Holy wow! Three or more cheers are in order for St. Bernard’s girls basketball team who made history over the weekend by becoming the first team in H-DNL history to earn a state championship. 

Taking the court at the Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center on Saturday morning, the team scored a dominant 47-29 win over Grossmont High School out of San Diego. 

Take that, SoCal! Read more at the Humboldt Sports.

###

Press release from the Klamath River Renewal Corporation:

Hornbrook, CA – Following Friday’s successful test blast, the Klamath River Renewal Corporation will proceed with the removal of the Copco No. 1 Dam, the second dam to be removed as a part of the Klamath dam removal project.

The Copco No. 1 Dam, constructed in 1918 for the sole purpose of hydroelectric power generation, has blocked fish passage for over 100 years and is expected to be fully removed by the end of August 2024.

“We are excited to get to work,” said Mark Bransom, CEO of the Renewal Corporation “with the initial phase of drawdown complete, the dam is fully exposed and can safely be disassembled.”

Copco No. 2, a diversion dam that was located just downstream of Copco No. 1, was removed last year. The remaining three dams, Copco No. 1, Iron Gate, and JC Boyle, created reservoirs that needed to be drawn down before removal could begin. The initial phase of drawdown concluded last month, and shortly thereafter FERC approved an advancement in the schedule, allowing for the removal of Copco No. 1 ahead of the other remaining dams.

Iron Gate and JC Boyle, which are clay core earthen dams, will remain at their full height until the spring runoff period has concluded and the Klamath River has returned to baseline flows. Work on their deconstruction will likely begin sometime in May, depending on precipitation.

Deconstruction of the Copco No.1 Dam, which will be performed through a repetitive cycle of drilling, blasting, and chipping, can begin before the spring runoff period has concluded because it is a concrete arch dam. So, should the Klamath River experience a significant flow event this spring, water could safely pass over the partially removed concrete dam and the dam would remain securely in place. The Copco No. 1 Dam removal plan was specifically designed to allow for this safe flow passing, should it occur.

The removal of Copco No. 1, Iron Gate, and JC Boyle Dams is expected to be complete sometime this fall, in time for the Fall run of Chinook salmon. The restoration of the former reservoir footprints is currently underway and will continue for several years until vegetation is successfully established and water clarity has returned to baseline conditions.

California is just starting a statewide effort to create apprenticeship opportunities for young people, ages 16 through 24, as college becomes less affordable for many high school graduates and other costs of living are rising.

But the program has run into a funding snag. Gov. Gavin Newsom, trying to plug a budget hole that some officials say could be $78 billion, now plans to delay $25 million in next year’s funding — about how much the state is spending this year on the effort.

This could be a setback for a new system that funds apprenticeships strictly for young people. Currently most apprentices are older than college age — the nationwide average age of an apprentice is 29 — and most apprenticeship programs feed into the construction trades.

State officials think much younger people should be tapping into this system.

“Not everybody can afford to go onto college, but that doesn’t mean that they’re not bright, hard working people,” said Adele Burnes, deputy chief of the state’s Division of Apprenticeship Standards. “It just means they may not be able to afford to not be earning.

“We as a state want to make sure we’re creating onramps into careers … that offer them that pathway into a family-sustaining wage.”

Those who complete apprenticeships can earn starting salaries of $77,000, and their average lifetime earnings could outpace their peers’ by more than $300,000, according to research by Jobs for the Future, a national organization that promotes workforce development.

Last July the Legislature tasked the Division of Apprenticeship Standards with gathering data and developing a system for allocating money to groups that operate youth apprenticeship programs.

Organizations have until March 15 to apply for funding.

Defining youth apprenticeship

The Division of Apprenticeship Standards has established grants for organizations that develop pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs targeting the state’s 500,000 “opportunity youth” — young people who have dropped out or are at risk of dropping out of school, or who come from low-income families or neighborhoods, or are involved in the foster care, child welfare or juvenile justice systems.

The organizations that receive the grants are expected to develop apprenticeship programs for careers in health care, education, information technology and more.

The effort is in line with Newsom’s stated goal of reaching 500,000 registered apprentices by 2029. So far, the state has about 90,000.

Typically apprenticeship programs are federally registered and involve at least 144 hours of classroom instruction and 2,000 hours of on-the-job work under the supervision of a professional.

