City looks at new system for compost site
Public Works Director Jason Cauley will report on the proposal for the compost site. The recommendation calls for the purchase of an air burner firebox from Air Burners Inc. for $163,107 and for Hammeke Electric to install an electric box at the compost site for $2,259.
Agenda materials explain the recommendation. Since the inception of the compost site, the City has burned tree debris in a berm area. Employees watch and pay attention to wind conditions, wind direction and moisture conditions before burning and get approval from the Fire Department. Depending on the wind, the city can become inundated with the smell of smoke. In addition, the street crew must watch the fire 24 hours while the fire is burning. According to Kansas Department of Health and Environment statutes, if it is smoking it is still burning.
By adding the recommended system, staff anticipates the City can burn more frequently, so they won't need to stockpile as much tree debris. The system would burn approximately 3 to 4 tons of material an hour.
The system is an enclosed steel box with an air curtain that traps smoke and increases the interior temperature to approximately 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Once it is up to temperature, there is no smoke. Employees can burn during the day and within two hours of the end of the day begin the process of snuffing the fire. Under normal conditions, this will eliminate the need for staff to stand by.
This system is endorsed by the EPA and U.S. Forest Service, and the City can use funds from its FEMA reimbursement for debris removal for the purchase.
Other agenda items
In other business Monday, the council will discuss the City's alcohol ordinance for Vets Park and will be asked to approve a three-year agreement for the annual July 3 firework show. It will consider a change to the mini-pitch surfacing at Heizer Park. The Council will also be asked to approve two agreements with JEO Consulting Group; one is for the 2025 Water System Preliminary Engineering Report and the other is for the 2025 Wastewater Treatment Facility Preliminary Engineering Report.
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Newsweek
a day ago
- Newsweek
Fury at Airline's Two-Word Response After Plane Is Delayed Hours in Sweltering Heat
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Passengers on a United Airlines flight spent hours trapped in sweltering heat without consistent access to water, as outside temperatures climbed above 110 degrees Fahrenheit. The original poster (OP), user PipeZestyclose2288, took to Reddit to recount the incident, which took place on United Airlines Flight UA1989 from Las Vegas to Denver. According to their post, they had boarded at 8:20 a.m., only to sit on the tarmac for more than six hours. Stock image of a United Airlines plane. Stock image of a United Airlines plane. Photo by PK-Photos / Getty Images "Requests for water went unanswered for long stretches, and I saw multiple passengers expressing discomfort and distress," the OP wrote. "They didn't hand water out until 5+ hours on the plane. Seventeen ended up deplaning, clearly overwhelmed by the situation. "The reason we were given that we couldn't take off was that it was too hot outside and LAS would not give the plane a long runway. "Eventually, after more than six hours, we returned to the gate [and were] told that although we had a long runway, it was now even hotter and the plane could not fly." After passengers were let off after 6.5 hours, they were told to reboard the same plane hours later, before new standby passengers were added, causing a further 30-minute delay. "Crew seemed overwhelmed, and despite [Department of Transportation] guidelines, basic needs like water were not consistently provided," the OP wrote. "Many people were openly discussing never flying United again, or reaching out to the media due to how this was handled." Reddit Reacts Reddit users flocked to the comments to weigh in, with one remarking, "Eventually one of these hot tarmac delays is going to kill someone. None of these aircraft were designed to keep the cabin cool in 110-115 degree days while sitting hours on end on the ground. "If they can't take off in two hours, it's time to deplane and figure out plan B. "Keeping people locked in a metal tube in the desert without effective cooling is just asking for a vulnerable person to have heat stroke." "File a complaint with the DOT, that's really all you can do," another advised. "I'm surprised they didn't have a gate available to disembark after 2-3 hours." 'Horrendous' In a message to Newsweek, the OP shared the email from United citing "crew schedule issues" as the reason for the delay. "The lack of communication [at the time] was horrendous," the OP explained. "I get it, the crew doesn't have any more information than we do, but we were constantly told we were doing one thing and then a different thing. "The story shifted every 30 minutes, ranging from 'We have no idea what's happening' to 'We are about to take off' and everything in between, for hours." "[United's] lack of accountability or acknowledgement of the situation has turned me off for good," they added. Tarmac Delay Rule The incident appears to exceed limits set by the Department of Transportation's Tarmac Delay Rule, which states that airlines cannot keep passengers on a domestic flight on the tarmac for more than three hours without offering the option to deplane, except for safety or security reasons. According to TripCast360, carriers must also provide working lavatories, proper cooling or heating, and "food and drink in reasonable quantities" during delays. Delays and Fines DOT data shows long delays are becoming more common. As per Newsweek, in 2024, U.S. airlines reported 437 tarmac delays of more than three hours on domestic flights, the highest since the rule took effect in 2010. Teresa Murray, who leads the consumer watchdog program for the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, told the publication that airlines can be fined "up to $27,500 per passenger if a domestic flight remains on the tarmac for more than three hours without allowing deplaning". Tested Loyalty In an update, the OP revealed that United later issued $100 flight credits to passengers, with no direct apology or assurance of policy changes. Several travelers have filed DOT complaints, disputing the airline's explanation that the delay was due to "crew scheduling". "They lost at least one loyal United customer today," the OP declared. Newsweek has contacted PipeZestyclose2288 for comment via Reddit and United Airlines via email. To read how Newsweek uses AI as a newsroom tool, click here.
