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THIS QUAKE'S MAGNITUDE HAS BEEN ADJUSTED FROM 3.0 DOWN TO 2.9 BY THE US GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.
COBB, Calif. – The US Geological Survey reported that a 2.9-magnitude earthquake took place near The Geysers geothermal steamfield Monday morning.
The initial report on the quake, which could later be adjusted for magnitude, indicated that it occurred at 7:54 a.m. two miles north of The Geysers, four miles west of Cobb and seven miles northwest of Anderson Springs.
Its depth was recorded at 1.5 miles, the survey reported.
Seven shake reports were submitted from the same number of zip codes – Middletown, Kelseyville, Calistoga, San Ramon, Berkeley, Sausalito and San Jose.
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THIS STORY HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH INFORMATION ABOUT A POWER OUTAGE.
LUCERNE, Calif. – A semi passing through the Northshore town of Lucerne early Monday afternoon overturned and hit a power pole, an incident that is resulting in an hours-long closure of the highway and a temporary power shutdown.
The California Highway Patrol reported that the single-vehicle crash occurred just after 12 p.m. on Highway 20 at Sixth Avenue near the Lake County Sheriff’s substation.
According to initial reports the semi’s driver was not speeding, but as he drove through a slight curve in the road his heavy load of metal materials shifted, leading to the truck overturning.
A Lake County News reporter at the scene said the truck rolled into a power pole, snapping the pole and causing the power lines to fall into nearby trees.
Northshore Fire Deputy Chief Pat Brown said the driver suffered minor injuries – a cut on his head and scrapes – and refused medical transport at the scene.
Along with Northshore Fire, CHP, Caltrans, AT&T and PG&E responded to the crash site on Monday afternoon.
Pacific Gas & Electric was to bring in their own traffic control later in the afternoon and will begin repairing the pole, officials reported.
Brown said they are bringing in a loader to move the truck’s load in order to let PG&E access the damaged pole.
Shortly before 2 p.m., Brown estimated that Highway 20 would be closed for up to five hours as repairs are made. Traffic will be routed around the crash site and onto Country Club Drive.
Power in a portion of Lucerne also is off to allow PG&E to conduct repairs.
Kyle Woodard, a lineman for PG&E, said they were able to isolate the outage area.
While originally it had been estimated that an outage would extend from Ceago to Glenhaven, Woodard said the power was taken offline from Seventh Avenue east along Highway 20 to Bell Ray Avenue.
Lucerne residents in that area should be prepared for a long outage; Woodward said power is expected to be restored on Tuesday.
Willits Towing arrived with two tow trucks, including a heavy duty semi tow truck that is the biggest truck of its kind north of Santa Rosa, according to company owner Mason Cook.
“We’re ready to pull it over just as soon as they give us the word,” he said of the overturned truck.
Lake County News will continue to update the story and post Facebook and Twitter updates as information becomes available.
John Jensen contributed to this report.
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In a decision announced Dec. 15, the CPUC levied a $1 million fine on San Dimas-based Golden State Water Co. for not informing the commission of the company’s internal control failures and the impact of those failures on its rates.
The fine is to be paid by Golden State Water shareholders to the state’s general fund, the CPUC reported.
The CPUC also ordered Golden State Water to refund $9.5 million in refunds to customers in its Clear Lake service area along with customers in Arden Cordova, Bay Point, Los Osos, Ojai, Santa Maria and Simi Valley over the next three years.
According to the 16-page agreement, Golden State Water’s 2,200 Clearlake customers are to see refunds totaling $1,437,211 over the next one to three years.
In addition, the commission is requiring Golden State Water to reduce its plant costs by $2.5 million, which it said will result in lower future rates and reduce other amounts owed by certain customers by $500,000.
CPUC President Michael R. Peevey said the settlement followed “a robust investigation into allegations that Golden State Water did not exercise reasonable management oversight and failed to apply adequate internal controls over its procurement for plant improvements."