“Legislatively there needs to be some sort of an incentive, some sort of a tax credit, anything for employers to invest in the youth.”
— Pam Knapp, director of college and career readiness, San Joaquin County Office of Education

Those who complete apprenticeships usually secure union jobs with living wages and benefits, said Taylor White, who helps design youth apprenticeship systems for New America, a national research and advocacy nonprofit.

Historically apprenticeships mostly fed the building and fire trades. Many union jobs require employees to be over 18, White said.

The national decades-long “college for all” push in high schools has steered young people by the droves toward four-year colleges. But college hasn’t worked out equally for everyone.

“That hasn’t necessarily resulted in the closure of the workforce and economic disparities that people expected it would,” White said. It’s now clear that young people need more options, she added.

While various pre-apprenticeship programs in the state prepare young people for apprenticeships, California has yet to create a central youth apprenticeship system to recruit workers who may still be in high school or college.

The state established a Youth Apprenticeship Committee that is expected to provide recommendations to the Division of Apprenticeship Standards in July.

California high school apprenticeships

One example of a new high school apprenticeship program is San Joaquin County’s Apprenticeships Reaching Career Horizons, the first of its kind in the state.

Three of the six young people who started at its beginning in 2020 have since completed the three-year program. To date there have been 25 students in the program, said Pam Knapp, director of college and career readiness at the San Joaquin County Office of Education. Students can train as teaching aids, assistant farm managers or hospitality marketing professionals.

When Catalina Govea, a Linden High senior, applied to the program, she thought she was applying for a summer job. It turned out to be a lot more, she said.

“Once I got the position, I immediately fell in love because I knew I wanted to be a teacher,” Govea said.

High school senior Catalina Govea, 17, part of a youth apprenticeship program, says it has given her management skills and patience she will use in her future career in education. Photo by Manuel Orbegozo for CalMatters

Govea works in Linden Elementary classrooms and in afterschool programs as a teacher’s aide, assisting teachers with administrative work and students with assignments and learning about classroom management.

She also takes online college courses on childhood and adolescent development, child discipline and other education topics that will transfer when she starts at Sonoma State University in the fall.

The program, Govea said, has helped her mature and handle stressful classroom environments, experience she might not have otherwise gained until years later.

The experience was “perfect to know what my future would look like,” she said.

Knapp said the apprenticeship program works well because the county Office of Education functions as an intermediary between employers, school districts, and the state Division of Apprenticeship Standards.

But the program has faced challenges convincing enough employers to hire teenagers, she added.

Catalina Govea works with students and faculty during school hours and after school as part of a high school apprenticeship program that combines technical instruction with paid work experience on March 5, 2024. Photos by Manuel Orbegozo for CalMatters.

There are higher workers compensation rates for workers under 18, so private companies may be hesitant to hire them, Knapp said. And unions representing school workers are hesitant to hire teenagers if those jobs could instead go to union employees, she added.

“That’s been the heavy lift,” Knapp said. “If we want to expand this, then legislatively there needs to be some sort of an incentive, some sort of a tax credit, anything for employers to invest in the youth.”

In the Bay Area, the Construction Trades Workforce Initiative is running its pre-apprenticeship programs as a pipeline for high school students interested in such fields as construction and plumbing.

Beli Achary, the initiative’s executive director, said the program has done a lot of outreach work to educate school counselors and employers about the importance of opening up apprenticeships to youth. The initiative also visits high schools in the Bay Area to inform students about the careers they can explore through apprenticeship programs.

The initiative oversees, funds and authorizes several pre-apprenticeship programs with school districts and juvenile detention centers across the Bay Area. They are in the process of developing programs for at least five more school districts and Laney Community College in Oakland.

“The attitude has shifted and is a lot more positive,” Achary said. “Workforce development is becoming more and more of a buzzword, which is a good thing.”

Ensuring equitable outcomes

Traditional apprenticeships, mostly in the building and fire trades, have skewed white and male.

Across the country, 63% of youth apprenticeships have gone to people who identify as white and 35% to those identifying as nonwhite, according to the Jobs For the Future report, which analyzed data for 2010 through 2020.

Women and girls make up 7% of all youth apprentices nationally.

After an apprenticeship, the average starting wage for youth apprentices was $31 an hour, the study said: white youth earned $29.55, Latino youth earned $32 and Black youth earned $23, it said.

While young men’s pay averaged $13.08 an hour, males who had apprenticeships earned $31 an hour, a 137% boost. For young women, those with apprenticeships earned 42% more than the average, the study said.

The report says occupational segregation is key to starting wage disparities, highlighting the need to recruit to diversify various occupations.

