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Press release from Providence St. Joseph Hospital:

Ellen Mahoney, MD, medical director of the St. Joseph Hospital Eureka Cancer Program and Join Luh, MD, radiation oncologist at the Dr. Russel Pardoe Radiation Oncology Center at St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, were recent recipients of awards and recognition from their peers in the field of cancer.
 
Dr. Mahoney, who has been a breast cancer surgeon in Humboldt since 2000, was chosen as one of 10 winners in the 2023 Commission on Cancer (CoC) Cancer Liaison Physician (CLP) Outstanding Performance award.
 
“When I became involved in the Cancer Program in the early 2000s, I had no familiarity with the Commission on Cancer (CoC) as a quality program of the American College of Surgeons (ACS) and the American Cancer Society,” said Mahoney. “But I have since learned to recognize its power to improve the quality of cancer care, especially in suburban and rural areas of the country. It is a true honor to be recognized by this program which has done so much to improve and sustain improvements in cancer care throughout most of the USA.”
 
Each year, the CoC Cancer Liaison Program recognizes outstanding performance by CLPs in their role as the physician quality leaders of their cancer programs. This year, more than 60 nominations were submitted and after careful review of each submission by the CoC State Chair Education Advisory Group, 10 Cancer Liaison Physicians were chosen to receive this award.
 
“Dr. Mahoney has been a trail blazer in the field of breast cancer surgery since her time as faculty at Stanford,” Interim Chief Executive and Chief Medical Officer Ranjit Hundal, MD said. “We’ve been so fortunate as a hospital and a community to have her providing clinical excellence and comfort to cancer patients and their families here on the North Coast for over two decades. Congratulations on this much deserved recognition.”
 
Dr. Luh, who has practiced at St. Joseph Hospital since 2007, was recognized by his radiation oncology peers at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) recently for his clinical excellence and was named to the 2023 Class of Astro Fellows. The ASTRO Fellow designation (FASTRO) is awarded based on service to ASTRO and extraordinary contributions to the field of radiation oncology.
 
“Dr. Luh is an exceptional radiation oncologist,” said Hundal. “Along with Drs. Michael Harmon and Dusten Macdonald, they have built a program here at St. Joseph Hospital that is world-class. Dr. Luh is a tireless advocate for his patients and is committed to delivering high quality care in a compassionate and warm manner.”
 
“As a community radiation oncologist, I’m honored to be recognized by ASTRO, and join 28 distinguished radiation oncologists and physicists who have made significant contributions to research, education, and patient care,” said Luh. “This would not have been possible without the support of my practice partners Dr. Michael Harmon and Dr. Dusten Macdonald—both of whom strive to provide state of the art, compassionate cancer care in our community. With the many changes occurring in health care nationally, I am thankful to still be at St. Joseph Hospital’s ACS/CoC accredited Cancer Program in Eureka after 16 years, in my first and only job out of residency training.”

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Press release from Caltrans:

On Saturday, September 2, 2023, at 6:00 pm, The California Highway Patrol (CHP), California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), Oregon State Police (OSP), Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office (DNSO) and Josephine County Sheriff’s Office in collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Incident Management Team 13 and Southwest Incident Management Team 2, have agreed to a full reopening of US-199 to all traffic. Caltrans and CHP will continue to pilot northbound traffic  from Patrick’s Creek to Oregon Mountain Road South and southbound traffic from Oregon Mountain Road South to Patrick’s Creek.

Please continue to drive slowly and with caution as Fire personnel, Caltrans and construction crews remain actively working on the fires and highway repairs. We anticipate this work to continue for at least the next several weeks if not months. The California Highway Patrol and California Department of Transportation will continue to monitor the highway to ensure it remains safe for travel to the motoring public.

The Smith River Complex Fire is still active and very unpredictable, on top of the effects of weather, so please be prepared at the possibility of future closures should something change and it becomes a safety risk to our motoring public and/or personnel.

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 conditions that ignite more frequent and intense fires.

Last week, wildfire smoke prompted another round of unhealthy air quality in California. Fires in Oregon and Northern California sent smoke into Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area. And it’s a global nightmare: This summer, world temperatures hit an all-time high, the worst U.S. wildfire in more than a century devastated Maui, a deadly fire in Greece was declared Europe’s largest ever, and swaths of the Midwest and Northeast have been blanketed by smoke from Canada’s forest fires.

