— AT&T’s fiber optic line, just about our sole digital connection to the outside world, is indeed beneath the gargantuan landslide that closed Highway 101 just north of Redway Wednesday. After days of uncertainty and rumor, KHUM’s Mike Dronkers got this confirmation from Caltrans engineer Sebastian Cohen earlier this morning. The good news is that someone — LoCO commenter excavato? — buried the thing deep on this stretch, probably saving us from days of countywide communications outages.

— Caltrans plans to have the road open to one-way controlled traffic from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., starting this Monday. Apparently the road bed was not significantly damaged by the slide.

Now for some stuff we actually learned within the last couple of days, but haven’t had the time to post because of the slide…

— The Catholic Church’s worldwide pedophilia scandal has its tentacles in Humboldt County; four current and former Humboldt County residents have been suing the Diocese of Santa Rosa, alleging that the church covered up former St. Bernard’s priest Patrick McCabe’s history of child abuse. McCabe was arrested last year.

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat has the latest turn in the case:

Four men who claim they were molested by a Humboldt County priest in the 1980s have dropped their case against the Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa. But only so they can expand their target to include “an international conspiracy” that extends to Ireland, their attorneys said.

— In the Arcata Eye and maybe other papers, but not online: Freelancer Daniel Mintz reports that the Arcata Community Recycling Center is considering legal action against the Humboldt Waste Management Authority. Earlier this year the HWMA entered into a recycling contract with Renewable Waste Systems out of Willits, severing its long relationship with the ACRC. The Arcata nonprofit apparently is considering legal action on the grounds that the switch was nothing more than a hidden attempt to bankrupt the ACRC so that the Waste Management Authority might acquire its processing facility. This despite the fact that the Willits firm offered to pay Humboldt County $8 per ton for its recyclables; ACRC wanted to charge the county $65 per ton for the same work.

— Some crazy-ass Crescent City fishermen put out to sea mid-tsunami a couple of weeks ago. Read Heidi Walters’ excellent telling of the tale in this week’s North Coast Journal.