These are from Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 in Berkeley, CA. This is partially a video report, and partially just a "what's changed since yesterday" report, so if you haven't seen yesterday's Berkeley Oaks Report check it out.
They had a much, much larger crane. It's not so much to lift out stuff as you can put workers or police in a bucket and deploy them anywhere in the grove.
They'd blocked off part of the road.
Many more bystanders.
One tree sitter ("Dumpster Muffin", I kid you not) way up on a platform. Most of the action revolved around her acting like they were cutting lines that were about to send her plummeting to her doom (while she shook the platform herself) and the crowd yelling at the workers not to do it, even when they were nowhere near her. This is 99% of the activity of interest, so I'm just going to set the scene with some higher quality still photos and then present my video.
You could just see bits of other action in the trees - you can see a hand in the upper left hand corner, but really there wasn't a lot you could see.
Feet.
Zachary Running Wolf was in a real state. He was running around calling the police pigs, M-F'er, all that good stuff. Some of it's in the video. I can see why the police call him Zachary Running Mouth.
Lots more police.
They'd set out free food and water - folks spent the night.
Lots of crap in the street. One of the reasons why almost no students support the tree sit is that the ground support group is just messy and nasty and embarrassing and the students want them gone.
There were maybe a half a dozen news vans and some smaller cars.
Some new characters.
He stuck really, really close to the cops waiting the court's decision.
Poor guy.
There were a bunch of random signs sitting around. I photographed a bunch of them but I'll just show a couple.
You get the idea.
The bystanders thought all this was hilarious.
Not a very reassuring structure, but they've been up there a year and a half so I assume they know what will and won't fall.
She has quite a lot of supplies - water and food for weeks I suspect. (They eventually used the crane to swing on in and remove most of it - whoops.)
Uh, oh. There were claims right after this guy fired up his chain saw that they were cutting branches. It's possible but I think it's more likely they were cutting up sleeping platforms for removal.
Little better focus - I'm trying to shoot through a fence.
There were extra workers and at least one unused cherry picker handy. I got the impression they weren't in any rush - just getting as much infrastructure as they could easily while waiting for the court decision and then going on to phase II - the mass removal of the sitters.
People kept reminding her to drink lots of water. I'm not sure if it was because of the heat or because the tree sitters had been throwing urine on the police and workers earlier. The tree supporters love that kind of stuff but it really alienates all but the hard core.
These police are probably a hundred yards away from the action - bored, bored, bored!
Here's the video which really shows the noise and chaos. I warn you that you might want to turn your volume down! If you don't see it try this link.
Update: At 6:00pm the judge issued a 129 page ruling. It mostly found for the university but called for some improvements to the EIR and found that pieces of the project might fall under a state law banning building on earthquake faults (basically the issue is if it's a major addition to the stadium it's no good - and she needs some dollar values to decide if it's major). They've set some dates in late June to get it all sorted out.
Oddly enough the tree sitters announced this as a total victory and even the San Francisco Chronicle parroted this in a horribly written article (update: they've since removed and replaced it). KTVU had a much more intelligent article discussing who won what and basically how the process will continue. Frankly until the lawyers take a couple of days to figure out the details I don't see a whole lot of movement on this, but there was nothing preventing the UC from removing the protesters (which they got permission to do in October) - it's more a question of strategy. I suspect the supporters announced it as a total victory so they can promote total outrage tomorrow when the removals continue, but that's pure speculation on my part.
Update: If you enjoyed this, you might want to see the report from a couple of days later.
You can contact me at info (at) ProtestShooter.com
