News

6/26/13

If you’ve been following the great East-West Train Dreaming that has been happening in these parts for the last year or so, you’ve no doubt been bewildered by the great variety of new or new-to-us public and private organizations that have sprung up to hasten the day when that glorious golden spike is pounded into place round about Hayfork or somewhere. You’ve got your Upstate California, your Upstate RailConnect Committee, your Land Bridge Alliance, your Humboldt Bay Harbor Working Group, your this, your that, etc., etc.

Which is what and what is who?

The picture was defuzzed a little this morning, when one of those groups — the Upstate RailConnect Committee — met in Humboldt County for the first time this. The RailConnect Committe, if I have this right, is a subset of Upstate California, a heretofore obscure (at least on this side of the mountains) quasi-public economic development council serving the entirety of Northern California.

Representatives from Trinity and Tehama Counties, through which the great east-west railroad will run in the extremely unlikely event that it is built, were in attendance, alongside Rex Bohn (representing Humboldt County) and Lance Madsen and Mike Newman (representing the City of Eureka). Also on the committee were former Eureka City Manager David Tyson, representing the Land Bridge Alliance, and former Humboldt Bay Harbor District CEO David Hull, representing … himself, it seems.

There was a good deal of questioning from the public about the nature of the RailConnect Committee itself. Is it a governmental agency? Is it a nonprofit group? Does it have staff? How can one contact it? What are its obligations to public transparency, or the Brown Act, or anything? Where are its agendae and minutes posted?

The answer, from Upstate California General Manager Allison O’Sullivan, amounted to the fact that Upstate California, of which the RailConnect Committee is a part, is something like a nonprofit economic development corporation that chooses to act as a governmental agency. She and Tyson said that there was much concern, at the committee’s formation, that it act as transparently as possible, even though their attorney told them they didn’t have to. So even though meetings of the committee are not noticed on Upstate California’s own website, they will be noticed on the sites of the City of Eureka and other member groups.

There is no staff. People seeking to contact the committee for information or input were directed to contact Eureka City Councilmember Lance Madsen, the committee’s chair.

So the fact that it is a non-governmental agency accounts for the presence of the two non-government actors on its board — Tyson and Hull, or, in committee parlance, “the Daves.” Hull led the most substantive portion of the day’s proceedings: A discussion of what would happen were some rich person to come along and offer money to fund an east-west feasiblity study? (Remember: Despite the amount of energy being poured into this, locally, we’re still in the pre-feasible stage. The committee is trying to find money to fund a study to determine if a new rail line is even feasible.)

Hull laid out a couple of scenarios as regards this hypothetical private party wishing to drop a bunch of cash into east-west feasibility and asked for committee input. What if this private party just wants to fund his own study, cutting Upstate RailConnect out of the loop entirely? What if he dropped a bunch of cash into Tyson’s Land Bridge Alliance, with the proviso that the money be forwarded to Upstate RailConnect to fund the study with no strings attached? What if he dropped a bunch of cash into the Land Bridge Alliance in the same way, but with a bunch of strings attached — i.e., that some, most or all of the information in the study be kept confidential?

It was the third scenario that got board members talking the most. In general, there was a great deal of disapprobation. A representative from Trinity County made the point that if this ever actually gets going, the impacts on the public would likely be enormous, and would run the gamut — environmental, economic, infrastructural. She was not comfortable with any part of the hypothetical third scenario, except that maybe she could see market research aspects of the study kept close in such an event. Her point of view seemed to carry the day among committee members. Most of them are, in fact, elected officials.

There was, perhaps, only one other major matter of note, and that was the Humboldt Bay Harbor District’s lightly simmering feud with the committee. For one, the Harbor District — through whose territory the massive goods anticipated by the eastie-westies would, after all, run — would like a seat on the committee. The committee is disinclined to give them one.

Why? That leads to the second source of contention. The Harbor District is skeptical of the possibility of east-west rail — current CEO Jack Crider has a great deal of experience with short-line railroads, and has publicly turned up his eyebrows at the possibility of a new Eureka-Red Bluff line. The district has, in fact, commissioned its own small ($20,000) pre-feasibility study that explores the restoration of rail service to the North Coast. Harbor District Chair Mike Wilson told the committee that his agency just received a draft report from its consultants yesterday, and that he hoped that the RailConnect committee would be allowed to hear its findings at a future meeting. No date was set, but Wilson and Madsen agreed to find a date sometime in the future.

Then they adjourned to go have lunch at the Samoa Cookhouse and ride the Madaket around the bay for a while. 

Read Original Article

6/20/13

After spending his entire career hoping to spot a rare North Pacific right whale, researcher John Ford had given up ever being able to see one of the rarest animals on earth.

The last time one of the majestic mammals was seen off the coast of B.C. was in 1951 — before the 58-year-old scientist was even born.

That was until last week, when Ford and fellow department of fisheries and oceans whale researchers James Pilkington and Graeme Ellis spent a day near Haida Gwaii monitoring a whale that’s the size of a semi-trailer and weighs more than 20 SUVs combined.

“It was a thrilling experience,” said Ford. “We would never have imagined that we would be able to see one. They are critically endangered and extremely rare.”

Ford estimates there are between 38 and 50 of the animals left on the eastern part of the Pacific Ocean and no more than a few hundred in the world.

This sighting south of Langara Island was only the seventh in the past century, he said.

The right whale — so named because it was the “right” whale to hunt for its blubber and its valuable baleen plates that hang from the roof of its mouth to filter out everything but its preferred meal of the tiny zooplankton called copepods — was harpooned almost into extinction in the mid-1800s.