For example, the top occupation for women apprentices was pharmacy technician, which nationally paid $12 an hour. The top occupation for male apprentices was electrician, which paid $26 an hour, according to the report.

“We as a state want to make sure we’re creating onramps into careers.”
— Adele Burnes, deputy chief of state’s Division of Apprenticeship Standards

“Providing more information and awareness, I think, will be a key part of working through some of those inequities,” said Myriam Sullivan, a researcher on the report. That includes educating employers on how to keep diversity in mind when hiring and informing young people about wages in various career paths.

Sullivan said some of the lack of diversity in apprenticeships may have to do with how they’re funded. Because grants typically incentivize high enrollment, that leaves little room for program leaders to think strategically about hiring diversely, she said.

California’s apprenticeship grant language targets groups that serve youth who are typically shut out of these opportunities, said Burnes, of the state apprenticeship standards division. The state program also tries to ensure organizations can support youth through the completion of their programs.

“What we heard resoundingly was just how important supportive services are to opportunity youth who are trying to get into apprenticeships,” Burnes said. They “face unique life challenges and barriers that might make their success in a program a step harder.”

Eric Morrison-Smith, executive director of the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, a national youth advocacy network which co-sponsored California’s youth apprenticeship legislation, said the priority must be ensuring young workers have more options than they’ve had in the past and building worker power.

“I think the pendulum is shifting a bit,” he said. “Historically the pendulum has leaned heavily on the side of ‘college is the only way to get a good job.’ We believe we need a solid ecosystem of economic opportunity that allows for people to make decisions that will give them more self determination over their lives.”

Morrison-Smith said supporters of the Youth Apprenticeship program are lobbying Senate and Assembly leaders to ensure it remains a priority in budget negotiations.

###

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

When Sacramento changed its plan to demolish a homeless encampment on a vacant lot on Colfax Street, instead offering the homeless occupants a lease, activists and camp residents celebrated it as a win.

The first-of-its-kind deal, which allows the camp to remain in place and govern itself without city interference, was held up as a model Sacramento could replicate at future sites. Other cities, including San Jose, have said they’re considering similar models, putting the success or failure of this encampment under the microscope.

A year later, Sacramento has not managed to reproduce the concept and has no plans to. Residents of the camp, who lack electricity or running water, complain they feel forgotten. And the county district attorney, claiming the site threatens public safety, has demanded the city clear the camp or risk prosecution.

Those troubles highlight the logistical and ethical dilemmas that come with setting aside outdoor spaces for homeless residents to go when there aren’t enough beds indoors. And it comes at a time when officials across the state increasingly are turning to this last-ditch solution as they face mounting pressure to clear encampments away from sidewalks, parks, schools and other high-traffic public areas.

“The fact that people have a place where they can legally exist and not be threatened with arrest, not be run off and have to lose their belongings, where they can go to the bathroom with dignity, where there’s trash pickup so they don’t have to live in a place where there’s trash all over, where service providers can find them regularly and they aren’t going to lose contact with people as they work their way to housing — those are all good things,” said Eric Tars, senior policy director of the National Homelessness Law Center. “But it would be even better if they were doing them indoors.”

They got a lease, and they make their own rules

Camp Resolution, as the Sacramento camp is known, was started in 2022 by Sharon and Joyce Jones — a married couple in their 50s who found themselves homeless for the first time late in life. More than four-dozen people now live there, some in new-looking Bullet trailers provided by the city, and others in cars, tents and more dilapidated trailers and RVs.

Joyce and Sharon Jones poke holes in a water bottle to water their garden next to their trailer at Camp Resolution on Feb. 28, 2024. The camp has no running water, so residents must rely on bottled water for all their needs. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters

Some residents have taken pains to make it more homey: Two potted plants hang from the hitch of one trailer, chickens roam the lot, and Sharon and Joyce are putting in a garden, using pallets to make raised planter beds.

“We try to make it as comfortable as possible,” Joyce said, “but sometimes it’s impossible.”

Shortly after Joyce and her community occupied the city-owned, formerly vacant lot in 2022, city workers determined the camp was unsafe and needed to be demolished — as often happens in Sacramento and throughout California. But that’s where the story takes an unusual turn. Residents of the camp, and their supporters, showed up in force to a city council meeting and persuaded council members to delay the sweep. About six months later, the city signed a lease allowing the camp to remain in place.

