there would be very expensive demolition of the existing buildings and other site prep, but the views from Alcatraz are almost unique.
But your major problem with developing Alcatraz is going to be the multiple layers of city, county, multi-county, state, federal and non-governmental agencies that will all want a say.
I was waiting to see if somebody made that point. Foster City officials point out that they went through the Loma Prieta with no serious damages, and claim that properly engineered landfill such as they are built on is much more seismically sound than older landfill development. They’ve engaged in a fight with the USGS to get their risk assessment downgraded for this. I’m not sure I’d believe them. Foster City is sort of an odd place:
Since it’s been pointed out that it’s a windy, cold, isolated, barren rock with no fresh water, the question might be: Why not blow it up, and regain some of the huge area that’s been filled in over the centuries?
That’s fascinating. I never would have guessed that. The authors of this text, Practical Lessons from the Loma Prieta Earthquake, agree with the statement that there was no significant liquefaction in Foster City, due to the use of compaction either during the fill, or shortly thereafter.
Though I experienced Loma Prieta personally, and remember the T.V. footage of the Nimitz Freeway pancakeing, and the Marina district, I didn’t remember hearing anything about damage in Foster City. Interesting. Distance matters, though, and I don’t know if they’ll have similar luck if say, the Hayward Fault(s) three times closer, let go.
I naturally can’t find the cite now, but I remember coming across a site that claimed that fresh water and sewage are currently barged to/from Alcatraz. One site made the unconfirmed statement that the ferries to/from Alcatraz handled the task. I don’t know either way.
Wildlife before Americans in the Bay Area, as I understand, was based on a climate that was considerably wetter than it is now, since the bay was much larger. (I don’t have a reference, but I remember hearing that it’s 1/3 filled in now.) Removing the island – just a thought, mind you – would improve the current flow, flush out man-laid deposits from past mining, etc. The regained surface area might not be that great, but over the last decades the trend has been more and more fill.
Parenthetically, removing Alcatraz is just a thought in passing. However I definitely believe Treasure Island should be demolished. There’s not much excuse of any kind for it.
I recognize Alcatraz is a tourist spot, and that some people imagine the culture of a concrete prison is more important than Spanish missions and native American culture, but I’m not one. To me, it’s an ugly testimony to America’s inability to handle social problems gracefully. I’d rather have a 10 story monument to the glory of the flush toilet. But I suppose that, at least, must be considered a minority opinion.
The people who lived on the island during the prison years, they talked about the poor health conditions everybody acquired after years living on that island. These conditions went away after moving to the mainland, it was cold humidity that made everybody ache, this was before glucosamine became widely used. Every single employee did not want to work there, there is some real speculation that the Morris Anglin escape was allowed to happen so that the prison could fall out of favor with the USG. They all knew that breaking the slogan hype (or shenanigans of the day) that carried the reputation the of ‘the rock, the unescapable prison’ could work.
Every single part of life was made more difficult just because of the location of the island, and not just the typical accoutrements expected from living on an island. But sewage, they said the smell of sewage occurred at least once a day and lasted an hour. Dead seals would wash up on the shore and rot for days. Bird droppings were everywhere, the day after a heavy rain changed everyones emotions because everything smelled clean again. They couldn’t buy something just for the sake of getting out, so a routine day became so maddening that one year a psychological study was conducted on the prisoners and a similarity was found amongst the families of the people who lived there. This was written in 2011
So am I, and also see lack of damage to Foster City, whether you believe their assertion that Foster City sustained no damage because it is properly engineered landfill or not. And no, I didn’t live in Foster City or the Marina at the time (I worked in Alameda. The Cypress Structure was my commute route until that happened).
I think something like Alcatraz would probably be most alluring to a single, very wealthy, owner. It already has a heliport and a yacht dock. The demands for water, sewage, etc. would be low and the privacy quite good.
I can just picture Elon Musk standing on top of cell block C yelling at kids “Get off my rock!”