The Pawnee fire early on the evening of Sunday, June 24, 2018. Photo by Todd Fiora.
CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – Cal Fire said the Pawnee fire burning east of Clearlake Oaks continues to grown significantly, with hundreds of structures still threatened and more evacuations ordered.
On Sunday evening Cal Fire said the fire – burning since the previous day in the Spring Valley Lakes subdivision – had reached 7,700 acres, with no containment so far achieved. The agency’s mid-afternoon report had put the fire at 3,000 acres,
Firefighters have so far kept the fire from taking any more structures; the count of structures destroyed stood at 12 as of the Sunday evening report.
However, 600 structures remain threatened, and the situation has remained critical enough that the Lake County Sheriff’s Office widened the mandatory evacuation order from Spring Valley Lakes to the Double Eagle Ranch subdivision to the east at about 4 p.m.
Shortly before 5 p.m. an immediate need strike team was ordered for Double Eagle Ranch, where as many as 40 structures are threatened, according to Cal Fire major incident traffic.
Winds and dry conditions continue to make the fire behavior erratic, based on reports from the scene.
During the middle of the afternoon, both firefighters and sheriff’s deputies reported that the fire was spotting across New Long Valley Road.
Then, shortly after 4:15 p.m., air attack reported that the fire had jumped Indian Valley Reservoir, with a five-acre spot fire burning on the reservoir’s east side. That spot fire was anticipated to move toward Bear Valley Road.
Later in the afternoon, just before 5 p.m., the sheriff’s office said Cal Fire requested that all remaining residents in the Spring Valley area reduce their water usage immediately in order to conserve water for firefighting purposes.
Cal Fire said resources assigned include 32 engines, two water tenders, two helicopters, five hand crews, seven dozers and 237 personnel, with several tankers also having worked the scene during the day, based on radio traffic.
New Long Valley Road and Old Long Valley Road both remain closed at Highway 20, officials reported. Highway 20 remains open.
Pacific Gas and Electric reported that power remains off to more than 500 customers in Spring Valley Lakes and 10 customers in the Double Eagle Ranch.
Cal Fire said the cause of the Pawnee fire is unknown at this time.
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.
Donald Couch. Courtesy photo. NICE, Calif. – The Lake County Sheriff’s Office is attempting to locate an elderly Northshore man who was last seen on Saturday.
Donald Ray Couch, 84, of Nice was last seen on Saturday at 11:30 a.m., the sheriff’s office reported.
Couch left a note at his residence indicating he was going to a local thrift store but never returned, authorities said.
No clothing description was given for Couch, who possibly suffers from dementia but does not take any medication.
If located please contact the Lake County Sheriff’s Office at 707-263-2690.
The Pawnee fire is continuing to burn in the Spring Valley Lakes subdivision east of Clearlake Oaks, Calif. The fire is shown here on the afternoon of Sunday, June 24, 2018. Photo by Todd Fiora. CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – On Sunday, Lake County Sheriff Brian Martin issued an emergency proclamation for the Pawnee fire, which is continuing to actively burn east of Clearlake Oaks in the Spring Valley Lakes subdivision.
The fire’s size estimate on Sunday doubled to 3,000 acres, with zero containment, Martin told Lake County News.
“It’s still extremely active” he said.
The fire, which was first dispatched on Saturday evening, led Martin’s office to issuing a mandatory evacuation order for all of the Spring Valley Lakes subdivision within hours of the incident’s start.
Martin said an estimated 1,000 people have evacuated from 500 homes in the Spring Valley Lakes area.
Cal Fire confirmed on Sunday that 12 structures burned overnight in Spring Valley Lakes, with 600 structures still threatened.
Martin said some of the homes destroyed were along Wolf Creek Road but he did not have specifics about all of the addresses.
He said a damage inspection team is due to go into the area where the homes burned.
Overnight, firefighters battled not just the fire but dangerous conditions – including a gusting north wind and downed power lines.
The downed lines led to incident command requesting Pacific Gas and Electric to cut power to Spring Valley, which was done early Sunday, just before 1 a.m., according to PG&E.
PG&E reported that the outage impacts more than 500 customers and is expected to continue until Monday evening.
Martin said the mandatory evacuations will remain in effect until further notice.
He said some residents have remained behind.
“Everybody has been notified but not everybody has gotten out of there,” he said, explaining that some people refused to leave.
