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LAKEPORT, Calif. – Lakeport Fire Protection District competed with a number of fire districts around the region in the seventh annual Bucket Brigade Blood Drive Challenge, placing second for its effort.
The event, which began late last year, brought in more than 800 donors and 700 units of life-saving blood, according to Blood Centers of the Pacific.
The flu and weather impacted December and January collection efforts, but the blood drives by the various fire districts helped the blood bank maintain an adequate blood supply.
Windsor Fire Protection District took first place for the fourth straight year with 134 donors, followed by Lakeport Fire with 110 donors.
Geyserville Fire Protection District and Healdsburg Fire Department tied for third place, with each bringing in 75 donors.
Cal Fire Petaluma/Wilmar Volunteer Fire Department placed fourth with 73 donors, with Sebastopol Fire Department’s 70 donors earning it fifth place.
Thanks to efforts like these, Blood Centers of the Pacific provided more than 100,000 pints of blood to patients last year throughout the 50 Northern California hospitals it serves – including all Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino county hospitals.
Over the past week, patients who received blood included a 12 year old boy and a 3 year old boy with leukemia, a 30 year old man with lymphoma, a 19 year old girl with cystic fibrosis, an infant girl with respiratory failure, a 9 year old girl with heart failure, a 28 year old woman who needed fetal transfusion and a 20 year old male with a heart defect.
For more information about Blood Centers of the Pacific and how you can help visit www.bloodheroes.com .
Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen and California Congressman Mike Thompson announced the details of a friendly wager over the outcome of this Sunday’s matchup between the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl XLVII.
As members of Congress from the two states represented in the championship game, and as passionate fans of their home state teams, they are competing for both bragging rights and sustenance.
If the 49ers win, Congressman Van Hollen will supply his colleague from California with a batch of world-famous Maryland crab cakes.
If the Ravens win, Congressman Thompson will provide his colleague from Maryland with bottles of wine from Napa, Sonoma, Contra Costa, and Lake counties.
“I look forward to watching an exciting and competitive Super Bowl between the Ravens and Niners, but I am confident that Coach John and his Ravens will ultimately soar to victory and keep our delicacy from the Chesapeake Bay on the right coast,” said Congressman Van Hollen. “I look forward to toasting their success with a glass of excellent wine.”
“I'm looking forward to celebrating a Niners Super Bowl victory with some great Maryland crab cakes,” said Congressman Mike Thompson. “With Coach Jim and Colin Kaepernick on our side, I'm confident our wine won't be leaving the West Coast.”
Agricultural irrigation in California's Central Valley doubles the amount of water vapor pumped into the atmosphere, ratcheting up rainfall and powerful monsoons across the interior Southwest, according to a new study by University of California, Irvine scientists.
Moisture on the vast farm fields evaporates, is blown over the Sierra Nevada and dumps 15 percent more than average summer rain in numerous other states.
Runoff to the Colorado River increases by 28 percent, and the Four Corners region experiences a 56 percent boost in runoff.
While the additional water supply can be a good thing, the transport pattern also accelerates the severity of monsoons and other potentially destructive seasonal weather events.
“If we stop irrigating in the Valley, we'll see a decrease in stream flow in the Colorado River basin,” said climate hydrologist Jay Famiglietti, senior author on the paper, which was published online Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The basin provides water for about 35 million people, including those in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Phoenix.
But the extra water vapor also accelerates normal atmospheric circulation, he said, “firing up” the annual storm cycle and drawing in more water vapor from the Gulf of Mexico as well as the Central Valley.
When the additional waves of moisture bump into developing monsoons, Famiglietti said, “it's like throwing fuel on a fire.”
He and colleague Min-Hui Lo, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California Center for Hydrologic Modeling who is now at National Taiwan University, painstakingly entered regional irrigation levels into global rainfall and weather models and traced the patterns.
“All percent differences in the paper are the differences between applying irrigation to the Central Valley and not applying it,” Famiglietti said. “That's the point of the study – and the beauty of using computer models. You can isolate the phenomenon that you wish to explore, in this case, irrigation versus no irrigation.”
Famiglietti's team plans to increase the scope of the work to track how major human water usage elsewhere in the world affects neighboring areas too.
A better understanding of irrigation's impact on the changing climate and water availability could improve resource management in parched or flooded areas, the team suggested.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The Super Bowl is one of America’s most-anticipated and watched sporting events of the year, an opportunity for family, friends, and fans to gather together and root for their team.