As California’s most intense wildfire months approach, the volume of greenhouse gases they emit is expected to grow.

A bill by Assemblymember Bill Essayli, a Republican from Riverside, introduced this year would have required the state to count wildfire emissions in its efforts to reduce statewide greenhouse gases. But the bill didn’t get far: It was defeated in committee.

Here are answers to some of the key questions raised by the symbiotic relationship between wildfires and climate change:

What’s happening to carbon emissions as wildfires worsen?

Scientists around the world are trying to quantify just how much wildfires contribute to climate change.

Last year, California wildfires sent an estimated 9 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to California Air Resources Board estimates. That’s equivalent to the emissions of about 1.9 million cars in a year.

In 2020, California’s wildfires were its second-largest source of greenhouse gases, after transportation, according to a study published last year. The researchers from UCLA and the University of Chicago concluded that the 2020 wildfires increased overall emissions by about 30%.

When forests burn, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are released into the air. It’s considered part of a natural cycle, with plants absorbing and then releasing the chemicals into the air over time. But experts say the increasing frequency of fires might be throwing this cycle out of balance.

Emissions this year from Canada’s forests have shattered records, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service. Last year, carbon dioxide from boreal forests — the world’s northernmost forests, which span vast swaths of Canada and Alaska — hit a record high, UC Irvine researchers reported in the journal Science.

“Where does that carbon go? It goes up into the atmosphere, it circles all around the globe, it’s affecting all of us.”
— Char Miller, Pomona College

Fires in these northern latitudes are of deep concern to researchers, as those forests historically were too cold to experience significant burns. They are incredibly dense, and emit methane from the permafrost that lies beneath them.

“These are forests that haven’t burned, not just in decades but probably centuries,” said Char Miller, an environmental professor at Pomona College in Claremont. “Where does that carbon go? It goes up into the atmosphere, it circles all around the globe, it’s affecting all of us. It’s both symbolic and I think really significant. The coldest part of the planet is also exploding in fire.”

In addition, wildfires emit methane, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, according to a study published earlier this summer.

Will wildfire smoke derail the state’s climate goals?

Researchers are increasingly calling attention to how forest fires might be eroding the state’s climate goals, with UCLA scientists describing the state’s efforts as “up in smoke.”

Michael Jerrett, a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, said nearly two decades worth of emission reductions from power plants were threatened by the 2020 fires, which included some of California’s largest and most destructive fires.

“Essentially, the positive impact of all that hard work over almost two decades is at risk of being swept aside by the smoke produced in a single year of record-breaking wildfires,” Jerrett said in a statement.

Some experts say carbon emissions from wildfires are not much of a concern — that the carbon captured by trees, brush and grasses already existed in the atmosphere so its release during fires is part of a natural cycle. As a result, they say, those emissions shouldn’t be considered net contributors to climate change.

“These are distractions from the real issue which is that we need to generate a lot more renewable energy to displace our use of fossil fuels,” Anthony Wexler, director of the Air Quality Research Center at UC Davis, wrote to CalMatters in an email.

On the other hand, some experts say carbon is carbon — and that it all contributes to climate change. Jerrett and the other authors of the UCLA report said wildfire emissions should be a bigger part of California’s climate policy.

For its part, the California Air Resources Board estimates emissions from wildfires, but it doesn’t count them against greenhouse gas targets for 2030. The targets are based only on gases produced by industries, energy, transportation and other human sources.

Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a requirement that the state achieve net-zero emissions as quickly as possible, no later than 2045. That mandate means the state will have to ultimately consider the roles of natural and working lands, said David Clegern, an air board spokesman. However, some wildfires are “part of the natural cycle and should not count against targets,” Clegern wrote in an email.

Clegern said “it’s difficult to know” how much carbon from wildfires “might reduce the effectiveness of the state’s climate programs.”

“That’s because to a certain extent wildfire smoke is part of a natural carbon cycle…We cannot yet draw a bright line to accurately measure that impact,” he said.

Instead, he said scaling back fossil fuels has to be California’s priority.

“California is working on reducing wildfire in an all-hands-on-deck manner, but we won’t really fix the problem until we quit pumping more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere,” Clegern said.

How does the state plan to deal with carbon from fires?

State officials say restoring the health of forests and taking steps to make sure they are more resilient to fires will result in fewer wildfires and fewer climate-changing emissions.