The lease, which advocacy group Safe Ground Sacramento signed on behalf of the Camp Resolution residents, was an experiment. Generally, similar programs are run by nonprofits contracted by a city. They often impose curfews, no-guest policies, sobriety requirements and other rules on residents. In exchange, they offer social services such as counseling or help finding permanent housing, and amenities such as showers and bathrooms.

“They don’t think people experiencing homelessness are capable of governing themselves,” Tars said.

Camp Resolution is different. Safe Ground Sacramento, which leases the property from the city for free, takes a hands-off approach that lets residents run the camp and write their own rules. The city gave the residents a handful of residential trailers, set up portable toilets and a hand-washing station, and provided dumpsters and ongoing trash pickup. But that’s it.

Many activist groups laud that model as a best practice, saying it’s important to let the residents run, or at least help run, their own camp.

“When individuals in these encampments have a sense of ownership, then it can really lead to the camp being a place that they take pride in and that they are trying to keep in as good condition as possible,” Tars said. “It gives a sense of responsibility to others in that community.”

It also means minimal overhead for the city: The trailers provided to Camp Resolution residents came from the Federal Emergency Management Agency at no cost to the city of Sacramento, and adding the camp to the city’s existing contract for trash pickup didn’t add any additional expense.

But in the case of Camp Resolution, it also means residents are left to fend for themselves. The city doesn’t provide electricity or running water. Community members donate food, some residents have generators, and a nonprofit used to bring a trailer with showers every other Sunday — but they recently stopped.

“It’s not going very well,” Joyce said. “I think that (the city) should do a little bit more.”

Jeanne Gillis uses tubs to wash dishes next to her trailer at Camp Resolution on Feb 28, 2024. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters

The Camp Resolution lease says the city would provide up to 33 trailers. Residents ended up receiving just 16. But 51 people live at the camp, meaning some people sleep in tents, in their cars or in dilapidated trailers and RVs that leak in the rain and have sprouted mold.

The city wouldn’t comment on the trailers — or anything else — citing a pending threat of prosecution from the county District Attorney’s Office. City officials recently sent 40 trailers to a new safe sleeping site they opened on Roseville Road, which also has plumbed toilets and showers.

Several of the Camp Resolution residents are elderly, and some have serious medical issues that make living without reliable power and water difficult. One woman, who recently turned 60, is on dialysis and gets around on an electric mobility scooter that she leaves parked outside her trailer.

Most of the residents are women, some of whom wouldn’t feel safe on the streets by themselves. Jeanne Gillis, 53, was cooking ground turkey over an open flame outside her trailer on a recent Wednesday. Gillis, who used to work as a medical patients’ advocate, lost her housing two years ago when she got sick with lupus and could no longer work. She’d never been homeless before and didn’t know what to do — so Sharon and Joyce took her under their wing. Now she’s part of their tight-knit community.

Jeanne Gillis cooks ground turkey over a wood fire next to her trailer at Camp Resolution on Feb. 28, 2024. Residents must rely on bottled water, generators, and wood fires because no utilities are provided at the camp. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters

“Thank God for everybody. Because it’s hard,” she said, tearing up. “I don’t think I’d be here if it wasn’t for everybody.”

Camp Resolution faces legal threat

Camp Resolution also faces an outside threat — Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho has demanded that the city close the camp. His office sent a letter to the city and Safe Ground Sacramento in November labeling the site a public health hazard. The site is contaminated by toxic chemicals left over from when it was used as a vehicle maintenance yard and held underground storage tanks for diesel and gasoline, he said. It’s not safe to camp on the contaminated soil, according to his letter. But only half of the site is paved, while the other half is bare dirt — and people live on both sides.

Ho’s office did not set a specific deadline for the city to clear the encampment, leaving it unclear exactly what, if anything, will come of his threat.

When asked about Ho’s next steps, Sonia Martinez Satchell, a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s Office, indicated prosecution is still on the table.

“To date, the City has failed to move the unhoused off this toxic waste site,” she said in an emailed statement. “We will not waiver from our commitment to protect public safety for all. As outlined in our letter, all available actions and recourse remain available.”

But camp residents and the advocates working with them say they’ve heard nothing but silence from the District Attorney’s Office since the November letter. That means the fate of those living at Camp Resolution is still up in the air.

Tim Swanson, spokesman for the City Manager’s Office, said the city can’t comment on any aspect of Camp Resolution because of the pending threat of prosecution.