Throughout the night, deputies and firefighters responded to help evacuate people who hadn’t left immediately, he said.
An evacuation center has been established at Lower Lake High School, 9430 Lake St., for impacted residents. The center is being staffed by American Red Cross as well as representative from the Lake County Department of Social Services, Martin reported.
The Pawnee fire is continuing to burn in the Spring Valley Lakes subdivision east of Clearlake Oaks, Calif. The fire is shown here on Sunday, June 24, 2018. Photo by Todd Fiora. That main evacuation center still has a sparse population, with many people remaining at the Clearlake Oaks Moose Lodge, Martin said. However, he said the Lower Lake High evacuation center will remain open in the expectation that it will be needed.
Martin said a location for a second evacuation center has been lined up and will be opened if needed.
Lake County Animal Care and Control’s Lake Evacuation and Animal Protection also has been at work evacuating animals from the fire.
Staging for animal evacuations is located at Lake County Social Services, 15975 Anderson Ranch Parkway, Lower Lake. For additional animal needs, call animal control at 707-263-0278.
Firefighters remain hard at work on the incident, working both on the ground and from the air, according to Cal Fire.
On Sunday, Cal fire said numerous firefighting air tankers from throughout the state are flying fire suppression missions as conditions allow.
The Pawnee fire area and much of Lake County remains under a red flag warning and heat advisory until Sunday because of hot, dry conditions coupled with northerly winds.
Martin said his local emergency declaration will go to the Board of Supervisors at its Tuesday meeting, at the same time as it considers renewing similar declarations for other major wildland fire incidents affecting the county over the past few years.
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.
CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – A fire burning in the Spring Valley Lakes subdivision east of Clearlake Oaks since Saturday evening grew through the night, as more resources arrived and authorities continued evacuating residents from the fire’s path.
The Pawnee fire was first dispatched shortly before 5:30 p.m. Saturday. Firefighters from Cal Fire, Northshore Fire and other assisting agencies accessed the fire at the subdivision’s north end, off of Quail Trail, as Lake County News has reported.
By nightfall, the fire was estimated to have burned 400 acres, a size that was to nearly quadruple within several hours.
Cal Fire said 700 structures are threatened by the fire. Late Saturday, Cal Fire confirmed in a written update that one structure had burned, and later in the night it was reported over the radio that several more were on fire.
So far, no injuries have been reported.
Through the night, the fire – which radio reports indicated was being pushed by gusting north winds – continued to balloon in size. In addition to the winds, Cal Fire said factors causing it to grow included low relative humidity and high temperatures.
Raising concerns are the forecast for gusting north winds into the mid 20s to return on Sunday morning.
Early Saturday evening, the Lake County Sheriff’s Office had called for mandatory evacuations of all of Spring Valley Lakes, but not all residents left, according to Sheriff Brian Martin, who was at the scene.
At about 11 p.m. Saturday, Martin told Lake County News that his deputies had been making evacuation notifications for hours. “We’ve had some people who have refused to leave.”
Due to the fire activity, Martin said the deputies were making repeat visits to several homes in the area of Wolf Creek and Cache Creek roads.
He said Lake County Animal Care and Control’s Lake Evacuation and Animal Protection, or LEAP, also was out helping evacuate animals from Spring Valley.
At that point, the winds had died down and Martin said several structures were threatened, with engines staged nearby to protect them.
He also had received a size estimate of between 550 to 600 acres by that time.
With the entire Spring Valley community ordered to evacuate, an evacuation center was set up at Lower Lake High School at 9430 Lake St.
Martin said late Saturday that there were more shelter staff that people staying there at that time, noting he believed many people were waiting at the Clearlake Oaks Moose Lodge, which originally had been named as a location for evacuees to shelter.
Throughout the night deputies, firefighters and California Department of Fish and Wildlife officers were dispatched to help evacuate residents who hadn’t previously left.
Just before 11:30 p.m., residents in the 17000 block of Cache Creek Road reported that the fire was making a run at their home.
Minutes later incident command reported the fire was continuing to spread to the south and threatening new structures, with a request put out for five additional engines which couldn’t be supplied by local fire districts.
Then, just minutes before midnight, there were multiple 911 calls about a possible new fire start in the 1800 block of New Long Valley Road. One 911 caller reported a series of large booms before the spot fire started.
At 12:20 a.m., firefighters reported multiple structures on fire, and said the new spot fire was “significantly established.”
