Last night, Arcata Mayor Brett Watson was booked into the Humboldt County Jail and briefly held on charges of driving under the influence, and for possession of a controlled substance and paraphernalia.
The Humboldt County Jail’s arrest logs show that the California Highway Patrol booked Watson into the facility at 11:13 p.m. last night. He was released on his own recognizance some four hours later.
All the charges were classified as misdemeanors.
Watson told the Mad River Union, which broke this story, that he would not be issuing statement at this time, pending conversations with an attorney.
According to the California Highway Patrol, the Union reports, Watson was stopped after crossing into a lane of Highway 101 that the CHP had closed with a line of flares.
A 12-hour time-lapse of the McFarland Fire. | AlertWildfire
Two lightning fires that ignited last week are affecting Highway traffic in Trinity County.
The McFarland Fire burning south of Highway 36 near Wildwood Road is currently 3,200 acres [UPDATE, 1:37 p.m.: Now 7,485 acres] in size and 5 percent contained.
The McFarland Fire. | InciWeb
Highway 36 is completely closed from the Highway 3 junction in Trinity County to White Rock Road in Shasta County. Caltrans reports that there is no estimated time for when the highway will reopen.
California Interagency Incident Management Team 11 is now managing the McFarland fire for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest Service. According to InciWeb, 479 firefighting personnel are actively working to stop the blaze.
“Fire is actively making runs, spotting (winds or convection columns carrying sparks or embers produced by the main fire) in front of the main fire and actively backing (fire with slower rates of spread and lower intensity normally moving into the wind or slope),” CIIMT11 reports. “The fire continues to spread and burn actively at night.”
Overnight winds are forecast for the area tonight and tomorrow.
The Monument Fire burning south of Highway 299 near Del Loma in the Shasta Trinity National Forest is currently 3,114 acres in size and 0 percent contained.
The Monument Fire. | InciWeb
“The fire is burning in the footprint of the 2008 Cedar Fire,” the fire’s incident management team stated. “The terrain is extremely steep and access is difficult. Evacuation warnings have been issued for residents of Del Loma and Big Bar on both sides of the Trinity River.”
Highway 299 has been intermittently closed in Trinity County due to the wildfire. The highway is currently reduced to one-way traffic control between the Hayden Flat Campground and Big Bar near the Big Flat Ranger Station.
The fire’s rate of spread reportedly slowed overnight due to calmer winds and settling smoke from other fires. A team of 67 firefighting personnel are working to build indirect containment lines and assess the fire’s potential to reach structures in Del Loma, Big Bar, and Pattison Ranch. Residents in these areas are advised to remain in contact with the Trinity County Sheriff’s Office in case additional evacuation orders are issued.
UPDATE, 1:36 p.m.: Satellite imagery taken from midday Monday shows smoke from both fires:
Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:
On July 30, 2021, at about 6:37 p.m., a Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputy on patrol in the area of 5th and N Street in Eureka observed a vehicle towing a trailer with an expired registration. The deputy conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle and learned that the vehicle towing the trailer had been reported stolen out of Oregon.
Olsen.
The driver of the vehicle, 37-year-old Jacob Jon Olsen, was arrested without incident. During a search of the trailer, deputies located over 48 ounces of cannabis.
Olsen was booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of possession of a stolen vehicle (PC 496d(a)), driving on a suspended license (VC 14601.1(a)), driving without valid registration (VC 4000(a)) and transportation of marijuana (HS 11360(a)), in addition to warrant charges of carrying a concealed weapon in a vehicle (PC 25400(a)(1)), possession of a controlled substance (HS 11377(a)), driving with a suspended license - prior conviction (VC 14601.2(a)), driving privilege suspended (VC 14601.5) and driving without evidence of valid registration (VC 4000(a)(1)).
A female passenger in the vehicle was detained and released on scene.
Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.
Humboldt’s President of Positivity continues her relentless march toward her personally envisioned utopia with another Monday morning video, this time featuring children sack racing toward some unspecified goal. Smiles. That’s the goal, we guess.
Oh! Also, the Boys and Girls Club of the Redwoods has a fundraising event coming up! On Aug. 21 they will be staging their second annual Wild Goat Race at the Humboldt County Fairgrounds. If you have no idea what that is, for your educational purposes, we will now rerun the event description BGCR gave us for this thing last year:
Essentially, we are going to release some goats on the racetrack and see which goat makes it to the finish line first. There will be no pressure, the goats can take their time, go the wrong way — that is part of the fun. We will have a bucket of grain at the finish line to get them going in the right direction.
OK! For more details, plus info on how you can become a sponsor, head to the BGCR website. Ciao Bella!
Early this year, state Sen. Dave Min discovered that his Social Security number, date of birth and other personal information had been published on the Dark Web, hidden networks that aren’t accessible through search engines and are considered a free-for-all for cybercriminals across the world. Not only was his own information compromised, he said, but so was that of his three children.
The experience has inspired Min, a former law professor at UC Irvine and Irvine Democrat, to start a senate select committee on cybersecurity and identity theft prevention, the first senate committee of any kind at the state level to focus specifically on cybersecurity.