Air board models project that natural and working lands — forests, rangelands, urban green spaces, wetlands and farms — will be a net source of emissions through 2045, while at the same time these lands will experience a decrease in the trees, shrubbery, soil and other natural features that naturally sequester carbon.

That’s why the proper management of these undeveloped lands will be important in the coming two decades. More than half of California’s forestland is managed by the federal government, and the Newsom administration announced in 2021 that it was working with the Biden administration to better manage forests and build fire resilience.

“These lands can be part of the climate solution, but we need to increase our efforts to reduce their emissions and improve their ability to store carbon into the future,” Clegern said.

Burning forests might be complicating the state’s climate goals in other ways, too. California’s carbon offset market has been threatened by out-of-state wildfires, the online publication Grist reported, because the state awards credits to companies that maintain forests elsewhere to store carbon.

What about the impact on smog and soot?

Wildfire smoke is toxic, containing substances such as carbon monoxide and benzene, a carcinogen. Smoke’s tiny particles of soot are considered its most hazardous ingredient, since they can enter airways, lodge in lungs and trigger asthma or heart attacks. Local air quality districts regularly send out warnings in California when wildfires spread smoke, sometimes hundreds of miles from the fires.

Smoke may be negating some of California’s hard-fought clean-air gains. A report last year by the Energy Policy Institute of Chicago found that some California counties were more polluted than they were in 1970. In 2020, more than half of California counties experienced their worst air pollution since 1998, according to the report.

California’s air quality agencies do not have to consider wildfire smoke when they outline plans to attain health standards for air pollutants, such as fine particles and ozone. That’s because fires are considered “exceptional events” under the federal Clean Air Act.

“Even though the frequency of wildfires is increasing, we have no reason to believe that (U.S.) EPA will change how wildfire emissions are treated under the exceptional events process,” Clegern said.

Meanwhile, concern about the impact of smoke on communities is growing. Nitrogen oxides, which form smog, appear to be increasing in rural areas — largely due to wildfires, according to a recent UC Davis study.

“If you go to these remote forests — which are predominantly in the north and the Sierras in the south — what you find is that there’s this large increase,” said study co-author Ian Faloona, a UC Davis bio-micro-meteorologist.

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CalMatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.

James Keefauver left this life on July 21, 2023. He was a loving son, father and grandfather. James is survived by his children, Shelly, Ryan and Amber; grandchildren, Alexander, Sabastian, Ameilya, Bryan, Jesse, Jaimie, Michael, William; brother Ron Keefauver and his Aunt Sarah.

James was preceded in death by his father, Walter Keefauver and mother, Betty Kinsley. He was also preceded by his son, Brandon Keefauver.

James was a Vietnam veteran and a Reserve Police Officer for Arcata Police Department. James became a Humboldt County Sheriff’s Deputy in 1974. James held many positions as a Deputy including the Orick resident Deputy, Petrolia resident Deputy and Field Training Officer, Corporal. James received many awards and commendations during his career. He retired on May 21, 2005, after 31 years of continuous service to the citizens of Humboldt County. Thank you for your service!

James was a long time member of the local H.O.G. group and was an avid Harley Davidson rider.

A Memorial Service for James Keefauver will be on September 8, 2023 at 11 a.m. at The Faith Center on Bay Street, Eureka.

James will be laid to rest at Sunset Memorial Cemetery, Eureka at 3 p.m.

Please join us for a celebration of life for James Keefauver on Saturday, September 9, 2023 from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.at the Humboldt County Peace Officers Hall , located at 2351 Freshwater Rd., Eureka, Ca.

The obituary above was submitted on behalf of James Keefauver’s loved ones. The Lost Coast Outpost runs obituaries of Humboldt County residents at no charge. See guidelines here. Email news@lostcoastoutpost.com.

Fact 1: In Jonathan Swift’s satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels, the eponymous hero visits the floating island of Laputia, where the local astronomers tell him about Mars’s twin moons. “…the innermost is distant from the center of the primary exactly three of his diameters, and the outermost five: the former revolves in the space of ten hours, and the latter in twenty-one and a half.” Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726.

Fact 2: During the close approach between Earth and Mars in 1877, American astronomer Asaph Hall discovered Mars’ two moons using the largest refracting telescope in the world at the time, the 26-inch pride and joy of the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. The moons were subsequently named Phobos and Deimos, meaning “panic” and “dread” respectively. They’re the names of the twin horses pulling Ares’ (Roman Mars) chariot. Phobos and Deimos are probably captured asteroids.

