Sunnydale Conspiracy

I'm of two minds about your thought here.

On the one hand, we're talking about a mayor and not POTUS. If the Wilkins family were made up of honest politicians (not that I'm saying they were, I'm just saying "if"), the most someone can hope to gain from removing Mayor Richard Wilkins III from office is an open seat.

However, given the sudden build-up of infrastructure (including a hydroelectric damn and International Airport) in the seven years prior to the town collapsing into a sinkhole (I promise to expound on this at a later date), I'm wondering if the Mayor's office wasn't heavily involved in graft. Given the size of the projects in question, I can only imagine that the bribery could be very lucrative. Then I could see assassination as maybe something worth trying.

I know that some of these projects were built after Wilkins's disappearance, but given the size of them, they had to be in the works while Wilkins still held office.

I was wondering if you have evidence that Mayor Richard Wilkins III was involved in corruption? It would help me a great deal in my research as well.

By the way, apropos of your post, did you see Without a Trace (http://www.cbs.com/primetime/without_a_trace/) the other night? The plot of the episode bore eery similarities to the Wilkins scenario. Instead of a mayor, it was a U.S. Congressman; and instead of a high school graduation, it was a college graduation. They even had "the student protest that got out of hand" that resulted in the nearby science building getting destroyed in a fire started in one of the classrooms? They, of course, concluded that U.S. Congressman had been involved in illegal gambling instead of construction.

Considering that Wilkins has gone missing since this incident, I thought it was striking.

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ffutures.livejournal.com

Unfortunately it'll be some time before this episode is aired in Britain.

One thought on infrastructure - is there any information on the town's water supplies, other than the river? I've wondered about pumping from an underground reservoir e.g. a water dome (similar to an oil dome) triggering the collapse, but I can't seem to find much information about the town's utilities.

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I can tell you that there was an extensive network of sewers under the town that went back almost a century. The strange thing about it is that according to blueprints I found in the archives at the California Public Utilities Commission (http://www.cpuc.ca.gov/), they seemed to be far more extensive than what a population of approximately 38,500 people would really need, not to mention that some of them seem to be quite large.

While I don't question the extensiveness of the sewer network, I do question the dimensions on the blueprints since they seem to indicate that they'd be as large as the underground aqueducts in Rome in some places. I'm hoping to get some confirmation about this.

Also, there was definitely an electric power plant in town, because it was knocked off line a few weeks before the town collapsed in teh sinkhole.

There was also a hydroelectric dam that was quite large, but I can't seem to find any paperwork on the state or local level indicating when and where it was approved. All I can tell you that the first mention I saw of it was in February 2002 in the local Sunnydale newspaper (there are microfiches available at UCLA, but I haven't been able to find anything online). I haven't been able to find any indication that it even existed before that time, and that's going by the local paper. And as far as I can tell, the federal and state governments aren't aware it ever existed at all!

Hope this helps.

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There is nothing unusual about the Sunnydale hydroelectic dam. Every significant river in California has got a dam on it. Some have several. These are used for generating electricity, flood control, and to create reservoirs of water needed for communities and agriculture. It would be much stranger if there wasn't a dam there.

Hydroelectric dams don't just provide power for the local community. (You think Boulder City needs a dam that big?) Power from the Sunnydale dam was helping keep the lights burning in L.A. and San Francisco.

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No, I agree with you there. Hydroelectric dams aren't uncommon. What I'm saying is that there is literally no mention of this damn anywhere prior to February 2002.

For example, there are no USGS maps indicating the presence of a dam prior to February 2002. Suddenly, the hydroelectic dam at the edge of the town limits appears from nowehere on a map dated August 2002. According to the documentation, there was a survey to check and make sure the dam was not damaged in the series of earthquakes that rocked the town the preceding May.

However, I've been unable to find any supporting documentation indicating the when, where, why, and how the dam built. There are no historical records in any archive that I've searched and, as I've said, surveys of the region prior to the August 2002 map indicate that there's no dam there at all.

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You can't find any reference to the Sunnydale Dam (note the lack of an "n" at the end) prior to 2002 because it wasn't called the "Sunnydale Dam" prior to 2002. From it's initial dedication ceremony, presided over by Richard Wilkins Jr. in 1953, up until 2002 it was known as "Wilkins Levee." (Wilkins himself was said to have insisted that it be called a levee, rather than a dam, because he couldn't bring himself to say the word, because it is a homophone of "damn." One story, probably apocryphal, had Wilkins refer to it in private conversations as the "Wilkins Darn.")

It was renamed, without any fanfare, as part of the city's attempt to distance itself from the Wilkins name after the extent of the corruption rampant in Richard Wilkins III's administration became known.

