Mapuana Jessica Alyce Zuleger née Arioli peacefully passed away at the age of 94 at home with her family at her side on February 24, 2023.

She was born to Mary Madaline and Walter Peter Arioli in Honolulu Territory of Hawaii on January 6, 1929.

When she was 8 years old, Mapuana lived in Honolulu, Hawaii at Pearl Harbor. She remembers being at the Catholic cathedral when soldiers entered during mass. They went to the priest to tell him we were being bombed and everyone to go home for shelter. The whole family gathered at her grandfather’s house in the cellar with the men outside.

After attending the University of Hawaiii and St Luke’s School of Nursing, she was registered in the State of California, practicing for 41 years first in San Francisco and Oakland hospitals as a surgical nurse, then Blue Lake and McKinleyville as her husband’s nurse.

Mother and father meet in St Luke’s Hospital, where father was a doctor. After they married, they went into the Army, Third Armored Division, for two years. When my parents’ got out of the military, they came back to California to start a practice. In 1958, my father wanted to be a country doctor and Simpson Lumber Company in Korbel invited him up to work here. At the time there were only 24 doctors in this area with Trinity Hospital in Arcata. He was offered the moon and an office in Blue Lake. It worked. Their last two children were born here.

We saw a lot of work in those days. The mill was working 24/7. Dad did house calls and would take patients in to the hospital if they could not make it there themselves. She worked as his nurse and took care of five children. Many of the patients remember her for her patience and her beauty. Years later, several patients confessed they had fallen in love with her. She loved clothes and when she first came up here, she would wear dresses only. Her friend told her she could wear slacks like Jacqueline Kennedy.

In 1964, during the great flood, she stayed at the house with us while father was at the triage center. She had to deal with us and people knocking at the door.

In the 1970s, she decided to open a restaurant, Al Capone’s Pizzeria in Arcata, to keep even more busy. One customer would buy a loaf of bread every day to eat on the way to work.

She loved dark chocolate and would eat it every day if she could. On one of her birthdays, she got 200 pounds of Cherrie Royals from Partrick’s Candy and ate them all. She loved dogs and always had one.

She is survived by her much-loved children Peter and wife Diane, Mary, Jamie and Louise; and sister-in-law Lois Arioli and family of Shawnee, Kansas. She was predeceased by her husband, Doctor Rolf August Zuleger.

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HUMBOLDT TODAY: Aid worker Jeff Woodke is back in Humboldt after over six years in captivity in Northern Africa; a SoHum man is arrested on child sexual abuse charges; plus, your weekend events and weather in today’s newscast with John Kennedy O’Connor.

FURTHER READING:

• ‘I Was Treated Brutally’: McKinleyville’s Jeff Woodke Speaks Publicly For the First Time Since His Release From Six and a Half Years as a Hostage in Africa
• Huffman Announces $10 Million in Federal Funds for SoHum Fire Prevention Efforts
• BUZZIN’ THE 36: Swains Flat Will be Choppered By PG&E Today, as the Utility Surveys Storm Damage
• CONVERSATIONS: How’s That Barge Coming Along? Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery on Downtown Development, the Dismantling of the Lloyd Building and, Yes, the State of the Dorm Barge
• Man Who Shot at Cops During Crazy Police Chase Around Eureka Pleads Guilty to Attempted Murder, Takes 43-Year Sentence
• Briceland Man Arrested Today on Charges on Producing Child Pornography, Sexual Assault on Child Under 10

HUMBOLDT TODAY can be viewed on LoCO’s homepage each night starting at 6 p.m.

Want to LISTEN to HUMBOLDT TODAY? Subscribe to the podcast version here.

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Six years, five months, five days and 12 hours.

That’s how long McKinleyville resident, missionary and aid worker Jeffery Woodke was held captive in Africa after being abducted by militants in Niger in October 2016.

He recited that length of time aloud more than once Friday afternoon as he addressed a roomful of reporters inside Arcata First Baptist Church, making his first public comments since being released from captivity on March 20. 

Wearing an orthopedic boot on his right leg and a knee brace on his left, Woodke walked to the lectern with a cane and a pronounced limp. Standing beside his wife, Els, he thanked God, his family and friends and the United States government for their labors to secure his release.

“My wife and a network of friends and organizations including Crisis Consulting International, this church and YWAM, Youth With A Mission, worked tirelessly for six and a half years to bring me home,” he said.

He identified the group that held him as Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM), an extremist organization that the Center for Strategic and International Studies describes as a coalition of Salafi-jihadist insurgent groups operating in the Sahel region of sub-Saharan Africa.

