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3/19/14





The Pacific Gas and Electric Co. is giving the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation Dis­trict $2 million to buy a dredge, which Eureka Director of Public Works Bruce Young said will be more economically beneficial than continuing to contract one.



PG&E previously agreed to com­plete the dredging of the Fisherman’s Channel. Once dredged, its owner­ship would have been turned over to the district. PG&E spokeswoman Jana Morris said that while working on the project it became clear to those involved that the area would benefit from a more long-term solu­tion, versus repeatedly importing a dredge from out of the county. The company agreed to purchase the dredge in exchange for the district taking ownership of completing the channel dredging.



“The King Salmon residents were a great partner while the Humboldt Bay Power Plant, which is what the generating station was previously called, used the channel. The station no longer uses the channel,” Morris said.“The district owning a dredge is better for everyone in Humboldt County in general.”



Harbor District Chief Executive Officer Jack Crider said the district will own the dredge, but the city will use it, which will help offset the costs of operation and maintenance. Silt fills in places where vessels dock in the harbor, which makes them more shallow and unusable. Crider said dredging helps remove the buildup and was typically done every eight to 10 years in the area before the district was promised money to buy a dredge of its own.



“By having our own dredge, we’ll not only be able to take care of both marinas, but private dock owners will also be able to use it,” Crider said.“Right off the bat, buy­ing our own dredge eliminates the mobilization cost of bringing one here. Our average cost of dredging before was somewhere between $12 to $15 a cubic yard and we should be able to dredge for maybe half that price or better now. In 2007, it cost $3.2 million to dredge both the Eureka Public and Wood­ley Island Marinas and $600,000 of that cost went to importing the dredging equipment into the area.”



Crider said the district is trying to establish an annual dredge cycle. There’s already a dredge surcharge for those who keep their vessels at the Woodley Island Marina.

“The fees we collect every year should cover the cost of dredging and we hope Eureka begins to include a dredge surcharge fee for their vessels too,” Crider said. “Our goal is to be dredging a small volume, 30 to 50 yards, of sections that are shallow and causing problems every year, and over a 10 year period, we should all be in pretty good shape.”



Young said Eureka is very excited to have a new way to deal with the dredging issue that will have less of an overall cost.


“We’re thinking it will be a won­derful tool to have moving forward,” Young said.



PG&E will hold a community meeting to discuss the dredging of the Fisherman’s Channel today at the Humboldt Bay Generating Station Assembly Building. To get there, enter at the paved “Parking Lot B” entrance and take the first left into the parking lot.

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City council will consider sending letter to Wiyot Tribe

3/15/14

The Eureka City Council will vote Tuesday on sending a letter to the Wiyot Tribe that would offer the first formal apology for the 1860 massacre on Indian Island that left 200 sleeping men, women and children dead.



“I think that is a wonderful thing to happen because no one has ever done that before out­side of giving us 60 acres, which we are grate­ful for,” said former Wiyot Tribal Chairwoman Cheryl A. Seidner.



The city turned over the 60 acres in 2000 after the tribe purchased 1.5 acres of the island in an effort to restore the site of the World Renewal Ceremony, where the massacre took place. The Environmental Protection Agency deemed the area, which had been contaminat­ed by toxins from a boat repair operation, safe for tribal use last August.



“It’s a huge deal,” Humboldt State University Native American Studies Chairman Marlon Sherman said of the apology. “First of all, the city of Eureka giving land to the tribe in the first place, that was huge. That never happens. Cities or counties or states just don’t give land back, so that was a wonderful acknowledgment of responsibility.



“Now, this apology to go along with that speaks really highly of the people in the city of Eureka,” Sherman added. “This is, for the city of Eureka, a major, major admission. I’m impressed with the action.”

Mayor Frank Jager said he thought the letter was appro­priate with the completion of the World Renewal Ceremony happening later this month — 154 years after a group of Eureka men stole out to the island under the cover of night and killed the sleeping tribal members. The Wiyot Tribe held its last vigil at the massacre site in February.

“I thought it was appropri­ate that we formally apologize as a city to the Wiyot Tribe for what happened, because I don’t think anybody’s apolo­gized to them,” Jager said. “Over the years, people have expressed outrage and anger over what happened, but I don’t think anyone apologized for what happened that day.”

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Monitoring effort by volunteers with crowdsource funding

3/15/14

Scientists have crowdsourced a network of volunteers taking water samples at beaches along the West Coast in hopes of capturing a detailed look at low levels of radia­tion drifting across the ocean since the 2011 tsunami that devastated a nuclear power plant in Japan.

With the risk to public health extremely low, the effort is more about perfecting computer models that will better predict chemical and radiation spills in the future than bracing for a threat, researchers say.

Federal agencies are not sampling at the beach. Washington also does not test ocean water for radiation, said Washington Department of Health spokesman Donn Moyer. The state of Oregon is sampling, but looking for higher radiation levels closer to federal health stan­dards, said state health physicist Daryl Leon.

The March 2011 tsunami off Japan flooded the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant, causing radiation­contaminated water to spill into the Pacific. Airborne radiation was detected in milk and rainwater in the U.S. soon afterward. But things move much more slowly in the ocean.

“We know there’s contaminated water coming out of there, even today,” Ken Buesseler, a senior scien­tist at the Woods Hole Oceano­graphic Institution in Massachu­setts, said in a video appealing for volunteers and contributions.

In fact, it is the biggest pulse of radioactive liquid dropped in the ocean ever, he said.

“What we don’t really know is how fast and how much is being trans­ported across the Pacific,” he added. “Yes, the models tell us it will be safe. Yes, the levels we expect off the coast of the U.S. and Canada are expected to be low. But we need measure­ments, especially now as the plume begins to arrive along the West Coast.”

