Building a Baseline, part I: Introduction

Dear Diary,

While we can do lots of fun things together, including the current page "Under Construction", your core topic is public restrooms whose doors open to the outside, and outdoor water fountains, public or private.

As I told you two years ago, I categorise the hikes in which I document that core topic:  "everything", "water fountain" or "restroom".  Something I didn't mention two years ago is that in the hikes of January 2021, which were restroom hikes, I tried to take "postcard shots", photos making these mostly pretty pedestrian buildings look as good as I could.  This hasn't been much of an issue since then, because I haven't had occasion to introduce any new restrooms to you, dear Diary.  However, in "Under Construction" and in this page, that will finally change.  So postcard shots will come back.

The hikes I started in July are intended to be everything hikes.  This part of this page has four remaining topics:

1. Why bother?
2. What's everything? (sources of information)
3. What will I do? (photographic practice)
4. What will I write? (organisation of this page)

Why bother?

Your friend and mine, Anna Patrick, formerly of The Seattle Times's Project Homeless, asked me in summer 2023 why I'd continued writing you, dear Diary, after getting housed in March 2021.  The easy part of the answer was that I hadn't then even finished writing up the January 2021 hikes, and then there was the second Durkan Drought that year, by which I mean then-mayor Jenny Durkan's decision to misread CDC guidance on public water fountains to justify leaving park water fountains turned off.

The hard part is, why after that?  I mean, dear Diary, you were obviously born of a pandemic that's now been over for years.  Why continue you?

Because if park restrooms and water fountains ever matter again, it'll be easier to pay attention to them if you, and the tools I've accumulated to write you, are still around.

There are three obvious contexts in which those things could matter.

• The Big One.
• Another pandemic.
• A scandal.

I'm pretty sure most park plumbing is not earthquake-safe.  I don't actually think, dear Diary, you'll be able to help much after the Big One.

I don't much like to think about scandals, but it's less likely that one will happen involving park restrooms in North Seattle if you exist.  You've already been part of the pressure on Seattle's leaders to address the scandalous lack of public restrooms downtown.

But the main reason to keep you going, dear Diary, is that another pandemic could come.  It's true that this country went about a century without any, so this would seem to be a long shot.  But the more certain politicians try to criminalise the practice of public health, the more chance there is for the next pandemic to come a great deal sooner, and when it does, it will probably come in the five months of the year when about half of Seattle's park restrooms are closed.

Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation has a plan to make its restrooms winter-safe, but it sure doesn't talk much about that plan.  What I found in January 2021 was that Parks claimed to be doing things differently because of the pandemic, and in some important ways those claims were true.  But they'd opened no additional restrooms, and diseases like cholera briefly returned to Seattle.  That plan is important, and you, dear Diary, and I, can help cover it.

What's everything?

Why do an everything hike?

Because I don't have a reliable list of water fountains.

Your frenemy Rachel Schulkin is now, according to LinkedIn, an Executive Operations Manager for the city; according to PubliCola, she oversees "parks, libraries, Seattle Center, and the waterfront".

So I wrote to Christina Hirsch, the remaining "media contact" for Parks.  I heard back from a general public questions address.  Fine.  I have to prove myself again. I can do that.

They sent me to two GIS/data analytics pages.

The one for restrooms is pretty good, and I've found it reliable so far.  My main concern with it is that I couldn't find a way to download the dataset.

The one for water fountains, however, while easily downloaded, is disturbingly familiar.  It not only resembles the list I got in 2020, it could be that list.  It also claims all water fountains in North Seattle are working, and although an awful lot really are, that claim turns out not to be true in detail.

So, about existence, there are false negatives (Soundview Playfield now has multiple water fountains) and false positives (Licton Springs Park now has no water fountain).  And, yes, it lists Baker Park on Crown Hill, which, the last time I went there, I was told has never had a water fountain.

There are no false negatives about function, because the map doesn't admit any fountains aren't working.  Well, I've actually been impressed at the fountains I've found operating, the parks department does deserve to brag, but there are exceptions.

So if I have to go to Baker Park, why not go to all of them?

Concretely, as I mentioned in your first page, dear Diary, parks are pretty fun.  The weeks coming up are all that's left of the summer I was supposed to have no classes; why not spend them visiting parks?

Many of the parks in North Seattle don't especially welcome visitors.  Most, but not all, such parks are called "Natural Area"s.  I've long used a heuristic to deal with this:  if a water fountain (let alone restroom) can't be found, if no trail leads to it, it probably doesn't exist at all, and certainly doesn't matter. So all I have to do in the Natural Areas and their ilk is follow all the trails.  In reality, I don't expect to find a water fountain in any of these parks.

Anyway, to get back to the question up above, "what's everything?"

I plan to rely on my past lists, plus four sources of information.

The one I've used the longest, going back to May 2020, is the parks department website.  This has individual pages for many parks, most but not all of which are linked to in the official list of all parks.  These pages have symbols for parks with restrooms and water fountains, and these symbols are usually reliable.  No new North Seattle parks were in the official list in July.

Almost as long, back to June 2020, I've used the City of Seattle's real property reports.  These are reports from the city's Real Estate Services office to the chair of the City Council's Finance committee.  The link currently only gets the 2025 and 2026 reports, but at the Internet Archive, the chain goes back to 2013.  The 2013 report begins with explanatory text that suggests to me that it may have been a new thing then, or at least that any previous versions had been forgotten.  These real property reports have two parts, a text introduction, and a spreadsheet.  As now downloadable, all except 2014 and 2018 actually have the intro; all except 2023 and 2026 actually have the spreadsheet, but the 2022 spreadsheet has changes that make its listings hard to correlate with the rest.  The spreadsheet usually lists department, Property Management Area (PMA) number, name, location or address, classification (Fully Utilized, Excess, etc.), current use, and land area; it usually has more columns than that, but what they are varies.  Between 30% and 40% of each spreadsheet is the parks department.

The third source of information, on which I've relied since May 2021 , is OpenStreetMap.  OpenStreetMap is an invaluable resource for many purposes, of course, but specifically for our purposes, dear Diary, it's often just Too Much, and that has probably contributed to my failures to finish my grander projects since getting housed.

Which is why I'm very glad to report the last major source, which has been familiar to me since I started working as a tax preparer in 2007, but which I've barely used for you, dear Diary, before.  The current version of the King County Parcel Viewer offers a map drawn by property lines, and identifies each "parcel"'s owner.  As a result, if what OpenStreetMap presents as green space is really a bunch of private back yards, I can find that out from the parcel viewer.  (The parcel viewer also colours parks green, but only if they're owned by an official parks agency, so, for example, the parks of Seattle Public Utilities aren't coloured.). Each pop-up in the map for a parcel links to assessor's reports, which often include a photo, and tax reports, which go back about 30 years.

What will I do?

Hiking for you, dear Diary, essentially consists of visiting geographical features, in this and most cases parks, and photographing things of interest, usually, in parks, restroom doorways, and water fountains, the former open or held open, the latter in action dispensing water, if all is well.

In Seattle, park restrooms are usually promised to be open 7 am to 7 pm; in reality, because a limited number of staff unlock and lock the doors, the times vary considerably (please refer your readers, dear Diary, to the series "My Book of Hours" in August 2020), but I try to time my visits between 8 am and 6 pm.

In summer, the restrooms are supposed to stay open later, until 9 pm; that was the point of that series, to find out whether the parks department was doing that during the pandemic.  (It wasn't.  So that was something they did differently because of the pandemic, shortening park restroom hours.)  Near as I can tell, now the pandemic is over, 9 pm closings are back. 

