Mark: [warmly] Alright — good morning, this is Ashley River Radio, I'm Mark, that is Lauren, and it is Friday, the fourth of September.
Mark: [rushed] Coming up we've got an emergency room that isn't a hospital, power lines nobody on the water wants, and Toyota digging a name out of the attic.
Lauren: [dry] In that order?
Mark: Roughly that order, yeah.
Mark: [amused] So today. Ninety degrees, sunny, then a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms later, and the wind — the wind is listed as one to nine miles an hour.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: One to nine. That's the forecast going, uh... your guess is as good as ours, buddy.
Mark: That's a shrug with a number on it.
Lauren: [flat] No, that's the most honest thing in the whole forecast.
Mark: [laughing] How?
Lauren: Because ninety's a guess. The storm chance is a guess wearing a percentage sign. One to nine is somebody saying, look, air will move, we can't tell you how much. I respect it.
Mark: Okay but if I ask you how long the maintenance window is and you say somewhere between one and nine hours —
Lauren: [interrupting] Then I'm being honest and you hate it.
Mark: [snorts] Yeah, fine.
Mark: Tonight's the good part though. Mostly clear, seventy-eight. That's the two hours of this day worth being outside for.
Lauren: >> So — my grievance. Wednesday evening, I'm chasing what looks like an outage.
Lauren: Half a department can't reach one internal thing. Everything else totally fine, which is the annoying part.
Mark: Uh oh.
Lauren: And I check... I mean I check the good stuff. Routing. Certificate expiry, because that bit me in June. I'm reading logs like a person with a hobby.
Mark: [amused] And?
Lauren: [pause] It was a hand-typed hosts entry on a jump box.
Lauren: Somebody put it there in twenty nineteen and the address it pointed at stopped existing about a year ago.
Mark: [delighted] So it was DNS.
Lauren: It was a text file pretending to be DNS, which is worse.
Mark: Lauren. You have told me, personally, probably four hundred times, check the dumb thing first.
Lauren: I did. Just not first.
Mark: You checked it fourth.
Lauren: ...I checked it fourth. Yes.
Mark: [laughing] Okay.
Mark: >> Well, it's convenient, actually, the whole drive-home theme, because the biggest local story this week is about how long it takes to get somewhere when it genuinely matters.
Mark: There's a Live 5 piece about the Roper St. Francis freestanding ER moving through approvals on Folly Road on James Island. And the detail that got me first isn't the medical part at all — the lot's split. Most of it's town of James Island, some of the general area is City of Charleston.
Lauren: One building.
Mark: One building, two approval processes. And the city planning director, Robert Summerfield, says it straight — every jurisdiction does things a little different, and it can be difficult for a developer when you're building on one property in one jurisdiction and the neighbor's in another.
Mark: And I want to say, from job sites — that's real. That's not an excuse. I've watched a guy spend six weeks on a stormwater detail because two people wanted it drawn two different ways.
Lauren: [beat] Sure. It's real. I just want to know who eats the six weeks.
Mark: Meaning?
Lauren: Meaning Roper is currently building a one-point-two billion dollar campus in North Charleston. Twenty-seven acres. They have lawyers whose whole job is two approval processes. That cost lands on them as, uh, a scheduling annoyance.
Lauren: The person it actually filters out is somebody trying to open a shop, or a homeowner who wants a second bathroom and finds out their back half is in a different jurisdiction. They just... don't. They give up.
Mark: Yeah, no. I've watched that happen. Guy gives up and just doesn't get the permit.
Lauren: >> And then the framing on the rest of it bugs me. Powell — Troy Powell, he's the COO of the ambulatory side — his own quote is that relocating Roper Hospital from downtown to North Charleston is "a little bit further away for those patients."
Mark: Right, so this fills the gap.
Lauren: They MADE the gap. That's the thing. They announced in twenty twenty-one they were leaving the peninsula after a hundred sixty-five years, Joe Riley got up and said publicly he disagreed, said the city has invested and will keep investing so it can take storms and flooding —
Mark: [interrupting] Okay but the flooding was real, man. That plant is old.
Mark: That is not a made-up reason.
Lauren: I know it's real.
Mark: And the workforce — it's close to seven hundred fifty people and most of them do not live downtown. Putting the hospital where the staff already lives is not a scam.
