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LUCERNE, Calif. – The California Highway Patrol arrested a Lucerne man Friday after he was found in possession of a stolen county of Lake pickup, stolen bank cards and a dead fox.

William Kenneth Pimentel, 26, was taken into custody on Friday morning, according to the CHP’s Clear Lake Area Office.

Just after 8:15 a.m. Friday a concerned citizen called the CHP’s Ukiah Communications Center to report he observed a possible stolen county of Lake vehicle on Highway 20 at Pomo Pumps in Nice, traveling eastbound, the CHP reported.

The CHP said Officer C. Ogburn responded to search the area and, less than an hour after the initial call, located a pickup matching the description of the stolen vehicle parked unoccupied in a vacant lot on Frontage Road, west of Rancho Vista Drive in Lucerne.

The pickup had a license plate from another vehicle attached to the rear. The CHP said Officer Ogburn ran the vehicle identification number located inside the driver's door and the vehicle returned to a stolen vehicle belonging to the county of Lake.

The CHP said Officer Ogburn observed a male briskly walking away from the scene, heading eastbound from the area near the shore of Clear Lake, who then began going through backyards.

Officer Ogburn went to the adjacent side of the houses, locating and detaining the man – who later was identified as Pimentel – without incident, the CHP said.

The stolen pickup had fresh white spray paint over the county of Lake emblems on the doors. The CHP said Pimentel also had fresh white paint on his fingertips.

The CHP also found recently stolen bank cards within the vehicle which had been used to withdraw a large sum of money the same morning. When the CHP did an inventory of the pickup, cards and a booklet with Pimentel's name were discovered within it.

The officer also found a dead fox within the bed of the truck which is illegal to possess, the CHP said.

Pimentel was subsequently arrested and booked at Lake County Jail, where he remained in custody on Friday night.

Pimentel was arrested at the end of July when he was found in Nice, which at that point was under mandatory evacuation due to the Mendocino Complex, according to the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.

When authorities located him, he was dressed in dark clothing and wearing a backpack that contained bolt cutters, flashlight and rope.

At that time Pimentel was arrested and booked into custody for being an unauthorized person in an evacuation area, possession of burglary tools, and a violation of probation.

On this most recent case, Pimentel is tentatively scheduled to appear in Lake County Superior Court for arraignment on Monday, according to booking records.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

LAKEPORT, Calif. – On Friday a Las Vegas man was ordered to stand trial on charges that he sexually molested his young daughter.

Harry Dashawn Van Dyke, 46, was in court for the judge’s ruling on Friday afternoon at the end of his preliminary hearing.

Van Dyke has remained in custody since his Sept. 6 arrest by the Clearlake Police Department.

Dressed in an orange and white jumpsuit, he sat in the jury box, with his defense attorney, Andrea Sullivan beside him.

The child’s mother reported the alleged abuse in February to the Clearlake Police Department, which investigated the case. Senior Deputy District Attorney Ed Borg said the case was filed in April.

Van Dyke – a musician, producer and actor – was living out of state when he was arrested in September, Borg said.

The abuse is alleged to have taken place from Aug. 1 to Nov. 25, 2015, when Van Dyke’s daughter was 5 years old, Borg said.

On Friday afternoon, Judge Andrew Blum heard arguments from both Borg and Sullivan as the preliminary hearing wrapped up.

Sullivan raised issues of the child being coached during her interview with investigators, while Borg argued there was ample evidence presented to support the charges at the preliminary hearing phase.

Blum said he went through recordings of the child’s interview with investigators as well as the transcripts. He noted major errors in the transcripts, including the failure to record the child’s statement, “My real dad molested me,” noting that Sullivan had raised those issues also.

The judge went on to point out that several questions and answers recorded in the interview also were not found in the transcript.

He said the evidentiary level at this point in the process was pretty low, “But, still, prelim means something.”

As such, he dismissed the first count in the case, which alleged sexual intercourse with a child under age 10, which results in a life sentence on conviction, as he said the evidence failed to meet the “strong suspicion” standard.

