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Skatepark filled with 37 tons of sand after skaters ignore No Trespassing signs

44 points by spking 7y ago

gfs 7y ago
It's funny to see a skate park so close to home. I play softball in a men's league across the way from it. This seems like a lazy solution that will be very hard to clean up after the fact though.
- lb1lf 7y ago
  Crude, but effective. I wouldn't be too concerned about cleaning it up afterwards - 90% can be dug out quite rapidly, the rest calls for half a dozen skaters with brooms or an industrial size vacuum cleaner. (Think: a trailer with a beefy diesel engine on it to power the suction pumps - I watched one clean out a drydock once. Never thought I'd find cleaning up a mess so fascinating.)
- dgrin91 7y ago
  Can you tell if there is actually 37 tons of sand there? 37 tons seems like... well.. a ton of sand for lack of a better phrase. In the video it seems like there was only few inches over a moderately sized park. It doesn't seem like its really 37 tons. Maybe though it just doesn't show the whole park, or I'm just bad at estimating.
  - bredren 7y ago
    Sand weighs ~100 lbs per cubic ft. 37 tons = 74000 lbs or 740 cubic ft 3 inches of depth gets you 4 sq ft of coverage 740*4 gets you 2960 sq. feet. The city says the park is 14,000 sq feet. [1] In the video you can see they avoided spreading it in a lot of areas because they didn't have nearly enough! Conclusion: Sand is heavy [1] https://www.san-clemente.org/Home/Components/FacilityDirectory/FacilityDirectory/43/2701 https://www.san-clemente.org/Home/Components/FacilityDirecto...
    - candu 7y ago
      To put that in context: 1 cubic foot of flour is 37 lbs; of sugar, 50 lbs; of water, 62 lbs. If you've ever tried to pick up a sack / large bucket of any of these things, it's like that but even denser. Compound that by the usual "volume varies as the cube of a side" thing, and this gets really heavy fast.
  - steanne 7y ago
    image search for one ton of sand, you'll see that it fits in a large bag.
  - itronitron 7y ago
    one ton of sand is about a 2 foot cube, so 37 tons would be about 12 feet by 12 feet by 2 feet deep, they really only need to fill in the bottom part of the skate park to render it mostly useless.
  - xouse 7y ago
    The easiest way to estimate/visualize it is that the normal dump trucks you see on the road are 20 ton dump trucks. So at a maximum it's two dump truck loads, which doesn't go very far. In reality sand is pretty dense/heavy so it's even less than that.
- pif 7y ago
  Maybe, but it's a fast solutions. Social isolation is important enough to be imposed, like, now!
cproctor 7y ago
Florida's beaches are one step ahead of this.
- J5892 7y ago
  Did they build skate parks on them because people kept going to the beach?
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
It would be more profitable to fine them and their parents
tapland 7y ago
I look out over our skate park, and its buzzing since spring is arriving (Sweden, largest skate park). 37 tons is about one truckload? It will be mostly brushed away quickly when quarantine ends. Wish they did the same here, but the skate park is the least of our social distancing problems.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > 37 tons is about one truckload Sand is 1.5-2 ton per cubic meter, it depends on how wet it is. A decent truck can be loaded with about 10 cubic meters and it’s trailer a little more 10-15 cubic meters. Based off a DIY project, so someone may know better.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    With sand axel weight is the limit not cubic volume.
- leakybit 7y ago
  37/2 = 18.5 tons which around the payload limit for a standard triaxle dump truck, So 2 truckloads.
2bitencryption 7y ago
I'm honestly so surprised to see stuff like this -- from a logistics standpoint. It's so easy -- free even! -- to just not do anything. But someone said, "We have to stop these skaters." And brainstormed ideas. And came up with "sand". And figured out how to acquire that much sand, and how to truck a literal ton of sand to the park. I'm not disagreeing with what they did. I'm just surprised that someone considered the cost/benefit to be worth it. Even more surprising if this was a government action instead of a private skatepark owner -- surely this must be a private skatepark. How many committees would it take to figure out this whole sand thing?
- bredren 7y ago
  Also worth noting the video says that a non-profit manages the skate park, but the city dumped sand on it without informing them of the plan.
  - tehwebguy 7y ago
    Absolutely psychotic, who would think it's okay to do this to someone else's stuff?
    - olyjohn 7y ago
      The government.
    - jedimastert 7y ago
      It's not "someone else's stuff," it's the city's. The non-profit "manages" the park, but they don't own it. An anology might be that you let a friend watch over a cabin in the woods in exchange for letting you use it for parties and stuff. Now you don't people to use the cabin for a while (perhaps wildfire season or bears spotted very close by), people still keep using the cabin, so you change the locks. Still arguably a dick move depending on the dynamic of the park and skaters and what have you, but well within the city's rights. The only "damage" was to their own property.
      - 7y ago
ipnon 7y ago
