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LAKEPORT, Calif. – Lakeport's 29th postmaster was sworn in on Friday.
Maria Lane, a 22-year Lakeport resident who was appointed to the job on Oct. 4, took her oath of office during an afternoon ceremony that included colleagues, family and friends.
Doing the honors of administering the oath to Lane was Dana Tibbetts, who retired as Lakeport's postmaster in 2010. He hired Lane as a letter carrier in 1995.
It's been exactly a century since a woman last held Lakeport's postmaster job. Myrtle Hancock was postmaster in 1914.
Since joining the US Postal Service, Lane has worked her way up from a letter carrier to a full-time clerk in Clearlake Oaks in 1997.
She transferred to Upper Lake, where she worked from 2000 to 2008, worked as postmaster of Hopland and then, in 2010, returned to Upper Lake to serve as postmaster, where she worked until her latest appointment.
In introducing Lane at the Friday ceremony, Joseph Machado, manager of Post Office operations from the San Francisco office, explained that the postmaster appointment is a significant one.
The position serves as a local federal representative, and has a responsibility to the community, Machado said.
“Maria does her job very well,” Machado said.
Lake County historian Ruby Glebe was on hand to offer a brief history of the local Lakeport Post Office.
The first trading in the area took place in 1855, with settler William Forbes arriving around that time and claiming a 160-acre homestead, she said. What is now Lakeport would, for a time, be known as Forbestown.
On July 17, 1858, a post office opened in Big Valley, as there was no suitable place at that time in Forbestown, Glebe said.
Indian and deer trails would become the post roads, she said. Mail would come from Sacramento, over the mountains through Pope Valley, and later from Ukiah by horseback and from Calistoga by stage.
Glebe said the city's name became Lakeport in 1861. The name change followed the formation of the county and came, in part, to prevent the town being confused with the mining town of the same name in Yuba County.
According to county historical records, a post office was authorized in Lakeport in November 1861, leading to the Big Valley Post Office's closure.
In 1913, Scotts Valley ranchers submitted 123 signatures in support of rural delivery, according to Glebe.
Over the years, the Lakeport Post Office was in a number of locations. On June 4, 1984, the Lakeport Post Office opened at its current location on 11th Street. Glebe said it's the only federally built post office in the county.
After Glebe's historical retrospective, Lane took her oath from Tibbetts.
She offered her thanks to her fellow postmasters and staffers. “Every day we learn something new.”
She added, “What a great crew we have here.”
Following the ceremony, when asked about the challenges Lane will face coming into the job, Tibbetts – who served as the city's postmaster from 1984 to 2011 – said it will be a matter of trying to keep up financially with a huge delivery volume and fewer staff.
“We can't cut services, we can't close places down just because they're not making money,” Tibbetts said.
When Tibbetts started as postmaster, there were 28 employees at the Lakeport Post Office, and 20 when he left in 2011.
Today, there are 17, said Lane, which serve 10 carrier routes and 1,234 post office boxes.
Over the last few years, as the post office has lost more staff, it's also gained about 1,000 deliveries, Lane said.
“As the county grows we add new delivery points,” she said.
Despite the challenges, Lane – who stopped to receive congratulatory hugs from staff – is excited about her new job.
“I love it,” Lane said.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The beaches around Clear Lake are increasing in number and size due to low lake levels.
As a result, many trash objects, such as old and discarded tires, are now visible.
To take advantage of the exposed shoreline conditions, the Lake County Department of Water Resources has scheduled a Clear Lake Cleanup day for Saturday, Dec. 6, between 8:30 a.m. and noon.
The three sites chosen for cleanup will be shorelines in Lucerne, the city of Clearlake and Clearlake Oaks.
If you are interested in participating in the Clear Lake Cleanup, email Carolyn Ruttan at
Dress in appropriate attire, and bring gloves, bottled water and snacks.
Gloves will be available at the coordination site for those who don’t have them.
All participants will need to sign a waiver of liability. An adult will need to sign for anyone under the age of 18.
C&S Waste Solutions and the Lake County Department of Public Services are also providing services to assist with the cleanup event.
“Volunteer just three hours of your time and know you will have made Clear Lake a cleaner place for everyone and our wild life to enjoy,” said Carolyn Ruttan of the Lake County Department of Water Resources and coordinator of the event.
KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – A Friday afternoon fire destroyed a garage at a Kelseyville home.
The fire, located at 4050 Pharo Place, was dispatched shortly after 12:30 p.m., according to scanner reports.