What remained were two counts of lewd and lascivious acts with a child, which carries a 10-year sentence on conviction. Blum said the child related incidents that those charges were based on several times, and he didn’t see coaching in the interviews.

“There is no corroboration as we know, but that’s not unusual,” said Blum, noting that such crimes are not usually committed with witnesses.

The child had told the investigator that her mother had walked in during one incident in which her father was touching her, but the mother denied that. Blum said the woman has no ax to grind, and the mother’s denial of that incident significantly weakens the child’s story.

Blum paused, chin on his hand. “It’s a strong suspicion, that’s all it is at this point, and I think they’ve met that standard,” he finally said, referring to the prosecution.

However, he said the case didn’t meet the level of being beyond a reasonable doubt, and so he dismissed the charge alleging intercourse due to lack of evidence – “I have no idea if it happened or not” – and instead held Van Dyke to answer on the two lewd and lascivious charges.

Sullivan also asked to revisit Van Dyke’s bail amount.

Van Dyke has been held on $1 million bail for the charge alleging intercourse, however, with that dropped, Judge Blum was willing to reduce bail to $100,000.

Blum ordered Van Dyke to return to court for arraignment on the information at 8:15 a.m. Nov. 27.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The Lake County Air Quality Management District has issued another alert due to unhealthy conditions resulting from the Camp fire in Butte County.

The district said air quality conditions are in the “unhealthy for sensitive individuals” to “unhealthy” range for Lake County.

The overnight forecast indicates a potential for settling of smoke into the basin. In areas that become impacted by smoke “unhealthy” or “hazardous” air quality may be experienced, according to Air Pollution Control Officer Doug Gearhart.

Gearhart said the “unhealthy” air quality forecast results from fine particulates in the smoke and the possibility of increased ground level ozone. These are generated when combustion products in the smoke combine with the high temperatures, sunlight and humidity. Other chemical reactions reduce visibility by forming secondary particulates.

Weather forecasts do not show significant improvement through the weekend, but conditions should start to improve through the day Monday, with “good” to “moderate” air quality expected to return to Lake County on Tuesday and continue through Thanksgiving, Gearhart reported.

While improving conditions are expected, Gearhart said all county residents should still be prepared for periodic smoke impacts throughout the region until the Camp fire is out.

An international team of researchers, including a NASA glaciologist, has discovered a large meteorite impact crater hiding beneath more than a half-mile of ice in northwest Greenland.

The crater – the first of any size found under the Greenland ice sheet – is one of the 25 largest impact craters on Earth, measuring roughly 1,000 feet deep and more than 19 miles in diameter, an area slightly larger than that inside Washington’s Capital Beltway.

The group, led by researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s Centre for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark worked for the past three years to verify their discovery, which they initially made in 2015 using NASA data. Their finding is published in the Nov. 14 issue of the journal Science Advances.

"NASA makes the data it collects freely available to scientists and the public all around the world,” said Joe MacGregor, a NASA glaciologist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who became involved in the investigation in its early stages. “That set the stage for our Danish colleagues’ ‘Eureka’ moment."

The researchers first spotted the crater in July 2015, while they were inspecting a new map of the topography beneath Greenland's ice sheet that used ice-penetrating radar data primarily from NASA’s Operation IceBridge — a multi-year airborne mission to track changes in polar ice — and earlier NASA airborne missions in Greenland.

The scientists noticed an enormous, previously unexamined circular depression under Hiawatha Glacier, sitting at the very edge of the ice sheet in northwestern Greenland.

Using satellite imagery from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer instrument on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites, MacGregor also examined the surface of the ice in the Hiawatha Glacier region and quickly found evidence of a circular pattern on the ice surface that matched the one observed in the bed topography map.

To confirm their suspicions, in May 2016 the team sent a research plane from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute to fly over the Hiawatha Glacier and map the crater and the overlying ice with a state-of-the-art ice-penetrating radar provided by the University of Kansas. MacGregor, who is an expert in radar measurements of ice, helped design the airborne survey.