Soon after getting housed, I learnt that Blogspot renames the photos I upload, which each of the phones with which I've taken these photos titles with date and time.  So starting with the May 2021 hikes, I made a point of including a daily newspaper in each restroom door shot and in each water fountain action shot.  And also of uploading the photos to my Google Drive the same day.  Theoretically I was also supposed to upload to Google Drive a close-up of the front page, to help in identifying the newspaper in the photos, but I was never very good about that.

Anyway, it turns out that if someone downloads a photo, Blogspot gives it its original name back.  By that time, also, I only uploaded occasional door and fountain shots to Blogspot, and at Google Drive they weren't renamed.  And, to be blunt, I can't afford daily newspapers right now.  So in most photos for these hikes, there's no newspaper.

So that's a change.  Another, probably more important, change is that I'm no longer photographing the doorways of women's restrooms.  That was always socially problematic, and now that the pandemic is over, I just can't see an upside.  I'm trying to at least notice whether the women's rooms are open, but in a recent hike of Green Lake Park, I failed to do that with two out of five restroom pairs.  Back then, I imagined finding a woman to accompany me; now, I see how unlikely that is, but in the event that someone wants equal treatment, she'd have access to a good list, linked above.  (It does, however, omit the composting toilet at Picardo Farm.)

Things that haven't changed:  I try not to photograph people.  I also try not to photograph homes, particularly tents.

So this is as good a place as any to mention what I've been seeing with regard to homeless people.  I've long complained about what the King County Regional Homelessness Authority has done with the federally required point-in-time count.  However, what I've been seeing is that a majority of the parks I've visited have isolated tents, a few have people sleeping rough, a few have obviously inhabited RVs, and a considerable minority have these:

The KCRHA asserts that homelessness has sharply increased around here over the past four years, and however much I doubt their methods, I'm fairly confident, now, that they're right about that.  What I haven't seen yet is the kind of sprawling encampments that were present during the pandemic.

I've long felt uncomfortable with how freely I wrote about such things at the time.  I re-read some of those pages today, and seriously doubt that I actually did wrong, made any homeless people known to those who did them ill.  For example, almost every park encampment I wrote about was in a park with a restroom, which a staffer visited twice daily, and the I-5 encampments, and others remaining, had "sanican"s, which were visited less than daily. The I-5 ones had also already become a political issue.  So this isn't an apology, but is an announcement of another change.  I intend to notice homeless people much less this time.

Which brings us to this part's last main topic:

What will I write?

I recently suggested to you, dear Diary, an ultimate fate of holding a bunch of park-specific pages.  I'm pretty sure most parts of "Under Construction" will be park-specific.

Much though I'd like to make that my norm already, though, it's too much.  I'm increasingly leaning toward being fairer to the downtown parks, and North Seattle alone has over a hundred.  I can't justify adding one or two hundred pages every time I do an everything hike, even though those aren't that common.

So, for example, I currently have a lot of crow to eat concerning Beaver Pond Natural Area.  That'll get its own page.  But the rest of that day's hike near Northgate will be a single part of this page.

My current class isn't over, and won't be until August 26th.  I worked very hard last week to make time for you today, dear Diary, and can't predict when we'll meet again, but surely not later than August 27th.  Until then, happy days and happy nights. 

Under Construction, part II: Themes

Dear Diary,

Well, I've been hiking, and have now visited six of the thirteen parks on my list for this page.  But technical problems are slowing me down, and anyway I can probably make the remaining parts shorter by putting these general remarks into one place.

Because, you see, dear Diary, Seattle's Department of Parks and Recreation has certain priorities when it comes to construction.  Let's start with a couple of magic words.

Activation

Parks cares a lot about how many people use its parks, and the particular feedback loop it embraces is known as "activation".

The idea behind activation is that there's always room for one more person in a park, and to the extent their budgets allow, park managers want to bring that one more person in, using techniques known to help in doing so.  I'm not sure believers in activation think there can ever be too much of it.

Now, I have a pretty jaundiced take on this whole activation ideology, because I'm not at all sure weird single middle-aged men are in activation's target audience, but I'm absolutely sure homeless people are not in activation's target audience.  In fact, activation is often presented as a way to discourage homeless people from being in parks, by outnumbering them with normal people.

Nevertheless, Seattle Parks embraces activation ideology, and it comes up time and again in their construction projects.  Specifically, they like to replace playground equipment, partly as trends in safety engineering change (and perhaps advance), but also because new equipment is a new chance to activate more kids.

Access

I'm not here, dear Diary, to object to the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, from which we all benefit in many ways, and from which I, personally, benefit in specific ways as well.

But already in my hiking, I've become convinced that the word "access", used in explaining park projects, has a weird meaning, at once narrower than it should be (a path can be made "more accessible" without removing stairs) and broader than it should be (any path can be made "more accessible" by widening it).  So, in Seattle Parks project management, "access" is a magic word, not a well thought out principle.

Synthetic turf

Not all park construction norms are magic words.  Seattle Parks has been fairly busy replacing natural playfield surfaces with synthetic ones.

Not being an athlete, I have no real opinion on synthetic turf as an experience.  It may well be less "ecological", but I've already visited one target for conversion, and no blade of grass will be harmed by the planned changes to Woodland Park's Field 4's infield:

As an accounting student, though, I have to admit that synthetic turf is a major bureaucratic win.  Instead of considerable expenses to mow, water, and so on - labor expenses, mostly, very high in Seattle - synthetic turf is an asset, and depreciates.  Replacing it is small change in capital budgets.  I don't know, though, whether it's also a win for taxpayers.

Single user stalls

Yes, dear Diary, Seattle Parks also has a norm concerning your core topic.  (Although both access and activation will come up in that regard as well.)

I think it's obvious that single user stalls aren't as efficient in using space as multi-stall restrooms.  Each single user stall has a sink, after all, and probably a dryer.  But I don't have proof, because I hardly ever know how big the women's rooms are, so I can't do before and after comparisons.

For example, the old Cal Anderson Park men's room had two stalls plus a urinal.  Did the women's room have two or three?  Impressively, Parks managed to squeeze four single user stalls into that building, which is either parity (ignoring for now the urinal) or minus one.  However, two of those four were damaged years ago, and aren't on the construction radar, so it's worse than that in practice.

Single user stalls are certainly safer, while people are in them, and that's not trivial - someone running away from someone else can take pretty good refuge in one.

Well, dear Diary, those are the things I wanted to sum up here.  The time I've spent hiking has been available because my instructor has given us some days to study before the midterm on Monday.  I hope to visit three more parks tomorrow, but that still leaves three in Lake City, plus Hubbard Homestead and a return trip to Woodland, to squeeze into several weeks of frenetic assignments thereafter.

As for when I'll tell you about these hikes, dear Diary, it's more of a hassle than it'd been the past few years, but less time-consuming than hiking, so I hope pretty soon.  Until then, happy days and nights. 

Weather Information Sources in North Seattle

Dear Diary,

Because my financial situation is becoming exigent, I don't know how long it'll take me to finish the time-consuming work on part VI of "Public Library Hours, Autumn 2023", or that on part II of "Institutional Libraries Long Closed to the Public".  And I don't know when I can get back to hiking, either.

