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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The latest report on unemployment in California indicates joblessness continues to drop, with Lake County's numbers also showing improvement.
Lake County's unemployment rate in August was 11.6 percent, down from the revised July rate of 12.6 percent and a marked improvement over the 14 percent rate from August 2012, according to the California Employment Development Department.
California's August unemployment rate was 8.8 percent, compared to 8.7 percent in July and 10.4 percent in August 2012, the agency said.
Nationwide, unemployment was 7.3 percent in August, down slightly from 7.4 percent in July and 8.1 percent in August 2012, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Employment Development Department report said nonfarm jobs in California totaled 14,671,800 in August, an increase of 29,100 jobs over the month and 223,900 over the year, based on a survey of 42,000 California businesses.
A federal survey of households, done with a smaller sample than the survey of employers, showed a decrease in the number of employed people. It estimated the number of Californians holding jobs in August was 16,935,000, a decrease of 53,000 from July 2013, but up 381,000 from the employment total in August of last year, according to the report.
The report said the number of people unemployed in California was 1,646,000 – up by 23,000 over the
month, but down by 279,000 compared with August of last year.
Lake County's industry sectors showed a 32.2-percent growth in total farm jobs, followed by a 5.3-percent increase in mining, logging and construction and 5.2 percent in government.
In areas that showed decreases, manufacturing jobs dropped by 3.6 percent, and leisure and hospitality each showed 1.8-percent decreases, the report showed.
Lake County's August rate earned it a ranking of No. 47 out of the state's 58 counties.
Marin ranked No. 1 for lowest unemployment, with 5 percent, while Imperial ranked No. 58 for the state's highest unemployment rate – 26.3 percent.
Lake's neighboring counties ranked as follows in August, according to the Employment Development Department: Colusa and Glenn tied for No. 54 at 13 percent; Mendocino, 7.3 percent, No. 12; Napa, 5.8 percent, No. 4; Sonoma, 6.6 percent, No. 7; Yolo, 8.1 percent, No. 23.
The Employment Development Department said there were 465,922 people receiving regular
unemployment insurance benefits during the August survey week, compared with 510,998 last month and 501,158 last year.
New claims for unemployment insurance were 48,747 in August 2013, compared with 67,382 in July
and 51,467 in August of last year, the agency said.
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NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – A St. Helena man died on Sunday afternoon in what authorities said appeared to be a paragliding crash on Mount Saint Helena.
Walden Grindle, 35, who also has a Lake County address, was found dead following the crash on Sunday afternoon, according to Sgt. Doug Pace of the Napa County Sheriff's Office.
Reports from the scene indicated Grindle's body was found on the south slope of Mount Saint Helena, between 500 and 1,000 feet below a climbing rock, shortly after 1 p.m. just inside the Napa County line.
Cal Fire Copter 104 from Boggs Mountain in Lake County and the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office's Henry-1 helicopter assisted with the search, according to radio reports. Henry-1's crew had to use a long line to drop in and help recover Grindle's body.
Pace said the call originally came in as a paraglider down, but officials aren't yet completely sure what kind of equipment Grindle was using.
“We're really early in the investigation,” Pace said.
The terrain in the area of the crash is very steep, and the only item of equipment recovered was what appeared to be a parachute, Pace said.
What Pace described finding matches the kind of paragliding equipment shown in videos Grindle had posted online of himself and friends taking part in the sport.
Pace said Grindle had with him a spot device to help track him in case of emergencies.
Authorities believe that Grindle set off the device, which Pace said alerted the GEOS International Emergency Response Center.
That center, in turn, alerted the Office of Emergency Services, which contacted local authorities, Pace said.
Emergency personnel were first dispatched to Grindle's crash at around 12:45 p.m., based on radio traffic. They located him just before 1:15 p.m. in the rough terrain.
“By the time we got to him, it was too late,” Pace said.
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LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – New numbers from the US Census Bureau show that many Lake County residents continue to struggle with poverty and low median incomes.
The 2012 American Community Survey provides statistics that measure the social, economic and housing conditions of US communities.
The latest Census statistics show that Lake County's population has dropped slightly over the past several years.
The county's 2012 population estimate is 63,983, compared to 64,323 in 2011 and 64,771 in 2010.
Between 2011 and 2012, the county's median income dropped from $35,991 to $33,219. In 2011, 13 percent of households had income below $15,000 a year, while there were 26 percent of households with income below $15,000 a year last year. In both 2011 and 2012, 3 percent of county residents had income more than $150,000.
