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- Written by: Lake County News reports
The city reported that it has been heavily impacted by the health crisis created by COVID-19 and many workers are expected to stay home for extended periods.
While this ordinance does not waive a tenant’s obligations to pay back rent owed once the COVID-19 emergency is over, providing tenants with short-term protection from eviction due to the inability to pay rent will help avoid increasing the homeless population and stabilize the rental housing market by reducing displacement, city officials said.
City officials said the ordinance is not intended to allow tenants to skip rent payments arbitrarily. The moratorium is intended to assist tenants only if they are affected by the COVID-19 emergency and can provide proof in writing to their landlord prior to rent being due.
Key points of the ordinance include:
• Residential tenants shall not be evicted for nonpayment of rent if the tenant demonstrates that the inability to pay rent is due to COVID-19, the state of emergency regarding COVID-19, or following government-recommended COVID19 precautions.
• Covered reasons for delayed payments include: the tenant was sick with COVID-19 or caring for a household or family member who is sick with COVID-19; the tenant experienced a lay-off, loss of hours, substantial decrease in business income caused by a reduction in the opening hours or consumer demand, or other income reduction resulting from COVID-19 or the state of Emergency; the tenant’s compliance with a recommendation from a government agency to stay home, self-quarantine, or avoid congregating with others during the state of emergency; the tenant’s need to miss work to care for a home-bound school-age child; and the tenant’s extraordinary medical cost resulting from COVID-19 related medical expenses.
• The tenant must notify the landlord in writing on or before the day rent is due that the tenant has a covered reason for delayed payment. Verifiable documentation includes, but is not limited to, a letter from the tenant’s employer stating that the tenant’s income is reduced or eliminated due to the effects of COVID-19, or a letter from the tenant’s health care provider indicating the tenant or a member of the tenant’s household is infected with COVID-19.
• The tenant shall provide updated documentation as stated above every 30 days to the landlord.
• If a tenant complies with the ordinance, landlords shall not serve a notice pursuant to California Code of Civil Procedure sections 1161 or 1162, file or prosecute an unlawful detainer action based on a three-day pay or quit notice, or otherwise endeavor to evict the tenant for nonpayment of rent, and the ordinance place into effect March 19 by the Clearlake City Council shall be an affirmative defense to any such eviction action.
• Tenants who were afforded eviction protection under this ordinance shall have up to 180 days after March 19, 2020, to pay their landlord all unpaid rent. Tenants are encouraged to pay as much as they can toward any rent payment during the state of emergency to prevent further financial hardship later when repayments become due.
For additional questions on this ordinance, please contact City Hall at 707-994-8201.
City Hall offices are still currently closed to walk-in visits by the public, but city staff are maintaining office hours and answering phones, emails and can set up video conferencing for citizen needs.
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
Potential smoke impacts to the public are considered in all prescribed fire and wildfire management.
As always, the Mendocino National Forest will work in coordination with local and state health organizations and make any necessary changes as the need arises.
This decision to temporarily postpone ignitions will prevent any effects from smoke that might further worsen conditions for those who are at risk in our communities, while reducing exposure for employees who might not otherwise need to travel, and creating social distancing for resources working on the fire.
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- Written by: LAKE COUNTY NEWS REPORTS
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – In February 2017, damage to the Oroville Dam's spillways prompted the evacuation of more than 180,000 people living downstream along the Feather River.
The raging muddy waters also triggered an emergency decision to relocate millions of young salmon from the Feather River Hatchery to the Thermalito Annex Hatchery to be raised and held until river water conditions improved.
Most, if not all, of the young salmon would have otherwise died when mud from the raging river overwhelmed the hatchery waters.
About two million spring run Chinook and five million fall run Chinook were evacuated during the two-day flood event. Those fish survived and were later released to the wild – helping fuel a record class salmon harvest in the ocean two years later.
Last year, most of the rescued salmon had matured in the ocean and were ready for their migration home to the Feather River. Their survival helped power strong ocean fisheries with one of the largest commercial catches in decades.
According to data collected by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, approximately 272,000 salmon were harvested in the commercial fishery along with a catch of nearly 88,500 in the recreational ocean fishery, while returns to the Feather River basin exceeded 70,000 in 2019.
Ocean fishing activities were an economic stimulus for local communities and industries along the coast and inland. Commercial trollers landed 2.6 million pounds of salmon valued at more than $17.2 million, which was the highest level of harvest since 2013.
The Feather River Hatchery was estimated to have contributed one-quarter of all commercially harvested salmon and one-third of the recreational ocean harvest.
"The return of the salmon released from Feather River Hatchery after the flood event was exceptional," said Kevin Shaffer, CDFW acting chief of the Wildlife Branch. "At several points in the crisis, the majority (if not all) of the young salmon could have been lost. If not for the hard work, ingenuity and dedication of the hatchery employees and staff we could have ended up with nothing."