Also, it looks like hiking may still be necessary.  As I told you eight days ago, dear Diary, I found two water fountains not running when I recently re-visited the parks with which we started:  the one in "lower" Ravenna Park, and the one near the tennis courts in Laurelhurst Playfield.  I reported the Ravenna one using the method preferred by the Public Restroom/Drinking Fountain Dashboard, Seattle's "Find It Fix It" mobile phone application, and told only you, dear Diary, about the Laurelhurst one.  Today both are shown as running:

Now, it may be that they really are running, that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's people were already aware of them at the time and fixed them the next day.  But the only way to verify that they're running now is, of course, to hike.  There will, however, be no newspaper in tomorrow's photos.

That said, what prompted me to start writing in you this morning, dear Diary, is something else entirely.  For nearly two months now, one of the three weather records sites I visit daily has been out of commission.  Now, by "weather records" I mean not all-time records, but rather records of routine events, specifically daily low temperatures.  As I think I've already told you, dear Diary, I check three of them most days:

• The theoretically every minute record maintained by the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
• The usually every five minutes record maintained by the US Federal Aviation Administration from Boeing Field.
• And the formerly every hour record maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a few blocks from Atmospheric Sciences, on the shore of Portage Bay.

Well, without a third, I lack any way of settling arguments.  For the past couple of weeks, Boeing Field has been reporting much lower low temperatures than UW.  Not that they necessarily have to report the same low, but they haven't done that once since October 3.  Is this a geographical difference, or is it a problem with either thermometer, or what?

Contents of this page:

• The problem
• Weather stations in North Seattle
• So who's right?
• Weather forecasts offered by NOAA

The problem

I should mention two idiosyncracies I have, compared to normal weather reports.  First, I call the low the lowest reading between highs, regardless of what time it is.  This presents problems when the temperature rises or falls steadily for more than 24 hours, which sometimes does happen, so most weather reporters instead state the low for a definite period such as "last night".  Second, I only need one reading at some temperature to call that the low temperature; UW, at least, seems to need more than one, while the Weather Service page for Boeing Field for a long time ignored its five-minute readings completely, counting only its hourly readings at XX:53.  With that said, let's get started:

Date	UW	Boeing	Difference
10/3/2023	54	54	0
10/4/2023	56	53	3
10/5/2023	56	55	1
10/6/2023	53	52	1
10/7/2023	55	48	7
10/8/2023	57	54	3
10/9/2023	59	55	4
10/10/2023	54	50	4
10/11/2023	52	48	4
10/12/2023	51	50	1
10/13/2023	53	48	5
10/14/2023	57	54	3
10/15/2023	58	54	4
10/16/2023	56	50	6
10/17/2023	53	48	5
10/18/2023	55	48	7
10/19/2023	57	50	7
10/20/2023	57	55	2
10/21/2023	54	53	1
10/22/2023	53	52	1
10/23/2023	51	45	6
10/24/2023	47	45	2
10/25/2023	44	42	2
10/26/2023	42	36	6
10/27/2023	38	30	8
10/28/2023	36	28	8
10/29/2023	37	27	10
10/30/2023	41	32	9
10/31/2023	40	30	10
11/1/2023	45	37	8

So has Boeing Field really been eight or more degrees colder than UW almost every night for the past week, or hasn't it?  If it has, will this ever end?  And if it hasn't, which one is wrong?

Well, dear Diary, less than a year ago, I announced a new project:  "Counties of Western Washington", and you haven't heard much about it since.  I haven't abandoned it, but haven't worked on it much recently.  However, in the course of researching the first county to be covered, I learned a lot, and one thing I learned was how to find weather stations, at least those known to NOAA.

In the county I was researching, at that time, several stations showed a pattern I'd already seen in NOAA's UW site's temperature records:  abrupt 8°  to 11°  changes of temperature, first downward, then upward, in its hourly record.  I call these "swoops".

The fundamental tool is a map.  Zoom in on it and, one by one as the zoom factor increases, additional stations are revealed.  Click on the stations and a box pops up showing current information and linking to 3 or 7 days' worth of records.  I'm tolerably sure there are at least fourteen stations in North Seattle, not counting either one at UW.  Shall we meet them, dear Diary?  My concerns are location, what each site records, and whether I see swoops in the past week's information.

I also got curious about ownership, but near as I can tell, I'm not going to learn much.  That's because most of these stations belong to something called the Citizen Weather Observer Program, or CWOP.  This is a public-private partnership, that is, private individuals (or perhaps organisations such as businesses, schools, or non-profits) provide information, and a public agency, the Weather Service, publishes it.  Since I have no idea how much longer I'll have to do without the NOAA station at UW, I have an interest in not upsetting the privacy of the citizens who provide that information.

So what I provide below is location in terms of the nearest intersection of collector or larger streets.  Also what each site records, but the default is temperature, humidity and wind at quarter-hour intervals, with no swoops.  One site doesn't do wind; many report more often than quarter hours; none have swoops.

Weather stations in North Seattle

N130th Seattle

This station is owned by the Washington Department of Transportation and is near the intersection of 5th Ave NE and Roosevelt Way NE, actually near or on I-5.  It records the default plus road temperature.

K7SSW Seattle

A CWOP station well west of Greenwood Ave N and N 125th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation.

DW8513 Seattle

A CWOP station near 15th Ave NW and NW 100th St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation.

EW6795 Seattle

A CWOP station near Sand Point Way NE and NE 95th St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation every five minutes.

CW3683 Seattle

A CWOP station north of Roosevelt Way NE and NE 92nd St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation every ten minutes.

FW0821 Seattle

A CWOP station north of Aurora Ave N and N 95th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every ten minutes.

FW8372 Seattle

A CWOP station near 15th Ave NW and Holman Road NW.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every five minutes.

CW6259 Seattle

A CWOP station south of Roosevelt Way NE and NE 92nd St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation every five minutes.

CW1943 Seattle

A CWOP station near 35th Ave NE and NE 65th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation.

EW9877 Seattle

A CWOP station near Sand Point Way NE and NE 65th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every ten minutes.

KG7QQL Seattle

A CWOP station near 32nd Ave NW and NW 65th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every five minutes.

FW6603 Seattle

A CWOP station north of Meridian Ave N and N 50th St.  It records the default, minus wind, but plus pressure and precipitation, every five minutes.

N7TUG-8 Seattle

A CWOP station near NW Market St and NW 54th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation, at irregular intervals; my impression is that they vary between two and fifteen minutes.

GW1230 Seattle

A CWOP station near Aurora Ave N and N 40th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation, every five minutes.

So who's right?

Let's look at two tables, dear Diary.  The first shows UW's lows and those of the nearest stations to the northeast (CW1943 Seattle), northwest (FW6603 Seattle), west (GW1230 Seattle) and south (GW1416 Seattle, near 24th Ave E and Boyer Ave E).  Anyway, let's look:

Date	UW	Northeast	Northwest	West	South	Boeing
10/26/2023	42	36	37	34	38	36
10/27/2023	38	33	33	36	36	30
10/28/2023	36	30	33	32	33	28
10/29/2023	37	32	34	35	34	27
10/30/2023	41	37	34	39	38	32
10/31/2023	40	35	35	37	38	30
11/01/2023	45	41	40	43	43	37

So will you look at that, dear Diary?  UW had the highest low for each day of that week among these sites, and Boeing Field had the lowest for six days out of seven.  Could they both be wrong?  Let's look at the other table before deciding. This one features stations  north (Seattle-Beacon Hill, AirNow), northwest (Seattle-Duwamish, AirNow, swooped today), west (FW7103 Seattle, CWOP) and southwest (FW7437 Seattle, CWOP) of the station I've been following for years.  So they cover less of the circle around Boeing Field; they're also considerably farther from the station at Boeing Field than the ones in the previous table are from UW's Atmospheric Sciences building.  But let's see what they say.

