Cal Fire has lifted the burn ban. Cal Fire Mendocino Unit Chief Luke Kendall formally canceled the burn permit suspension and says anyone who has current and valid agriculture and residential burn permits can now get back to burning on permissible burn days. Agriculture burns must be inspected by the fire agency before you burn. You can get your permit online at the Cal Fire site. They’re only for folks who live in the State Responsibility Area or in the Cal Fire jurisdictional authority. You also have to check with the Mendocino County Air Management District to make sure it’s a permissive burn day.
Impaired drivers beware… The CHP and California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) are working together the next year on a campaign to slow the number of crashes caused by impaired drivers. Their “Don’t Drive Impaired” campaign runs through next September. The CHP reports 669 people were killed and 10,646 were injured in DUI crashes in 2020. They say they are preventable tragedies and there is a continued need to reduce impaired driving. The Office of Traffic Safety is paying for the campaign through grants for DUI checkpoints, and traffic safety education efforts throughout the state.
A new effort in Calif to protect humpback whales from getting entangled has begun. The Center for Biological Diversity is suing the National Marine Fisheries to force them to protect the endangered Pacific humpbacks from getting caught up in drift gillnets. There have been about a dozen entanglements over the last two fishing seasons. The lawsuit filed yesterday claims the fishery’s excessive harm to endangered humpback whales violates the Endangered Species Act by using the mile-long hanging nets, which are left overnight, to catch Pacific bluefin tuna, swordfish and thresher sharks.
Before that earthquake hit the Bay Area earlier this week millions people got shake alerts. It means those who registered through the ShakeAlert system had several seconds’ warning before the magnitude 5.1 earthquake hit near San Jose Tuesday. A pretty good-sized quake, the largest since the 2014 when a 6.0 hit Napa. The ShakeAlert operations team says over 2.1 million earthquake alerts were sent out. The Governor’s office says most of those were sent to Android smartphones. Those phones have the alerts manufactured into the phones operating system though. There were also about 100,000 users alerted through the free MyShake app for both iOS and Androids. The warnings generally went out to an area within 10 miles of the epicenter.
A new study says about 30% of blackened trees in the Sierra Nevada mountains died in the last decade. The UC Berkeley study showed from 2011 to 2020 fire, drought and drought-related bark beetle infestations killed a third of the forests in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range between Lake Tahoe and Kern County. The lead author of the study says, “it’s kind of a wakeup call.” The study showed not only a decline in the total conifer forest in the area, but also that half of mature forest habitat and 85% of high-density mature forests are completely gone or they’re now low-density forests.
Police are on the lookout for a teenage girl they disappeared from Clearlake. 16-year-old Lilah Ryan Allen is described as about 5’6”,180 lbs., with brown hair and brown eyes. She was last seen wearing pink zip up, black sweats with white stripe, and black vans. She was last seen at a bus stop on Austin Rd in Clearlake around 7:00am.
Congressman Mike Thompson made an appearance at the Moose Lodge in Clearlake Oaks. Thompson was the featured speaker at the October dinner for the Clearlake Oaks-Glenhaven Business Association at the Moose Lodge last night. He talked about items of interest for those in Lake County, for which he represents the entirety of since the 2020 US Census. Some of the items he covered included safe route for schools through a Community Development Block Grant Sidewalk Project, federal funding for infrastructure projects and money to move the Lake County Sheriff’s Office into the former National Guard Armory facility in Lakeport. He mentioned how excited he was too to be able to represent the entire county not, now just a chunk of it. Folks at the lodge got to question Thompson after his presentation.
A recommendation has been made by vaccination advisors for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for all kids to get a COVID-19 vaccine. But it’s so far not mandatory in Calif. The recommendation for children doesn’t mean a state needs to require it for attendance. If that happens the state Legislature or the state Department of Public Health would decide. That was attempted by the Governor and lawmakers, but it failed and it’s not expected to be picked up again unless there’s a huge surge in cases and deaths.
More than $300,000 is going to the City of Ukiah for broadband. The money to be used to dig groundwork for a new high-speed network. The $311,000 grant comes from the California Public Utilities Commission for the ‘City of Ukiah Digital Infrastructure Design and Implementation Plan’. The Community Development Department was at the city council meeting last week and informed it’s all just the first steps and once the design and engineering work is done, they hope for more grant money to finish the build out of the high-speed, broadband network. The work within city limits, including in unserved and underserved areas of the Public Utility Commission’s “California Interactive Broadband map.”
Nearly a half million dollars has been secured by the Lake County Winery Association to put Lake County wines on the map. The $440,476 grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) for the campaign “When You Think Wine, Think Lake County”. The initiative to attract younger consumers. Many Lake County vineyards supply grapes to Napa County. Lake County is thought of as an important wine grape growing region with family owned and operated wineries. The idea is to get younger generations looking for smaller production and boutique wineries, and authentic experiences to come to Lake County. For more info on the Lake County Winery Association promotions of the Lake County wine region,
visit www.lakecountywineries.org