The effort to save the young salmon began on Feb. 9 and 10, 2017. More than 60 people from CDFW, the California Department of Water Resources, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries and other agencies worked night and day to successfully transfer more than five million Chinook salmon to the Thermalito Annex hatchery facility nine miles away.
Fisheries and engineering staff also constructed an emergency filtration system for the remaining salmon and steelhead at the Oroville facility, saving an estimated 1.5 million fall Chinook salmon fry that were too small to move and 1.6 million steelhead eggs which lead to a returning year class of 1,874 steelhead in 2018-19.
On March 20, 2017, the first salmon to be released after the evacuation were 1 million state and federally listed threatened spring-run Chinook salmon.
They were released successfully into the Feather River. In all, a total of 2 million spring-run Chinook and 5 million fall-run Chinook were released.
Their work did not go unnoticed. Team members received a letter of appreciation from then-Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom, and were later presented with the CDFW Director's "Team Award" for their ingenuity and dedicated work to save the salmon and steelhead eggs.
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- Written by: NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
Using the unique capabilities of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, a team of astronomers has discovered the most energetic outflows ever witnessed in the universe.
They emanate from quasars and tear across interstellar space like tsunamis, wreaking havoc on the galaxies in which the quasars live.
Quasars are extremely remote celestial objects, emitting exceptionally large amounts of energy. Quasars contain supermassive black holes fueled by infalling matter that can shine 1,000 times brighter than their host galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars.
As the black hole devours matter, hot gas encircles it and emits intense radiation, creating the quasar. Winds, driven by blistering radiation pressure from the vicinity of the black hole, push material away from the galaxy's center. These outflows accelerate to breathtaking velocities that are a few percent of the speed of light.
"No other phenomena carries more mechanical energy. Over the lifetime of 10 million years, these outflows produce a million times more energy than a gamma-ray burst," explained principal investigator Nahum Arav of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. "The winds are pushing hundreds of solar masses of material each year. The amount of mechanical energy that these outflows carry is up to several hundreds of times higher than the luminosity of the entire Milky Way galaxy."
The quasar winds snowplow across the galaxy's disk. Material that otherwise would have formed new stars is violently swept from the galaxy, causing star birth to cease. Radiation pushes the gas and dust to far greater distances than scientists previously thought, creating a galaxy-wide event.
As this cosmic tsunami slams into interstellar material, the temperature at the shock front spikes to billions of degrees, where material glows largely in X-rays, but also widely across the light spectrum. Anyone witnessing this event would see a brilliant celestial display.
"You'll get lots of radiation first in X-rays and gamma rays, and afterwards it will percolate to visible and infrared light," said Arav. "You'd get a huge light show – like Christmas trees all over the galaxy."
Numerical simulations of galaxy evolution suggest that such outflows can explain some important cosmological puzzles, such as why astronomers observe so few large galaxies in the universe, and why there is a relationship between the mass of the galaxy and the mass of its central black hole. This study shows that such powerful quasar outflows should be prevalent in the early universe.
"Both theoreticians and observers have known for decades that there is some physical process that shuts off star formation in massive galaxies, but the nature of that process has been a mystery. Putting the observed outflows into our simulations solves these outstanding problems in galactic evolution," explained eminent cosmologist Jeremiah P. Ostriker of Columbia University in New York and Princeton University in New Jersey.
Astronomers studied 13 quasar outflows, and they were able to clock the breakneck speed of gas being accelerated by the quasar wind by looking at spectral "fingerprints" of light from the glowing gas.
The Hubble ultraviolet data show that these light absorption features created from material along the path of the light were shifted in the spectrum because of the fast motion of the gas across space.
This is due to the Doppler effect, where the motion of an object compresses or stretches wavelengths of light depending on whether it is approaching or receding from us.
Only Hubble has the specific range of ultraviolet sensitivity that allows for astronomers to obtain the necessary observations leading to this discovery.
Aside from measuring the most energetic quasars ever observed, the team also discovered another outflow accelerating faster than any other. It increased from nearly 43 million miles per hour to roughly 46 million miles per hour in a three-year period. The scientists believe its acceleration will continue to increase over time.
"Hubble's ultraviolet observations allow us to follow the whole range of energy output from quasars, from cooler gas to the extremely hot, highly ionized gas in the more massive winds," added team member Gerard Kriss of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. "These were previously only visible with much more difficult X-ray observations. Such powerful outflows may yield new insights into the link between the growth of a central supermassive black hole and the development of its entire host galaxy."
The team also includes graduate student Xinfeng Xu and postdoctoral researcher Timothy Miller, both of Virginia Tech, as well as Rachel Plesha of the Space Telescope Science Institute. The findings were published in a series of six papers in March 2020, as a focus issue of The Astrophysical Journal Supplements.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.