Date	Boeing	North	Northwest	West	Southwest	UW
10/26/2023	36	40	42	40	35	42
10/27/2023	30	37	38	36	33	38
10/28/2023	28	34	35	34	28	36
10/29/2023	27	35	35	34	31	37
10/30/2023	32	38	38	37	34	41
10/31/2023	30	39	39	39	33	40
11/01/2023	37	43	44	43	38	45

Well, hully gee!  Similar pattern!

What we know, dear Diary, is that while the federal sites have both long gotten colder readings than UW, this pattern of extreme differences between the UW, traditionally highest of the three I've long followed, and Boeing Field, traditionally in the middle, is relatively new.

And you know what, dear Diary?  I'm really tired today of fighting Blogspot every time I put a table in here.  So I've just uploaded the current state of my spreadsheet into Google Drive (134 KB .ods file).  The same dates as the past week last year were messed up by the complicated series of omissions I told you about when I told you, dear Diary, about the three sites I normally follow.  But the spreadsheet includes those dates for 2021, 2020 and 2019 as well, and while differences between UW and Boeing consistently rise during this season, in the past those rises were from 0 to 2 degrees to 3 or 4 degrees.  Not to 8 to 10 degrees.

So maybe there is a newly arising weather-related reason why Boeing Field should be so much colder at night than the UW.  But that hypothesis doesn't account for the fact that the area around Boeing Field, and that around the UW, seem to be much more similar in nightly lows than Boeing Field and the UW themselves.  So here are some other potential reasons:

• Could it be because of the quality control procedures the CWOP home page boasts about?  No, because two stations in the second table aren't CWOP stations.
• OK, so could it be because everyone except the UW and the FAA use the same brand of weather equipment?  Possible, but doesn't explain why this difference only appeared over the past month or two.  (Also, the FAA station at SeaTac Airport is between Boeing Field and UW too. [1])
• Could the UW and FAA have made an agreement that every user of either site should consult both and split the difference?  Maybe, but I'm a leftist, and we don't approve of conspiracy theories this decade.
• Could both the UW's and the FAA's thermometers have gone out of whack recently?  That's my notion.  But real meteorologists have programs that can agglomerate all the observations, not just those nearest the two subject sites, and then run real statistical analyses of those observations.  So my goal is just to point out that the difference exists, and let them work out what it is.

That accomplished, this page's title promised "weather information", not just "weather records".  Most people care more about the forecast than about the past; in fact, I started tracking low temperatures mainly as a tool to evaluate forecasts.  So what about those?

[1] Stupid me, I started this page thinking I track a NOAA site at SeaTac.  So the first version of the second table in this section was centred on SeaTac and included the actual FAA station there as one neighbouring my imagined NOAA station there.

Weather forecasts offered by NOAA

The Weather Service likes to present its forecasts as carefully numerically modulated, a smooth mathematical surface, so to speak; if I go to the Seattle office's page and hit "Forecasts", then "Local Area", what I get is a page that invites longitude and latitude numbers with many digits.  But I doubt very much that it has either the manpower or the computer power to present so very many reliable forecasts that take full account of topography, for example separate forecasts for the top and the bottom of Golden Gardens Park.  So my preference is to find forecasts that claim to be for a specific place rather than for some offset from a specific place, and do my own modulating.  However, the Weather Service is enough invested in its claim to have superpowers that it doesn't offer a list or map of the places it writes real forecasts for.  So the question is how to find them.

The most precise tool the Weather Service offers for finding its forecasts varies depending on the situation.  Specifically, then, Seattle is big enough to resemble a rural area with regard to precision, so the ZIP code is the best choice.   This map says we have nine ZIP codes in North Seattle.  The layout:

Northwest	North	Northeast
98177	98133	98125
98117	98103	98115
98107	98103 again	98105 and 98195

The east-west dividing lines appear to be around 100th St and mostly around 65th St (except where I live); the north-south ones appear to me to be by address, the way I used to divide up the parks, NW, N or NE.  Note, dear Diary, that 98133 continues north well into Shoreline, and 98177 continues north even beyond Shoreline.

Here, in numerical order, are the forecasts I get when I put the ZIP code into the search box at weather.gov:

• 98103 leads to "2 Miles W Seattle-University WA".
• 98105, 98115 and 98195 all lead to "Seattle-University WA".
• 98107 and 98117 both lead to "Seattle-Ballard WA".
• 98125 leads to "2 Miles ENE North Seattle WA".
• 98133 leads to "Shoreline WA".
• 98177 leads to "2 Miles WNW Shoreline WA".

For all these ZIP codes, the observation station, whose current readings are cited and to whose recent readings there's a link, is one in Lake Forest Park that doesn't do anything for about an hour each morning.  It's a CWOP station, so why don't they link instead to one of the better CWOP stations within North Seattle, at least for the southern North Seattle ZIP codes?

Anyway, I tried typing in those names, but didn't get good results.  So basically, dear Diary, the most reliable search term with which to get to a forecast for the U-District is 98105; for Ballard, 98107; for "North Seattle", turns out, Northacres Park.  (Or Green Lake.)  These three may be all the locations in North Seattle that get real forecasts, or there may be more; I don't know; but ZIP code searches and similar strategies are how I try to identify such locations in general.

All for tonight, dear Diary.  Now I'm going to go see if I can get myself to work any more today on Cowlitz County's population, and bid you happy nights and days until we meet again.

 

Institutional Libraries Long Closed to the Public, part I: Institutions for Adults

Dear Diary,

This page is about several classes of libraries that I explicitly put aside in "Library Hours Six Months Later" despite my avowed goal of covering all libraries listed in my sources, and one class on which I spent much effort and some actual writing in that page.

What these libraries have in common is that they are available to people who live in, or spend many of their waking hours in, institutions in which their freedom of movement, their literal "liberty", is often or always restricted.   Because these people, sometimes or always, can't physically go to, for a notable example, public libraries, it's important that they have access to libraries inside the institutions in question.

I separated out academic libraries as a category in "Six Months Later", and handled it differently, because I believed and believe it's essential to academic work to have library access.  The argument this time is different, but more compelling in the context of the issues you're about, dear Diary.  No, it isn't possible for homeless people, any more than most housed ones, to use the restrooms inside these institutions.  But the institutions for adults covered in this part are all well-known as places whose residents often leave them to become homeless.  I have absolutely no evidence, but I believe, nonetheless, that it's obvious that libraries in the institutions should decrease the percentage who actually do become homeless.  Therefore, as with the academic libraries, I'm proceeding not just library by library but more importantly campus by campus.  Or anyway physical location by physical location. The point being that each physical site (except maybe ones very close together) should have its own library.  So this page is really about whether sites have libraries, not what sort of libraries they have.

Both this argument and my history with these libraries dictate my methods.  Because this is my first time dealing with most of these libraries, I don't consider myself free to e-mail or telephone anyone.  (Separately, all the people I'd be e-mailing or telephoning are people governments sometimes authorise to use force on other people, and I'd be nervous about bothering them.)  And not only am I not going to physically visit each site, I'm not allowed to physically visit each site.  So all I can do is take these places' word for it that libraries exist, if they say so.  In the body of this part, I go into how much justification I think I actually have for taking each place's word.  Moreover, since libraries' existence is my main concern, and not their hours, or their conduct or borrowing rules, the rest of this part is terser than this introduction.