CNET
3 days ago
- CNET
This One Steak Hack Will Make You the Grill God of Every Cookout
Grilling season is in full swing, and nothing impresses a crowd like a perfectly cooked steak. The challenge? Nailing that sweet spot between overdone and undercooked. Too long on the grill and you end up with something dry and chewy; too short and you're serving raw in the middle. With the right timing and a couple of easy tricks, you can serve up steaks that are juicy, tender, and cooked exactly the way your guests like them-every single time. So if you're manning the grill today, here's how to nail your steak and impress your guests without breaking a sweat. To get the inside scoop on how pro chefs measure doneness of ribeye, strip or flank, I spoke to Joe Flamm, chef-partner and culinary director of Chicago's BLVD Steakhouse. "Doneness is such a preference and everyone has their own," he said. "For something as simple as steak, prepared with just salt and fire, you want it exactly how you want it." We love using a meat probe for checking the temp on larger cuts of meat, chicken and other foods, but this gadget-free method works on steaks and burgers and saves you from having to pull out the thermometer. Here, we unpack a simple trick for testing steak doneness using only your hands, guaranteeing you'll nail it every time. Read more: A Beef Expert Told Me the Best Cheap Steak Cuts to Look for at the Market Practice makes perfect Fancy meat thermometers do a nice job at reading internal temps, but you can save some money and learn to test doneness like the pros do. James Bricknell/CNET Doneness in steak is frequently associated with color, as the steak goes from bright red when rare, through various stages of pink, until it becomes well done and has the pink cooked completely out of it. (RIP, ribeye.) It's difficult to gauge color without cutting into the steak, which you don't want to do until it comes off of the heat and has a moment to rest. Otherwise, the juices spill out of it, making for a drier, tougher outcome, especially if you're going to put it back on the fire for additional cooking. It's even more important not to do this prematurely if your preference leans toward medium well or well done; you want as much juice left in the meat as possible. Doneness is also associated with temperature, with the internal temperature of the inside of the meat typically graduating between 120 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit as you move between rare and well done. This can be accomplished with a meat thermometer, but there is another method frequently applied by chefs that doesn't require any gadgets. Nailing the perfect doneness for your next steak takes nothing more than a few pokes. Brian Bennett/CNET With bigger cuts, such as a whole prime rib roast that will be sliced after cooking, "a thermometer is super helpful for consistency and accuracy," says Flamm, but "for smaller cuts and for speed, many chefs can check it by feel," he says. "If you're cooking 100 filets a night, every night, it begins to fall into place." Understanding doneness in steak and why overcooking is bad Overcooking steak is the fastest way to ruin a perfectly good piece of meat. Tyler Lizenby/CNET What's a home cook to do who isn't in the habit of cooking dozens of steaks on repeat, many times a week? Before we get to the shortcut trick to help you learn this, it's important to understand the transformation your steak undergoes as it cooks to higher and higher temperatures. In basic terms, the longer a steak cooks, the firmer the meat becomes, which has to do with the chemical process the meat is undergoing. "Whenever you cook a steak for a longer period there's a breaking point where fat and muscle are done breaking down," explains Flamm, "and you're just drying out the steak and losing moisture, which gives the steak a tougher texture." This increasingly firmer or tougher texture is key to being able to check the doneness of steak without relying on a thermometer. Read more: I Did the Math to See if Buying Meat Online Is Cheaper Than the Grocery Store Technique for testing doneness Learning to check for doneness by feel doesn't necessarily require hundreds of dollars of raw materials to get the requisite practice. Neither does it rely on any particular gadget. It's not exactly a one-handed method, but the method only involves the use of your hands. Whether or not you have the means or mentality to quit your job and go to culinary school, here's a culinary school trick to understand doneness in meat, using the fleshy base of your thumb as a point of comparison in the resistance of the steak when poked. Here it is: With one hand, gently touch your thumb and forefinger together, keeping the rest of your fingers relaxed, in a half-assed "A-OK" signal. You don't want to press your thumb and forefinger together -- simply make light contact between them. With the forefinger of your opposite hand gently poke the fleshy base of your thumb. Pamela Vachon/CNET You're not pressing down here, just giving it a quick jab. This is approximately the level of resistance you should feel for a medium rare steak when similarly jabbed in the center of the meat. (Quick aside here about clean and/or gloved hands. Also, the steak will be hot on the outside, yes, but again, a brief jab is all that's in order.) Pamela Vachon/CNET Subsequently, as you move your thumb to lightly touch your middle finger, the