Skateboarding is de facto illegal. You can't stop kids from skating without making it physically impossible because they are already dismissing the law and its enforcement. Notice the sand has already been cleared in enough areas to start skating again.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  To be scrupulously fair, while laws against (or de facto against) skateboarding aren't legitimate, this seems to be more about enforcing quarantine for coronavirus, so as long the people doing this clean it up when the quarantine ends, I don't think this particlularly unreasonable.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
g_sch 7y ago
All over the world, I see people trying to stop people from being outdoors, regardless of the health and safety implications. In the UK, police are issuing citations to people in parks. NYC has set up a tip line to report "social distancing violations" and is closing some parks. I don't understand it. I understand the imperative for social distancing, of course. But it seems like enforcement has been targeted at relatively low-risk activities (hanging out in large, public outdoor spaces) and not at all at the high-risk ones (e.g. where I live in Brooklyn, half the laundromats have closed and the remaining half are constantly crowded). I can't help but think that part of this impulse comes from a certain sour-grapes mentality that sees people trying to enjoy themselves during a trying time and wants to take it away from them. A real public health intervention would ensure that all necessary activities - getting groceries, doing laundry, going to work - are just as safe as going to the park.
- com2kid 7y ago
  Washington State has a more measured approach, the Governor has told people they can still go outside for walks, just stay apart. A lot of hiking trails did get shut down after people crowded them, parking lots were overflowing when people were supposed to be social distancing, so that didn't go well. But the majority of city parks and trails are still open, only the children's playgrounds are closed.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    I live close to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, which ordinarily is a good place to get out into nature and wouldn't be hard to follow social distancing rules. But it's owned and run by the University of Minnesota, and the Governor ordered the university closed. They won't even let you walk into the place anymore.
  - williamstein 7y ago
    I also live in WA. Many parks (except playgrounds) are officially opened, but the parking lots are mostly closed. See [1] for: > "Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office announced Thursday that the city will allow major parks to remain open through the weekend [...] Parking lots at larger parks will remain closed, and additional rules are in place for Green Lake, Seward Park, Alki Beach, and Golden Gardens such as no fire pits or picnics, no gatherings or beach activities, and loop trails remain open to pedestrian use only. You'll also notice new signage at Seattle parks about social distancing and the #KeepItMoving initiative. Seattle Parks and Recreation will also be deploying 60 new "Social Distancing Ambassadors" at major parks who will remind people to socially distance." I've gone to some parks to walk my dog, and you have to park in the surrounding neighborhood instead of the big parking lot at the park, which puts additional strain on the community. It's kind of weird, but entirely legal and within the established rules. The weather in Seattle is ridiculously nice right now. I'm going to go skateboarding this afternoon, somewhere that won't be filled with sand by self-righteous assholes. [1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washington-state-seattle-coronavirus-updates-real-time/281-bb8c2867-a50e-4476-8564-d35fa4502895 https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washin...
grawprog 7y ago
Anyone who still thinks this is about 'protecting' people from themselves is just deluding themselves. When there's footage of children being harassed and arrested by cops for selling lemonade in public or old folks being dragged off trains by groups of cops for not wearing a mask and talk from governments of allowing law enforcement to enter people's homes on suspicion of 'being sick' there's something seriously fucked up going on. I don't give a shit how many people get sick from covid-19 at this point, I'm not going to accept living in some fucked up dictatorship because people are scared of dying. People die all the time. I don't care, get over it. That's what life is, you live and then you die. Everyone living right now will die some day. Period. Living your life like a prisoner because some authority tells you you need to be scared of this is unacceptable to me and.in all honesty I would rather be dead then live in a world like that.
- battery_cowboy 7y ago
  Then go kill yourself rather than expose everyone to the risk as well, you libertarian nightmare.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    That’s not libertarianism; It’s more anti-authoritarian. “The government said not to do something, so I’m gonna do exactly that!”
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - freyir 7y ago
      Mixed in with some general solipsism & selfishness: “The government said not to do something that I want to do, so I’m gonna do exactly that even if it causes people to die!” OP going to the park or boarding a train without a mask might not cause anyone to die. But if everyone shared OP's view and went to parks and crowded onto trains, people certainly would die. Some people are just bad at extrapolating beyond themselves and their own immediate wants.
chrisco255 7y ago
This is the insanity of overreaction. Let's shut down all outdoor activities and force people to huddle in tightly enclosed spaces. Sounds like a great health policy! So draconian and unnecessary.
DeonPenny 7y ago
Sour grapes are the worse thing about this situation.