Contents of this part:

• Military bases
  • Military bases whose websites say they have libraries
  • Military base whose website doesn't say it has a library
  • Military base without a public website
• Mental hospitals
  • Mental hospital whose website says it has a library
  • Mental hospitals whose websites don't say they have libraries
  • Mental hospitals without public websites
• Prisons
  • Prisons whose websites say they have libraries
  • Prisons whose websites don't say they have libraries
  • Digression:  Visiting prisoners in autumn 2023, according to prisons' websites
  • Prisons without public websites

Dear Diary, some of your readers may object to the idea that military bases are anything like mental hospitals, let alone prisons.  The military, after all, is just another job!  I can sympathise with such objections.  In fact, in "Six Months Later", I listed the military base libraries properly according to my criteria, but dismissed the prison libraries and mental hospital library much more casually as beyond my purview, even though, at that time, my main concern was public restrooms and none of these offer any, so I should've treated them all the same.  The difference was precisely:  It could be argued that the military is simply a job.  Whereas the other two categories required me to look into very bleak "There but for the grace of God go I" situations.  Even now, I'm organising the three parts of the body of this part not by the distance of the closest member as I usually would, but by a more or less moral scale, best to worst.

While the military is indeed significantly different from mental hospitals and prisons by virtue of the fact that the adults in the military chose to be there (which hasn't always been the case in American history), in fact, members of the military who physically move off the base without formally granted permission not only can be forced to return but can be put into prison for leaving.  (As best I understand it, they usually aren't, but they can be.)  Whereas at most jobs, employees are physically free to leave at any time, albeit they may have trouble getting another job after doing so.  In fact, when someone at a private employer isn't physically free to leave, we call it "slavery".  Well, I don't expect slave-owners to permit their slaves to go to libraries.  (I do expect slave-owners to die miserably, but that's another matter.)

But if the military is an ordinary job, and yet soldiers (sailors, airmen, Marines, etc.) can't go to the public library in their free time without explicit permission, then there ought to be libraries on military bases, I'm glad there are, and I'm now going to show how the military, in western Washington, in fact takes better care to provide library service to its volunteer charges than mental hospitals and prisons do to provide them to their conscripted ones.

Previous parts of pages relevant to this part:

• Library Hours Six Months Later, part VI: Other local governmental libraries
• Library Hours Six Months Later, part VII: Other governmental libraries
• Library Hours Six Months Later, part XI: Yet more governmental libraries

Throughout this part, given that the populations in question are heavily male, I'm less politically correct in certain locutions; mainly "his (her)" instead of "his or her", let alone "her or his", which I think both convey a misleading impression of parity.

Military bases

Because I never registered for the draft, I'm ineligible to work for the US government, so for thirty years now, it's been extremely unlikely for me to end up on any military bases.

I consider the existence of the libraries and other forms of library service described in this section extremely probable.  The vast Web presence of the US military is unlikely to be purely a performance for spectators like me.  So I think many members of the military read pages relevant to themselves, and if the military promised libraries that don't exist, there would probably be lots of complaints.  Also, most of the libraries are presented not on strictly military sites but on .com ones meant to give military people warm fuzzy feelings; I don't see how it would benefit morale at all to lie on such pages.

Military bases whose websites say they have libraries

I gave distances to these in part XI of "Six Months Later", according to the distance calculator I used to use. In that part, I also mentioned other libraries not intended for the populations of the bases at large, such as medical libraries, which I'm ignoring this time.

• Naval Base Kitsap.  English Wikipedia says it has 15,601 active duty personnel, without a reference.  It used to be two separate parts, which no longer have their own websites, and are geographically disjunct.
  • Naval Station Bremerton. Its Bremerton Recreation Center offers "Library services".  Naval Hospital Bremerton, some distance from the recreation center, used to make known that it had a library for its patients, but no longer appears to make that known.  (I have no idea whether it still has the library.)
  • Naval Submarine Base Bangor  Its Liberty Center, Bangor offers "Lending Library & Board Games".
• Naval Station Everett. English Wikipedia says it has about 350 sailors and civilians assigned to the station, but also hosts naval commands totalling about 6,000 people, without a reference. Its Resource Center offers "a free paperback exchange program and hardback book checkouts".
• Joint Base Lewis-McChord. English Wikipedia says it has about 210,000 active population, referring to a website titled "The 5 Largest Military Bases in the World". It used to be two separate parts, which no longer have their own websites, and are geographically conjunct.
  • McChord Air Force Base. It includes McChord Library. This library is to close for re-carpeting for January and February.
  • Fort Lewis. It includes Grandstaff Library. Within that library is a smaller one that also has its own website, Book Patch Children's Library. (Remember, dear Diary, I'm writing about institutions for adults, not necessarily libraries for adults.) These libraries are to close for re-carpeting for November and December.
• Naval Air Station Whidbey Island. English Wikipedia says the 2010 census found 1,541 people there. I looked at the wrong location here last time. Its Liberty Northwest Center offers a "Trade-a-Book Program".

Military base whose website doesn't say it has a library

• Naval Magazine Indian Island.  English Wikipedia says the 2000 census found 44 people there, on the island just east of Port Hadlock, all of which the Navy controls.  It's 32.07 miles from my house by the distance calculator I'm currently using (which is also the source of all distances further on in this page). That distance would put it between Naval Station Everett and Joint Base Lewis-McChord if it were in the above list.  Both the magazine's own site and most sites found by searching for it on Google focus heavily on the place's ecological aspects.

Military base without a public website

• Camp Murray.  It's owned by the state of Washington, not the US government, and is used by the Washington Air National Guard and Washington Army National Guard (which can be taken over by the US government) as well as the Washington State Guard (which can't).  I'm also ineligible to join these bodies.  I have no idea whether anyone lives there month-round, let alone year-round; I strongly doubt it's a residential military base of the kind this section is mainly about.  It's 40.58 miles from my house by the current distance calculator, which would put it between McChord and Grandstaff libraries in the above list; it's between Steilacoom and DuPont, which means I've walked past its fences.

My conclusion:  The extent of library service the US military offers to the people it stations in western Washington is pretty carefully calibrated to the number of such people in each place.  Library service is obviously taken seriously.  However, an isolated city of 210,000 should probably have more than two libraries, as the example of Tacoma, with about that population, suggests, and as the upcoming re-carpeting crisis will probably vividly demonstrate.

Mental hospitals

Currently, as I understand it, there are at least four ways a person in Washington can be involuntarily committed, which is what it takes to end up in the kind of mental hospital I mean in this part.   First, the person can be found, without the involvement of criminal law, to be a danger to himself (herself) or others, either via violence of some kind or via incapacity to function.  This is "civil commitment".  Second, the person can be charged with something, but there's serious doubt of his (or her) competence to stand trial.  This leads to "competency evaluation" and other mental health activities that aren't optional.  Third, the person can be found not guilty of a crime by reason of insanity.  Both of these are "forensic commitment".  Fourth, the person can have served out a sentence for a crime, but is still being detained for mental health-related reasons.  Washington's Department of Social and Health Services calls this "special commitment" (but also considers it a form of civil commitment, which strikes me as bizarre).  Anyway, although I've now for about fifty years experienced occasionally severe mental illness (depression), I don't think I've come all that close to qualifying for these places.

The state of Washington is under court pressure to do better by the people who do qualify, so this area of Washington's mental health infrastructure has been growing rapidly, and I'm cheating a bit by dinging a location that hasn't quite opened yet.  I'd have been pretty lost if not for a 28-page PDF ("Washington State Legal System Guide to Forensic Mental Health Services", dated 2016) and the link list on the left sides of pages under DSHS's Behavioral Health Administration.  I still don't believe that this section is anywhere near complete.