That report was followed up by a request for LEAP to rescue seven horses in the 2200 block of New Long Valley Road.
Just after 12:40 a.m., the fire’s overall size was put at 1,000 acres, according to incident command.
The firefighting situation continued to become more complex and dangerous, as it was then reported that power lines were down along Spring Valley Road.
At about the same time, a deputy working on evacuations reported seeing another spot fire cresting back toward Long Valley.
That prompted authorities to issue another mandatory call for evacuations for all of Spring Valley, with the sheriff’s office issuing its third Nixle alert for the fire just before 1 a.m. Sunday.
Due to the downed and live power lines, incident command also asked Pacific Gas and Electric to shut off power to the fire area.
Just after 1:45 a.m., incident command confirmed that power had been cut to all of Spring Valley Lakes, as well as New Long Valley and Old Long Valley.
PG&E’s online outage center showed the area where the power was turned off has 504 customers.
Incident command reported just after 2 a.m. that “branch five” of the fire, caused by the spot fire located between New Long Valley Road and Old Long Valley Road, was estimated to be 100 acres in size.
Less than 10 minutes later, incident command followed up by reporting that the Pawnee fire had burned a total of 1,500 acres, with zero containment.
Just after 3 a.m., incident command said all known requests for animal evacuations had been completed.
Cal Fire said the resources assigned to the fire included 21 engines, four water tenders, two helicopters, five hand crews, six dozers and 150 personnel, with incident command ordering a significant number of additional ground and air resources.
Assisting agencies include Lake County Fire, Lakeport Fire, Kelseyville Fire, South Lake Fire, Williams Fire Department and the United States Forest Service-Mendocino National Forest.
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.
A map showing the outage area after Pacific Gas and Electric cut power due to downed power lines in Spring Valley Lakes east of Clearlake Oaks, Calif., due to the Pawnee fire on Sunday, June 24, 2018. Courtesy image.
Mary McLeod Bethune, photographed on April 6, 1949, by Carl Van Vechten. Photo in the collection of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.
If I were to ask you to list the three most important African American women of the 19th and 20th century, you likely wouldn’t come up with Mary McLeod Bethune.
She’s one of those historical figures that, although flashing brightly in her own lifetime, the imprint of her passing quickly faded away.
Bethune was part of that first generation of free African Americans. Born in 1875 in Mayesville, South Carolina, she was the 15th of 17 children; both of her parents had been born slaves.
She studied at the local Presbyterian church schools and grew up wanting to become a missionary. With this goal in mind, she applied to the Presbyterian Board in 1895 but found that they took no negroes.
Although this roadblock deterred her from her initial dreams, it awakened in her a fresh determination to alleviate the detriments of discriminatory educational practices. How, after all, were black boys and girls supposed to get ahead in life if they were barred from the basic avenues taken by other children?
Nine years later Bethune founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Institute for Colored Girls.
For the entire life of the Institute, Bethune successfully garnered financial support from wealthy white patrons. The most famous of these were Thomas H. White of the White Sewing Machine Company and James Gamble of Proctor and Gamble, who both left significant trust funds to expand the school. By 1922, the Institute had grown to 300 girls and 25 staff members.
During the 1920 elections, Bethune and her all-women staff braved the threats from the local Ku Klux Klan to cast their votes. In 1923, Bethune’s school merged with the Cookman Institute for Boys and became a coeducational school. In 1943, the Bethune-Cookman Institute became a four-year liberal arts college.
The impact of Mary McLeod Bethune’s work went well beyond this single school. Starting in the 1890s, Bethune became deeply involved in the Progressive women’s clubs movements and in 1920, became the head of the Southeastern Association of Colored Women.
As chair of the association for five years, Bethune participated in the Southeastern Interracial Committee, which became the Colored Contingent at the Women’s General Committee of the Atlanta-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation.
During this same period, she served as the president of the National Association of Colored Women, or NACW. Throughout the 1920s, she sought to transform this loose collection of service organizations into a united organization at the regional, state and national level.
In 1928, she secured a national headquarters for the NACW in Washington, D.C. Her efforts to create a strong, national advocacy group that could tackle issues of racial equality were wasted on the NACW, however, whose more conservative members continued to focus only on local issues.
After a power struggle within the organization, Bethune left the NACW and at the end of 1935, she created the National Council of Negro Women and served as its president until 1949.