44 points by spking 7y ago

gfs 7y ago

It's funny to see a skate park so close to home. I play softball in a men's league across the way from it. This seems like a lazy solution that will be very hard to clean up after the fact though.

lb1lf 7y ago
Crude, but effective. I wouldn't be too concerned about cleaning it up afterwards - 90% can be dug out quite rapidly, the rest calls for half a dozen skaters with brooms or an industrial size vacuum cleaner. (Think: a trailer with a beefy diesel engine on it to power the suction pumps - I watched one clean out a drydock once. Never thought I'd find cleaning up a mess so fascinating.)
dgrin91 7y ago
Can you tell if there is actually 37 tons of sand there? 37 tons seems like... well.. a ton of sand for lack of a better phrase. In the video it seems like there was only few inches over a moderately sized park. It doesn't seem like its really 37 tons. Maybe though it just doesn't show the whole park, or I'm just bad at estimating.
- bredren 7y ago
  Sand weighs ~100 lbs per cubic ft. 37 tons = 74000 lbs or 740 cubic ft 3 inches of depth gets you 4 sq ft of coverage 740*4 gets you 2960 sq. feet. The city says the park is 14,000 sq feet. [1] In the video you can see they avoided spreading it in a lot of areas because they didn't have nearly enough! Conclusion: Sand is heavy [1] https://www.san-clemente.org/Home/Components/FacilityDirectory/FacilityDirectory/43/2701 https://www.san-clemente.org/Home/Components/FacilityDirecto...
  - candu 7y ago
    To put that in context: 1 cubic foot of flour is 37 lbs; of sugar, 50 lbs; of water, 62 lbs. If you've ever tried to pick up a sack / large bucket of any of these things, it's like that but even denser. Compound that by the usual "volume varies as the cube of a side" thing, and this gets really heavy fast.
- steanne 7y ago
  image search for one ton of sand, you'll see that it fits in a large bag.
- itronitron 7y ago
  one ton of sand is about a 2 foot cube, so 37 tons would be about 12 feet by 12 feet by 2 feet deep, they really only need to fill in the bottom part of the skate park to render it mostly useless.
- xouse 7y ago
  The easiest way to estimate/visualize it is that the normal dump trucks you see on the road are 20 ton dump trucks. So at a maximum it's two dump truck loads, which doesn't go very far. In reality sand is pretty dense/heavy so it's even less than that.
pif 7y ago
Maybe, but it's a fast solutions. Social isolation is important enough to be imposed, like, now!

cproctor 7y ago

Florida's beaches are one step ahead of this.

J5892 7y ago
Did they build skate parks on them because people kept going to the beach?

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

It would be more profitable to fine them and their parents

tapland 7y ago

I look out over our skate park, and its buzzing since spring is arriving (Sweden, largest skate park). 37 tons is about one truckload? It will be mostly brushed away quickly when quarantine ends. Wish they did the same here, but the skate park is the least of our social distancing problems.

lostlogin 7y ago
> 37 tons is about one truckload Sand is 1.5-2 ton per cubic meter, it depends on how wet it is. A decent truck can be loaded with about 10 cubic meters and it’s trailer a little more 10-15 cubic meters. Based off a DIY project, so someone may know better.
- bluGill 7y ago
  With sand axel weight is the limit not cubic volume.
leakybit 7y ago
37/2 = 18.5 tons which around the payload limit for a standard triaxle dump truck, So 2 truckloads.

2bitencryption 7y ago

I'm honestly so surprised to see stuff like this -- from a logistics standpoint. It's so easy -- free even! -- to just not do anything. But someone said, "We have to stop these skaters." And brainstormed ideas. And came up with "sand". And figured out how to acquire that much sand, and how to truck a literal ton of sand to the park. I'm not disagreeing with what they did. I'm just surprised that someone considered the cost/benefit to be worth it. Even more surprising if this was a government action instead of a private skatepark owner -- surely this must be a private skatepark. How many committees would it take to figure out this whole sand thing?

bredren 7y ago
Also worth noting the video says that a non-profit manages the skate park, but the city dumped sand on it without informing them of the plan.
- tehwebguy 7y ago
  Absolutely psychotic, who would think it's okay to do this to someone else's stuff?
  - olyjohn 7y ago
    The government.
  - jedimastert 7y ago
    It's not "someone else's stuff," it's the city's. The non-profit "manages" the park, but they don't own it. An anology might be that you let a friend watch over a cabin in the woods in exchange for letting you use it for parties and stuff. Now you don't people to use the cabin for a while (perhaps wildfire season or bears spotted very close by), people still keep using the cabin, so you change the locks. Still arguably a dick move depending on the dynamic of the park and skaters and what have you, but well within the city's rights. The only "damage" was to their own property.
    - 7y ago

ipnon 7y ago

Skateboarding is de facto illegal. You can't stop kids from skating without making it physically impossible because they are already dismissing the law and its enforcement. Notice the sand has already been cleared in enough areas to start skating again.