Last year, 46 percent of the county's population 16 and over were employed with 44 percent not in the labor force, compared to 48 percent employed and 42 percent not in the workforce in 2011.
Lake County showed a slight uptick in the number of people in poverty in 2012 – 27 percent, up from 25 percent in 2011.
Also in 2012, 31 percent of related children under 18 were below the poverty level, down from 40 percent in 2011. Fourteen percent of people 65 years old and over were defined as being in poverty in 2012, compared with 11 percent of people 65 years old and over the previous year.
The US Census Bureau said the latest data showed that the number and percentage of people in poverty did not have a statistically significant change in 43 states and the District of Columbia between 2011 and 2012, while in three states – California, Mississippi and New Hampshire – the number and percentage of people in poverty increased.
Regarding health insurance, in 2012 there was a ratio of 79 percent covered and 21 percent not covered among the civilian noninstitutionalized population in Lake County. In 2011, 81 percent were covered, 19 percent were not. For both years, 14 percent of children 18 and under had no health insurance.
The percentage of people without health insurance fell in most states in 2012 from 2010 levels, after rising between 2008 to 2010, the US Census Bureau reported.
The county's housing inventory showed a higher vacancy rate in 2012 than in 2011, based on the report.
In 2011, 18 percent of the county's 35,000 housing units were vacant, climbing to a 26-percent vacancy rate in 2012.
For local homeowners, there was a potential bright spot. Median monthly housing costs in 2012 were $1,324 for mortgaged owners, $371 for nonmortgaged owners $371 and $799 for renters, down from housing costs for mortgaged owners of $1,515, nonmortgaged owners of $411 and $945 for renters in 2011.
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After an unusually cold summer in the northernmost latitudes, Arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum summer extent for 2013 on Sept. 13, the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado in Boulder has reported.
Analysis of satellite data by NSIDC and NASA showed that the sea ice extent shrunk to 1.97 million square miles.
This year's sea ice extent is substantially higher than last year's record low minimum. On Sept.16, 2012, Arctic sea ice reached its smallest extent ever recorded by satellites at 1.32 million square miles. That is about half the size of the average minimum extent from 1981 to 2010.
This summer's minimum is still the sixth lowest extent of the satellite record and is 432,000 square miles lower than the 1981-2010 average, roughly the size of Texas and California combined.
The 2013 summertime minimum extent is in line with the long-term downward trend of about 12 percent per decade since the late 1970s, a decline that has accelerated after 2007.
This year’s rebound from 2012 does not disagree with this downward trend and is not a surprise to scientists.
“I was expecting that this year would be higher than last year,” said Walt Meier, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “There is always a tendency to have an uptick after an extreme low; in our satellite data, the Arctic sea ice has never set record low minimums in consecutive years.”
The ice cap covering the Arctic Ocean shrinks and expands with the passing of the seasons, melting in the summer and refreezing during the long, frigid Arctic winter. This year, cooler weather in the spring and summer led to a late start of the melt season and overall less melt.
This year, Arctic temperatures were 1.8 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit lower than average, according to NASA's Modern Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications, a merging of observations and a modeled forecast. The colder temperatures were in part due to a series of summer cyclones.
In August 2012, a big storm caused havoc on the Arctic Ocean’s icy cover, but this summer’s cyclones have had the opposite effect: under cloudier conditions, surface winds spread the ice over a larger area.
“The trend with decreasing sea ice is having a high-pressure area in the center of the Arctic, which compresses the ice pack into a smaller area and also results in clear skies, which enhances melting due to the sun,” said Richard Cullather, an atmospheric scientist at Goddard and at the Earth System Science Interdisciplinary Center of the University of Maryland, College Park, Md. “This year, there was low pressure, so the cloudiness and the winds associated with the cyclones expanded the ice.”
The remaining Arctic sea ice cover is much thinner on average than it was years ago. Satellite imagery, submarine sonar measurements, and data collected from NASA’s Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, indicate that the Arctic sea ice thickness is as much as 50 percent thinner than it was in previous decades, going from an average thickness of 12.5 feet (3.8 meters) in 1980 to 6.2 feet in recent years. The thinning is due to the loss of older, thicker ice, which is being replaced by thinner seasonal ice.
Most of the Arctic Ocean used to be covered by multiyear ice, or ice that has survived at least two summers and is typically 10 to 13 feet thick.
This older ice has declined at an even faster rate than younger ice and is now largely relegated to a strip along the northern coast of Greenland.
The rest of the Arctic Ocean is dominated by first year ice, or ice that formed over the previous winter and is only 3 to 7 feet thick.