Mental hospital whose website says it has a library

• Western State Hospital.  Has a capacity of over 800 beds.  It's the first institution in this part of this page to have a branch of the Washington State Library, and unlike most such institutions, it gives that library its very own Web page, such as the military libraries have.  It serves patients both by "campus mail" and an "on-site library open Monday-Friday".  It's in Lakewood on the way to Steilacoom, 35.98 miles from my house, and yes, dear Diary, I've walked past it too.

Mental hospitals whose websites don't say they have libraries

• Olympic Heritage Behavioral Health.  Has a capacity for 137 beds; the first were filled on October 2, 2023, but they're opening gradually, so it won't reach its full capacity until spring.  That said, this used to be a private mental hospital, Cascade Behavioral Health, so it's not a new thing, and there should already have been a place in it where books could be found, ideally also read or discussed.  Maybe there is, but DSHS doesn't think it's worth mentioning online; but then, maybe there used to be, but DSHS found what it thinks a better use for the space.  The residents are civilly committed people, meant to make more room at Western (and Eastern) State Hospitals for forensically committed people.  Since civil commitment is often started by family members, there would seem to be an incentive for DSHS to throw those family members some bones by describing a few better aspects of life there.  The existing page is focused on reassuring neighbours that the residents won't escape.  The place is in northwest Tukwila, on the Burien border, 13.07 miles from my house.
• Maple Lane.  According to the 2016 book listed above (page 17, numbered 13), this 30-bed cottage northwest of Centralia, 69.54 miles, was being used for competency evaluations.  According to DSHS today, it's about to start being used to house people found not guilty by reason of insanity, specifically to prepare them for release.  For so few people presumably staying only temporarily, anything more than a standing bookshelf or three (or a single shelf in each room) is probably overkill; but then, for all I know, competency evaluations are still going on in some nearby cottage, in which case the population is about to double.

Mental hospitals without public websites

• In Washington, the state allows itself to hold "sexually violent predators" after their sentences end until it's satisfied that they no longer have whatever impulses drove them to their crimes.  The courts appear to doubt that Washington has this authority, so DSHS is trying to thread the needle partly by changing venues - that is, not changing court venues, but rather, not keeping all the hundreds of men being kept on McNeil Island stuck in that one place forever.  For obvious reasons, neither McNeil Island nor whatever other places DSHS has opened have websites Google could find.

I have no idea how well calibrated library service at mental hospitals in western Washington is to the number of people held in them, because I'm not convinced I've found all the mental hospitals.  (And I'm not just referring here to places holding "sexually violent predators".)  But also because I don't trust that the ones I have found would all have mentioned any libraries.  Hold that thought, dear Diary, or you'll completely misunderstand the next section.

Prisons

I have no experience of prison (or jail) either.  I was homeless for eight and a half years, and it's pretty obvious that many elected officials in King County desperately want to re-criminalise homelessness.  Also, the only occasions on which police have treated me as a suspect were both for trespassing.  But one was hand-cuffing, but not arrest, at a building that had been a tax office I'd worked at, and where I had permission to be; and the other was detention, but not arrest, at an office that was still a tax office, and where I thought I had permission to be.  More importantly, both were while I was still housed.

Anyway, you'll remember, dear Diary, that in western Washington, five levels of government have libraries - municipal, tribal, county, state, and federal.  Unlike the military bases, which are mostly or entirely federal, and the mental hospitals, which (as far as I know) are all state, all five levels have prisons here.  An important distinction here:  Crimes in Washington are classified into two main categories, felonies and misdemeanors.  Misdemeanors in general can be punished by up to one year in prison; felonies in general can be punished by more than a year in prison.  In Washington, convicted felons usually go to state prisons, occasionally to federal ones.  Convicted misdemeanants usually go to county or municipal "jail"s.  (I won't profess to know anything about how tribes' laws work, so am not sure where in this framework tribal jails fall.)  Jails also hold people awaiting trial, who may not have been convicted of anything yet.  But because people are thought of as spending relatively shorter times in jails, we as a society tend to allow worse conditions there than in prisons.  The digression below offers a fairly spectacular example of this.

The websites of western Washington prisons are highly imitative.  Obviously this is true of the state prisons, which all belong to the same state agency, but it's also true of the jails.  Here are some rules that many jails' websites explicitly lay down:

Prisoners may not enter their incarceration with books.  They can be given, or if they have money buy, books "directly from their publishers" (which some jails admit usually actually means from Amazon; the point is, the books have to be new, not used).  However, prisoners are limited to only a few books in their cells at a time, the numbers very comparable to typical limits on homeless people's library cards at the libraries that impose such limits, usually 3 to 5.  Also, they may not own or have access to any hard-cover books.  The limits don't count "religious books"; I infer, but don't know, that by this is meant not random inspirational books, but Bibles, or at the more broad-minded prisons maybe also Torahs, Korans...  Those may also be limited to 1 or 2, but don't count against the limit on other books; they do also have to be soft-covered.

The state's (9-page PDF) restrictions on publications are much less onerous than the jails'.  Regular publications kept in an inmate's cell are limited to a space 18" x 12" x 10".  (I pulled the top five mass market paperbacks off a stack in my house and found them 7" x 5" x 5".  So this is clearly a better deal.)  There's a separate, smaller, space allotment for religious items, including but not limited to books.  Also, I was unable to find any exclusion of hardcover books (despite looking in a bunch of places both directly and through site-specific Google searches), and non-profits approved by the state can send used books.  Because prisoners normally arrive at state prisons from local jails, what to bring on arrival isn't as much of a focus.

Prisons are legally required to provide certain inmates - apparently, ones acting as their own lawyers - with legal references.  A few jails still page books from the county law libraries when necessary, but nowadays the vast majority instead offer terminals equipped with legal references.  These terminals are referred to as the jail's "law library", but I didn't take them as evidence of a more general library.  Near as I can tell, state prisons still use books, the larger ones having their own physical law libraries.

Prisons whose websites say they have libraries

Libraries at prisons have more things in common.  Seven of the eleven county or municipal jails whose websites say that they have libraries, also the one federal prison that says so, say it in one specific place.  This is in PDF versions of "inmate manual"s (the title varies, but below, I call them all inmate manuals), books inmates are expected to read and live by, and are penalised for damaging.

The state prisons famously have "branches" of the Washington State Library, and do mention those.  Except the ones that don't have them, which, it turns out, are about half of those in western Washington.  People in minimum security prisons are restricted to getting books by inter-library loan through the Washington State Library's catalogue.  I link to the available-online federal and local inmate manuals below, so here's a link to the state inmate manual, 81-page PDF, library reference on page 47.  It's much more lawyerly- and much less practically-oriented than the jail manuals; for a notable example, it doesn't include any of the state's actual restrictions on books.

Most references to prison or jail libraries don't go into detail about how they work, but two do, and it's radically different from what most of us understand by "library".  The Federal Detention Center SeaTac and the Island County Jail both explain that what they really have are book carts that are wheeled by staff from cell to cell.  Not a place outside the cells where even minimum security inmates can sit and read, let alone discuss, books.  Because prisons appear to me to be so imitative, I find it entirely plausible that this is how it works at every one of these prisons, but because the Washington State Library's Institutional Library Services home page emphasises the word "place" a lot, the Washington State Library branches are where I'd look for exceptions first.

Finally, a few of the libraries mentioned below do come up in random parts of the websites.  This suggests to me that "inmate library" or "jail library" is a common term, and (again because of imitation) probably most or all of the prisons listed further below whose websites don't happen to mention libraries actually do have them anyway, for whatever those carts are worth.

