Daybreak Monday 4/6/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

It's going to be a fine day for being outside. High pressure's worked its way into the region for today and tomorrow, and we should see mostly sun and temps up into the mid-50s. Winds from the northwest, with some gustiness. It's going to be pretty clear out tonight, so down to around or below 30 by dawn. There's still ice on Mascoma Lake. Brittany Schones, a local professional drone photographer and videographer, sends along a 30-second clip she put up on Saturday, flying high over the lake. Open water in some spots but still plenty of thinning ice sheets (though not for long!).In fact, there's a lot of running water out there. And it's pretty sweet to listen to it. On Saturday, Jay and Julie Davis and their family were out skiing (yes, you still can) above Lyme. "I realized that the entire forested landscape was alive with the sound of running water, eventually collecting together to flow into the Mascoma or Baker Rivers," Jay wrote the Lyme list. So he and his son Andrew put together this video and soundscape of the waters coming alive. They run from loudest to softest, and all were taken in about a two-square-mile area.Now, where were we...? Ah! The numbers:

Five Grafton cases are Dartmouth students, campus readies for more.

The Dartmouth

reports that as of last night, the college reported 10 students, including those five, living in self-isolation in a designated dorm because their symptoms are consistent with Covid-19; another 10 are in self-quarantine in a separate dorm because they've been exposed. “We know [community transmission] is happening in our county, so we will probably transition more to a stance of, really, you need to assume that anyone that you may come in contact with could have COVID-19,” says health services director Max Reed.

In case you want to take a look ahead...

VPR's

Vermont Edition

today will talk to Michael Pieciak,

the state's commissioner of financial regulation, who's been overseeing caseload and equipment projections for the Scott administration. He'll talk through how they came up with the model they're relying on, and what it tells them. At 1 pm and 8 pm. 

And NHPR's The Exchange looks at the situation on the state's small farms.

Guests will include Edgewater Farm's Pooh Sprague and state ag commissioner Shawn Jasper. At 9 am and again at 7 pm.

Co-op to start curbside pickup, change hours. Curbside will be a Thursday-Saturday thing at the main Hanover store only (at first), and for members only. Members can sign up starting today, then once you're enrolled you can call to place an order and schedule a pickup, payment processed curbside. Starting Thursday, all stores will open at 8 am for high-risk shoppers, who have until 9:30 am; all stores but Leb will close at 6, and Leb will be open until 9, with the last hour reserved for health care workers and first responders.And with spring kinda, sorta here... there are a bunch of farms getting ready to feed us:

Dartmouth freezes hiring, eyes spending reductions. "The pandemic's financial impact on Dartmouth...leaves us with an operating budget deficit substantially greater than our loss of room and board income for spring term," Provost Joe Helble and Executive VP Rick Mills wrote in a letter to the college community on Friday. They announced a freeze on staff hiring through the end of December, though ongoing faculty searches will continue if funds remain available; and coming reductions in "services, supplies, food, events, and other expenditures that are not critical to Dartmouth's spring quarter operation."Silo gets props from Boston. Globe columnist Kevin Cullen maybe stretches a little far for a metaphor — "My kingdom for a horse"??? — but last week did a very nice column about Silo Distillery, head distiller Erin Bell, and the free hand sanitizer she's whipping up and giving away. They've had visitors from all over New England, even Ohio, and when Cullen calls up CEO Peter Jillson to suggest Silo could be cashing in, Jillson responds, "To be able to help our front-line health care workers, our police officers and firefighters, to be able to give some people something to bring home that makes them feel a little safer, that means a lot to us.” (Thanks, HS!)You know who knows a lot about being stuck with a few other people for a long time? Astronauts. And Dartmouth's Jay Buckey, who runs the Space Medicine Innovations Laboratory, has created an online self-help toolkit that uses insights gained from helping astronauts "cope with confinement in small spaces for extended periods," The Guardian reports. It wasn't designed for the stay-home era, but it's applicable, Buckey says. "It’s challenging to be isolated with a small group of people and to not be able to get away. Outer space and your own living room might be drastically different physically, but emotionally the stressors can be the same.” It's been made freely available here. Leb's Fujifilm Dimatix jumps on the face-shield problem. The VN's John Lippman the other day went in depth on how the company, which ordinarily designs and manufacturers industrial print heads, is making 20,000 plastic face shields for DHMC and hospitals in Santa Clarita, CA, where it has a sister operation. Employee volunteers have been organized into two four-hour shifts, aiming to produce 1,000 face shields a day.NH Food Bank donations drop in midst of rising demand. It's getting fewer donations from retailers, as grocery stores try to keep up with customer needs, and less fresh produce and dairy is getting delivered. Donations of canned goods were down about 50 percent in March compared to 2019, WMUR reports, while the food bank's distribution has gone up 5 percent. It turned away about 237 households at a mobile food pantry in Berlin last weekend, though it was able to feed 589 people."This is a keep you up at night kind of thing. We can’t run out.” That's Al Gobeille, COO at the UVM Health Network, talking to VTDigger about medical supplies. The state believes it has enough protective gear to equip medical providers through the crisis, if its best guess on caseload projections holds. However, Digger's Katie Jickling and Alan Keays report, if the trends shift toward the worst-case scenario, the state would be short 280,000 N95 face masks. The state, like others, is scrambling to land supplies, working with the feds and on the open market, and first responders are stretching theirs by re-using what they can.Even as demand for produce and meat rises, dairy farmers are taking a hit. CSA shares are up for vegetable farms and livestock farmers are learning to sell direct to consumers, but faced with evaporating demand and tumbling prices, some dairy farmers are being told to dump their milk. And cheese producers, too, are in bad shape: Those that sell to restaurants and specialty stores have seen revenue losses of more than 80 percent, VTDigger reports. The state ag commissioner says the next 6-8 weeks could see “catastrophic losses” for cheesemakers, with some expected to go out of business.Plummeting air traffic in two pics. On his Granite Geek blog, David Brooks is up with two screenshots by a data analyst in Orlando who's been tracking flight radar to show how much air traffic has fallen. The screenshots are centered on Logan, but also include Manchester and Lebanon. The radar from March 2 is crowded. You can pretty much see the tumbleweeds in the one from April 2.New system a face-mask "game changer." In case you've been wondering where Upper Valley crime & mayhem reporter Eric Francis has landed, he's doing coronavirus coverage for a website called Heavy.com. And he's up with a story about a system developed by the Battelle research institute in Columbus, OH, that uses concentrated hydrogen peroxide vapor to sterilize massive numbers of N-95 masks — as many as 80,000 a day. Hospitals in Ohio and NY have them, and more are on their way to Boston, NYC, and Seattle. 

Oh, what the heck, we've got time, right? Let's do a second drone video. This one's by Emily Johnson at VINS, sort of what a raptor might see as it soars overhead.Wow. There's speeding, and then there's this. VT State Police say they clocked two cars doing 108 mph in Bennington on Saturday night — in 35 mph zone. They caught one driver, and are searching for the other.Hanover planning board recommends lifting ban on short-term rentals. The new rules would allow “hosted” rentals, with the owner present, for up to a month in most areas outside of downtown — once the property is registered with the town. "Unhosted" rentals would require a special exception from the zoning board. The move will go before voters at town meeting later this spring. Despite the existing ban, Planning Director Rob Houseman found earlier this year that one Airbnb property netted $216,000 last year, and four others grossed over $100,000, the VN's Tim Camerato reports. Don't forget: The Census is going on and the Upper Valley's core counties are falling short on responses. I don't need to remind you why responding matters — we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars in federal allocations to states and localities, shifts in political power, money for nonprofits to do their thing — and yet Windsor, Orange, Grafton and Sullivan counties are lagging the state averages on responses so far, which in turn are behind the national average (see link). You can fill it out online, using the unique ID they mailed you not too long ago. Go find it.Did you know AVA Gallery has a new online store? No, neither did I. But Artful blogger Susan Apel did, and highlights its virtual display of photographer Carla Kimball's exhibition, Solitude. Susan's not a big fan of all the online mega-museum options out there, she writes, "So I won’t be traipsing through the online collection at the Louvre or the Met, but I’m delighted to visit something smaller, more manageable, and local." That's AVA's Off the Wall, which allows you to browse (and dream about buying) the work of artists who've exhibited there.

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Now... Legendary singer and songwriter Bill Withers died last week. There's so much to choose from, but let's go with this

 (Thanks, DG!)

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