"Previous radar measurements of Hiawatha Glacier were part of a long-term NASA effort to map Greenland’s changing ice cover," MacGregor said. "What we really needed to test our hypothesis was a dense and focused radar survey there. The survey exceeded all expectations and imaged the depression in stunning detail: a distinctly circular rim, central uplift, disturbed and undisturbed ice layering, and basal debris — it’s all there."

The crater formed less than 3 million years ago, according to the study, when an iron meteorite more than half a mile wide smashed into northwest Greenland. The resulting depression was subsequently covered by ice.

"The crater is exceptionally well-preserved and that is surprising because glacier ice is an incredibly efficient erosive agent that would have quickly removed traces of the impact," said Kurt Kjær, a professor at the Center for GeoGenetics at the Natural History Museum of Denmark and lead author of the study.

Kjær said that the crater’s condition indicates the impact might even have occurred toward the end of the last ice age, which would place the resulting crater among the youngest on the planet.

In the summers of 2016 and 2017, the research team returned to the Hiawatha Glacier to map tectonic structures in the rock near the foot of the glacier and collect samples of sediments washed out from the depression through a meltwater channel.

"Some of the quartz sand coming from the crater had planar deformation features indicative of a violent impact; this is conclusive evidence that the depression beneath the Hiawatha Glacier is a meteorite crater," said associate professor Nicolaj Larsen of Aarhus University in Denmark, one of the authors of the study..

Earlier studies have shown large impacts can profoundly affect Earth’s climate, with major consequences for life on Earth at the time. The researchers plan to continue their work in this area, addressing remaining questions on when and how the meteorite impact at Hiawatha Glacier affected the planet.

For more on NASA’s Earth science activities, visit https://www.nasa.gov/earth.

KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – Supervisor Rob Brown explained a plan to reduce fire danger in four homeowners associations at a community meeting in Kelseyville on Wednesday night.

At least 200 people attended the standing-room-only meeting at Riviera Elementary School.

During the meeting, which ran just under an hour and a half, Brown explained the idea behind the plan, which he’s been working on since June, and fielded a number of questions from area residents.

Brown’s plan focuses on four communities which he said have the highest fire risk: Buckingham, Clear Lake Riviera, Riviera Heights and Riviera West. Brown’s district includes all of those areas except for Riviera Heights, which is in the supervisorial district of Tina Scott, who also was on hand for the meeting.

He’s proposing a risk management zone or county service area zone of benefit, as enabled by California Government Code Section 25210, for the purpose of removing brush and other wildfire fuel sources from private property.

The benefit zone would need to be separately approved in the homeowners associations of each of those four communities.

He showed a map of the area’s fire history, noting the biggest fires were from 1949 to 1961.

“They were huge fires. They did a lot of damage to the wildland, but there were no homes back there then,” other than a few farmers and people living on the lake, Brown said, explaining that much of the development in the Rivieras and Buckingham came in the 1970s and later. He said the 1949 fire burned in an area that today is in the Rivieras footprint.

Now, Brown estimated there is 69 years of fuel load in the area, and it’s much heavier than it was in the 1940s.

“It’s gonna burn again. And what we have to do is try to minimize that fuel load,” and do what is possible to make sure the area doesn’t experience another disaster like those that already have happened in Lake County or what Paradise is undergoing, he said.

“I don’t think I’m overdramatizing the possibility, that we have a fire here in the Rivieras, given the roads and the access and different situations that we have here, people will die. That’s the thing that really – it literally keeps me up at night, wondering what’s going to happen,” Brown said, explaining that he had predicted there would a a serious fire there because of the fuel load.

Brown said there are approximately 5,000 lots in the four communities that would be included in the zone. The breakdown is 2,776 in the Clear Lake Riviera, 480 in Riviera West, 639 in Riviera Heights, 600 in Buckingham and 505 peripheral lots.