In one decade back then, 30,000 of them were killed in one decade, said Ford.

“They were big, slow and easy to float once they were killed,” he said.

The right whales were coveted for their 500 baleen plates, which are three metres long and 25 cm wide, because the substance was strong and flexible and used for various products, including “whalebone” corsets popular a century ago.

The North Pacific right whale is mostly black, large and stocky, and is easily recognizable for its highly arched jaw and growths of white thickened skin on its head called callosities, according to the DFO website.

“If you do spot one, you may have just won the marine mammal lottery,” according to the DFO.

Hunting of the animals have been banned since 1935 but the Soviets continued to hunt them illegally in the 1960s, which likely delayed their recovery, said Ford.

He said it’s “very, very doubtful” that any nation would continue to hunt it because of its endangered status but the whales are at risk from collisions with ships and getting entangled in fishing line.

“It was not only exciting personally to see one of the whales but it was wonderful for us to be able to confirm that this species still exists,” said Ford.

He and his colleagues for identification purposes videotaped and photographed the whale, coming to within 25 to 50 metres of it but not close enough to disturb it.

The researchers were able to collect some of its prey and its scat, which they can analyze to genotype the animal through its DNA and learn more about it, such as its gender.

The Canadians have already compared photos with the Americans’ catalogue of 19 whales and none of them match, which means they likely have discovered a new whale.

Ford said they spent as long as they could monitoring the whale, which seemed “pretty indifferent” to their presence.

“It’s an opportunity we may never have again,” he said.

This is the first sighting in over 50,000 km of whale surveys off the B.C. coast over the past 10 years, said Ford, who is head of the cetacean research program at the Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo.

But he said he remains hopeful that the sighting is a sign that the population will survive. The DFO has been implementing a strategy to help it recover.

The whale was first spotted by Pilkington on June 9 and Ford and Ellis joined him on June 13 to observe the whale.

“When we realized what we were looking at, we were in a state of disbelief,” said Pilkington in a press release. “I never thought I’d see a North Pacific right whale in my lifetime, let alone have the opportunity to study it over several days. I was ecstatic!”

Read More

6/6/13

Look out across Monterey Bay, and one hardly thinks of a junkyard. But below the surface, decades of garbage have been piling up, a new study by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute shows.

Go 1,000 meters down, and it's still there. Go a mile down, it's still there. Go two miles down and beyond -- down to the limits of scientific exploration -- and it's still there. Old boots, tires, fishing gear and especially plastic, litter the ocean floor.

"Once it gets in the ocean, it's not going to get cleaned up," said Susan von Thun, a senior research technician at MBARI. "Especially with plastic or metal, it doesn't really break down. It'll be there for possibly thousands of years."

The study is based on 22 years of deep-sea video accumulated and cataloged by marine researchers. They decided to search their database and came up with more than 1,150 hits for human-produced garbage in the Monterey Bay region alone, much of it within the boundaries of a national marine sanctuary.

While there have been some eye-popping finds -- a shipping container full of 10,000 steel-belted tires lies at the bottom of the bay -- about a third of the findings were plastic, with about half of those being plastic bags.

PLASTIC POLLUTION

That goes to the heart of an ongoing debate about single-use plastic bags, with the plastics industry recently helping defeat a proposed statewide bag ban, as well as a second bill, by Assemblymember Mark Stone, D-Scotts Valley, aimed at getting plastics producers to help cut back on pollution.

When the bag ban was defeated by three votes, the industry group American Progressive Bag Alliance hailed its victory, saying the proposal was based on "unfounded stats, junk science and myths."

Dave Asselin, executive director of the American Progressive Bag Alliance, reiterated the group's position in a statement Wednesday.
"We have not had a chance to review this particular study, but we do know that the rationale behind efforts to ban or tax plastic bags is largely based off of junk science and exaggerations," Asselin said.

The study is far more exhaustive that any prior examination of debris on the ocean floor, with MBARI's submarines routinely plumbing depths rarely seen by human eyes. Whether it makes a difference in the political debate about plastic bags remains to be seen. Wednesday, Stone held a previously scheduled legislative hearing that dealt with plastics and the marine environment.
Laura Kasa, executive director of Santa Cruz-based Save Our Shores, a group that holds beach cleanups throughout the region, said the study is another sign that plastic bags need to be banned.

"This is why it's so important that we prevent trash that people leave on the beach from getting into the ocean," Kasa said. "If one person doesn't think that it makes a difference, if they leave their piece of trash on the beach, they're wrong. It'll end up in the bottom of the ocean."

Von Thun said researchers combed through video for instances where marine life interacted with plastic and found several. They include plastic bags wrapped around deep coral -- which eventually will kill the coral -- and debris serving as habitat for anemonies and other marine life, giving them a home in areas they would not normally settle.

The study also found plastics and metals were more likely to be found in deeper waters, and researchers speculated that because Monterey Bay is a national sanctuary and subject to heightened environmental protections, it is likely that oceans elsewhere have a more significant problem.

"I was surprised that we saw so much trash in deeper water. We don't usually think of our daily activities as affecting life two miles deep in the ocean," said Kyra Schlining, the study's lead author. "I'm sure that there's a lot more debris in the canyon that we're not seeing."

Read Original Article

The "UpState RailConnect Committee" - Dedicated to Completion of the Alternative Rail Route Feasibility Study - will meet June 26 at 10 a.m. at the Wharfinger Building in Eureka.

Read on for the meeting agenda.

For information regarding this meeting, please contact the Upstate RailConnect Committee at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..