Charleston Currents

Articles by: Fred Palm

MYSTERY PHOTO: This one should be easy

We’re betting this orange building on a contrasting blue background will be a pretty easy mystery for you to solve. What and where is it? Send your best guess to editor@charlestoncurrents.com. And don’t forget to include your name and the town in which you live. And if you’ve got a clever mystery photo for our readers, send it to the same address (Try to stump us!)

Our previous Mystery Photo: A gracious reader sent in our most recent mystery, “A brick folly?” It shows the remains of a bell tower at Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site on the Ashley River near Summerville.

by Fred Palm · 10/04/2021 · Comments are Disabled · Mystery Photo

ANOTHER VIEW: Suffer the children

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The ongoing raging COVID-19 community transmission that is expanding, like this year’s wildfires and tropical storms, will continue to impact children beyond this season. It is not over yet for them. Nor will it end for them. Children’s lives, like the lives of adults, are being damaged in many ways. But children have much less experience to return to. Adults have memory and lived perspectives.

by Fred Palm · 11/30/2020 · Comments are Disabled · Common Good, My Turn, Views

FOCUS: Vigorous government action needed to curb spread of virus

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | Correct and effective state action to battle COVID-19 is required. Now. Otherwise, more lives and livelihoods across South Carolina will suffer as a third wave descends upon the state.

Gov. Henry McMaster’s Oct. 23 public relations visit to Myrtle Beach revealed a guy who is in over his head with no way out. That means we have no way out.

“We’re vigilant. We’re trying to do our best,” he said during the visit. “We’ve heard from a lot of people in a lot of different kind of businesses; we’re taking all of that into consideration. These restrictions, it’s uncomfortable. Sometimes it imposes great hardship; we’re aware of that. All of these decisions are made not quickly.”

by Fred Palm · 10/26/2020 · 1 comment · Focus, Good news

FOCUS, Palm: Governor should create new state health testing office

By Fred Palm, contributing editor for the common good | In the bizarro world of 2020, South Carolina legislators of both parties are not only demanding that a state agency ask for more money, but telling its leaders outright they will get whatever they need.

It should be obvious by now — even to us dullards casually watching the paint dry with the absence of our no-show legislature — that for seven long months, our governor, Henry McMaster, does not want a big effective testing program to contain COVID-19. The S.C. McMaster program is no testing and no masking.

McMaster lacks the modicum of a plan to contain the COVID-19 infections, illnesses and deaths. There is no victory; just enduring the pain and dislocations. Nada. Nope. Just Southern plantation slow talk without substance.

McMaster likes coasting and bumping along, as if this is a flood. McMaster dons his black emergency-in-charge shirt standing ready to send in helpful stuff as the waters recede. Governor: This is a pandemic. The storm emergency model does not work in this virus emergency.

by Fred Palm · 08/31/2020 · 1 comment · Focus, Good news, News briefs

FOCUS: Management of an epidemic requires surveillance monitoring

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | Our South Carolina emergency plan is an all-event skeleton. Depending upon the particular threat, customization to the plan is made. Even in the overall skeleton plan, any epidemic event is a second thought found in an appendix (14-1) to the general model for action. In these plans, there is no pandemic appendix, so with COVID-19, we presumptively start as if the virus is an infection.

An epidemic requires a swift model that leaps ahead of the presenting of requests for medical services. State-level authorizations and equipment requests passed up the line will not be delivered in time. In fact, little time exists if an infection doubles every five days.

Social science surveys estimate the size of something, the incidence in the population. In this election season, for example, we are bombarded with polling data about what percentage of voters, likely Republicans or Democrats, are expected to behave in a particular way.

by Fred Palm · 03/16/2020 · Comments are Disabled · Common Good, Focus

FOCUS: Justify spending $1.1 billion on Interstate 526 widening

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT) proposes to widen Interstate 526 and redo the Interstate 26 intersection. This will be a massive redo of a major travel vector. The cost: at least $1.1 billion. The I-526 Corridor Analysis shows minor shifts in congestion or capacity improvement. The SCDOT website is open to the end of January for our comments.