a1369209993 7y ago
To be scrupulously fair, while laws against (or de facto against) skateboarding aren't legitimate, this seems to be more about enforcing quarantine for coronavirus, so as long the people doing this clean it up when the quarantine ends, I don't think this particlularly unreasonable.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

g_sch 7y ago

All over the world, I see people trying to stop people from being outdoors, regardless of the health and safety implications. In the UK, police are issuing citations to people in parks. NYC has set up a tip line to report "social distancing violations" and is closing some parks. I don't understand it. I understand the imperative for social distancing, of course. But it seems like enforcement has been targeted at relatively low-risk activities (hanging out in large, public outdoor spaces) and not at all at the high-risk ones (e.g. where I live in Brooklyn, half the laundromats have closed and the remaining half are constantly crowded). I can't help but think that part of this impulse comes from a certain sour-grapes mentality that sees people trying to enjoy themselves during a trying time and wants to take it away from them. A real public health intervention would ensure that all necessary activities - getting groceries, doing laundry, going to work - are just as safe as going to the park.

com2kid 7y ago
Washington State has a more measured approach, the Governor has told people they can still go outside for walks, just stay apart. A lot of hiking trails did get shut down after people crowded them, parking lots were overflowing when people were supposed to be social distancing, so that didn't go well. But the majority of city parks and trails are still open, only the children's playgrounds are closed.
- mark-r 7y ago
  I live close to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, which ordinarily is a good place to get out into nature and wouldn't be hard to follow social distancing rules. But it's owned and run by the University of Minnesota, and the Governor ordered the university closed. They won't even let you walk into the place anymore.
- williamstein 7y ago
  I also live in WA. Many parks (except playgrounds) are officially opened, but the parking lots are mostly closed. See [1] for: > "Mayor Jenny Durkan’s office announced Thursday that the city will allow major parks to remain open through the weekend [...] Parking lots at larger parks will remain closed, and additional rules are in place for Green Lake, Seward Park, Alki Beach, and Golden Gardens such as no fire pits or picnics, no gatherings or beach activities, and loop trails remain open to pedestrian use only. You'll also notice new signage at Seattle parks about social distancing and the #KeepItMoving initiative. Seattle Parks and Recreation will also be deploying 60 new "Social Distancing Ambassadors" at major parks who will remind people to socially distance." I've gone to some parks to walk my dog, and you have to park in the surrounding neighborhood instead of the big parking lot at the park, which puts additional strain on the community. It's kind of weird, but entirely legal and within the established rules. The weather in Seattle is ridiculously nice right now. I'm going to go skateboarding this afternoon, somewhere that won't be filled with sand by self-righteous assholes. [1] https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washington-state-seattle-coronavirus-updates-real-time/281-bb8c2867-a50e-4476-8564-d35fa4502895 https://www.king5.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/washin...

grawprog 7y ago

Anyone who still thinks this is about 'protecting' people from themselves is just deluding themselves. When there's footage of children being harassed and arrested by cops for selling lemonade in public or old folks being dragged off trains by groups of cops for not wearing a mask and talk from governments of allowing law enforcement to enter people's homes on suspicion of 'being sick' there's something seriously fucked up going on. I don't give a shit how many people get sick from covid-19 at this point, I'm not going to accept living in some fucked up dictatorship because people are scared of dying. People die all the time. I don't care, get over it. That's what life is, you live and then you die. Everyone living right now will die some day. Period. Living your life like a prisoner because some authority tells you you need to be scared of this is unacceptable to me and.in all honesty I would rather be dead then live in a world like that.

battery_cowboy 7y ago
Then go kill yourself rather than expose everyone to the risk as well, you libertarian nightmare.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  That’s not libertarianism; It’s more anti-authoritarian. “The government said not to do something, so I’m gonna do exactly that!”
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - freyir 7y ago
    Mixed in with some general solipsism & selfishness: “The government said not to do something that I want to do, so I’m gonna do exactly that even if it causes people to die!” OP going to the park or boarding a train without a mask might not cause anyone to die. But if everyone shared OP's view and went to parks and crowded onto trains, people certainly would die. Some people are just bad at extrapolating beyond themselves and their own immediate wants.

chrisco255 7y ago

This is the insanity of overreaction. Let's shut down all outdoor activities and force people to huddle in tightly enclosed spaces. Sounds like a great health policy! So draconian and unnecessary.

DeonPenny 7y ago

Sour grapes are the worse thing about this situation.