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Martina Scarfia | Photo via Facebook, used with permission.

Martina Scarfia, a 25-year-old Eureka woman who graduated from College of the Redwoods’ nursing school Saturday, died at Moonstone Beach Sunday afternoon despite rescue efforts from concerned onlookers and the U.S. Coast Guard.

While out surfing, Scarfia experienced an unknown medical emergency and lost consciousness, her older sister, Asia Autumn Scarfia-Ward, told the Outpost on Monday.

As first reported by Kym Kemp on Redheaded Blackbelt, the Coast Guard and other agencies were dispatched to Moonstone Beach Sunday afternoon in response to a 911 call regarding a surfer who’d been pulled from the ocean.

Trinidad resident Larisa King was at the beach with her husband at the time, and in an email to the Outpost she said that they and other beachgoers attempted to help Scarfia, who appeared unconscious.

“My husband and I saw what happened and assisted with contacting 911,” King said in her email, adding, “She was ultimately airlifted by coast guard helicopter after a period of approximately 30 minutes of chest compressions.”

Scarfia-Ward confirmed in a Facebook post this morning that her sister passed away Sunday. 

“My beautiful baby sister took her last breath yesterday,” Scarfia-Ward wrote. (She gave the Outpost permission to share her message with the public.) “I am so proud of everything she has done and the amazing person she has become. She graduated from Nursing School with honors on Saturday. We celebrated as a family and paddled out together one last time until paradise. I love you Martina Scarfia.”

Scarfia was born in Nebraska but raised here in Humboldt County since 2000, her sister told the Outpost.

We have requested more information from the Coast Guard and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. We will update this post as that information becomes available.

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UPDATE, 1:55 p.m.: 

From the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:

On May 14, 2023, at about 3:51 p.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to Moonstone Beach near Trinidad for the report of a surfer in distress.

According to witnesses, two women were surfing in the ocean when one of them, later identified as 25-year-old Martina Marie Scarfia of Eureka, reportedly became unattached from the surfboard and was overcome by waves. Another beachgoer was notified of the emergency and swam out to rescue Scarfia. She was recovered from the water and transported to a local hospital via helicopter by the U.S. Coast Guard Sector Humboldt Bay. Scarfia was later pronounced deceased.

An autopsy is in the process of being scheduled. Cause and manner of death remain under investigation, pending the results of the autopsy.  

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CORRECTION: This post has been updated to reflect that Scarfia lived in Eureka rather than Arcata.

Press release from the Humboldt County Department of Health and Human Services:

There are lots of reasons to celebrate in May — Mental Health Awareness, CalFresh Awareness and Caregiver Appreciation, just to name a few.

On Tuesday, May 16, join your friends and neighbors for the Take Action for Mental Health Walk. Participants will meet up at the Hope Center, 2933 H St. in Eureka at 11:30 a.m. and walk to the Humboldt County Courthouse and back. Wear lime green to show your support. Snacks will be provided.

On Friday, May 19, the Wellness and Connection Barbecue is scheduled to take place at the Jefferson Community Park, 1000 B St. in Eureka, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Hot dogs and vegetarian options will be provided.

Humboldt County Department of Health & Human Services (DHHS) Behavioral Health Director Emi Botzler-Rodgers said these community events go a long way toward ending stigma.

“Mental health is part of a whole person experience and just like physical illness, mental illness can occur at various times throughout all our lives,” she said. “We as a community have a responsibility to respond to those with mental illness, our friends, family members, neighbors and ourselves, from a place of kindness and compassion.”

One in every four Americans experiences some form of mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Mental health issues affect people regardless of gender, race, age, sexual orientation, social or economic status.

Many pregnant people and new parents also experience mental health challenges. According to the California Department of Public Health, one in five California women has symptoms of depression during or after pregnancy. Pregnant people and new parents who need assistance can call the 24-hour National Maternal Health Hotline at 1-833-9-HELP4MOMS.

If you or someone you know needs help, contact the local Behavioral Health 24-hour crisis line at 707-445-7715, toll-free at 1-888-849-5728 or call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.

For a full list of events, visit http://humboldtgov.org/behavioralhealth.

To learn more about CalFresh and if you may be eligible, visit benefitscal.com, https://humboldtgov.org/CalFresh or call the DHHS Social Services Call Center at 1-877-410-8809.

To learn more about becoming a Resource Family, formerly known as a Foster Family, call 707-499-3410 or email DHHSFoster@co.humboldt.ca.us.

This month Californians worried about the cost of housing were offered the rarest of gifts: a glimmer of hope.

New numbers released by the Newsom administration show that California added homes to its housing stock at a faster clip than any time since the Great Recession — 123,350 additional units, or an increase of 0.85%.