The first units on scene reported finding a fully involved structure.
Kelseyville Fire Chief Mike Stone said the structure that burned was a detached garage.
He said a total of four engines and a water tender from Kelseyville Fire, Lakeport Fire and Cal Fire responded.
It took firefighters about 45 minutes to contain the blaze, he said.
Stone said the fire was confined to the building of origin and didn't do any damage to the nearby home.
He said no one was injured.
The garage was a complete loss, Stone said.
The cause of the fire, said Stone, is so far undetermined.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Thanks to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, some of the most mysterious cosmic residents have just become even more puzzling.
New observations of globular clusters in a small galaxy show they are very similar to those found in the Milky Way, and so must have formed in a similar way.
One of the leading theories on how these clusters form predicts that globular clusters should only be found nestled in among large quantities of old stars.
But these old stars, though rife in the Milky Way, are not present in this small galaxy, and so, the mystery deepens.
Globular clusters – large balls of stars that orbit the centers of galaxies, but can lie very far from them – remain one of the biggest cosmic mysteries.
They were once thought to consist of a single population of stars that all formed together. However, research has since shown that many of the Milky Way's globular clusters had far more complex formation histories and are made up of at least two distinct populations of stars.
Of these populations, around half the stars are a single generation of normal stars that were thought to form first, and the other half form a second generation of stars, which are polluted with different chemical elements.
In particular, the polluted stars contain up to 50 to 100 times more nitrogen than the first generation of stars.
The proportion of polluted stars found in the Milky Way's globular clusters is much higher than astronomers expected, suggesting that a large chunk of the first generation star population is missing.
A leading explanation for this is that the clusters once contained many more stars but a large fraction of the first generation stars were ejected from the cluster at some time in its past.
This explanation makes sense for globular clusters in the Milky Way, where the ejected stars could easily hide among the many similar, old stars in the vast halo, but the new observations, which look at this type of cluster in a much smaller galaxy, call this theory into question.
Astronomers used Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) to observe four globular clusters in a small nearby galaxy known as the Fornax Dwarf Spheroidal galaxy.
“We knew that the Milky Way's clusters were more complex than was originally thought, and there are theories to explain why. But to really test our theories about how these clusters form we needed to know what happened in other environments,” said Søren Larsen of Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, lead author of the new paper. “Before now we didn't know whether globular clusters in smaller galaxies had multiple generations or not, but our observations show clearly that they do!”
The astronomers' detailed observations of the four Fornax clusters show that they also contain a second polluted population of stars and indicate that not only did they form in a similar way to one another, their formation process is also similar to clusters in the Milky Way.
Specifically, the astronomers used the Hubble observations to measure the amount of nitrogen in the cluster stars, and found that about half of the stars in each cluster are polluted at the same level that is seen in Milky Way's globular clusters.
This high proportion of polluted second generation stars means that the Fornax globular clusters' formation should be covered by the same theory as those in the Milky Way.
Based on the number of polluted stars in these clusters they would have to have been up to ten times more massive in the past, before kicking out huge numbers of their first generation stars and reducing to their current size.
But, unlike the Milky Way, the galaxy that hosts these clusters doesn't have enough old stars to account for the huge number that were supposedly banished from the clusters.
“If these kicked-out stars were there, we would see them – but we don't!” explained Frank Grundahl of Aarhus University in Denmark, co-author on the paper. “Our leading formation theory just can't be right. There's nowhere that Fornax could have hidden these ejected stars, so it appears that the clusters couldn't have been so much larger in the past.”
This finding means that a leading theory on how these mixed generation globular clusters formed cannot be correct and astronomers will have to think once more about how these mysterious objects, in the Milky Way and further afield, came to exist.
The new work is detailed in a paper published on Nov. 20 in The Astrophysical Journal.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – After a rainy Thursday, forecasters are predicting more rain will fall on Lake County on Friday and Saturday.
Totals reported by the National Weather Service late Thursday for the preceding 24-hour period included 0.69 inches in Lakeport, 0.52 inches in Kelseyville, 0.64 inches in Whispering Pines, 0.51 inches near Middletown, 0.54 inches in Bartlett Springs and 0.66 inches at High Glade Lookout above Upper Lake.
Thursday's rain created a slight improvement in Clear Lake's conditions. At the start of the day, the lake was at -.85 feet Rumsey, the special measure for the lake. By early Friday the lake's depth was -.81 feet Rumsey, according to the US Geological Survey.