tension in the base of your thumb increases, and this represents how a medium-cooked steak should feel. As you stretch your thumb to reach the ring finger, now you've got medium well, and the tension in the thumb when touched with the pinkie finger reveals well done. Pamela Vachon/CNET Regardless of how you like your steak cooked, and how you'd personally define it, now you have a consistent point of comparison available to you at all times with which to practice, whether you're cooking steak once a week or once a year. Pamela Vachon/CNET What's the best way to cook steak? Searing steak followed by some indirect heat to bring it up to the desired doneness is the preferred method of many professional chefs. David Watsky/CNET So, what's the best way to cook a steak? Opinions abound regarding direct heat versus indirect heat, hard searing and reverse searing, and even cooking steak in an air fryer. Flamm recommends a time-honored method: "For me, it's searing the steak hard, and then using indirect heat to slowly let it render and come up in temp to the place where you want it to be," he says, finishing your seared steak in the oven. You can consult various recipes for time and temperature recommendations with the indirect heat method, just be sure to factor in that your steak will continue to cook while resting, and to take your steak out and give it a good jab every so often. Read more: Avoid Dry Beef Syndrome: Here Are the Best Ways to Reheat Steak
Los Angeles Times
4 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
When the going gets tough for L.A., our city rallies like no other
Los Angeles has portals to its future sprinkled across the city: Silicon Beach. Hollywood. Public schools. The ruins of Pacific Palisades. What goes on inside at City Hall and the Hall of Administration. But why go to those obvious choices when trying to figure out which way L.A. is going when the best answer is right in front of Platinum Showgirls LA? I parked next to the downtown gentleman's club on a recent weekday morning to do just that. A hulking security guard stood outside the entrance, the 101 Freeway buzzing nearby. So were the street vendors setting up for another day of business, damn the migra agents driving in and out of the Metropolitan Detention Center just up Commercial Street. But I wasn't there for the sights or sounds — or what was going on inside Platinum Showgirls. I was there to scour the sidewalk for a plaque dedicated to a tree. For centuries, a six-story-tall sycamore stood near this slice of land and saw empires come and go. Indigenous people from across Southern California and beyond gathered under its shade for special councils and to meet with its caretakers, the residents of the village of Yaanga. It was an awe-inspiring sight for the pobladores who came from Mexico in 1789 and set up El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles in the name of the Spanish crown. The sycamore — now bearing the name El Aliso — appears as a towering black splotch in the first known photo of Los Angeles, shot in the early 1860s when the city was in the process of turning from a Mexican village into an American town. When El Aliso was finally chopped down in 1895, felled by brewery owners who inadvertently killed the giant after cutting off too many limbs and paving over its roots, residents took chips from it as a memento mori of sorts. But El Aliso never truly died. It lived on in the history books but especially in the memory of the descendants of the people who had seen the sycamore grow from a seed to a giant. In 2019, members of the Kizh-Gabrieleño Band of Mission Indians were present as representatives from the city of Los Angeles laid a bronze plaque on the sidewalk at the northeast corner of Commercial and Vignes streets — in the shadow of what was then a different strip club — to commemorate El Aliso. 'While its physical presence is gone,' the plaque stated, 'the oral history handed down through the generations has kept its beauty and story alive in the Kizh people.' I was looking to read those words for myself, to touch them and the etching of El Aliso that hovered above the dedication. To take inspiration from this fundamental part of L.A.'s past in hopes of divining its future. But when I finally figured out where the plaque was supposed to be, I found a shallow slot strewn with trash and the remnants of the adhesive that once kept the plaque in its place. Leave it to 2025 for thieves to make off with a memorial to L.A.'s mother tree. The fires. The raids. Housing inequality. Homelessness. Cost of living. Trump's never-ending war against L.A. anything. Is the Big One around the corner? Probably. Nothing seems to be going right in Lost Angeles right now. Trump says it. Too many residents feel it. Too many former Angelenos scream it. How can one possibly even think about a better future when the present is so bad? How can one even think about any future when the current outlook seems so bleak? But as I walked back to my car, an answer occurred to me that I wasn't expecting to be so hopeful. Before I joined The Times in 2019, I never had any real interest or investment in L.A. Oh, I visited family and friends and paid some attention to the political scene from my native Anaheim. Went to UCLA for graduate school, haunted the Sunset Strip and Thai Town for rock en español shows in my cub reporter days. But L.A. was just … L.A. Huge. Cool. Really