Cyberattacks have increased in the past couple of years, said Ronald Manuel, a supervisor on the FBI’s Los Angeles cyber task force, and rose during the coronavirus pandemic. Recent cyberattacks have targeted thousands of businesses, hospitals, a police station and a major pipeline. CalMatters also reported about an increase in ransomware attacks against schools.
President Joe Biden signed an executive order to boost cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, but there still isn’t much legal or policy framework for cyberattacks and cybersecurity, according to experts. For example, there are no federal or state reporting requirements for cyberattacks.
“I really believe that in the next 10 years, most of us, and maybe almost all of us, will be subject to some kind of hack,” said Min, who was part of a large hack targeting the University of California. “It’s just inevitable, given just how broad and pernicious the problem of hacking is.”
A new cybersecurity committee is born
Min’s new committee is what’s called a select committee.
Select committees don’t hear bills 一 they’re designed for legislators to delve deep into issues without having to produce anything.
Previous criticisms of select committees detailed a lack of accountability and transparency. Some select committees only had one member, used committee staff as their own personal staff and didn’t meet at all, according to reporting from the Sacramento Bee in 2012. Select committees also are not audited and aren’t required to report their findings.
Min’s office said his select committee also won’t hire any staff.
“We’re not coming into this with prebaked solutions, necessarily,” he said. “We want to be thoughtful … nonpartisan ideally and just approach this in a way that’s systematic. But we think that there’s a lot here to do as far as learning, educating ourselves and hopefully creating a record for the body of the state Senate.”
Do select committees actually achieve anything?
Well, it depends on how you define “achievement.”
The goal of select committees is to learn more about designated topics. That doesn’t always translate into policy.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian served in the California Legislature from 2000 to 2012 as both an assemblymember and senator. He was on several select committees and said the utility and productiveness of select committees varied greatly depending on the chair and committee.
“I think a candid assessment … would be that select committees were only as good as the time and effort the chairs put into them,” he said. “Different chairs used select committees in very different ways, for very different purposes.”
Simitian said that the productivity of select committees is often not apparent until years later.
“The challenge is that you really can’t tell for some time after whether or not the select committee generated any significant benefit,” he said. “So during the course of any given year or two, it’s going to be hard to assess just how productive or not a particular committee has been. Over a period of years, though, there should be some work product that is readily identifiable to justify the creation and use of the committee.”
What will the committee do, exactly?
Over the next year, Min will bring in experts and other witnesses to discuss cybersecurity and identity theft prevention issues.
But with all the pressing concerns the Legislature has to deal with, the select committee is a way to focus attention on cybersecurity.
“There’s a lot of balls in the air right now and I think Senator Min wanted to make sure that this topic was given ample attention from the Legislature,” said Sen. Ben Allen, a Santa Monica Democrat. He said the Legislature hasn’t paid attention to cybersecurity.
“Well, people pay attention to the topic,” he said. “But there’s so many things happening, there’s so many issues, there’s so many difficult policy challenges, each of them merit more attention. The creation of this committee in some respects is an acknowledgement of the fact that we need to pay more attention to this issue.”
Min said new laws on cybersecurity are overdue and blames a lack of one for the pervasiveness of California’s Employment Department Department fraud.
“One of the reasons EDD fraud was so pernicious here in California and really across the country was because so many criminals have access to IDs,” he said. “I mean, there are millions of IDs that they just can access almost immediately. And that’s why they were able to open up accounts, because they had all the information and it’s really hard to stop.
“They were facing issues that they were not equipped to deal with. What do you do when somebody has all of the information that you’d need to open up any kind of an account?”
Other issues committee members said they want to learn more about: ransomware attacks, California’s food and water infrastructure security, the scope of the UC breach and artificial intelligence.
Who are the other cybersecurity committee members?
Santa Monica Sen. Benjamin Allen As a former lecturer at UCLA’s law school, he was also implicated by the University of California breach, although he doesn’t know if his information is on the Dark Web.
Menlo Park Sen. Josh Becker, who represents Silicon Valley, home of tech giants like Apple, Google and Facebook.
Fresno Sen. Andreas Borgeas will serve as the sole Republican on the committee. He hopes that guarding food production from cyberattacks will be a focus for the select committee.
Santa Barbara Sen. Monique Límon and Orange County Sen. Tom Umberg both chair influential committees that intersect with cybersecurity and identity theft issues: Límon chairs the banking committee and Umberg chairs both the judiciary and artificial intelligence committees.
###
CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
Photo of the rescue provided by the U.S. Coast Guard.
U.S. Coast Guard press release:
The Coast Guard rescued a man off of a cliffside near Patrick’s Point, Friday afternoon.
Coast Guard Sector Humboldt Bay watchstanders received a report from Calfire stating that a man was stranded on a cliffside between Patrick’s Point and Big Lagoon.
Watchstanders directed the launch of a Coast Guard Sector Humboldt Bay MH-65 Dolphin helicopter crew at 12:35 p.m.
The aircrew arrived on scene at 1:00 p.m. and began their search for the missing person.
The aircrew lowered the rescue swimmer, hoisted the man into the helicopter and returned to Sector Humboldt Bay.