The National Weather Service forecast for Friday includes an 80- to 90-percent chance of rain around Lake County, with rainfall totals expected to be about a tenth of an inch.
Patchy fog also is in the Friday forecast, with daytime highs in the mid 50s and nighttime highs in the high 40s.
On Saturday, forecasters also anticipating a 70-percent chance of rain in the county.
Rainfall totals for Saturday are expected to range from a tenth of an inch up to a quarter of an inch.
Conditions are expected to be sunny and mostly clear from Monday through Thursday, Thanksgiving day, with daytime highs in the mid 60s and nighttime lows into the high 30s, according to the National Weather Service.
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NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – Attorney General Kamala D. Harris and Alameda County District Attorney Nancy E. O’Malley on Thursday announced a settlement with AT&T to resolve allegations that hundreds of AT&T’s California facilities unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste and material over a nine-year period.
If approved by the court, AT&T will pay $23.8 million, including $18.8 million in civil penalties and costs.
Another $3 million will fund supplemental environmental projects furthering consumer protection and environmental enforcement in California, and AT&T will pay a minimum of $2 million to enhance its environmental compliance.
In addition, AT&T will spend an estimated $28 million over the next five years to implement the enhanced environmental compliance measures required by the settlement.
Among the affected locations listed in the settlement are two in Lake County – 2510 Old Highway 53 in Clearlake and 555 Lakeport Blvd. in Lakeport.
The settlement includes a $6,000 penalty that AT&T must pay to the Lake County District Attorney's Office.
Sites in the neighboring counties of Mendocino, Napa, Sonoma and Yolo also are among the affected locations, with the district attorney's offices in those counties to receive penalty payments of $6,000, $21,000, $45,000 and $63,000, respectively, according to the settlement documents.
The settlement and proposed judgment, filed in Alameda County Superior Court, requires approval from the court before becoming final.
“This settlement holds AT&T accountable for unlawfully dumping electronic waste,” Harris said. “The illegal disposal of hazardous waste can lead to serious environmental and health risks for California communities. AT&T will be required to implement strict compliance measures at its facilities that set an example for other companies to safeguard our communities against hazardous waste.”
This is the first enforcement action in California against a telecommunications company for its management of electronic waste.
“Today’s settlement marks a great victory for California’s ongoing efforts to ensure that hazardous waste is disposed of in a safe, legal and environmentally sustainable manner,” O’Malley said Thursday. “Whether a small local business or a huge international company, my Office will pursue all necessary legal action against entities that pollute our environment. This legal action should put others on notice that local and state agencies will continue to work together to investigate and prosecute violations against our environment.”
The civil enforcement action and proposed settlement against AT&T were filed on Thursday in Alameda County by Harris and O’Malley, and is the product of a robust investigation by the two offices together with the Department of Toxic Substances Control.
The enforcement action claims that approximately 237 AT&T warehouse and dispatch facilities throughout the state unlawfully handled and disposed of various hazardous wastes and materials over a nine-year period.
Those hazardous wastes and materials primarily consisted of electronic equipment, batteries, aerosol cans, as well as certain gels, liquids and other items used by AT&T service technicians in delivering telephone, Internet and video services to residential and business customers in California.
In 2011, inspectors from the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office Environmental Protection Division and investigators from the California Department of Toxic Substances Control conducted a series of waste inspections of dumpsters belonging to AT&T warehouse and dispatch facilities.
The inspections revealed that AT&T was routinely and systematically sending hazardous wastes to local landfills that were not permitted to receive those wastes.
There are 13 AT&T facilities in Alameda County and all 13 facilities were found to be unlawfully disposing hazardous waste.
Upon notice of the investigation, AT&T immediately agreed to cooperate and promptly implemented measures to halt the removal of regular trash until it could be inspected to remove any potentially hazardous wastes before they reached municipal landfills.
AT&T also has voluntarily dedicated additional resources toward environmental compliance and improving its hazardous and universal waste management compliance programs.
In addition to the $23.8 million settlement payment, AT&T expects to incur another $28 million over the next five years to implement enhanced environmental compliance measures required by the settlement.
For example, AT&T has implemented multiple layers of protection against electronic waste getting into its regular trash, including contractor inspections of “staging bins” before their contents are deposited in dumpsters, hundreds of unannounced dumpster inspections annually, and three independent audits over five years.
The telecom provider will be bound under the terms of a permanent injunction prohibiting similar future violations of law.