SCDOT builds highways and wants us to focus on the four alternative highway routes. We are putting down our future regional investments and growth. Highway investment drives other future investments. Businesses use interstate distribution of their goods that grows our economy. Build it and they will come or follow. In a similar vein, railroad spines drove our country’s western development.

Transportation, flooding and economic factors drive the following decisions: Where homes get put; where business expands; and how long the commute follows. These are supporting, opposing, or conflicting factors.

* CLICK into the story to find how too take part in the SCDOT virtual public meeting and share your voice.

by Fred Palm · 01/06/2020 · 2 comments · Common Good, Focus, Views

FOCUS, Palm: Let’s be smarter about dealing with traffic woes

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The S.C. Department of Transportation (SCDOT) wants to widen Interstate 526 to six lanes in Charleston and Berkeley counties recognizing that congestion is regional and the correct response is more highway.

Maybe.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into the commercial, medical and educational spheres. Traffic management involves dynamic conditions involving both complex and repetitive decisions to control traffic signals to get us through an intersection.

Congestion detection and prediction is a math problem that we can do — and so can trained machines. In fact, the Federal Highway Administration advocates more use of these “Adaptive Traffic Management Systems.”

by Fred Palm · 12/16/2019 · Comments are Disabled · Common Good, Views

FOCUS, Palm: Whistleblowers, inspectors general and the common good

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The role of a government inspector general is much in the news lately. The position has evolved from military tradition to ensure that government-funded entities use taxpayer money in careful, frugal and legal manners. We don’t want, for example, our hard-earned tax dollars wasted, ripped-off, squandered, thieved or frauded.

The inspector general was first used here during our Revolutionary War. General George Washington smartly recognized that his militia leaders and those that reported to them sometimes distorted, exaggerated and plain lied about their fitness and capabilities.

Washington appointed an inspector general modeling a practice of the Prussian Army, then the world’s elite war-fighting army. Back then, one of the practices of the Prussian Army was to require field inspections for war-fighting fitness to be conducted by knowledgeable staff who were independent and outside the reporting chain of command. They were intentionally free from the obligation to follow orders.

Washington and his command staff used an inspector general to provide a potential pathway for the truth. The obligation of Washington’s inspectional forces was to objectively determine capability and to accurately report on the conditions …

by Fred Palm · 10/07/2019 · Comments are Disabled · Common Good, Focus, Good news

FOCUS, Palm: Much more work needed on flood-prone areas

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The City of Charleston is required to identify severely flood-damaged properties so that if the damage is extensive, the properties are removed from the floodplain and, if not, they are brought up to a higher level of resilience to better survive the next flood event.

This is a long-term, common-sense strategy to correct past planning and building decisions that did not work with increases in flood events and to lessen the replacement cost borne by all taxpayers. This also is a “common good” policy offering transition. Carried out over decades, owners are to be compensated for their losses, at-risk housing is removed from the floodplain, and we get to live in a more resilient community.

Unfortunately, the sensible policy is not being done well enough and treated more on a par with sloppy housekeeping by the city. …

by Fred Palm · 07/07/2019 · Comments are Disabled · Common Good, Focus, Good news, Views

FOCUS, Palm: I-526 Extension is a huge boondoggle

By Fred Palm, contributing editor | The S.C. Joint Bond Review Committee last week sent Charleston County’s funding application to extend Interstate 526 to a four-person subcommittee to provide the due diligence of the facts of the financing. Why? Because years of skittish details about the project just do not fly.

Core issue: The basic problem that caused the delay by the Joint Bond Review Committee is found in the half-truths, equivocations, shell games, bait and switch, balderdash and peekaboo funding sources draped with inchoate statements about other displaced projects from the majority of Charleston County Council that backs the I-526 extension (I-526X). Through proposed no-see-em fiscal sleights of hand, the council’s Majority of Five offers to push through this incredibly expensive highway with zero contingency built off of a well-founded cost estimate because at its root, the extension is unjustifiable.