Over that same period, the state’s population declined, marking the third year in a row that it’s fallen from one new year to the next.

Put those two numbers together and a surprising statistic emerges: There are now more homes per person — 3,770 units for every 10,000 Californians — than there have been since at least 1991.

For a state that has long suffered from too many people trying to cram themselves into too few homes, that’s an encouraging number at first glance.

It’s also the kind of news that might lead a person to wonder: Does this California exodus mean the state’s perennial housing shortage is finally coming to an end?

The long answer is “it’s complicated.”

Though many analysts have tried, no consensus exists on just how many more homes the state would need to build (or how many more people would need to leave) before we can call an end to the crisis and start to see rents and home prices fall within reach of working and middle class Californians.

But the short answer is “almost definitely, no.”

Much of the outflow of residents is itself driven by the high cost of living. In March, the median price of an existing single family California home was $791,490, more than twice the national median of $375,700.

“When house prices go up, people leave,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said as much in a recent interview with UCLA’s Blueprint, naming the cost of living as the “principal driver” and its chronic shortage of homes “our original sin.”

And while experts don’t agree on exactly how much additional housing the state might need to attain an ill-defined “affordability,” they do agree on this much: it’s a whole lot more.

Just how big is California’s housing shortage?

In 2000, a report issued by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development estimated that the state would need to build 220,000 additional units each year for two decades to meet the needs of what was then still a growing population.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Even last year, a relative high-water mark for home construction, the total was roughly 100,000 units below that goal.

The department published another estimate in 2018 urging 180,000 units per year through 2025. And last year, in putting together housing goals for regions across the state, the department’s total prescription added up to 2.5 million new homes over the next eight years (or 315,000 per year).

The administration acknowledged the state’s sluggish population growth in its latest proposed budget for next year, which gauged the need at 148,000 new units per year.

One of the reasons these estimates vary is because there’s no single definition of a “housing shortage.”

In 2015, for example, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, an agency that serves as a think tank for state legislators, framed the issue with the following question: How many units would the state have had to build between 1980 and 2010 to keep the median value of an owner-occupied home increasing at the same rate as the rest of the nation, rather than skyrocketing so much higher, as it has for the last half century?

That definition of the state’s shortage led the office to estimate 210,000 each year. Alas, the state has only hit that annual mark five times since 1980 — and not once since 1990.

A year later, the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, put out its own figure — 3.5 million homes by 2025. Newsom took that eye-popping figure as a rallying cry during his first gubernatorial run, when the then-candidate vowed that California would reach that total by the end of his second term. He’s since scaled the pledge back to 2.5 million, a goal the state is still unlikely to reach.

McKinsey based its estimate on its own version of the state’s housing problem: the number of new units required to bring California’s houses-to-people ratio in line with that of the rest of the country.

The common thread behind all these estimates is they are all very, very big. And whichever shortfall estimate you choose, the state has never hit the mark.

A moving target

But the numbers have been moving in a more encouraging direction in recent years.

The totals since 2020: roughly 430,000 new homes and some 821,000 fewer Californians competing to reside within them. That necessarily narrows the gap, however we define it, said Hans Johnson, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

If the shortage is relatively modest, he said, and “if we continue like this for another decade, with very slow population growth or essentially no population growth, and with fairly robust housing construction, then it should start to eat into that lack of housing,” he said.

But if the state needs to hit McKinsey-esque levels of new production, counted in the millions of units, “we’re still a long, long way off,” he added.

That’s in part because the size of the hole is so large. But it’s also because the shortfall is “a moving target,” explained Len Kiefer, deputy chief economist at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. The building industry booms and busts. Young Californians grow old enough to live out on their own while older ones begin to die off. And people’s housing wants and needs change, too.

How COVID worsened the housing crisis

A particularly dramatic driver of such change: the pandemic.

Eager to keep COVID at bay and seeking more space to work from home, Californians dumped their roommates when they could and sought out places to live on their own, resulting in a great “spreading out,” as analysts at the Public Policy Institute of California put it. The trend toward fewer people living in each home is nationwide and long term. Over the last 40 years, the number of people living alone doubled across the country. But the pandemic put the trend on overdrive.

That worsened the state’s housing shortage. Even if the total number of Californians continues its gradual downward drift, more homes are needed to house the roughly 38 million sticking around.

Starting in June 2020, the median price of an existing single-family home shot up from $626,170 to a peak of $900,170 in May 2022, according to data compiled by the California Association of Realtors. That’s an increase of 44% in less than two years.

Since then high interest rates have brought California’s housing inflation back down to earth slightly. But the median price in March was still 29% above where it was three years earlier.

Whether Californians will begin clustering together again as COVID concerns ease is an open question. But there’s no sign that’s happening yet. By the beginning of 2023, with the worst of the pandemic presumably behind us, the number of Californians per household hit a record low of 2.77.

