LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – With most of California expecting mild weather conditions over the holiday weekend, Cal Fire urges everyone to be cautious and not let their guard down. 

To keep everyone safe while planning to recreate outdoors for the Memorial Day weekend, Cal Fire is asking the public to take steps to prevent sparking a new wildfire.

“Although most of California is no longer experiencing drought conditions, the normal warm and dry climate of California means that it will always be susceptible to wildfires,” said Chief Ken Pimlott, Cal Fire director. “All of us need to do our part to ensure we are being safe when working or recreating outdoors by taking precautions to avoid sparking a wildfire.”

Since Jan. 1, Cal Fire has responded to over 1,000 wildfires that have burned nearly 15,000 acres.

Californians are encouraged to be vigilant and remember that “one less spark means one less wildfire.”

Camping

• Obtain a campfire permit ( www.PreventWildfireCA.org );
• Check for local fire restrictions;
• Clear away grass, leaves and other debris within a 10-foot perimeter of any campfire;
• Have a responsible person in attendance at all times;
• Ensure all campfires are completely extinguished before leaving;
• When barbecuing, never leave the grill unattended.
 
Vehicle

• Ensure your vehicle is properly maintained with nothing dragging on the ground;
• When towing, make sure trailer chains are properly secured;
• Never drive or pull over into dry grass.

Fire is not the only danger that can occur in the outdoors, as water drownings also increase dramatically during this holiday weekend.

As the snowpack continues to melt, the rivers and lakes will run fast and cold, making them very dangerous.

Following a few simple steps could save someone’s life.

In the water
 
• Always wear a life jacket!
• Children should always be supervised by a responsible adult.
• Never swim alone.
• Be cautious of rivers and waterways with rapid currents.
• Drinking and swimming can be just as dangerous as drinking and driving.

For more ways to be safe this holiday, visit www.ReadyforWildfire.org or www.fire.ca.gov .

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Memorial Day weekend is the traditional start of summer and a time when many families and travelers will be on the go.

California Highway Patrol officers will take to the roads throughout the holiday weekend and will be working to save lives through seat belt education and enforcement.

To help ensure the safety of all motorists, the CHP is conducting its annual Memorial Day Maximum Enforcement Period, or MEP, throughout the state.

The MEP began at 6 p.m. Friday, May 26, and continues through 11:59 p.m. on Monday, May 29.

Although the focus of the MEP is seat belt usage, the CHP will be closely watching for distracted drivers and those driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

“Seat belts save lives and prevent injuries. Do not put your own life at risk, or the life of your family or friends. Buckle up,” said CHP Commissioner Joe Farrow. “Making sure everyone in the vehicle is properly restrained could make the difference between life and death.”

An unrestrained child in a car is at significant risk of injury or death in the event of a traffic collision. Protect your children by using age-appropriate passenger restraint devices.

As of Jan. 1, 2017, any child who is under two years old must be secured in a rear-facing child passenger safety seat.

Thirty-nine people died in collisions during the 2016 Memorial Day MEP. Two-thirds of those killed in the CHP’s jurisdiction were not wearing seat belts. That same year, CHP officers made 1,065 DUI arrests during the Memorial Day MEP.

California also joins the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in its nationwide Click It or Ticket campaign, May 22 to June 4.

The NHTSA reports that in 2015 seat belt use in passenger vehicles saved an estimated 13,941 lives. Many Americans understand the lifesaving value of the seat belt. The national seat belt use rate is at 87 percent, and in California it is more than 97 percent.

“Those statistics are good, but we can do even better. Continued education and enforcement efforts can bring the seat belt compliance rate to 100 percent,” added Commissioner Farrow. “Many of the deaths and injuries that occur on the highway are entirely preventable.”

LOWER LAKE, Calif. – An award-winning Clearlake auto repair business has broken ground on the construction of its new state-of-the-art facility, a major project that is expanding the company’s investment and commitment to the community.

A&B Collision co-owners Bill Stone and Alvaro Valencia held the groundbreaking for their new location at 9535 Highway 53 in Lower Lake on Thursday afternoon.

“It’s a million-dollar project, start to finish,” said Valencia, who lives in Clearlake, while Stone lives in Clearlake Oaks.