In an email from Japan, Buesseler said he hopes the sampling will go on every two or three months for the next two to three years.

Two different models have been published in peer-reviewed scientif­ic journals predicting the spread of radioactive isotopes of cesium and iodine from Fukushima. One, known as Rossi et al, shows the lead­ing edge of the plume hitting the West Coast from southeast Alaska to Southern California by April. The other, known as Behrens et al, shows the plume hitting Southeast Alaska, British Columbia and Washington by March 2016.

The isotopes have been detected at very low levels at a Canadian sam­pling point far out to sea earlier than the models predicted, but not yet reported at the beach, said Kathryn A. Higley, head of the Department of Nuclear Engineering and Radia­tion Health Physics at Oregon State University. The Rossi model predicts levels a little higher than the fallout from nuclear weapons testing in the 1960s. The Behrens model predicts lower levels like those seen in the ocean in the 1990s, after the radia­tion had decayed and dissipated.

The models predict levels of Cesium 137 between 30 and 2 Becquerels per cubic meter of seawater by the time the plume reaches the West Coast, Higley said.

The federal drinking water health standard is 7,400 Becquerels per cubic meter, Leon said.

Becquerels are a measure of radioactivity.

The crowdsourcing raised $29,945 from 225 people, enough to establish about 30 sampling sites in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and California, according to Woods Hole. The website so far has not reported any radiation.

Sara Gamble of Renton, Wash., the mother of a young child, raised $500 because she thinks it is important to know what is really going on. Woods Hole sent her a bucket, a funnel, a clipboard, a UPS shipping label, instructions and a big red plastic container for her sample. She went to Ocean Shores, Wash., a couple of weeks ago, collected her sample and shipped it off. No results have come back yet. To do another sample, she will have to raise another $500.

“I got lots of strange looks at the beach and the UPS Store, because it’s labeled ‘Center for Marine and Environmental Radioactivity,’ and it’s a big red bin,” she said. “But it’s funny; nobody would ask me anything out on the beach. I was like, ‘Aren’t you curious? Don’t you want to ask?”’ Taking the sample has allayed her initial fears, but she still thinks it is important to know “because it affects our ecosystems, kids love to play in the water at the beach, and I want to know what’s there.”

AP writer Phuong Le contributed to this story from Seattle.

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3/10/14
 
After nearly two hours of public testimony — most of it lambasting the recent activities of the Planning Commission — the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors today reached a rare and refreshing consensus on an issue pertaining to the general plan update: Sending part of it back to the Planning Commission was a bad idea.

“If I had to do it over, I wouldn’t have made that decision,” 5th District Supervisor Ryan Sundberg admitted.

On Jan. 13, the board voted 3-2 (with supervisors Mark Lovelace and Estelle Fennell dissenting) to send the entire Conservation and Open Space element back to the Planning Commission for a re-review. (A previous incarnation of the Planning Commission already reviewed that element in 2011 and submitted its recommendations to the board.)

In sending the element back for another look, the board gave planning commissioners 45 days to get through a “short list” of 13 goals and policies it felt needed reconsideration. However, the board also gave the commission leeway to delve into whichever other policies it saw fit.

By the time the 45-day window closed, the commission had only gotten through six of the 13 policies on the “short list,” and the public was riled up about the changes it did make — especially deleting language in support of a countywide trail system and reducing the size of wetland buffer zones.

“I truly thought it was going to be a quicker process, less controversial,” Sundberg continued this afternoon. “I watched some of the tapes of [Planning Commission meetings] and quickly realized that wasn’t going to happen.”

Fourth District Supervisor Virginia Bass chimed in next, saying she agreed with a public commenter who said the board should take responsibility for this phase of the general plan update. “I’m taking responsibility,” she said. “I thought it would work; it didn’t. It was a failed effort.”

With each special meeting costing between $900 and $928, according to staff, that failed effort cost close to $7,500 in scarce county funds.

Fennell, the county’s 2nd District supervisor, reminded folks that she didn’t want to send the element back in the first place, but she also defended the general plan work that the board has done thus far.

“I think we’ve done a very good job, in many instances reaching consensus and teasing things out to achieve the balance we’ve all been talking about,” Fennell said.

Fennell took some heat during the public comment period, with a number of speakers chastising her for appointing her former boss — and co-founder of property rights corporation HumCPR — Lee Ulansey Bob Morris to the Planning Commission. The other HumCPR co-founder, Bob Morris Lee Ulansey, also sits on the current Planning Commission, having been appointed by a majority of the board to an at-large position. Several speakers said both men should be removed.

Fennell wrapped up her comments by saying, “I think it’s important we take this plan back, take responsibility, do the job we were elected to do, and move forward.”

Lovelace chimed in next with a single word: “Agreed.” His brevity sparked appreciative laughter from the public.

“That’s basically what I was going to say,” added 1st District Supervisor Rex Bohn, who admitted that he, too, was wrong in voting to send the element back to the Planning Commission. “If I was 100 percent right I wouldn’t be sitting here; I’d be making sure you guys all got to keep your insurance,” he quipped. “But that’s not the way it works out.”

Before calling a 10-minute recess, Bohn waxed poetic, suggesting that for all the vitriol and controversy over this process, we noble Humboldtians aren’t so different after all. “All of us have little parcels of this earth we call home,” he said. He even went so far as to compliment some of his regular critics on their eloquence.

“The thing is, we agree on a lot of stuff,” Bohn declared. “The main thing [to keep] in mind is compassion for Humboldt and the respect for each other. I think we’re gonna do a lot better. You’ll look back 10 years from now, and we’re gonna be fine.”

And if something similar was said 10 years ago, the room was polite enough not to mention it.

The next Board of Supervisors hearing on the general plan is scheduled for March 24.

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