• Federal Detention Center SeaTac, in southern SeaTac south of the airport, 17.55 miles from my house.  Inmate manual, 71-page PDF, see page 42.  This prison holds primarily inmates involved in trials in Seattle, 787 as of evening, October 19.
• Monroe Correctional Complex (state), in southwestern Monroe, 19.52 miles.  Washington State Library branches in the Twin Rivers Unit, with 800 capacity (per English Wikipedia), and the Washington State Reformatory, with 720.  Inter-library loan for the Minimum Security Unit, with 470.  These numbers and two more below add up to more than the prison's stated total capacity of 2400.  At that capacity, MCC would be the third biggest prison in Washington; at the total of its units' Wikipedia sizes, 2590, it would be the biggest.
  
• Snohomish County Jail, in downtown Everett, 21.63 miles.  Comforts future inmates reading that they mayn't bring books by saying "inmates may use the inmate library."  Did not report its average daily population for 2022 to the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, whose 2022 data (link is directly to a spreadsheet) I'm using below.  (I also used that spreadsheet to identify the municipal and tribal jails, about which I hadn't previously heard.)
• Washington Corrections Center for Women, just west of Gig Harbor, 26.56 miles.  Washington State Library branch.  738 capacity.
• Marysville Municipal Jail, southwest Marysville, 27.03 miles.  Inmate manual, not a PDF, mentions "Jail Library".  Average daily population, 2022, was 22.
• Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women (state), a few miles northwest of unincorporated Belfair, Mason County, 28.13 miles.  Minimum security prison with inter-library loan available from Washington State Library.  321 capacity.
• Pierce County Jail, downtown Tacoma, 29.65 miles.  A 2016 Request For Proposals, 232-page PDF, contains a 2015 organisation chart for the jail in Appendix D, unnumbered page 216, which identifies someone as responsible for the "Inmate Library".  That person isn't findable through Pierce County's website now, but their title, "Program Coordinator", is still in charge of other programs, so maybe also still the inmate library.  Average daily population, 2022, was 748.
• Jefferson County Jail, unincorporated Port Hadlock, 31.51 miles.  Jail policy manual, 584-page PDF; library discussed pp. 547-548.  Average daily population, 2022, was 22.
• Island County Jail, Coupeville, 40.86 miles.  Inmate manual, 31-page PDF; library described p. 13.  Average daily population, 2022, was 42.
• Mason County Jail, downtown Shelton, 48.29 miles.  Inmate manual, 19-page PDF; library mentioned p. 11.  Average daily population, 2022, was 81.
• Washington Corrections Center, northwest of Shelton, 50.01 miles.  Branch of Washington State Library.  Capacity 1,268.
• Clallam County Corrections Facility, downtown Port Angeles, 59.62 miles.  Inmate manual, 49-page PDF; see pp. 21-22.  Average daily population, 2022, was 94.
• Cedar Creek Corrections Center (state), unincorporated Littlerock, Thurston County, 66.77 miles.  Minimum security prison with inter-library loan available from Washington State Library.  Capacity 480.
• Whatcom County Jail, downtown Bellingham, 74.79 miles.  2020 Request For Proposals, 19-page PDF; see p. 11.  Average daily population, 2022, was 302.
• Olympic Corrections Center (state), quite a few miles east of unincorporated Oil City, Jefferson County, 84.24 miles.  Minimum security prison with inter-library loan available from Washington State Library.  Capacity 272.
• Stafford Creek Corrections Center (state), south across Grays Harbor from Hoquiam, 90.85 miles.  Branch of the Washington State Library.  Capacity 1,936.
• Clallam Bay Corrections Center (state), unincorporated Clallam Bay, Clallam County, 97.88 miles.  Branch of the Washington State Library.  Capacity 858.
• Skamania County Jail, Stevenson, 138.43 miles.  Inmate manual, 42-page PDF, see p. 27.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Clark County Jail, downtown Vancouver, 142.23 miles.  Inmate manual, 52-page PDF, p. 37 (numbered 28) mentions the library.  Average daily population, 2022, was 440.

Two places you might have thought to see listed there, dear Diary, are no longer operating as prisons:  Olympia Municipal Jail and Larch Corrections Center.

Prisons whose websites don't say they have libraries

• King County Correctional Facility, downtown Seattle, 4.97 miles from my house.  Average daily population, 2022, was 1,491, but that probably includes both this location and another listed further below.
• Kirkland City Jail, near Totem Lake, 6.91 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 16.
• Lynnwood Jail (municipal), downtown Lynnwood, 10.34 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Issaquah City Jail, downtown Issaquah, 16.89 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 46.
• Kitsap County Jail, near the coast of Port Orchard, 17.40 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 313.
• South Correctional Entity (the contiguous cities of Burien, Des Moines, SeaTac and Tukwila, plus Auburn and Renton), about a mile north of downtown Des Moines, 19.33 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Monroe Correctional Complex (state), in southwestern Monroe, 19.52 miles.   Special Offender Unit, capacity 400, and Intensive Management Unit, capacity over 200.
  
• Maleng Regional Justice Center (King County), downtown Kent, 20.45 miles.  Average daily population for 2022 probably included with the other King County Jail listed above.
• City of Kent Jail, southeast Kent, 21.67 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 67.
• Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center (federal, rented private prison), east of downtown Tacoma, 29.74 miles.  Washington's attorney general says its capacity is 1,575.
• Puyallup City Jail, downtown Puyallup, 33.51 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 32.
• Enumclaw City Jail, downtown Enumclaw, 36.12 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 14.
• Skagit County Jail, southern Mount Vernon, 49.68 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 247.
• Thurston County Corrections Facility, half a mile southeast of the Capitol Mall, 52.44 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 244.
• Nisqually Corrections Center (tribal), a mile south of the Nisqually village, 53.12 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• San Juan County holding facility, Friday Harbor, about 67 miles.  It sends all the inmates it knows will be longer term to the SCORE (South Correctional Entity) jail listed above.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Chehalis Tribal Corrections Department, Chehalis village, 71.47 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Lewis County Jail, downtown Chehalis (the city, this time), 76.33 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 168.
• Grays Harbor County Jail, central Montesano, 76.57 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Aberdeen City Jail, central Aberdeen, 84.92 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Hoquiam City Jail, central Hoquiam (the G.M. Johnson map of Grays Harbor County lacks the symbols that other G.M. Johnson maps use to indicate things like city halls and libraries), 87.37 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 15.
• Forks Correctional Facility (municipal), central Forks (yep, same map), 97.13 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Pacific County Jail, South Bend, 98.78 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.
• Cowlitz County Jail, Longview near the bridges to Kelso, 109.44 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 186.
• Wahkiakum County Jail, Cathlamet, 113.35 miles.  Average daily population, 2022, was 5.
  

Digression:  Visiting prisoners in autumn 2023, according to prisons' websites

Because I was looking at all the prisons' home pages, I saw a lot of visiting rules.  And then I was also looking for prisons' addresses, to work out how far away they are, and saw some visiting-specific pages due to that.  And let me tell you, dear Diary.  The prisons of western Washington have made great strides toward more perfect ways of visiting prisoners than hitherto, thanks to the wonderful gifts of technology.

(I should clarify.  Many prisons distinguish between "family" or "social" visits, which is what I'm talking about here, and "professional" visits, which are ones they're more or less legally required to allow:  with lawyers, doctors, and clergy, the kinds of people many parents want their children to marry.  Some have thrown hoops in the way of professional visits that strike me as inspired by COVID-19, and I think some have made no reference online to in-person professional visits, but anyway, those aren't my topic here.)