The Laputian astronomers claimed that Phobos and Deimos orbit Mars in 10 and 21.5 hours respectively; the actual values are 7.7 and 30.3 hours. Similarly, the Laputians’ values for the distance from the center of Mars was 3 and 5 Martian diameters for Phobos and Deimos; the correct values are 1.4 and 3.5 diameters. How could Swift have known about Mars’ two moons 151 years before they were discovered, and how could he have made reasonable estimates for their orbits?

First off, he didn’t know. No one did until Hall discovered them with a really large telescope. One possibility is that Swift knew of an incorrect interpretation by Johannes Kepler of an anagram devised by his contemporary, Galileo Galilei. In 1610, Galileo wanted to announce his discovery of the rings of Saturn, but was afraid of being preempted. In those pre-arXiv days, you wrote coded letters about your discoveries to your fellow scientists. Kepler, however, misinterpreted Galileo’s code, believing he was claiming to have found two moons of Mars, an impossibility given the small size of Galileo’s telescope.

Or — equally plausible — Galileo had discovered Jupiter’s four largest satellites, now called the Galilean moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). Earth has one moon, so perhaps (according to Kepler) Mars, which orbits the sun between Earth and Jupiter, has the geometrical mean of 1 and 4, i.e. 2 moons.

And as for the orbital elements for Mars’ moon — the periods and distances from Mars’ center — I think we can safely put Swift’s numbers down to lucky guesses. As blogger and neurologist Steven Novella puts it, “These figures are correct to within an order of magnitude, which is another way of saying that they are wrong.”

Finally, a shout-out to Asaph Hall’s wife, Angeline Stickney, who was instrumental in convincing her reluctant husband to spend time looking for moons of Mars during one of Earth’s closest approaches. In her honor, the largest of Phobos’ crater, about six miles across, is named “Stickney.”

(Thanks to Total Recall, starring our once-time governator, Arnie, for the title of this piece.)

David George Gordon, author of the new book, Heaven of the Half Shell, joins the show to discuss all things oysters. From indigenous cultivation to the oyster’s role in settling the West, the oyster has always been an integral part of local diets and has helped to shape our history. Now, climate change and invasive species put our oysters at risk. Come learn more about this lovely mollusk!

David will be in town for an oyster-filled weekend the second weekend in September The first event will be held Friday, September 8 at 7 p.m. at Northtown Books and the second event (featuring oysters!) will be on Sunday, September 10th at 4 p.m. at Wrangletown Cider in Arcata.

I must have been a very small child when I heard adults sitting around the kitchen table at 816 Harris Street talking of the Coyote Flat killings and saying that Jack Ryan, the man serving life-imprisonment for the murders, was innocent. Both my parents had spent their childhood at Showers Pass near Coyote Flat. Surely they knew Jack Ryan and also his half brother, Walter David. The murders of Henry Sweet and Carmen Wagner took place in 1925, two years before I was born, but, due to the many unexplained and questionable events surrounding the case, were still a topic of conversation when I was a child. A jury had found Jack Ryan innocent in 1926; then, two years later, Ryan confessed to the murders. I imagine there were others, besides my family, who questioned the circumstances surrounding Ryan’s confession.

In 1981, when one of Jack Ryan’s accusers admitted before her death that she had lied in court, investigator Richard Walton decided to find out what really happened on Coyote Flat in 1925. Walton spent ten years searching for the truth. He interviewed more than 400 people, including the sheriff ’s deputies who had witnessed District Attorney Stephen Metzler’s aggressive interrogation of Ryan, driving the young man to confess to murders he did not commit. Richard Walton concluded that Henry Sweet was killed over a bootlegging debt and that Carmen Wagner just happened to be in the killer’s way. On the other hand, one wonders if perhaps Henry and Carmen had stumbled upon a whiskey still while hunting and camping on Coyote Flat, and the bootleggers had felt they had to silence them.

An April 15, 1996 Los Angeles Times newspaper article on file at the Historical Society states that Sweet’s body was found near a cabin close to Coyote Flat. This was the Wagner cabin where the Phillips side of my family lived while building a house on their homestead just down the hill below Showers Rock. Several years ago, my husband, Ken, and I were fortunate enough to join a short caravan of family members interested in Showers Pass history. Erwin Fredrickson, a longtime family friend with a ranch at Iaqua, obtained permission from the Fort Baker Ranch, which now owns the Showers Pass and Coyote Flat property, for us to go in with a guide who had keys to the gates. We were shown where, back in 1925, Henry Sweet’s body had been found with a bullet in his head next to the Wagner cabin. Henry Sweet’s Roadster had been parked nearby loaded with camping gear and with the carcass of a deer tied to the running board. Sweet’s companion, Carmen Wagner, was missing. A volunteer posse of 40 men searched the mountains near Coyote Flat. Carmen’s body was found in a shallow grave. She had been shot twice, once in the head and once in the throat.