Lauren: No. But you move the hospital, you create the distance, and then you come back and sell us the patch as new access. And we're supposed to say thank you. [flat] That's bullshit.
Mark: [beat] It's a little bit bullshit.
Lauren: >> And the density on that road.
Lauren: So this would be, what, the third acute-ish site inside about half a mile? HCA's James Island ER is at 945 Folly, there's a Novant urgent care, and Roper already has an Express Care at 319 Folly and offices at 325.
Mark: [incredulous] Wait, wait — say that list again, because that's four things in half a mile.
Lauren: And MUSC downtown is ten minutes out and still where the bad ones go. So what you get out of this is three billing addresses and not one new trauma bay.
Mark: [pause] So — hang on, you're saying nobody actually gets helped here?
Lauren: I'm saying it's market-share siting with an access story stapled to the front. If the goal were minutes-to-care, you'd put it where there ISN'T one.
Mark: Okay, but — nine PM in August, kid comes off a scooter, arm's clearly broken, and I'm sitting in Folly Road beach traffic. Half a mile down the road versus across the bridge is a real difference to that family.
Mark: I'm not pretending that's nothing, man.
Lauren: [conceding] No. That family's fine. I just want somebody to say out loud it's a business decision that happens to help that family.
Mark: >> Speaking of Folly Road — did either of us hear one word about a turn lane in any of this?
Lauren: Not a syllable.
Mark: Because that's the whole corridor. Downtown, James Island, Folly Beach, all of it, one road, and it's driveway, driveway, driveway, and every summer it's a crash map.
Mark: And I'll tell you exactly how it goes, because I've watched it. Traffic study gets done, it's competent, it's stamped, impact is nominal.
Lauren: Nominal.
Mark: Every time. I've sat in those meetings. Nobody's lying, they're just measuring one driveway.
Lauren: So who pays for the left-turn stack when it opens?
Lauren: Because Roper doesn't pay it. Everybody already sitting in that intersection pays it, four minutes a day for the next fifteen years, uncompensated.
Mark: Mm-hm.
Lauren: And nobody writes that down anywhere. It just... evaporates.
Lauren: >> Okay, across the river. Dominion's acquiring more land in Seagate Village for a third set of high-voltage lines. Also Live 5.
Mark: The Church Creek project.
Lauren: Six miles, roughly.
Lauren: Church Creek substation on Bees Ferry, crosses the Ashley to the Leeds Avenue substation, keeps going to Azalea Drive. New line plus replacing the existing stuff with galvanized steel poles.
Mark: And people are on camera about it.
Lauren: A resident, Tim Smith, says — we want to be in a marina community, this is a nice peaceful place, we don't want any more power lines at all. Says he doesn't even really want the two that are there.
Mark: Right.
Lauren: And I'm... unsentimental about that part. The route follows an established right-of-way. If you have to run a line, running it where the line already is, is the least-bad version.
Mark: I figured you'd say that.
Lauren: What I want is a named load. Dominion says additional capacity for current and future customers and federal reliability standards, which is — I mean, that's four words that mean nothing.
Lauren: Who's the future customer?
Mark: [beat] You're doing the Spartanburg thing again.
Lauren: An application that goes from about fifty megawatts to four hundred fifty does change what "growing demand" means, yeah.
Mark: [thoughtful] What gets me is different. Engineering and permitting started in twenty twenty-three. There's a twenty twenty-four order granting them the certificate — environmental compatibility, public convenience and necessity, the whole thing.
Lauren: Right.
Mark: So it was decided. And Seagate Village found out when somebody came to buy land. That's the part that pisses me off. If those lines were going through a neighborhood with a preservation society attached, we'd have heard about it in twenty twenty-three.
Lauren: [flat] Three years earlier, easily.
Mark: >> Alright, Johns Island. Post and Courier.
Mark: Board of Zoning Appeals, September second, voted four to one.
Lauren: Kelvin Huger was the one.
Mark: Kimley-Horn asked for a variance to take out fifteen grand trees, another one to build closer to nineteen more, and a special exception to remove seven on top of that. For a hundred and two townhouses on twenty-six and a half acres off River Road.
Lauren: Near Maybank.
Mark: Right by that intersection.
Mark: Over a hundred eighty residents wrote in against, including Jim McBride, the councilman for the island.
Lauren: And what's the landscape architect's line? Todd-Burke?