However, the celebration can quickly turn to tragedy when partygoers exercise poor judgment and fail to designate a non-drinking driver.
The California Highway Patrol (CHP) joins with the U.S. Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the National Football League and TEAM (Techniques for Effective Alcohol Management) to spread an important safety message to the public about designating a sober driver on Super Bowl Sunday – Fans Don’t Let Fans Drive Drunk.
“Make the responsible decision to designate a driver who can provide a safe ride home, someone who is abstaining from drinking that day,” said CHP Commissioner Joe Farrow. “Impaired drivers destroy thousands of lives every year by simply getting behind the wheel of a vehicle.”
According to the CHP’s Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System, alcohol was involved in nearly 25 percent of collisions on Super Bowl Sunday 2010, the most recent year that finalized collision data is available.
Those 211 alcohol-involved collisions resulted in the death of six people and injuries to 124 others throughout California.
The CHP will work with law enforcement agencies throughout the state to discourage the public from driving under the influence (DUI), and to try to remove those drivers who are impaired before they injure or kill themselves or others.
On average, the past three years (2010-2012), the CHP has made nearly 450 DUI arrests on Super Bowl Sunday throughout the state.
The public is also encouraged to be a team player by calling 911 if they suspect a drunk driver. Callers should be prepared to provide the vehicle’s description, license plate number, location and direction of travel.
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A pedestrian was injured Tuesday evening after being hit by a vehicle.
The crash occurred at about 6:30 p.m. on S. Main Street and Lupoyoma Avenue, according to radio reports. Lakeport Fire Protection District firefighters and Lakeport Police responded.
The vehicle involved was reported to have been a minivan, with reports from the scene indicating that the victim was a female.
Radio reports indicated that firefighters initially asked for an air ambulance to land at Sutter Lakeside Hospital, then asked for the helicopter to land closer, at the old Natural High School property in the 800 block of N. Main Street.
REACH 6 reported lifting off at about 7 p.m., headed for Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.
Additional details will be posted as they become available.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
Snow surveyors on Tuesday reported that water content in California’s mountain snowpack is below average for the date.
Manual and electronic readings taken Tuesday morning record the snowpack’s statewide water content at 93 percent of average for this time of year. That is 55 percent of the average April 1 measurement, when the snowpack is normally at its peak before the spring melt.
The snowpack normally provides about a third of the water for California’s homes, farms and industries as it slowly melts into streams, reservoirs and aquifers in the spring and early summer.
“We’re still seeing decent snowpack conditions due to storms in late November and early December,” said Department of Water Resources Director Mark Cowin. “Those early season storms also erased the deficit in our reservoir storage, but relatively dry weather this month is once again a reminder that the weather is unpredictable and we must always practice conservation.”
Electronic readings indicate that the water content in the northern mountains is 97 percent of normal for the date and 59 percent of the April 1 seasonal average.
Electronic readings for the central Sierra show 90 percent of normal for the date and 54 percent of the April 1 average.
The numbers for the southern Sierra are 91 percent of average for the date and 51 percent of the April 1 average.
The Department of Water Resources and cooperating agencies conduct manual snow surveys around the first of the month from January to May.
The manual measurements supplement and check the accuracy of real-time electronic readings from sensors up and down the state.
The Department of Water Resources currently estimates that it will be able to deliver 40 percent of the slightly more than 4 million acre-feet of State Water Project water requested for this calendar year by the 29 public agencies that supply more than 25 million Californians and nearly a million acres of irrigated farmland. The delivery estimate may increase as more winter storms develop.
The final allocation of State Water Project water in calendar year 2012 was 65 percent of requested deliveries.
The allocation was 80 percent in 2011, 50 percent in 2010, 40 percent in 2009, 35 percent in 2008, and 60 percent in 2007.
The last 100 percent allocation – difficult to achieve even in wet years because of restrictions on Delta export pumping to protect sensitive fish species – was in 2006.
Lake Oroville in Butte County, the State Water Project’s principal reservoir with a capacity of 3.5 million acre-feet, on Tuesday was at 75 percent of capacity, 113 percent of average for the date. Shasta Lake north of Redding, the federal Central Valley Project’s principal storage reservoir with a capacity of 4.5 million acre-feet, today is at 76 percent of capacity, 111 percent of normal for the date.
An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, enough to cover one acre to a depth of one foot.