A shrinking population, driven largely by outward migration, provides an escape value for some of that extra pressure, said Meyer, the USC demographer. But based on analysis he and his colleagues conducted for the California Association of Realtors, it’s easy to imagine demand for homes staying strong, given how large the millennial generation is and how many are now reaching a baby-having, roommate-jettisoning age.

Plus, if the California exodus is a cure to the state’s housing shortage, it’s also a symptom, said Dowell.

“The ones who are older are leaving because they’re (homeowners) cashing in their gains,” he said of the nearly 8 million ex-Californians who exited the state last decade.”The young people who are leaving, we now think, are leaving because they can’t buy a house here.”

And even if those departures do ultimately alleviate the state’s scarcity of homes, it’s not the solution to the problem that anyone should want, adds Johnson from Public Policy Institute of California.

“I don’t think any of us who have been advocating for building more housing in California — to help alleviate the shortage of housing we’ve had and to improve affordability in the state — thought that the best path was just to have the state start to depopulate.”

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

I was born October 5, 1942, in Detroit, Mich., to my dear parents Oscar Thomas Nelson and Dorothy Ruff Stein Nelson. I have taken great joy in my two younger sisters: Cynthia Rocchi (John; Waterbury, Conn.) and Suzanne Dickson (Robert, dec.; Westland, Mich.). In Detroit, I met and married my beloved life partner and dearest friend Richard (Rick) Botzler in November 1963 at Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church with a large group of family and friends attending our wedding.

Over the years, Rick and I have felt fortunate to raise five responsible and caring children: Emilisa Botzler-Rodgers (Jimmy); Tin Botzler; Dorothy Davis; Sarah Kennon (Tim); and Thomas Botzler (Lisa). Rick and I have been blessed with several dear grandchildren and great-grandchildren who have been an incomparable delight to us: Ashley De La Concepcion; Tim Kennon, Jr. (Abbey); Thomas Kennon (Jenny); Taylor Kennon; Katie Ogle; Joshua Ogle (Erin); Karie Partridge (Dexter); Jade Marie Newell (Darryl, div.); Tyler A. Blackburn; Aaron M. Blackburn; Tiana Rodgers; Olivia Botzler-Washington; Nathan Botzler; P.J. Rodgers; Nelson Botzler-Washington; Andrew Davis; Kali Sky, Claire Marie, Harlem and Milo; Lilly; Olivia; Adeline; Sawyer; John Roy, Amy and Cecelia; as well as numerous cousins, nieces, and nephews.

Over the years, I have enjoyed special friendships at Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church & School (Detroit, Mich.); at Divine Shepherd Lutheran Church (Ann Arbor, Mich.); at Grace Good Shepherd Lutheran-Presbyterian Church (McKinleyville, CA); in the Arcata Interfaith Gospel Choir (Humboldt County); in the Humboldt County Council on Adoptable Children; at the Humboldt County Office of Education and at Humboldt State University; in the Bilingual McKinleyville Ecoclub and at Morris Spanish Immersion School (as a Grandparent Volunteer); in Peace Corps Mexico; in Jalpan de Serra, Querétaro, Mexico; and in the Latino community in Humboldt County. My special friends have included: Óscar Estrada and family, Querétaro, Mexico; Jo Ann Marsh, West Bloomfield, Michigan; Sue Lee Mossman, Trinidad; Mary Nethery, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Heidi Nieden, Neuendettelsau (Nürnberg) Germany; Ariko Sekine, Tokyo, Japan; and Marisol Madriz, McKinleyville. I have felt deeply grateful for the care, concern, and commitment of my loving parents; for each of my remarkable grandparents; and for my many dear aunts, uncles, and cousins. I am grateful to Holt Adoption Services (Holt International) and Lutheran Children’s Friends Society for their support in our adoptions.

I earned degrees in Education at Wayne State University (B.A., 1964; Detroit, Mich.); at Humboldt State University (M.A., 1979; Arcata); and at the University of Southern California (Ph.D., 1989; Los Angeles). I worked as a Curriculum and Staff Development Resource Teacher in Multicultural Education at the Humboldt County Office of Education in Eureka and later as a Professor at Humboldt State University in Arcata, teaching courses in Multicultural Education, Education in Society, Pedagogy, and Teaching in Higher Education. I also served as the Interim Associate Dean for HSU’s College of Professional Studies in 2006-2007. After retiring from HSU in December 2007, Rick and I served as Peace Corps Volunteers for two years in Querétaro, Mexico (2009-2011).