A&B Collision has been at its current location, 7070 Old Highway 53 in Clearlake, for the past 12 years, opening Aug. 1,  2005.

Stone and Valencia bring more than 45 years of experience in the collision repair industry to the community.

The company specializes in collision and mechanical repairs, state-of-the-art painting services, vehicle detailing, glass repair, rental cars and trucks through Hertz, as well as free loaner cars for customers. It’s also been recognized as a Gold Class auto repair facility.

Stone said it’s taken three years to get to this point in the project, from the property purchase to the needed rezoning to locate there. The planning permits and zoning were handled through the county of Lake.

“The process was a long process but it’s definitely needed. Everything had to be checked out, everything has to be done right, and we’re all in favor of that. So we’re set to go,” Stone said.

The newer and much bigger shop will provide a better location for customers, according to Stone and Valencia, with additional parking and a more centralized, highly visible location off Highway 53.

While A&B Collision has maintained its small-town friendliness, it’s consistently expanded its services and also embraced forward-thinking business practices, including a recycling program that significantly reduced its waste output and a “green business” approach to ensure a clean environment.

One of the new energy-efficient facility’s offerings will include a car wash that uses recycled water as well as “planet-friendly” landscaping at the site.

The company plans to add between two to four new employees in the future.

“We’re happy to invest in Lake County,” said Stone, adding that they want their employees to have a better place to work and their customers a better place to get their cars repaired.

The project’s funding was assisted by Clearlake Bank of the West.

Bank representative Stephanie Ashworth, who was at the ground-breaking with a shovel in hand, said the bank had worked with Stone and Valencia for about nine months on funding through the Small Business Administration loan program.

“We’re happy to be helping local customers invest back into the community,” she said.

A&B Collision’s owners are both heavily involved in the community, and are active members of the Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce, the Lake County Chamber of Commerce, Lakeshore Lions Club and the Clearlake Oaks-Glenhaven Business Association. Valencia is a former member of the Clearlake Planning Commission.

They also support many local youth-oriented organizations, from sporting groups including Little League, football and soccer to the Lower Lake High School auto shop program.

Those efforts earned them the 2012 Stars of Lake County Youth Advocate of the Year Award.

Construction on the new Lower Lake A&B Collision shop is expected to be completed by the fall, with the company relocating shortly afterward.

Valencia said they hope to be in their new site by the end of September.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – A Caltrans worker was seriously injured at the agency’s maintenance yard in Clearlake Oaks on Wednesday.
 
Firefighters were dispatched to the maintenance yard, located at 13070 Highway 20, just before 8:45 a.m. Wednesday on the report of a male employee who had become caught in a garage door, according to radio reports.
 
Northshore Fire and Cal Fire responded, with firefighters reporting from the scene that they had extricated the man within minutes of their arrival on scene.
 
Reports from the scene indicated that the man was transported by Northshore Fire ambulance to Sutter Lakeside Hospital, where they rendezvoused with a REACH air ambulance that responded from Willits.
 
Shortly before 10 a.m. REACH reported that it lifted off with the patient en route to Enloe Hospital in Chico.
 
Phil Frisbie Jr., Caltrans’ chief of public information, confirmed to Lake County News that an employee was seriously injured in the incident. The man’s name was not released.
 
Frisbie said the injured employee’s condition had “greatly improved” since the accident Wednesday.
 
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

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Early science results from NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter portray the largest planet in our solar system as a complex, gigantic, turbulent world, with Earth-sized polar cyclones, plunging storm systems that travel deep into the heart of the gas giant, and a mammoth, lumpy magnetic field that may indicate it was generated closer to the planet’s surface than previously thought.

“We are excited to share these early discoveries, which help us better understand what makes Jupiter so fascinating,” said Diane Brown, Juno program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It was a long trip to get to Jupiter, but these first results already demonstrate it was well worth the journey.”

Juno launched on Aug. 5, 2011, entering Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. The findings from the first data-collection pass, which flew within about 2,600 miles of Jupiter's swirling cloud tops on Aug. 27, are being published this week in two papers in the journal Science, as well as 44 papers in Geophysical Research Letters.