Perhaps Bethune’s most significant impact on national affairs came by way of her political connections to the Roosevelts. She had met Eleanor Roosevelt through clubwomen’s groups working on social tolerance, community uplift and other educational programs.
After FDR’s election in 1932, Bethune used her connections to organize the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, known unofficially as the Black Cabinet. During this period of political support, she helped sponsor national conferences on labor in 1937, 1938 and 1939.
She reached new heights of political influence when President Roosevelt appointed her the Director of Negro Affairs for the National Youth Administration on June 24, 1939. This appointment made Mary McLeod Bethune the first black woman to hold a major federal office.
Throughout the Roosevelt Presidency, Bethune had unprecedented access to the White House. The First Lady routinely referred to her as “her closest friend in her age group” and she wasn’t afraid to show it. When the President and First Lady attended the 1938 Southern Conference on Human Welfare held in Birmingham, Alabama, Mrs. Roosevelt requested a seat next to Mary, despite the state segregation laws.
Mary McLeod Bethune would go down as one of the most effective activists in the fight for racial equality – certainly the most effective in the first half of the 20th century.
Unfortunately, she would not live to see the tumultuous, yet vindicating decade of the 1960s. Bethune began to suffer health problems in the 1950s and died of a heart attack in 1955.
Although she might not have the name recognition of Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune is the black woman most commemorated through historic preservation, with a total of four state and/or nationally-registered sites preserved in honor of her work, including buildings on the campus of the still-operating Bethune-Cookman University.
Antone Pierucci is curator of history at the Riverside County Park and Open Space District and a freelance writer whose work has been featured in such magazines as Archaeology and Wild West as well as regional California newspapers.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County Animal Care and Control has several big dogs and a puppy needing new homes this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of husky, mastiff and pit bull.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
If you're looking for a new companion, visit the shelter. There are many great pets hoping you'll choose them.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).
This male terrier puppy is in kennel No. 3, ID No. 10250. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Terrier puppy
This male terrier puppy has a short fawn-colored coat.
He’s in kennel No. 3, ID No. 10250.
“Toby” is a male border collie in kennel No. 19, ID No. 10245. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. ‘Toby’
“Toby” is a male border collie with a short tricolor coat.
He already has been neutered.
He’s in kennel No. 19, ID No. 10245.
“Alex” is a male husky in kennel No. 20, ID No. 10154. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. ‘Alex’
“Alex” is a handsome male husky with a long gray and white coat.
Shelter staff said he is a great companion who gets along with other dogs, small or large, male or female. Anyone interested in adopting him is asked to bring their dogs for a meet and greet with Alex.
Alex walks well on a leash, has very good manners and will roll over for belly. Staff recommends a secure fence to keep him from getting loose to go explore.
Alex is in kennel No. 20, ID No. 10154.
“Baxter” is a male pit bull terrier in kennel No. 21, ID No. 10079. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. ‘Baxter’
“Baxter” is a male pit bull terrier with a short white coat.
He’s in kennel No. 21, ID No. 10079.
This female pit bull terrier is in kennel No. 22, ID No. 10225. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Female pit bull terrier
This female pit bull terrier has a short brown and white coat.
She’s in kennel No. 22, ID No. 10225.
This male mastiff mix is in kennel No. 26, ID No. 10191. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Male mastiff mix
This male mastiff mix has a short tan and white coat.
He’s in kennel No. 26, ID No. 10191.
This male mastiff mix is in kennel No. 27, ID No. 10192. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Male mastiff mix
This male mastiff mix has a short tan and white coat.
He’s in kennel No. 27, ID No. 10192.
This female pit bull terrier is in kennel No. 28, ID No. 10224. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Female pit bull terrier
This female pit bull terrier has a short brown and white coat.
She’s in kennel No. 28, ID No. 10224.
This male pit bull terrier is in kennel No. 29, ID No. 10217. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Male pit bull terrier
This male pit bull terrier has a short black and white coat.
He’s in kennel No. 29, ID No. 10217.
This male Labrador Retriever-pit bull mix is in kennel No. 31, ID No. 10082. Photo courtesy of Lake County Animal Care and Control. Labrador Retriever-pit bull mix
This male Labrador Retriever-pit bull mix has a medium-length brown and black coat.
He already has been neutered.
He’s in kennel No. 31, ID No. 10082.
Lake County Animal Care and Control is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport, next to the Hill Road Correctional Facility.
Office hours are Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
For more information call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278.
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.
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