Throughout my personal life, I have firmly believed that God’s Love is revealed in the life of Jesus Christ and that I must endeavor always to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly” (Micah 6:8). Both personally and professionally, I have been a strong advocate on behalf of children and youth. I have sought to strengthen the educational opportunities and life chances for all and to encourage international friendships, peace, and understanding. I have valued multiculturalism, multilingualism, and the study of world religions. I have been committed to promoting respect for diverse cultures, languages, and religions. I have supported youth-leadership programs focused on sustainable development based on the belief that well-educated and fair-minded youth can have a lasting impact in solving environmental, social, economic, and political problems in their communities and world.

In 2020 I was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP) and experienced it slowly depriving me of my capacity to live a normal life. Finally, as an octogenarian who experienced a rich and full life, with no significant unmet goals, I departed this life on April 16, 2023. I am grateful to my family, friends, medical support teams, and CurePSP for their support.

A family graveside internment was conducted for me at Trinidad Cemetery in Trinidad. Those who wish may make memorial contributions in my memory to the Humboldt Area Foundation (HAF) Youth Leadership Fund, CurePSP, Hospice of Humboldt, or to a charity of your choice.

A celebration of life will be held for Sally at the Moonstone Beach House, on Sunday, May 28, 1 to 5 p.m.

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I’ll be lying on the sofa in the evening, shot glass of Jägermeister alongside, reading the latest story de jour — usually something sciency (my love) — and some factoid will call out to me. Here’s the latest bunch:

The right answer

Cunningham’s Law states that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer, since people are more interested in criticizing others than helping them.

Homestead Act

After the 1862 Homestead Act, which gave settlers title to a quarter square mile of land if they remained for five years, over half quit before their time was up, victims of drought, debt, loneliness and “prairie madness.”

Military spending

The US spends more money on its military than the next ten biggest military powers in the world, while maintaining over 800 bases worldwide.

Carbon emissions

The clothing industry accounts for 10% of global carbon emissions, and is responsible for 20% of the world’s wastewater. (Airlines contribute 2.4% of global carbon emissions.)

BP

The American Heart Association recommends that everyone should aim for blood pressure below 130/80.

Diabetes

Over a quarter of 65+ year olds in the U.S. have diabetes, usually type 2.

Waistlines

Post-menopausal women having normal (between 18.5 and 24.9) Body Mass Index with waistlines over 35 inches have a one-third greater risk of death from cancer or heart disease than those with under 35 inch waists.

Greyfiveys, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Fives

The height of the Washington Monument is 555 feet 5 inches; its base is 55 feet square; the windows are 500 feet from the base. 

Illegal crypto

According to CNBC, the volume of illicit cryptocurrency transactions in 2021 was less than 0.1% of all transactions.

One less child

Emissions savings in “equivalent” tons of carbon dioxide:

• going car-free = 2.3
• avoiding one round trip across the Atlantic = 1.5
• eating a plant-based diet = 0.8
• drying clothes in air = 0.2
• having one fewer child = 60

Printing

In the 45 years following the publication of the Gutenberg Bible in 1455, the number of books created on printing presses in Europe exceeded all hand-copied books up to that time (over 20 million).

Voyager 1

The most distant human-made object, Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, is over 15 billion miles away. The spacecraft’s signals are increasingly weak as its three plutonium batteries lose power—with luck, it will keep transmitting until 2030.

Psychedelics and God

In a 2019 study involving nearly 4,000 participants who ingested psilocybin, LSD or ayahuasca, more than two-thirds of those who identified as atheist before the experience no longer identified as atheist afterwards.

This past February, Suzanne Ward’s doctor removed a growth from her eardrum and sent it off to the lab for analysis. (That’s not her real name; we’re using a pseudonym to protect her privacy.) 

Ward was anxiously awaiting results when, on March 4, she received a letter from Traci Ober, area risk manager for Providence St. Joseph and Providence Redwood Memorial Hospital. A courier driving patient pathology samples through severe winter weather had been in an accident eight days earlier, the letter said. The injured driver had been taken to the nearest hospital. Their vehicle wound up in a ravine, along with all the patient samples they’d been hauling.

“We believe your pathology specimen may be located in the courier vehicle at the bottom of the ravine,” the letter to Ward read. “If your specimen was preserved in formalin and the container is intact, it is possible, once the vehicle is rescued, the Hospital can perform the ordered testing.”

That never happened.

Ward didn’t hear anything more from Providence for nearly three weeks. When finally she did, via another letter from Ober on March 27, the news wasn’t good. A third-party retrieval company had gone to the site of the crash, accompanied by a member of the hospital’s “Laboratory Leadership Team,” and together they “spent the day attempting to locate the pathology specimens from the vehicle” without success.

To this day, neither Ward nor her doctor know what type of growth he removed from her eardrum, and because he excised the entire thing, there’s nothing left to be biopsied and analyzed.