“We knew, going in, that Jupiter would throw us some curves,” said Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator from the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “But now that we are here we are finding that Jupiter can throw the heat, as well as knuckleballs and sliders. There is so much going on here that we didn’t expect that we have had to take a step back and begin to rethink of this as a whole new Jupiter.”

Among the findings that challenge assumptions are those provided by Juno’s imager, JunoCam. The images show both of Jupiter's poles are covered in Earth-sized swirling storms that are densely clustered and rubbing together.

“We're puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is, and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn't look like the south pole,” said Bolton. “We're questioning whether this is a dynamic system, and are we seeing just one stage, and over the next year, we're going to watch it disappear, or is this a stable configuration and these storms are circulating around one another?”

Another surprise comes from Juno’s Microwave Radiometer (MWR), which samples the thermal microwave radiation from Jupiter’s atmosphere, from the top of the ammonia clouds to deep within its atmosphere.

The MWR data indicates that Jupiter’s iconic belts and zones are mysterious, with the belt near the equator penetrating all the way down, while the belts and zones at other latitudes seem to evolve to other structures.

The data suggest the ammonia is quite variable and continues to increase as far down as we can see with MWR, which is a few hundred miles or kilometers.

Prior to the Juno mission, it was known that Jupiter had the most intense magnetic field in the solar system.

Measurements of the massive planet’s magnetosphere, from Juno’s magnetometer investigation, or MAG, indicate that Jupiter’s magnetic field is even stronger than models expected, and more irregular in shape.

MAG data indicates the magnetic field greatly exceeded expectations at 7.766 Gauss, about 10 times stronger than the strongest magnetic field found on Earth.

“Juno is giving us a view of the magnetic field close to Jupiter that we’ve never had before,” said Jack Connerney, Juno deputy principal investigator and the lead for the mission’s magnetic field investigation at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Already we see that the magnetic field looks lumpy: it is stronger in some places and weaker in others. This uneven distribution suggests that the field might be generated by dynamo action closer to the surface, above the layer of metallic hydrogen. Every flyby we execute gets us closer to determining where and how Jupiter’s dynamo works.”

Juno also is designed to study the polar magnetosphere and the origin of Jupiter's powerful auroras—its northern and southern lights.

These auroral emissions are caused by particles that pick up energy, slamming into atmospheric molecules. Juno’s initial observations indicate that the process seems to work differently at Jupiter than at Earth.

Juno is in a polar orbit around Jupiter, and the majority of each orbit is spent well away from the gas giant.

But, once every 53 days, its trajectory approaches Jupiter from above its north pole, where it begins a two-hour transit (from pole to pole) flying north to south with its eight science instruments collecting data and its JunoCam public outreach camera snapping pictures. The download of six megabytes of data collected during the transit can take 1.5 days.

“Every 53 days, we go screaming by Jupiter, get doused by a fire hose of Jovian science, and there is always something new,” said Bolton. “On our next flyby on July 11, we will fly directly over one of the most iconic features in the entire solar system – one that every school kid knows – Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. If anybody is going to get to the bottom of what is going on below those mammoth swirling crimson cloud tops, it’s Juno and her cloud-piercing science instruments.”

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages the Juno mission for NASA. The principal investigator is Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio.

The Juno mission is part of the New Frontiers Program managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate. Lockheed Martin Space Systems, in Denver, built the spacecraft.

More information on the Juno mission is available at https://www.nasa.gov/juno or http://missionjuno.org , and follow it at http://www.facebook.com/NASAJuno or http://www.twitter.com/NASAJuno .

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COBB, Calif. – A south county man died this week when his backhoe overturned while he was clearing property on Cobb.

Mark Victor Basili, 62, was killed in the accident, which occurred on Tuesday in the area of Bleuss Way, according to Lt. Steve Brooks of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office.

Brooks said that Basili was clearing the area to start building a new house when, based on the conclusion of the subsequent investigation, the backhoe went off the road and overturned, killing him.

Later that day, Basili’s wife became concerned when he didn’t return home or respond to calls to his cell phone, Brooks said.

She drove to the site, where she discovered the overturned backhoe and her husband’s body, according to Brooks.

Brooks said a coroner’s investigation was conducted as is standard in such cases. “There’s nothing suspicious,” he said.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.