diverse. But special? No more so than any other great world city. I never felt the metropolis up the 5 to be a den of grossness like too many of my fellow Orange Countians still think it is. It also never called to me as a promised land like it did to my creative O.C. friends, either. I generally rooted for L.A., but its future meant nothing to me. My opinion obviously changed as I began to cover it as a columnist starting in 2020 and tried to commit the layout and vibe of the city to my mind. One of the first things that struck me in a way I never anticipated was how precarious everyone felt their lives to be. Oh, I had read enough Joan Didion, Mike Davis, Nathaneal West and other writers to not be too surprised by this. But seeing it manifested was something else, and it made a lot of things about the city finally click. From the Westside to the Eastside, from Wilmington through South L.A. and all the way to the San Fernando Valley, I met person after person who acted and lived as if what they had scraped for themselves was at risk of disappearing in an instant, in the most disastrous fashion imaginable. I initially thought this betrayed an insecurity in the Angeleno soul, but then I realized it was something worse. If anyone's L.A. dream could crumble at any moment, that meant you had to defend it at any cost — and especially at the expense of everyone else. The more I talked to people and studied L.A. history, the more this outsider felt that the idea of fighting for the dream was what created a famously segregated city that too often erupts, whether electorally or otherwise. In an era where stratification is worse than ever and the federal government has declared war on various fronts — legal, psychological, financial — the L.A. of the past can't be the guiding light for the L.A. of the future. The city might have grown and operated as 19 suburbs in search of a metropolis — as Aldous Huxley infamously wrote — through most of the 20th century, but it's time to act like a united front if we're going to successfully navigate the rest of the 21st. And the rallying cry should be what we're going through right now, what L.A. has weathered again and again: Disaster. Because when the going gets tough for L.A., the city rallies like only it can. Americans should see this resilience and the subsequent spur of creativity and hope as a blueprint on how to fight back and not just survive, but thrive better than ever. Nothing has proved this more than our current year, with two catastrophes that would have buckled, if not outright destroyed, other cities. The Palisades and Eaton fires in January were infernos of biblical dimensions. People died, houses were incinerated, neighborhoods were eradicated. The suffering will continue for years, if not decades. Residents know their past can never be recaptured — and yet they continue to rebuild for whatever's next. Angelenos could've stayed to themselves in the aftermath, but they chose not to. They choose not to. The rest of L.A. has stood up to help survivors through financial donations and clothing and food drives and benefits that continue and whatever folks in the Palisades and Altadena need. At one of the city's darkest hours, Los Angeles shone brighter than ever. I write this columna during a long deportation summer unleashed on L.A. and beyond by a native son of Santa Monica in what amounts to a racist revanchist snit. Even a generation ago, large swaths of L.A. would have been cheering on the raids. But today's L.A. isn't having it. As with the fires, fundraisers and mutual aid societies and neighborhood watch groups have sprouted. The city, from Mayor Karen Bass to street vendors, knows that it's up against an Orwellian apparatus that wants us to collapse — and that L.A. will win. Because L.A. always wins. We might not know how the victory will look, but we know it'll happen. See how I use 'we'? Because while I plan to forever live in Orange County, I want to be a part of this future L.A. — an area, a people that teaches the rest of the United States how we'll triumph as calamities of all types seem to crash down on this country with increasing regularity. All of the stories and columns in this package are about that, from housing to fires, disasters to palm trees, transportation to climate change and beyond. No one thinks it's going to be easy — if anything, it's probably going to be harder than ever. But everyone expects victory. The miracle of L.A. has gone too far for it to fail. Which takes me back to El Aliso. I haven't read anything about the theft of its plaque, so I'm not sure when it happened. But people will read this and be upset. People will do something to mark El Aliso's existence in front of a gentleman's club near the 101 Freeway once more. That means El Aliso will continue to live — maybe as a plaque, maybe as a hologram, maybe as something even grander. It can't die, because that means we will. It must live, because that means so will the rest of us. L.A. is frequently seen as a place of destruction, where the past is bulldozed and forgotten and then trivialized and romanticized. But the Native American tribes that the Spaniards tried to eradicate are still here. The Latinos that Manifest Destiny tried to vanquish are now nearly half of the population of this most American of cities. L.A. will survive whatever happens next. We will figure it out. We always do. There's no other way. There's no other option.