“All I have are pictures of what he removed,” she told the Outpost in a recent phone conversation. She said her doctor was beside himself when he learned, after the fact, that her biopsied tissue had been sent south, along with other patient samples, to a lab in Santa Rosa, where they would have been processed and placed onto microscope slides before being sent back to Eureka for diagnosis. 

With Hwy. 101 closed due to winter weather conditions on Feb. 24, the day of the crash, the courier, who was contracted through a national medical logistics company called MedSpeed, had taken the narrow and remote State Route 36.

Chuck Petty, the former pathology manager at Providence’s Eureka lab, said numerous other patients must have been seriously impacted by this incident.

“I can’t imagine that there were just pathology specimens in this load, because they were taking blood specimens and culture specimens every day in the same courier runs,” he said in a recent phone interview. 

Those types of specimens can be collected again fairly easily — by redrawing a patient’s blood or re-swabbing a wound. But other types of samples require invasive procedures, “like a lung biopsy or something deep in the body,” making it “a major deal for the patient to go through to be re-biopsied,” Petty said. And in cases like Ward’s, where there’s nothing left to re-biopsy, the only thing to do is watch and wait, which can be risky.

“Consider this: It could be a malignant melanoma, which could go into the bloodstream and then go throughout the body,” he said. “So if they missed a malignant melanoma, it could be disastrous for the patient to just watch and wait.” 

Ward still doesn’t understand how this could have happened. 

“None of it jives,” she said. “How can [my sample] be lost? How does this happen?” 

Until recently, all of the hospital’s pathology lab work, including microbiology and histology, was performed locally, at a laboratory located across the street on Harrison Avenue. But over the past two years, under the leadership of executives at Providence’s headquarters in Renton, Wash., laboratory services for St. Joseph and Redwood Memorial hospitals have systematically gotten outsourced to Providence-managed facilities in Napa and Sonoma counties. 

Former St. Joseph Hospital employees interviewed by the Outpost say the February car accident that caused so many patient samples to be lost was a predictable risk under these new procedures, and they say this centralizing of services with distant health care facilities has led to increased turnaround times and lower quality lab work, which can have major implications for patient outcomes.

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Providence, which merged with St. Joseph Health System in the summer of 2016, has grown into one of the largest not-for-profit health care systems in the country. It now operates 51 hospitals and more than 800 clinics across the western U.S. In each of the last two years Providence’s operating revenues exceeded $27 billion, and according to the New York Times, the organization runs its own venture capital fund with $10 billion in investments while avoiding more than $1 billion a year in taxes through its nonprofit status.

Rod Hochman, the president and CEO of Providence Health & Services, told an industry publication in 2021 that “‘nonprofit health care’ is a misnomer.”

“It’s tax-exempt healthcare. It still makes profits,” he said, adding that he considers shareholders his community.

Unfortunately for that community, the organization’s financial outlook has taken a bad turn recently. Providence posted a net loss of $6.1 billion last year, making for an operating margin of negative 8.8 percent. Last month the organization’s credit rating was downgraded for the third time in three weeks.

Providence is not an outlier in its management style. In recent years, the health care industry has undergone unprecedented consolidation, both in California and across the country. The California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) says this trend harms consumers by creating higher health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs. And it’s worse in places like Humboldt County. 

“When rural hospitals are absorbed by large health systems, neither their financial stability nor performance are improved,” CHCF market analyst Kristof Stremikis observed in 2020. 

In emailed replies to questions from the Outpost, Darian Harris, chief executive of Providence in Humboldt County, said the February car crash was the first time lab specimens have been lost in such a way, and he added that Providence “exhausted all feasible opportunities to retrieve these lab specimens on behalf of our patients.” 

“This included, but was not limited to, securing a specialized third-party retrieval company to support in our efforts. … [and the use of] specialized equipment to support an extended search,” Harris said.

“We are deeply sorry for any interruption of care the courier’s car accident may have caused our patients and their families,” he continued. “We immediately contacted patients informing them and provided guidance on engaging their providers to next steps for their care.” (This despite the fact that it was eight days after the incident before Ward received notice and nearly three more weeks before she was informed that the samples remained missing.)

Harris did not say how many patients’ samples were lost and, citing patient privacy, he said, “[W]e can’t share the specifics of the tailored way providers advised patients of the most appropriate next steps for their continued care.” 

As for the decision to consolidate lab work to facilities located several hours away, Harris described it as a centralization within the “broader Providence family of organizations,” a move that “allows us to keep access local by partnering with our sister facilities in Northern California in lieu of patients having to leave our community for this service.” 

In other words, if the lab work didn’t get sent four hours south, patients would likely have to make that drive themselves. But why is that the case when lab work was performed locally for decades?

According to Harris, the decision was made “in response to the chronic workforce shortage of caregivers with the specialized expertise in this lab modality, specifically in rural and remote areas across the country like Humboldt.”