Golden State Water released a statement in which it said the agreement it reached with the CPUC settled an eight-year-old contracting matter which began after two Northern California-based Golden State Water executives violated internal bidding procedures for work – much of it dating back to the 1990s – involving one contractor.
The company said in its statement that it disputed many of the conclusions reached by commission staff but that it agreed to settle the case “to avoid the uncertainty of a costly legal battle.”
Golden State Water “had long ago put in place safeguards to ensure that such a problem would not happen again,” said Robert Sprowls, chief executive officer and president of American States Water Co. and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Golden State Water Co.
“I am pleased that we were able to reach an agreement that is good for all parties,” Sprowls said. “The settlement reflects our commitment to our customers, who will be the greatest beneficiaries of this agreement, and our recognition of the importance of maintaining positive relations with the CPUC.”
Golden State Water said that when the contracting problem surfaced in 2003, it launched a thorough investigation which led to the firing of the two executives alleged to be responsible for the violations.
The company also said it severed all ties with the contractor that it found to be at fault, and hired independent experts to evaluate both the financial issues and the quality of the work.
Golden State Water said it conducted a top to bottom review of its policies and procedures, putting in place additional safeguards – among them, a more rigorous employee code of conduct, ethics training, a confidential employee hotline and an anti-fraud committee reporting directly to the board of directors – in order to prevent similar problems from happening again.
The CPUC said it will conduct three additional independent audits and require Golden State Water's management to report on internal controls related to the company's procurement practices over the next 10 years.
Those audits will coincide with Golden State Water’s next two general rate cases, the first of which is anticipated to be filed for 2016, to seek rate increases, according to the agreement.
Golden State Water reported that it has agreed to participate in the audits.
“The commission directed Golden State to view the settlement as a fresh start to vigorously enforce strong and effective internal controls; we understand this direction and will comply,” said Sprowls.
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The effort is part of the Mendocino National Forest Grow-site Reclamation Project, which is supported, in part, by county funding granted at the recommendation of the Lake County Fish and Wildlife Advisory Committee and in cooperation with the High Sierra Volunteer Trail Crew.
Abandoned illegal marijuana grow sites on public lands have caused major devastation to the environment. When a grow site is discovered by law enforcement, they remove the marijuana and any weapons, but the sites are left primarily intact because of a lack of manpower to do a full cleanup.
These sites often include miles of irrigation tubing, pesticides, piles of trash, water diversions, temporary living quarters and erosion.
The sites also can be a major impediment in developing safe trails and the public's unrestricted use of natural resources and public lands, according to the Konocti Regional Trail Team.
In order to fill this void and help restore public lands back to their natural state, the Mendocino National Forest Grow-site Reclamation Project, coordinated by Bruce Hilbach, has been organizing cleanups in Mendocino County.
The group recently announced planned operation dates for cleaning up marijuana grow sites in the Upper Lake District of the Mendocino National Forest.
All volunteer groups are escorted and assisted by at least one law enforcement official at all times. Volunteer safety is of the highest priority.
Volunteers will cleanup and bag trash and debris from the grow sites and leave it onsite. The Mendocino National Forest Rangers will coordinate pickup of the bags at a later time, often by helicopter.
Weather permitting, work will begin on Thursday, Jan. 5, with most of the action taking place from Friday, Jan. 6, through Sunday, Jan. 8. If necessary, mopup will take place on Monday, Jan. 9, Konocti Regional Trails reported.
Interested volunteers should know that some hiking off of main roads may be required, but volunteers of varied physical strength and ability are encouraged.
If you can spend some time, please contact coordinator Bruce Hilbach as soon as possible to indicate availability for any or all of those dates.
Hilbach can be reached at 707-983-6169 or send an email to
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The second of NASA's two Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecraft has successfully completed its planned main engine burn and is now in lunar orbit.
Working together, GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B will study the moon as never before.