Mark: [dry] That they've been working from the beginning to save clusters of trees together, and the clusters can serve as passive green space, maybe picnic tables, walking trails. Quote — "it's a good way to create character on the site."
Lauren: [pause] Picnic tables.
Mark: Picnic tables.
Lauren: Creating character, my ass.
Lauren: You cut down twenty-two grand trees and leave a clump with a bench in it.
Mark: [laughing] So we agree.
Lauren: No, we don't, actually. Because a hundred and two homes inside the urban growth boundary is EXACTLY where housing is supposed to go. That line was drawn around two thousand for this. And I think the tree fight is the only lever anybody on that island has left, because nobody will let them argue about the thing they actually care about.
Mark: Which is the road.
Lauren: Right. So they show up and talk about canopy and flooding, because the intersection isn't on the agenda.
Mark: Okay but I've sat at River Road and Maybank. I have sat there for eleven goddamn minutes to make one turn, at like four-fifteen on a Tuesday, no wreck, nothing.
Mark: And no arborist letter in the world moves that light.
Lauren: I didn't say it does.
Mark: And the units go in first and somebody eats it for fifteen years. Road's always last. Always.
Lauren: So what's the alternative — don't build?
Mark: I didn't say don't build.
Lauren: [beat] Then we're arguing about sequencing.
Mark: Fine. And you know full well the sequence never changes.
Lauren: [exhales] Yeah.
Lauren: Well — somebody at least counted the trees. Twenty-two, in writing. Try getting a number in writing about that intersection.
Mark: >> Funny you say measured. Grist had a thing this week about measuring cracks in a glacier with a piece of fiber optic cable.
Lauren: [curious] Go on.
Mark: So it's called distributed acoustic sensing. DAS.
Mark: And the way it works is, you fire laser pulses down a fiber optic cable, and any tiny disturbance along that cable sends tiny bits of light back to the box — the interrogator — and from the speed of light you can work out where along the cable it happened.
Lauren: Wait — so the cable is the sensor. Not a thing sitting on the cable. The cable.
Mark: The whole kilometer, man. Seismometer tells you one point. This turns the cable itself into a whole line of them.
Mark: And they did it on the Gorner Glacier, near Zermatt. About a kilometer of ordinary commercial cable laid out in a grid, plus twenty-nine accelerometer nodes. In roughly a week it logged one thousand three hundred fifty-five icequakes.
Lauren: In a week.
Mark: In a week.
Lauren: [warmly] Okay, I like this a lot.
Mark: [surprised] Really? I had you down as skeptical on this one.
Lauren: Why?
Mark: Because it's a hot new field. The article literally says one of the hottest new fields in science.
Mark: That's usually your cue.
Lauren: [amused] No, this is the good kind. It's a boring cable doing something nobody sold it as. Nobody's putting AI in the pitch. Nobody's charging a subscription for the light.
Lauren: And the finding is plain. More icequakes when the surface air temperature went above freezing. Meltwater gets down into the ice, pressure builds up, ice cracks open. That's called hydrofracturing and that's — I mean, that's the whole thing.
Mark: [laughing] You're annoyed there's nothing to take apart.
Lauren: [flat] A little.
Lauren: >> Also — it's not a one-off, which is the part I actually care about. The lead author, Thomas Hudson at ETH Zurich, he's been at this for years. There's a twenty twenty-one paper where they ran fiber in Antarctica at the Rutford Ice Stream and checked it against a conventional geophone array.
Mark: To prove the fiber wasn't lying.
Lauren: Exactly that, yeah.
Lauren: And then there's a twenty twenty-four one on a frozen lake with airgun shots. So there's a decade of unglamorous checking behind this, and it gets written up now as though somebody had an idea on Tuesday.
Mark: [thoughtful] See, that's why I buy it though. The boring decade is the reason.
Lauren: Sure. Doesn't make the press cycle less late.
Mark: >> Here's the part that stuck with me, though. Hudson's quote — hydrofracturing is hypothesized to be a mechanism that can cause mass disintegration of ice shelves and ice sheets, Antarctic, Greenland, whatever. And then: "no one's really observed the mechanism in any detail."
Lauren: [pause] Right.
Mark: So — every sea level number we plan against, and nobody had ever actually watched the thing happen. That's wild.