Petty says that’s simply not true. “The pathology department was completely staffed until January of 2022 when I retired,” he said.  And the reason he retired when he did, he said, is because it had become clear to him that Providence wanted to close St. Joe’s pathology unit. “I told my manager several times, ‘I will not stick around to watch you dismantle my department,’” he recalled

‘I will not stick around to watch you dismantle my department.’
-former pathology manager Chuck Petty

Petty, who began working at St. Joseph Hospital in 1981, said consolidation is a fundamental component of Providence’s corporate-style management, and the writing was on the wall from the beginning.

“When Providence bought St. Joseph in the summer of 2016, all the managers went to an online seminar, and [Providence executives] stated at the time that their model was to centralize all services that could be centralized — so, laboratory and other things like that, that don’t have to be done onsite,” Petty said. “So we knew at some point that was going to happen.”

The Outpost also spoke with a former employee of Coastal Pathology Medical Associates, which long operated out of the Humboldt Central Laboratory on Harrison Avenue, across the street from St. Joseph Hospital. That’s where pathology specimens were sent for nearly 40 years — until last summer. The employee asked to remain anonymous to avoid professional repercussions, so we’ll refer to her as Jane Wilson.

She remembers that the Providence-St. Joseph merger was sold as a “strategic alignment,” but in her view it was “100 percent a takeover” by Providence, and things at the hospital have since changed for the worse.

“I was there when it was [run by] the Sisters of St. Joseph,” Wilson said. “It wasn’t perfect but I look back on those days now as being idyllic. The sisters — we still had nuns up here — they actually cared about the community and the employees and the physicians. … We always had nuns on the board. They weren’t here full time … but they absolutely were here every month for board meetings and you felt their presence. They’d say, ‘We can’t just dump homeless people. Can we come up with a solution to not dump them on the street?’” Wilson said the nuns functioned as organization’s conscience, “like Jiminy Cricket.”

Wilson said there weren’t any alarming changes immediately after Providence took over, but after a couple of years things started to shift. First it was small stuff, procedures related to IT and purchasing, for example. Then the signs were changed, adding “Providence” to the front of the hospital, and staff was told that the hospital would no longer have a CEO but rather a president.

The last time Providence negotiated a new contract with the pathology group, Wilson said, compensation got tied to turnaround time, which was a change. But initially she wasn’t overly worried.

“It was like, okay, we’ve always had 24- to 48-hour turnaround times, so, sure, we can do that. And I’m not kidding, like, a month later they [Providence] were like, ‘We’re going to be consolidating the laboratories.’” This meant that histology would no longer be performed by someone in the local lab; instead Wilson would have to wait for samples to be shipped to Santa Rosa, thinly sliced and placed on microscope slides before getting sent back to Eureka for diagnosis.

To her this made no sense. “I’m like, ‘How does that work? How do I meet turnaround time?’” she said. “There’s literally no way for me to maintain a 24- to 48-hour turnaround time if that [sample] is getting driven down to Santa Rosa once a day.’” 

‘Waiting 24 hours to get results is hard; waiting a whole week is not good. Waiting a week is kind of soul defying.’

She also sympathized with patients. “I’ve had a breast biopsy before,” Wilson said. “Waiting 24 hours to get the results is hard; waiting a whole week is not good. Waiting a week is kind of soul defying.” 

Harris, in his emailed statements, defended the new system. “Our turnaround times relative to these services are within industry standards,” he said. “All services we provide to our community have the patients’ best interest in mind and we are driven by providing the highest level of care to our patients.”

He added, “The care that is currently being offered by Providence in Humboldt is a product of creative partnerships and innovative thinking to advance care locally.”

Petty, on the other hand, argued that Providence’s consolidation model may work well in metropolitan areas like Seattle and the North Bay, places where Providence has several hospitals within a 50- to 100-mile radius. But it hasn’t worked out for Humboldt County, with its remote location and often unreliable roads.

“It just didn’t work the same as they expected based on their model of sending [specimens] to a centralized laboratory,” he said.

Like Wilson, he had a great relationship with the hospital’s previous owners, the Southern California-based Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange, which, like Providence, is a Catholic nonprofit health group. But Petty was concerned about the new management.

As with Wilson, Petty said nothing too alarming happened during the first few years after Providence took over, “but in the last two years they really started moving things. So, in June of 2021, the first part of the laboratory to move was microbiology. They moved it to Napa, Queen of the Valley Hospital.”

An outside courier service was hired to make two runs per day between Eureka and Napa, and according to Petty, the three Eureka-based clinical laboratory microbiologists, who until then had been under contract with Providence, were given a choice between moving into “a regular clinical laboratory scientist job in the hospital” or being laid off. It wasn’t much of a choice.

