🟠 Good morning, RVA: Orange air quality alert, combating climate change, and chili bowls

Good morning, RVA! It’s 62 °F, and today you can expect highs around 90 °F, cloudless skies, and…fine particulate matter filling the air from Canadian wildfires. The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has issued a Code Orange Air Quality alert (that’s “unhealthy for sensitive groups”) until midnight tonight. Keep an eye on the weather app of your choice, though, because, as of right now, mine reports an AQI of 159 which would put us in the red zone (or “unhealthy” for everyone). If we do end up spending most of the day at the red level level, sensitive groups—people with lung disease, older folks, children, minority populations, and outdoor workers—should avoid long or intense outdoor activities and consider rescheduling or moving those activities indoors. Everyone else should keep it breezy and take more breaks. Keep this Air Quality Guide for Particle Pollution handy, it’s the best resource I’ve found for remembering how to stay safe and healthy during bad air days—which are sure to continue throughout the summer.
 

Water cooler

City Council update: The Public Utilities and Services Commission paper, which I’m now officially obsessed with (ORD. 2023–188), cleared the Governmental Operations committee and will now (theoretically) show up on full Council’s July 24th agenda. The paper has three patrons (Addison, Jordan, and Lambert), and to become a real boy/law it needs to find two additional votes out of the group of Nye, Lynch, Robertson, Newbille, Trammell, and Jones. Lynch sits on the Governmental Operations committee, but I’m not sure how she voted yesterday (and I can’t get the video to load). It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the group goes—especially someone like Councilmember Trammell who values keeping an eye on rising utility rates, but would not, I assume, be a strong supporter of removing methane gas sales from DPU’s service portfolio. Stay tuned!
 

Related, Patrick Larsen at VPM reports on this past Tuesday’s rally against Dominion’s plans to build a new methane power plant in Chesterfield. I’ll tell you what, I’m pretty tired of Dominion’s circular talking points about how to meet rising electricity demands. If Dominion wanted to, they could build clean power facilities to crank out more power during peak periods. Nothing says that we’ve got to burn methane gas to make sure people have enough juice to run their air conditioners in the summer (which are hotter due to climate change) and heaters in the winter (which will have more severe storms due to climate change). We shouldn’t make the long term problem worse trying to meet the short term needs.
 

NBC12’s Desiree Montilla has the story of a bystander, in this case a Chesterfield librarian, who saved a person’s life by administering naloxone—the miraculous drug that stops an opioid overdose in its tracks. You can (and should) get free naloxone training from your friendly local health department! It’s easy, and you never know when you may need to save someone’s life.
 

Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond reports that Ben’s Chili Bowl may start to franchise, and, if they do, Richmond may be one of the first cities they target for expansion. That’s a lot of “mays,” so maybe temper your excitement for a minute, but we should learn more concrete details in the coming months.
 

I’ve written about Incanto before—the impressive and immersive sculpture installation at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden—and, on July 4th, from 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM, you can go check out Incanto for free. That’s pretty early in the day and gives you plenty of time to make your way to wherever you post up for your preferred Independence Day fireworks display. While you’re at the Garden, you can also check out the Butterflies LIVE! exhibit, too (if you can get past the fact that the experience would be way different if it were another bug landing on you without your permission, like, say, cockroaches).
 

This morning’s longread

Everything is Open

After reading this longread about lockpicking YouTube, I instantly lost 45 minutes to watching this man open lock after lock after lock. Honestly, it’s sort of calming in an ASMR-adjacent way.
 

Watch enough picking tutorials and you may well start to seriously think about changing out the lock on your front door for something sturdier—but what about the windows, surely a far likelier point of entry for would-be break-ins? (A riposte to the flak that LPL caught for his storefront lock video, for example, might be that the lock is typically used on automatic glass doors—meaning that any criticism lobbed at LPL for arming would-be 7/11 robbers could be leveled with equal validity against brick manufacturers.) Compounding this is the fact that the more unusual and ostentatious a security measure is, the more likely it is to tip off potential thieves that it’s guarding something of value worth their time and effort. Sometimes the best bike lock isn’t the one with the strongest chain, as he noted in a video testing a device put out by Supreme, it’s simply the one that attracts the least notice.
 

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Picture of the Day

This creek was the actual trail.