You see, dear Diary, during the COVID-19 pandemic into which you were born, it was important to keep people distanced, to reduce our human bodies' vulnerability to the virus.  Well, distance is precisely what in-person visitors to prisons don't want, so in-person visits weren't allowed, and in their wisdom most western Washington prisons implemented video visiting instead.  They didn't get into the streaming video industry themselves, oh no; rather they hired a panoply of amazing private companies that have only people's best interests at heart.

Now that the pandemic is officially over, there are five ways western Washington prisons are offering visits.  First are the fence-sitters, who've chosen video vendors and set up the systems, but have also re-opened their in-person visiting rooms.  As we know from the Bible, such pusillanimous behaviour will get its reward.

• King County (both prisons) - in person and video.
• The state prisons generally (for each one, same link as above).
• Marysville Municipal Jail.

Second, many prisons remain stuck in the past, offering only in-person visits, as if anyone could tolerate not using the latest technology for such an important event as meeting with their nearest and dearest:

• Federal Detention Center SeaTac
• City of Kent Jail
• Northwest Immigration and Customs Enforcement Processing Center
• Jefferson County Jail
• Enumclaw City Jail
• Island County Jail
• San Juan County holding facility (family only)
• Chehalis Tribal Corrections Department
• Aberdeen City Jail
• Forks Correctional Facility
• Wahkiakum County Jail
• Skamania County Jail

I bet people in those places still get married in person, too.

So none of the state or federal prisons have fully embraced the cutting edge of future prison technology, but a solid majority of the local jails have.

Now I have to explain some things about the video visiting business.  The way most of the jails have set it up, video visiting has two modalities.  One is visiting from the comfort of one's own home.  This has a number of genuine advantages.  While it doesn't get rid of the huge sets of rules that surround visits to prisoners (many of which, seems to me, amount to demanding middle-class behaviour of both prisoners and visitors), it does pretty much eliminate the competition for scarce physical space in the visiting room.  So in principle, prisoners could spend much of their time on visits, except that most jails wisely limit them to a certain number of visits per week or month.  It also eliminates the need to travel to the jail (albeit many jails are pretty close to home).

But what about people who actually prefer making a travel event out of their visits?  Or, hypothetically of course, are too poor to pay the costs - $7.50 for 30 minutes, $9 for 20, whatever.  (Of course no real people are that poor.  For example, dear Diary, I, right now, must be imaginary.)  Or lack video-capable Internet access?  Or just want to imagine being in the same building as their loved ones?  In their munificence, many jails have installed video visiting kiosks in their own lobbies; this is the other modality, the alternative to visiting from home.  Some of these kiosks also charge, but most offer free connections.  Of course, they're even scarcer than in-person visit windows, and really have to have limits again, but all these backward emotional needs, for novelty, money, or proximity, show that visitors who express them are behind the times and don't deserve any better.

So I have to make two lists of video-visit-only prisons. One shows prisons that do have working free terminals, and the other, the more heroically avant-garde prisons that don't.  First, those who still harbour doubts in their hearts:

• Kirkland City Jail
• Lynnwood Jail
• Issaquah City Jail
• Kitsap County Jail
• Puyallup City Jail
• Mason County Jail, which boasts that it's been doing this since well before the pandemic, as long ago as July 2018.  Truly a trailblazer!
  
• Skagit County Jail
• Clallam County Jail
• Whatcom County Jail, which claims it would offer in-person visits if not for "facility maintenance" which it says has been going on for just short of 21 months.  I wonder how many more years it'll keep claiming that.
  
• Lewis County Jail
• Pacific County Jail, which continues to claim COVID-19 prevents in-person visiting.
• Cowlitz County Jail
• Clark County Jail

Now, the ones that have fully committed to the new wave in prison technology:

• Snohomish County Jail - Free terminal "temporarily closed until further notice".  That note was put up before September 24, 2022.
• South Correctional Entity - "LOBBY VISITS SUSPENDED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE".  That note was put up before June 4, 2023.
• Thurston County Jail - "The public visitation stations at the Thurston County Corrections Facility have been closed until further notice."  They've been that way since the Internet Archive's first capture of the page, on St Patrick's Day of this year.  To be fair, however, the quoted paragraph continues:  "[Company] has provided 60 minutes of free remote (from home) visitation per inmate, per week."  Which works fine for those who can do that, which is surely everyone contemporary enough to bother with.
• Grays Harbor County Jail doesn't report that its free stations are closed, it doesn't mention any at all; it specifically indicates that payment is part of setting a visit up.  On its home page, it still claims COVID-19 prevents in-person visiting.
• Hoquiam City Jail also doesn't mention any free stations.  However, it's the only prison in western Washington to have chosen the video company it did, despite that company's prominence in many non-prisoners' lives during COVID-19.  Since, unlike Grays Harbor County, it doesn't talk about money, perhaps it's paying the bills itself.

One prison remains, that has done better than any of these.  We know from Buddhism that perfection lies in nullity.  Well, according to the Pierce County Jail, no visiting, be it video or in-person, is allowed.  Because of COVID-19, which is apparently much fiercer these days in Pierce, Grays Harbor and Pacific counties than in the rest of the area, Pierce County Jail has evidently barred all visits since April 17, 2020.  So surely, with all visits to prisoners banned for three and a half years, Pierce County has fully attained nirvana, don't you think, dear Diary?

Prisons without public websites

• Puyallup Tribal Jail, Tacoma near the Emerald Queen Casino, 30.56 miles.  (I got all these prisons' addresses from Google.)  Average daily population, 2022, was 32.
• Northwest Joint Regional Correctional Facility, Fort Lewis near DuPont, 34.26 miles.  This is where soldiers, airmen, sailors, etc. who went absent without leave might be sent.  A dubious site claims its capacity is 219.
• Neah Bay Public Safety Detention Center (Makah Tribe), west around Neah Bay from the museum, 116.52 miles.  Didn't report its average daily population for 2022.

I think it's very probable that inmate libraries are widespread.  The only reason I can think of for the posting of inmate manuals online is deterrent.  They aren't fun to read at all.  So mentioning libraries in them would defeat the rhetorical purpose, unless those libraries actually existed.  And basically, I found libraries in every single inmate manual I found online (even the weird state of Washington one), so I'm very skeptical indeed that the jails that haven't put their manuals online are any different.

I trust, dear Diary, that you're immensely comforted by the fact that we have a lot more military people in western Washington than psychiatrists, and a lot more prisons than mental hospitals.  Doesn't that encourage you to sleep well at night?

Anyway, until people come up with a whole new category of institution that limits physical movement, I think I'm about done.  Saying that, I thought "Hmm, better check", and found the English Wikipedia category "Total institutions".  I considered at the last minute adding monasteries, but too many of the monasteries in Washington seem to encourage visitors, and I'm not convinced any use force to return errant residents.  That said, none of my sources list any monastic libraries, and there turn out to be too many monasteries here for that to be right, so I'll look again when I get to private libraries.  More concretely but more distantly, if I do this again, I certainly hope to have a better grasp of mental hospitals by then.

In the meantime, part II of this page, this year, will focus on institutions for "minors", which are those people aged 17 or fewer years who aren't yet "adults".  It's a lot more work than this part has been, so I won't complete part II, and with it this page, for a while yet, and I'll probably finish something else first.  Happy days and nights until I write in you again, dear Diary!