Sharon and Joyce aren’t concerned — they claim the camp isn’t on the portion of the site that’s contaminated. Ho’s letter is just an excuse to try to kick them off the property, they said.

Sanctioned homeless encampments in California

Faced with a massive shortage of affordable homes, desperate city officials across California are considering opening places where unhoused people can legally set up tents. The move could give them more power to clear encampments from around parks, schools, downtown zones and other high-profile areas. That’s because unless cities have somewhere for displaced unhoused residents to go, the 2018 appellate case Martin v. Boise limits the extent to which they can clear encampments. That could change soon, as the Supreme Court has agreed to take up the case and will hear arguments next month. But for now, cities’ hands remain largely tied if they lack enough shelter beds.

San Diego recently passed an ordinance banning encampments in much of the city. As the city ramped up enforcement, it opened two sanctioned camp sites that together can hold more than 500 tents.

After the city rejected the idea three years ago, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan recently said he’s considering opening similar sites.

Safe sleeping sites take many different forms — and have a range of price tags. In August, after the city stalled in its attempts to open safe sleeping sites, Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan single-handedly tried to identify locations for the projects. He initially said Camp Resolution could be a model for future sites — because it cost the city so little to run, it would allow the city to open more sites than if they used more expensive models.

Instead, the city in January launched its next safe sleeping site, on Roseville Road, with more services, more oversight and a greater cost — $3.2 million per year. The site has 60 rudimentary tiny homes and 40 trailers, and is governed by a nonprofit contracted through the city.

But, due to an anticipated budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year, the city has no plans to launch additional safe sleeping sites, Swanson said. At a committee meeting last month, city staff predicted that by next year, the city’s budget for homeless services would be short $11 million. By the 2025-26 fiscal year, they expected to be short nearly $39 million.

Life at Camp Resolution

There are about 800 people on the waitlist to get into Camp Resolution, according to Sharon and Joyce. Only six people from the camp have moved out and into permanent housing, they said. Just on the other side of the gate that separates Camp Resolution from the rest of the world, a group of people live in a cluster of cars parked haphazardly on the side of the road. Across the street, someone has erected a makeshift shack. RVs that serve as stand-in homes line the road.

Inside the gate, Sharon and Joyce tend to have the ultimate say in what goes, though there’s also a council that meets on Thursday evenings to discuss camp issues. Things don’t always go smoothly.

Camp Resolution, a “self-governed” homeless camp on city-owned land in Sacramento, on Feb. 28, 2024. Photo by Fred Greaves for CalMatters

Last year a neighbor’s dogs attacked Sharon and sent her to the hospital with multiple bite injuries. That led to new rules at the camp about pets. But Sharon and Joyce say it’s hard to actually enforce the rules they impose.

“We need more structure,” Sharon said.

As they showed off the different parts of their community, Sharon and Joyce expressed disapproval of a trash pile in the middle of the camp.

“That can go in the trash can,” Joyce said. It didn’t take long. A few minutes later, residents could be seen picking up the garbage and carrying it to a nearby dumpster.

###

CalMatters Capitol reporter Jeanne Kuang contributed to this story.

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

###

PREVIOUSLY: 

• At a Two-Day Conference in Eureka This Week, North Coast Tribes Advocate for ‘Meaningful Engagement’ With Offshore Wind Developers, Federal Regulators
• Yurok Tribal Council Votes to Formally Oppose Floating Offshore Wind Energy Projects Along the North Coast

###

Press release from the Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria:

On Tuesday March 5th, 2024, The Bear River Band of the Rohnerville Rancheria Tribal Council voted to formally oppose the development of offshore wind, the effects of transmission lines over land and across the ocean floor, the development of the harbor area, and the East/West rail lines.

All of these projects are related to the implementation of offshore wind off the Bear River Coastline and directly through Bear River Ancestral Territory.

The Tribal Council Opposes offshore wind in our Territory for the following reasons:

• There is insufficient and inadequate scientific research on the adverse environmental impacts associated with floating wind turbines and platforms, the development of a massive Harbor, the effects to marine life from the subsea transmission cables and the effects over land transmission lines to the habitats of endangered/protected species such as the Humboldt Martin and Snowy Plover, just to name a couple.
• The 900 foot tall turbines impact the view shed from sacred cultural sites along the coast.
• The sacrifice of our Cultural and Natural Resources for the benefit of more electrical capacity for large cities in Central and Southern California is a scenario that we will not accept.