“They had been working strictly as microbiologists for so many years they felt uncomfortable going back into the general labs,” Petty said. One of the three chose to retire and the other two got laid off, all but obliterating the hospital’s microbiology unit. (A single employee remained, tasked with setting up cultures and streaking them onto plates, according to Petty.)

Next to go were the histology technicians, the lab workers tasked with preparing thin slices of tissue to be analyzed by pathologists.

Julia Minton is a labor organizer and member representative with the National Union of Healthcare Workers, which represents employees at St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka and Redwood Memorial Hospital in Fortuna as well as workers at Queen of the Valley Medical Center in Napa and Petaluma Valley Hospital in Sonoma County.

‘This is a pattern of consolidation. … It’s happening across the whole industry but especially with Providence. It’s part of their business plan.’

“The sense from the histology techs [in Eureka] since early in the pandemic was, ‘They’re winding this department down,’” Minton said, though she added that the employees were never told that directly. “The concern there was that this is a pattern of consolidation of services. It’s happening across the whole industry but especially with Providence. It’s part of their business plan.”

Early in the pandemic, the histology techs saw the writing on the wall, according to Minton. “They felt like their employer didn’t want to fill [vacant] positions. I’ve seen this time and time again, where Providence says, ‘It’s the labor market.’ And there are genuine issues across the industry, but they’re also not doing due diligence to fill these positions.”

Petty said that after he retired last January, both of his remaining histology techs went out on stress leave. “That’s when the short-staffing started,” he said.

One of those former histology techs, who we’ll call Iris, told the Outpost that hospital management repeatedly denied that they had any intention of closing the lab, right up to the day when the remaining techs were notified that they were being laid off.

“They kept claiming they had no intention to shut down the lab, but all of the decisions being made pointed in that direction,” said Iris, who worked at the hospital for seven years. “They wouldn’t replace equipment; they wouldn’t replace staff; they wouldn’t invest in the department. … Long before we ever went on medical leave they were clearly divesting in the department.” 

Petty said this trend is what convinced him to give his boss an ultimatum, saying he refused to stand by while his department was dismantled. Asked why he felt it was so important to take that stand, Petty replied, “Well, because I saw the quality declining.”

He’s been to the labs in Napa and Sonoma counties. Napa’s is state-of-the-art, he said, and Sonoma County’s is decent, “but it’s very small, and their ability to absorb our workload and still maintain good turnaround time seemed questionable.”

According to Petty, Providence didn’t provide any new staff members at the Santa Rosa lab when Humboldt County began sending its pathology samples down there. Once the work shifted to that lab, Petty said, “turnaround time went from 24 to 48 hours to five to seven days. And the quality went down.”

How does lower-quality lab work impact patients?

“Well,” Petty said, “potentially it could have an effect on the pathologist’s ability to diagnose a cancer because the quality of the specimen preparation was not good. The stains were not as clear as they used to be because they were putting a lot more tissue through without changing the stains as frequently, so they would get depleted after time. It was just not good pathology. [But] it was good economically for the parent organization because they were saving money on the staff.”

Wilson said she finds the whole situation sad. She ran down a list of St. Joe specialists lost to attrition over the nearly 20 years since she moved to Humboldt County. “We had three nephrologists; they have none now. We had two rheumatologists; now, none. I think we had three or four more general surgeons. They’re down to one neurologist. They had four or five OB/GYNs; now they basically have [Dr. Deepak] Stokes.” 

The number of pathologists and oncologists has also declined, and many of the hospital’s specialist positions are now filled with locums, a situation Wilson characterized as “this revolving door of semi-incompetents,” adding that these temporary workers rarely stay in the area for longer than six months.

“I don’t think they care that we’re losing specialists,” Wilson said of Providence. “I think it’s revenue optimization. … I think they want us to be a feeder hospital to Santa Rosa. I don’t think they want specialty care up here at all. … They can just basically let us go to the dark ages.”

Bob Just, chief executive of Providence Medical Group Northern California, strenuously denied these charges. He noted that Humboldt Medical Specialists, founded in 2009, is now part of Providence.

“Through our combined efforts over the past 14 years, we have either recruited or retained over 150 physicians and advanced practice clinicians in the community,” he said in an emailed statement. “Without PMGNC support, there would be very few physicians left in the community and the hospital would be struggling to keep its doors open. The reality is that we have and continue to improve access to care and coverage of the hospital in recent years despite the nationwide physician shortage.”

Harris concurred. Asked if there are any plans to further consolidate services offered at St. Joseph Hospital he replied:

Health care is rapidly changing. Any service decisions we make as an organization will always have our Mission and patients’ best interests in mind. However, we are not immune from the economic and global workforce challenges that are impacting health care across the country, especially in remote and rural locations like Humboldt County. 