The basic idea is that property owners will pay a one-time assessment based on size: $100 per lot for properties of less than one acre, $200 for lots from one to five acres, and $300 for lots of five acres or more, Brown said.

It’s anticipated that the one-time assessment would raise $500,000, which would pay for lot abatement. Brown said liens would then be placed on the properties to recover the funds. Those funds will not go to the fire department.

In addition, Brown said the money could be used as the necessary match for state grants, which could add millions more dollars to the effort.

The program will be run through the Lake County Community Development Department, he said.

Priority lots will be determined by an assessment committee that includes Cal Fire, Kelseyville Fire, homeowners association staff and county representatives, he said.

Abatement letters will be sent to the violating property owners, who will have 45 days to cleanup the lots, Brown said. If they don’t, it will be done for them and then a lien will be placed on the property; that lien will go on their tax bill. The lien, when repaid, will go back into the benefit zone fund.

As to the election process, Brown said ballots would go out to the property owners. If a person owns multiple lots, they get multiple votes.

Brown said the county is aiming to send out the ballots during the week of Jan. 9.

There will be 45 days for property owners to return their ballots. The Board of Supervisors will hold a protest hearing on the first Tuesday after that 45 days is up. The board can then accept the results and go to work in the spring, Brown said.

Brown said the abatement letters would go out 30 days from the middle of February. By March, the lots are either cleaned up or the county’s hired contracts go to work.

By that time, they won’t yet have the assessment money – the assessment bills will go out with the property tax bills in December 2019 – but Brown said he has assurances from County Administrative Officer Carol Huchingson that she would recommended fronting some money to begin the work, which would later be reimbursed.

“We’d tried to have those done before fire season,” Brown said of the lots prioritized for cleanup.

He added, “It’s going to take awhile to get all this done, but we have to start somewhere.”

Brown said the county wouldn’t guarantee there will never be another fire. However, the reality is, with the fuel load there is now, another fire would be a disaster.

Brown’s presentation on the plan lasted about 20 minutes. For more than an hour, he responded to numerous questions about the proposal, as well as other issues.

One matter that came up was control burning. Brown said this year alone there were 2,200 burn permits being handled for the county. He said control burns aren’t necessarily the answer, explaining his own burn several years ago that ended up destroying a neighbor’s garage.

On Thursday, Brown told Lake County News that he has received an enormous amount of interest for his proposal.

“It’s been very positive,” he said.

He said he’s also received a very good suggestion about including areas all the way around Soda Bay.

“We can connect the dots later,” he said.

Anyone wanting to speak to Brown about the plan is invited to call him at 707-349-2628.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

111418 Fire Mitigation Community meeting presentation by LakeCoNews on Scribd

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – A local teenager and two Fresno women were injured in a crash in Nice on Wednesday afternoon.

The California Highway Patrol said the two-vehicle wreck occurred on Highway 20 at Lakeshore Boulevard at 3:50 p.m.

Steve White, 19, of Clearlake was driving his 2004 Chevrolet Impala eastbound on Highway 20 near Lakeshore Boulevard while Karen Miles, 58, was driving a 2018 Nissan Rogue westbound on Highway 20 with 68-year-old Amy Kircher riding in the right front passenger seat, the CHP said.

As the vehicles approached each other, White lost control of his Chevrolet and hit a metal guardrail. The CHP report said that the impact caused White’s Chevy to cross into the opposing westbound lane, directly in the path of Miles’ Nissan.

The CHP said the two vehicles collided head-on, causing the Nissan to overturn and land on its right – or passenger – side in a drainage ditch.

After the collision, White was able to exit his vehicle and remained on scene. The CHP said Miles and Kircher remained in the overturned vehicle until extricated by emergency personnel.

All three were wearing seat belts at the time of the crash, according to the report.

The CHP said White, who had moderate injuries, found his own transportation to Sutter Lakeside Hospital, while Miles was transported there by ambulance for treatment of minor injuries.

Kircher suffered moderate injuries and was flown by air ambulance to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital, the CHP said.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.