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This does not, however, address the absence of any structure, labeled either dam or levee, at the appropriate place on the Sunnydale River, on USGS 7.5 minute maps (Sunnydale Quadrangle, last edited in 1973) or on the more recent International Scale map of the area (last print edit 1980; currently available from USGS in downloadable form).

The absence of the structure from the 7.5 minute map is particularly critical, as small ground features (a corral less than 500sq ft in extent in the Union Mill Quadrangle comes to mind) are mapped with meticulous precission.

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There are about 57,000 sheets to the 7.5 minute maps series. You think that the omission of the Sunnydale Dam is the only error on them?

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very-true-thing.livejournal.com

Good point. I'd like to recommend the book How to Lie with Maps (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226534219/qid=1141248226/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/203-3903858-2764724). That's full of the stuff that gets onto (or gets left off) maps by accident, malice, subterfuge or as a joke.

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ffutures.livejournal.com

A classic example is the Post Office Tower in London (now renamed the Telecom Tower) which from its construction in 1966 until the late 90s was omitted from all maps of London published in the UK, under the Official Secrets Act. For most of that time it was the tallest building in London, and as you can see it is hardly inconspicuous!

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See? You bring up a side point.

One: We need to know when the Sunnydale Hydroelectric Dam was built. We have no indication anywhere even beyond the USGS maps the when, where, and why of it.

Hypothesis A: The Hydroelectric Dam had, in fact, been approved and built between the 1930s (when such a large structure as the one you see in the August 2002 Sunnydale Press could have built) and August 2002. Yet, its very existence was hidden. The question is: Why?

Hypothesis B: The dam in question is actually a much newer construction that was built, somehow, without anyone leaving a trace. Considering how many people would be needed to build it, you would think there'd be a record somewhere, yes? That says to me that a lot of money got spent to keep people very, very quiet about its existence. Its presence was only revealed broader public when the people in power became concerned about whether it was safe in the wake of the May 2002 earthquake.

However, the issue of keeping it a "secret" obvioulsy became moot after February 2002, when references to it suddenly appeared as a result of investigations into the the Enron-California energy crisis that happened during 2001.

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In addition, something which happened in another country, under a set of laws which not only do not exist in the US but which would be patently unconstitutional if proposed, is not only irrelevant but smacks of an attempt to distract from the actual matter under discussion.

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But the issue here is that there isn't even a mention in the local press prior to February 2002.

The town has existed for more than a century and a large hydroelectric dam such as the one photographed in the August 2002 issue of the Sunnydale Press reporting that the final survey of the dam showed that it had been undamaged in the earthquake of May 2002 could not have been built before the 1930s.

Therefore, some record of the dam at least being built or showing that it actually exist prior to August 2002 should be available somewhere. I merely bring up the USGS map as one piece of evidence showing a lack of evidence for the dam's existence. However, coupled with no indication of its existence in any public or private document prior to February 2002, and coupled with the lack of photographic evidence of its existence prior to August 2002, I fund it's sudden "appearance" to be highly suspect.

As

ffutures says in the comment below yours, there has to be a reason why the existence of the hydroelectric dam was hidden before that time.

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There are about 57,000 sheets to the 7.5 minute maps series. You think that the omission of the Sunnydale Dam is the only error on them?

I'm not going to get into an expertise wank over this- obviously there is no way for either of us to verify the other's knowledge of mapping error rates, nor experience in using USGS source materials (although I'm willing to bet that only one of us has ever spent much time reading 1856 GLO survey notes). I will say that, in my experience, the absence of a landscape modification as large as a hydroelectric dam, especially in an area of intense mapping due to seismic activity, would not be of a class of information manipulation decribable as mere "error."

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Thank you for answering this for me. I only was able to check in today. This is my point exactly.

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Ummm....did you actually look at these maps, or did you just take someone else's word for the lack of the Sunnydale Dam on these maps?

I actually checked out the USGS site, and the all maps for the Sunnydale area were last updated in 1995 (not 1973 as you claim)

The map showing the dam is:

TCA1254 Lake Wilkins 343000N 1195230W 1995

Contrary to popular opinion Sunnydale Dam (or Wilkins Levee) is not on the Sunnydale River. It's on the Santa Zeny river, about 20 miles NW of the city of Sunnydale itself.

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Sorry if I confused you by using a map irrelevant to the specific discussion as an example of the normal resolution of USGS 7.5 quadrant maps.

I am, however, surprised to find any USGS 7.5 map has been updated at that late date, as new surveys on that grid ceased decades ago in favor of the International (1:1,000) scale maps.

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Richard Wilkins wasn't just a mayor. The Wilkins family was building a political dynasty that was just as far reaching as the Kennedy's. For example, Richard Wilkin's cousin, Roger Tribby, served as the Agriculture Secretary during President Bartlett's first term.

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