As an organization we are constantly evolving so that we can adapt to the needs of our community, now and in the future. At present, Providence has no plans to limit services. In fact, we have been successful in adding physicians and other providers in service lines like orthopedics, cancer, and neurology.  

Additionally, the St. Joseph Hospital Family Medicine Residency Program is graduating another cohort of Family Medicine physicians this June, adding to the provider base here on the North Coast.  

Our goal is to continue to remain a vibrant and forward-thinking health care organization that provides our community with best-in-class care that is in alignment with the community’s needs and our ability to furnish that care.

But from Petty’s perspective, things are moving in the wrong direction.

“A lot of good people have been leaving,” he said. Rattling off a few, he said the head of chemo-oncology left, as did “a bunch of managers.” The head of the emergency department stepped down into a nursing role. The head of surgery has changed several times.

Petty observed that it has been a difficult time to work in health care in Humboldt County. The COVID-19 pandemic took a huge toll on frontline workers, who were forced to manage isolation wards along with patients, friends and family who could be hostile.  Health care workers were also impacted by the Public Safety Power Shutdowns initiated by PG&E in recent years. Hospital workers went on strike in 2019 to protest chronic understaffing.

“It’s just a very traumatic time,” Petty said. 

Wilson said there’s a silver lining to the problems at St. Joseph and Redwood Memorial: a “burgeoning” of improved services at Mad River Hospital in Arcata and Sutter Coast Hospital in Crescent City. “They are growing and doing well because people don’t want to deal with the bullshit of turnaround times,” she said.

Petty believes that things didn’t need to happen this way, that Providence executives could have chosen a different path but instead sacrificed the quality of care for local patients in an effort to maximize profits. 

“It’s just my opinion that this was planned all along,” he said.

Children who grew up in Eureka in the 1920s were about as likely to experience the joys of sucking on a piece of ice as a child in the Mojave Desert. But there were a select few of us living on Brett Street (now 14th Street), who, for several years, enjoyed this rare treat every summer. How could such an unlikely pleasure happen in Eureka — and anyway, who needed ice in the center of the cool fog belt?

Well, it happened this way! Amos Christie, while a college student at the University of Washington from 1920 to 1924, spent his summers delivering ice for the Eureka Ice Company in a Model T pickup to various customers such as the Union Labor Hospital, the Humboldt County Hospital, Rosaia’s Fruit and Vegetable Market, Lazio’s fish wharf, the saloons on Second Street, and several “lady-of-the-night” houses. After all, a girl had to have a little ice for her customers’ drinks in the seclusion of her workshop.

When Amos Christie wasn’t going to school during vacation he became Eureka’s favorite ice man. Here he is with his leather apron and upturned collar—a fad of the day in (1922).

At the Union Labor Hospital the ice was used to make ice cream for the patients on Sundays, and Amos was the one who hand cranked the freezer. He fell into this chore naturally since he lived there, sharing a single room (No. 27) with his mother during the summer vacations. His mother, Mrs. Edna Christie, was the dietician for the hospital and always saw to it that the patients had a little to eat on Sundays.

Delivering ice often took him down Williams Street to Brett, where he was somewhat of a hero, partly because he was always good for a piece of ice, and partly because he was a college football player: he played for the University of Washington and on teams which went to the Rose Bowl twice.

About the same time, another football player. Red Grange, was gaining fame. He delivered ice in his home town in Illinois, so Amos was called “Eureka’s Red Grange,” although he was a tackle and Red Grange was a running back.

On Saturday evenings he occasionally went shopping downtown with his mother, and, of course, encountered a few of his lady-of-the-night customers who always recognized him and gave the friendly nod. His mother probably never understood the connection.

Amos Christie went on to become a physician, graduating from the University of California Medical School in 1929. After residency training in pediatrics at the University of California Hospital, postdoctoral fellowships took him to Johns Hopkins, Babies Hospital in New York City and the Harvard School of Public Health. Early in World War II he was Associate Director of the American Red Cross in Washington, D.C. In 1944 he became professor and chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine where he made his greatest contributions to the medical world. It was here that he and his colleagues unraveled some of the mysteries of Histoplasmosis, a fungus disease which looks like Tuberculosis by x-ray.

It was here that he trained many great pediatricians, many of whom went into practice and others remained in the academic world. At one time 16 chairmen of departments of pediatrics had been trained at Vanderbilt by Amos Christie and his staff. Several became Deans and one became a Nobel Prize laureate.

So,if your son wants to be an ice man, don’t knock it! One of Eureka’s most illustrious natives started off that way!

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Dr. Robert Quinn, a native Eurekan and now head of Department of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., 37232. 

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The story above was originally printed in the September-October 1982 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.