“Thinner ice melts completely at a faster rate than thicker ice does, so if the average thickness of Arctic sea ice goes down, it’s more likely that the extent of the summer ice will go down as well,” said Joey Comiso, senior scientist at Goddard and coordinating lead author of the Cryosphere Observations chapter of the upcoming report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “At the rate we’re observing this decline, it’s very likely that the Arctic’s summer sea ice will completely disappear within this century.”
Comiso added that the slight rebound in the 2013 sea ice minimum extent is consistent with a rebound in the multiyear ice cover observed last winter.
“The character of the ice is fundamentally different: It's thinner, more broken up, and thus more susceptible to melt completely,” Meier said. “This year, the cool temperatures saved more of the ice. However, the fact that as much of the ice melted as it did is an indication of how much the ice cover had changed. If we had this weather with the sea ice of 20 years ago, we would have had an above-normal extent this year.”
The sea ice minimum extent analysis produced at NASA Goddard – one of many satellite-based scientific analyses of sea ice cover – is compiled from passive microwave data from NASA's Nimbus 7 satellite, which operated from late October 1978 to August 1987, and the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, which has been used to extend the Nimbus 7 sea ice record onwards from August 1987. The record began in October 1978.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – Downtown Lakeport became a temporary pirate capital on Saturday as part of the second annual “Shipwreck Day.”
Despite the stormy Saturday weather, pirates converged for a fun time at Library Park, where Shipwreck Day was based.
The event, hosted by the Lakeport Main Street Association, featured music and minstrels, grog, eye patches, tricorn hats and tales of the high seas, as well as vendors, knot-tying, flag painting and a Pirate School.
See highlights of the day in the video above by John Jensen.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County Animal Care and Control continues to offer a wide variety of dog breeds for adoption.
Once again this week there mixes of dachshunds, Maltese, terriers, labs, Chihuahuas and even a Vizsla mix.
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.
In addition to the animals featured here, all adoptable animals in Lake County can be seen here: http://bit.ly/Z6xHMb .
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”).
'Bear'
“Bear” is a 1-year-old Labrador Retriever mix.
He has a short black coat, weighs 66 pounds and has been altered.
Shelter staff said Bear is very friendly, gentle and mellow, and would make a great family pet, as he's good with kids. He's also scared of cats.
He's currently in foster care, ID No. 37345.
Female wire-haired terrier mix
This female wire-haired terrier mix is 7 months old.
She has a curly black coat, weighs 11 pounds and has been spayed.
She's in kennel No. 15a, ID No. 37850.
Female wire-haired terrier mix
This female wire-haired terrier mix is 2 years old.
She has a curly black coat, weighs 13 pounds and has been spayed.
She's in kennel No. 15a, ID No. 37851.
Pit bull terrier mix
This female pit bull terrier mix is of undetermined age.
She has a short gray coat, weighs nearly 44 pounds and has not yet been spayed.
She's in kennel No. 20, ID No. 37919.
Vizsla-hound mix
This female Vizsla-hound mix is of undetermined age.
She has a short red coat and floppy ears, and has not yet been spayed.
She's in kennel No. 21, ID No. 37929.
Male Maltese mix
This male Maltese mix is 3 years old.
He has a short white coat and floppy ears, weighs 14 pounds and has been neutered.
He's in kennel No. 29, ID No. 37655.
Male dachshund mix
This male dachshund mix is one year old.
He has a short tan coat, weighs nearly 14 pounds and has been neutered.
He's in kennel No. 30a, ID No. 37728.
Male dachshund mix
This male dachshund mix is 14 weeks old.
He has a short Brown coat, weighs 9 pounds and has been neutered.
He's in kennel No. 30b, ID No. 37656.
Female Chihuahua mix
This female Chihuahua mix is two years old.
She has a short tan coat and weighs nearly 10 pounds. Shelter staff did not report if she has yet been altered.
She's in kennel No. 32, ID No. 37808.
Male pit bull terrier mix
This male pit bull terrier mix is 1 year old.
He has a short blue brindle and white coat, and weighs 60 pounds. Shelter staff did not report if he had been altered.
He's in kennel No. 33, ID No. 37809.
To fill out an adoption application online visit http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control/Adopt/Dog___Cat_Adoption_Application.htm .
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, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. The shelter is open from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and on Saturday from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.
Visit the shelter online at http://www.co.lake.ca.us/Government/Directory/Animal_Care_And_Control.htm .
For more information call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278.
Email Elizabeth Larson at