"NASA greets the new year with a new mission of exploration," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "The twin GRAIL spacecraft will vastly expand our knowledge of our moon and the evolution of our own planet. We begin this year reminding people around the world that NASA does big, bold things in order to reach for new heights and reveal the unknown."
GRAIL-B achieved lunar orbit at 2:43 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday. GRAIL-A successfully completed its burn yesterday at 2 p.m. Pacific Time on Saturday, NASA reported.
The insertion maneuvers placed the spacecraft into a near-polar, elliptical orbit with an orbital period of approximately 11.5 hours.
Over the coming weeks, the GRAIL team will execute a series of burns with each spacecraft to reduce their orbital period to just under two hours.
At the start of the science phase in March, the two GRAILs will be in a near-polar, near-circular orbit with an altitude of about 34 miles.
During GRAIL's science mission, the two spacecraft will transmit radio signals precisely defining the distance between them.
As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity caused by visible features such as mountains and craters, and masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, the distance between the two spacecraft will change slightly.
Scientists will translate this information into a high-resolution map of the moon's gravitational field. The data will allow scientists to understand what goes on below the lunar surface.
This information will increase knowledge of how Earth and its rocky neighbors in the inner solar system developed into the diverse worlds we see today.
Each spacecraft carries a small camera called GRAIL MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students) with the sole purpose of education and public outreach.
The MoonKAM program is led by Sally Ride, America's first woman in space, and her team at Sally Ride Science in collaboration with undergraduate students at the University of California in San Diego.
GRAIL MoonKAM will engage middle schools across the country in the GRAIL mission and lunar exploration.
Thousands of fifth- to eighth-grade students will select target areas on the lunar surface and send requests to the GRAIL MoonKAM Mission Operations Center in San Diego. Photos of the target areas will be sent back by the GRAIL satellites for students to study.
A student contest that began in October 2011 also will choose new names for the spacecraft. The new names are scheduled to be announced this month.
Ride and Maria Zuber, the mission's principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, chaired the final round of judging.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the GRAIL mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington.
The GRAIL mission is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver built the spacecraft.
For more information about GRAIL, visit www.nasa.gov/grail. Information about MoonKAM is available online at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/grail/education.cfm.
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LAKEPORT, Calif. – A hood fire has been ruled the cause of a fire on New Year’s morning at the Burger King in Lakeport.
Firefighters were dispatched to the fast food restaurant, located at 1142 Lakeport Blvd., at 10:50 a.m. Sunday, according to Lakeport Fire Capt. Bob Ray.
Lakeport Fire responded with a ladder truck and an engine, with Kelseyville Fire sending two engines on mutual aid, Ray said.
By the time firefighters arrived everyone was out of the restaurant, so Ray did not know how many employees or customers may have been in the building at the time the fire broke out.
“It originated in the hood system above the deep fat fryer,” he said of the fire’s cause.
“Their hood extinguishing system did activate and it controlled the fire. It didn’t totally put it out,” Ray added.
He said the grease fire burned hot enough and long enough that the heat radiated out from the metal hood system and into the surrounding wood framing, allowing the fire to get into the attic.
Ray said firefighters had to cut a hole in the roof around the duct system in order to access all of the fire. They also pulled down ceiling tiles from below in the kitchen.
The fire was confined to that area around the hood, with a 7 foot by 7 foot hole cut in the ceiling and roof, Ray said.
While Lakeport Fire was committed to the Burger King incident, Ray said two medical aids were reported in the city. He said the second Kelseyville engine and a Northshore Fire unit from Nice assisted with responding to those calls.
Lakeport Fire remained on scene at Burger King until approximately 11:59 a.m., Ray said.
The fire has been ruled accidental, he said.
Ray had no available estimate of damage, although he said that it would be in the thousands to make the repairs.
The fire did not damage the building’s main structure, but Ray said the hood system will have to be replaced, necessitating the restaurant’s closure for what he estimated would be more than a few days.
“There’s quite a bit to do to get it back in service,” Ray said.
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