Immediately after each body was discovered the areas had been searched for clues. None were found. Jack Ryan and his half brother, Walter David, young half-Indian men who lived in the area, were arrested for the murders. Not until after the arrest was Carmen’s watch “discovered” in Jack Ryan’s chaps that had previously been searched and found empty. Shell casings supposedly from Ryan’s gun were found near Carmen’s grave. Jack’s half brother, Walter David, was released, as he had an alibi, but Jack Ryan had no alibi and went on trial for five weeks, the longest trial in the history of Humboldt County. The clumsy effort to frame Jack Ryan did not sway the jury. On March 12, 1926, Jack Ryan was acquitted.

Stephen Earl Metzler ran for District Attorney in 1927 on the platform that he would do away with the “dry squads” — authorities who smashed hidden whiskey stills. This plan would serve Metzler well, as, according to the Los Angeles Times newspaper article, he was a successful and powerful bootlegger. Metzler also vowed to solve the Coyote Flat murder within two years, or he would resign the position of District Attorney. It seems likely that he wanted the murders solved according to his own plans. When Jack Ryan’s brother, Walter David, was found brutally murdered in October 1927, Metzler did not investigate the case. Instead, he began sending letters to Ryan, warning that if Ryan did not confess, he would end up like his brother.

Additionally, Metzler arranged for a booby-trapped tripwire that would fire a rifle at Jack Ryan when he used his regularly traveled trail. Metzler also prevailed upon a woman (and may have paid her) to get Ryan drunk and elicit a confession to the murders, but this plan failed. Then as she was driving Ryan over a bridge, two gunmen fired three shots at the car. Ryan jumped from the bridge into the river and got away.

On June 12, 1928, Metzler paid another woman $100 to swear that Ryan had raped her thirteen-year-old daughter. Ryan was arrested and two other women came forward with similar charges against Ryan. In September, after an all-night interrogation by Metzler, Ryan appeared in court on the rape charges and shocked everyone by confessing to the murders of Henry Sweet and Carmen Wagner. Ryan was sentenced to life in prison and within ten hours transported to San Quentin, where he stayed for twenty-five years.

Eventually, Metzler was convicted of bootlegging and went to prison for fifteen months. When released, he used his political influence in Washington D.C. to win a pardon from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Metzler continued to oppose all Ryan’s petitions for parole. Why? And what about Jack Ryan’s half-brother, Walter David, who was found heinously murdered as a threatening example to Jack Ryan? Metzler secretly paid three women to testify against Ryan. It’s possible that he also paid someone to kill Carmen Wagner, Henry Sweet and Walter David. As District Attorney, Metzler had used the women’s testimony to force Ryan to claim he was guilty of the murders. Why would he do all of this unless he had something to cover up?

Ryan spent 25 years in the San Quentin State Prison, where he was a model inmate and worked in the cobbler shop. In 1953, at the age of 50, he was paroled with the condition that he could not return to Humboldt County. Ryan moved to Redding, where he worked on highway projects. He became friends with a family in Burney and helped the grandmother raise her grandchildren when they were orphaned. He is buried in this family’s graveyard.

Due to Richard Walton’s tenacious investigation, Jack Ryan was exonerated in 1996 when Governor Pete Wilson pardoned him posthumously. In his pardon, the Governor said, “We must remember that a just society may not always achieve justice, but it must constantly strive for justice.” The Governor quoted the philosopher Francis Bacon, “If we do not maintain justice, justice will not maintain us.” Governor Wilson continued, “Therefore, so that justice is maintained, I grant Jack Ryan posthumously a pardon based on innocence.”

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The story above was originally printed in the Summer 2008 issue of The Humboldt Historian, a journal of the Humboldt County Historical Society, and is reprinted here with permission. The Humboldt County Historical Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to archiving, preserving and sharing Humboldt County’s rich history. You can become a member and receive a year’s worth of new issues of The Humboldt Historian at this link.