It seems to happen almost every fall, Humboldt Wildlife Care Center co-director Monte Merrick says. Fledging western grebes, small, white-throated sea birds widespread on the Pacific Coast, move from protected marshlands and sloughs to the open ocean just as a storm is moving in, only to find the waters too rough to navigate and wash […]
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‘A Troubling Trend’
The community of Fortuna was jolted Sept. 8 by news that police had arrested two teenagers in possession of handguns, one of whom had allegedly bought the weapon to school as part of an apparent “beef” with another student. The two arrests — hours apart of a 13 year old and a 15 year old […]
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Trial by Fire
To say it’s been a trial by fire undersells it. After all, there have also been earthquakes, bomb cyclones, near-hurricane force winds and that Snowmageddon event in February. Before all those, there were the public safety power shutoffs of 2019 and then the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s been nonstop,” says Andrew Bogar, the disaster program manager […]
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California’s Wildfire Smoke and the Climate Crisis: Four Things to Know
Wildfires and climate change are locked in a vicious circle: Fires worsen climate change, and climate change worsens fires. Scientists, including those at the World Resources Institute, have been increasingly sounding the alarm about this feedback loop, warning that fires don’t burn in isolation — they produce greenhouse gases that, in turn, create warmer and drier […]
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Forgotten in Rio Dell
Eight months ago, Jacqui and Shane McIntosh were getting ready to celebrate. With an offer in hand, the couple’s Rio Dell home was set to enter escrow Dec. 20, marking the beginning of a new chapter in their lives after they put in years of sweat equity to afford a new house closer to their […]
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Not Expelled But Not Fully Welcome
Editor’s note: This story includes racist language in quotations from historical newspaper articles. Humboldt County’s Chinese history is notorious. For nearly 70 years, from the mid-1880s to the early 1950s, a keynote of Humboldt’s public identity was the (false) assertion the county had successfully expelled all its Chinese or Chinese American residents. During one expulsion […]
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‘It’s All Gone’
It was almost 6 p.m. on Aug. 8 when Faraz Soltani saw that gusting winds had pushed the fire burning through Lahaina, Maui, to the church across the street from his home and knew he had to flee. “I knew it was a matter of minutes, if not seconds,” Soltani says. “When I saw that, […]
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Elk Crossing
A herd of Roosevelt elk living around Stone Lagoon has been getting a lot of attention lately. It’s not the usual adoration heaped upon the animals from tourists driving along U.S. Highway 101 near Stone Lagoon who are taken in by the frequent sight of bulls bearing candelabra-esque antlers grazing in a sunlit meadow with […]
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EPD Looks to Close ‘Dark Chapter’
An outside auditor that reviewed the third-party investigation into the text messaging scandal that rocked the Eureka Police Department in 2021 found the city’s response was “appropriate” and held “most involved in the misconduct accountable,” noting the department has made strides in changing the culture and policies that enabled this “dark chapter.” “The investigation revealed […]
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Initiative Pits Housing Against Parking in Eureka
Robin P. Arkley II’s parking lot war against the city of Eureka has moved into a new phase. An outspoken critic of the city’s plan to convert downtown municipal parking lots into affordable housing developments, Arkley is attacking the city on multiple fronts, through two lawsuits challenging the city’s plans and threats to move his […]
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Without a Jury
One can only imagine Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would be sorely disappointed in Humboldt County. After all, it was Madison who penned what would become the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing the right to trial by jury for the accused, and it was Jefferson who saw the right as the cornerstone of […]
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‘Staggering Solidarity’
In Los Angeles it’s rare to see actors and housekeepers standing shoulder to shoulder on picket lines, or TV writers standing behind UPS drivers fighting for better pay. Yet such signs of solidarity across social classes are prominent features of what some are calling a “hot labor summer” sweeping California. Strikes have ground Hollywood to […]