Lauren: And this'll improve the models, and then in about ten years the improved numbers make it into the projections somebody writes a drainage project against. Meanwhile every project in this town right now is scoped to numbers that were written down years ago.
Mark: [flat] It's worse than that on my end.
Lauren: How?
Mark: Because on a drawing, the flood elevation is whatever the code says it is. That's it.
Mark: Not what the engineer thinks, not what the science says — the code. And the code updates last. So you can have the guy on site who knows damn well that pad's too low, and he still builds it to the number, because that's the number he's allowed to build to.
Lauren: [flat] Yeah.
Mark: >> [exhales] Okay. I want something with an engine.
Lauren: [amused] It's Friday, so it's cars.
Mark: [excited] Autoguide has an everything-we-know piece on the twenty twenty-eight Toyota Celica Sport.
Mark: The Celica is coming back.
Lauren: Mm.
Mark: In-house, under Gazoo Racing — not a joint venture like the GR86 with Subaru — slotting above the eighty-six. Two-door liftback, long hood, low roof, wide rear fenders, aimed at the Honda Prelude. High-output all-wheel drive.
Mark: And, uh — this is the line — it "completes former chairman Akio Toyoda's dream of reuniting the brand's historic Three Brothers sports car family alongside the Supra and MR2."
Lauren: [deadpan] You read that with your whole chest.
Mark: I did. I meant it.
Lauren: [dry] Okay, so, two things. One, my default is that the new one is worse than the thing it replaced until somebody shows me otherwise, and I'm usually right.
Mark: You're usually right.
Lauren: Two — that's an aggregated everything-we-know piece.
Lauren: Which is code for "design details point toward" and "expect." That's a guess in a nice font.
Mark: [conceding] Some of it's guessing, yeah.
Lauren: I will grant one thing.
Mark: [curious] Yeah?
Lauren: Physical controls for the performance modes.
Lauren: Actual buttons. Somebody at Toyota lost an argument in the right direction and I want to shake their hand.
Mark: [laughing] That's it? That's your one?
Lauren: That's my one.
Mark: [laughing] Dude. Whole nameplate comes back from the dead and you're happy about a switch.
Lauren: [flat] I'm not excited. I'm relieved. And I give it about eighteen months before a cost meeting turns it into a submenu.
Mark: [groans] Don't.
Lauren: >> Cars, but the other kind. Mother Jones piece — Florida is revoking every law enforcement license plate reader permit on state highways.
Lauren: Every one of them dark by the end of September.
Mark: DeSantis.
Lauren: DeSantis, with the line about how if you want to get in your car and go down to Buc-ee's in St. Augustine, it's really none of the government's damn business.
Mark: [amused] That's a pretty good line.
Lauren: It's a great line and I'm giving him exactly zero credit for it, because the framing is the easy part. Look at what's already happened. An officer running an ex-girlfriend's plate two thousand times. Another one running an estranged wife's, seven hundred.
Lauren: Somebody tracked across state lines for an abortion.
Mark: [flat] Yeah.
Lauren: And the fix is retention limits measured in days. Record's gone, there's nothing to abuse. Nobody at that podium said the word retention.
Mark: >> Okay, the bit that got me is operational.
Lauren: Go on.
Mark: At least three towns say that after their contract ended, Flock turned the cameras back on.
Lauren: [beat] Mm.
Mark: Are you shitting me? You cancelled. It's over. And the thing keeps running because somebody on their end can flip it. That's — the contract was never the control, man.
Mark: The control is who has the login.
Lauren: [flat] Correct. And Texas told state agencies to stop funding them, and of the two hundred fourteen cities that have dropped Flock since twenty twenty-one, ninety of them did it in August. This year. One month.
Mark: Ninety in a month.
Lauren: Which tells you the competitors are already in the parking lot with a new name on the truck.
Mark: [laughing] Absolutely they are.
Lauren: A camera that turns itself back on after you cancel it. That's the whole week, honestly.
Lauren: Who gets asked. And who just finds out.
Mark: >> Speaking of — we've got about four minutes of leftovers.
Lauren: Fire away.
Mark: [rushed] SC Daily Gazette. McMaster says South Carolina will stop pulling money out of orphaned foster kids' Social Security benefits to pay for their own care. Both parents die, kid gets the benefits the parents earned, and the state's been taking it. We'd be the thirty-sixth state to end it.
Lauren: Thirty-sixth.
