It was October of 1989, and Santa Cruz City Councilmember John Laird was sitting at his desk in the Loma Prieta earthquake-battered downtown, somewhere amid a four-day power outage.
In one hand he held a hammer and in the other a towel filled with coffee beans.
“I swore before the next disaster that I was going to get a hand-crank coffee grinder,” he said.
Four decades, several key leaps up the political ladder and multiple natural disaster responses later, state Sen. John Laird still doesn’t own that coffee grinder.
“We’ll go into chaos again and there I’ll be,” he laughed last week while being whisked by staff toward the set-to-overflow Salinas River, a day before Laird and other Central Coast electeds would visit the combined coast-and-redwoods wreckage in his longtime home county.
What it takes to be prepared for even the small-scale loss of creature comforts like a palatable cup of coffee underscores the larger point about this historical moment of flooding that just keeps on coming.
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