The Tribal Council is deeply concerned with the potential effects of these projects on marine life in the ocean off our coast as well as the effects to the Estuaries of the Eel and Mattole Rivers.

Additionally, while not in our ancestral territory, we are deeply concerned with the effects of offshore wind to Yurok territory, whom we have interlinked with by our membership and their membership through marriage.

It is the opinion of the Bear River Tribal Council that the effects of these offshore wind projects will be disastrous to the Cultural and Natural Resources of all Native Territories in the area and we seek unity amongst Tribes to protect these things which we have been the protectors of since time immemorial.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.

— Genesis 6:4, KJV

###

I can’t keep up with today’s conspiracy theories. After posting last week’s GOU column celebrating the number seven, with particular reference to the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the comments — following what I would have thought was a pretty benign topic — came in thick and fast. “Most of those things are still under warranty compared to what was destroyed 11,500 years ago (YDIH),” was the comment that got things going. Half an hour after reading this, my nephew wrote asking, “Have you heard of the mud-fossil conspiracy theory?” And suddenly Doctor Who’s Silurians started to make sense, not to mention Atlantis and von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods. All these different (and conflicting) lines of evidence proving — if you’re sufficiently gullible — that, by golly, we’re not the first advanced race to live on planet Earth. “They” were here before us.

It’s all nonsense, of course, unless you believe that the world’s archaeologists, geologists and paleo-anthropologists are all engaged in a vast conspiracy. (Probably more than the 400,000 folks who would have had to be in on “the moon landing didn’t happen” conspiracy.) Taking a couple of these wacky ideas at face value:

The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis

The Younger Dryas impact hypothesis (YDIH) is a fringe theory to explain Earth’s cooling period at the end of the Ice Ages, nearly 13,000 years ago. While the mainstream, widely-accepted explanation points to an influx of freshwater from Lake Agassiz (a huge lake that covered much of North America during the Pleistocene, starting about 2.6 million years ago) shutting down the “normal” flow of the “North Atlantic Conveyor” current, the YDIH posits a huge comet or asteroid raining fragments down over the Americas and Europe. The consensus is that it’s not totally wrong, but unlikely — virtually all the evidence supplied by proponents of the theory have been convincingly refuted.

Turns out, though, some folks realized there’s money to be made in keeping the theory alive, one of whom, British author Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods), has been promoting pseudoscientific theories for decades. According to Hancock, the putative Younger Dryas impact destroyed an ancient civilization — but not before its secrets had been shared with hunter-gatherers who rebooted civilization — hence the earliest that we actually know of, in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Because, you know, those folks just weren’t smart enough to build pyramids and canals and cities and all the rest without help…

Atlantis

… or maybe it was Atlanteans?! In two of his dialogs, Plato describes Atlantis as a huge empire that ruled most of the known world some 11,000 years ago. When the Atlanteans tried to conquer Athens, the gods were displeased and their home base — an island in the Atlantic “beyond the Pillars of Hercules” (i.e. west of Gibraltar) was submerged. But lest I forget my nephew, there’s…

The Mud-fossil Conspiracy

…a wild and wonderful theory whereby some rocks contain the fossilized remains of ancient giants. Which actually makes Graham Hancock and company look quite rational!

Sometime, I’m going to have to write about Doctor Who’s Silurians.

Klamath River dam removal is underway, with drawdown of the three largest reservoirs occurring now and physical removal of these dam structures scheduled for this summer. The dams have impacted the river for over a hundred years and dam removal has its own environmental impacts. While fish biologists and water quality scientists are confident that the long-term benefits will outweigh the short-term impacts, a loud group of dam removal antagonists have glommed onto the ‘messy’ part of this massive ecosystem restoration project — temporary increases in suspended sediment and associated impacts to water quality and the recent mortality event of hatchery juvenile salmon— to continue their fight against dam removal.

Luckily, Toz Soto, Senior Fisheries Biologist with the Karuk Tribe, and Dr. Maia Singer, Senior Scientist at Stillwater Sciences, join the show to help sort fact from fiction.

For more information about Klamath Dam removal, check out:

• Lower Klamath Project – Final Environmental Impact Report (EIR) | California State Water Resources Control Board
• Klamath Dam Removal Overview Report for the Secretary of the Interior an Assessment of Science and Technical Information, Version 1.1, March 2013 | FWS.gov
• Klamath Dam Removal Studies | U.S. Geological Survey (usgs.gov)
• Klamath River Renewal (klamathrenewal.org)
• Klamath Basin Monitoring Program