Mark: The number is one point six million dollars extra that DSS needs to cover three hundred and one kids. Average benefit's around eleven hundred a month, which by eighteen is tens of thousands of dollars.
Lauren: And it's conditional. Obviously.
Mark: It's conditional on the agency getting the funding, yeah.
Lauren: So the announcement is: we will stop taking dead parents' money from orphans, if you give us the money. That's a request, not a policy.
Lauren: And one point six million in a state budget is a rounding error — it is genuinely nothing, and we were thirty-five states late to nothing.
Mark: [exhales] The federal guy, Adams, said it seems too cynical to be real.
Lauren: It's a spreadsheet. Somebody found a revenue line and nobody wanted to be the one to close it. Jesus.
Mark: I'll take it though. There's a number in public now, and somebody's got to answer for it in January.
Lauren: [grudgingly] Yeah, alright.
Mark: >> Sad one, close to home. The Mason Jar by Fatboys, off Ashley River Road — closing at the end of September. Twelve years.
Lauren: [pause] Huh. No, that one's a shame.
Mark: Laura Black put it on Facebook. She and Charles Lee both lost their fathers a few months apart, and they took what their parents left them and put it into opening the place in twenty fourteen. She was twenty-seven.
Mark: And the reason for closing is her daughter. She wrote — "she needs us, and she deserves to have us there." Not just squeezed in around the restaurant.
Lauren: [pause] Honestly, that's a better ending than most restaurants here get.
Mark: [laughs] That is a cold way to be nice about somebody.
Lauren: No, I mean it. Usually it's the lease. Usually somebody tripled the rent and the post says "so grateful to this community" and you know exactly what happened. This one's a family choosing their family.
Lauren: I'm not making this one about rent. Not this one.
Mark: [warmly] She's talking cookbook, too. Which — man, I'd buy that day one.
Lauren: [amused] You'd buy it and it'd sit next to the workbench you haven't finished.
Mark: >> Okay, replacement energy. Avondale. Old Ruby Sunshine space, 835 Savannah Highway, becomes two things — Angel Biscuit Co. during the day, and then after dark it turns into Emily, which is the New York pizza-and-burger place. Wednesday through Sunday. Biscuits from seven AM.
Lauren: One building, two names.
Mark: [rushed] The owner, Greenstone, said Avondale has a real neighborhood feel, which is hard to find, people know each other — and he specifically said West Ashley, not just Charleston.
Mark: I liked that.
Lauren: [dry] Of course you did.
Mark: What!
Lauren: Nothing. I'm just saying, the seven AM biscuit window is the first thing to go. Six months. A night concept with a day concept bolted on, the day concept always loses.
Mark: [defensive] It's the whole point of the design, it changes with the rhythm of the day —
Lauren: It changes with the labor schedule, is what it does.
Mark: [laughing] You did a whole thing with your face.
Lauren: I didn't say anything.
Lauren: >> Last one. Jermaine Johnson, Democratic nominee for governor, was at First Calvary Baptist in Columbia Wednesday. Fifty-odd people in a church.
Mark: How'd it go?
Lauren: He told his story — homeless childhood in California to the Statehouse — and a woman got up to the mic and said, your story is inspiring, but inspiration doesn't necessarily win elections.
Mark: [beat] That's a hell of a thing to say to a man's face.
Lauren: It was also correct. And people wanted to know how he gets long-time Republicans and young people, and his answer was: exactly what I'm doing right now, in this room.
Mark: Which — okay, it's the only thing that's ever worked for him. He got outspent to hell, every big name behind the rich guy, and he still took sixty percent outright. Three-way. No runoff.
Lauren: Right, and I still want the specific. Same thing I said about Darline Graham — I'll say it again about him. Name a utility. Name a rate case. Name a hospital system.
Lauren: Say the words out loud.
Mark: Fifty people in a church basement and he's building something out of it. Let the man build it.
Lauren: [flat] He's got two months and no Democrat's won since Hodges in ninety-eight. He can build it and name a company.
Mark: [amused] Noted.
Lauren: [warmly] Alright, that's us. Thanks for hanging out with us — if you're driving Folly Road this weekend, uh... leave early, I guess.
Lauren: We're back Monday.
Lauren: [dry] Mark, keep your biscuit expectations low.
Mark: [laughing] Seven AM. I'll be there.
Lauren: We'll see. Take care, everybody.