He declined to answer a question about why they took him hostage and why they finally let him go, saying he didn’t want to compromise an ongoing investigation.

“I was treated brutally and with inhumanity during my captivity,” he said. “I was beaten and held continually in chains for 16 hours a day, every day. I was kept in isolation. I suffered injuries and illness which were never medically treated.”

Woodke said his left knee is “blown out” and his right achilles tendon was injured by a blow from a rifle butt. He now suffers from chronic gastro-intestinal problems for which he might have to undergo surgery, and while he’s not sure what caused the stomach issues, he speculated that they’re likely related to the meager diet he was fed, which consisted mostly of unfiltered water, boiled rice and a sand-baked flatbread called taguella. 

Though he declined to describe the details of the mental coping mechanisms he employed to endure his captivity, Woodke said he finally lost hope after the fifth year and embarked on a hunger strike in hopes of improving his treatment and being allowed to speak to his wife and his country.

Seven hostages remain in captivity in the Sahel region, including a German priest, citizens of Romania, Australia and South Africa and an Italian family. Woodke said one of the things he’d like to do now that he’s free is to help secure their release.

“For now, I will limit the information I share and continue to cooperate with authorities to bring these monsters to justice and to help get the other people out — because they’re in hell,” Woodke said.

Asked if she’d ever given up hope, Els Woodke said that she did not.

“I remember when it first happened, I cried out to God, ‘I want my husband home!’ and He did not say ‘no,’” she recalled. “And I believe that God never changed his mind … . He did not say ‘no’ six and a half years ago. He did not say ‘no’ every day, so I kept my faith that Jeff would be home. I lived every day in the faith that he would come home.”

Woodke said he had heard about the pandemic but didn’t know whether his family was alive or da.

Each day since then he’s been noticing little things that are different from the last time he was here. Some of those things are within himself.

“Crowds are a bit difficult for me to handle,” he said, and as an example he described an incident that occurred last week when he and his family visited Pier 39 in San Francisco. “We were sitting there and a child popped a balloon,” he said. “Well, I freaked out.” 

He said he doesn’t have any trouble relating to people one-on-one, though men with big beards freak him out a little bit.

Through it all, Woodke said his family, including his wife, two sons and grandchildren, never stopped working to get him home. “And now it’s time to learn how to be a family again,” he said. “And that’s the journey. We’re on it.”

You can watch video of the full press conference below.

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CORRECTION: This post originally misquoted Woodke regarding how much he’d heard about the COVID-19 pandemic. The Outpost regrets the error.

Press release from the office of Rep. Jared Huffman:

Today, Rep. Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) shared the news that The U.S. Department of Agriculture awarded $8,602,883 in funds to three projects in California’s Second District through the department’s Community Wildfire Defense Grant program. Rep. Huffman helped secure these funds for his district through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Rep. Jared Huffman. 

“We are undeniably in a climate crisis – and one of the starkest impacts for folks on the North Coast are the drought-fueled wildfire seasons that have devastated the region year over year. This crisis isn’t going away, so we need to work to get resources out the door to make our communities more resilient for what’s ahead,” said Rep. Huffman. “Thanks to the hard-fought funding Democrats were able to include in the Infrastructure Law, we’re seeing critical investments in wildfire defense and resilience. I’m glad to see some of this funding going to such great projects in my district that will ensure our communities, especially low-income and tribal ones, have the tools they need to protect our region.”

Project Details:

• Briceland Volunteer Fire Department, Fire Hazard Reduction Project: $205,251 to create a Fire Hazard Reduction Crew, to conduct roadside clearance and improve fuel breaks along otherwise unmaintained roads, creating safer routes for emergency response and evacuation and reducing the chance of roadside ignitions.

• Mattole Restoration Council, Prosper Ridge Community Wildfire Resilience Project: $2,175,132 to continue work on private lands that connect to the treatment success on the public lands of northern King Range National Conservation Area. Treatments include roadside fuels reduction for safe ingress and egress, grassland restoration, forest health treatments, prescribed fire and cultural burns. The 450 acres of land on private properties include newly acquired Bear River Band ancestral properties, ranch lands, and rural residential homesteads.

• Resort Improvement District No.1, Shelter Cove Wildfire Resiliency & Community Defense Project: $6,222,500 to provide outreach, coordination & Inspections services and conduct 1,211 acres of Hazardous fuels reduction work over a 5-year period. This project is designed to protect life and property in Shelter Cove by implementing priority actions identified in the 2019 Humboldt County CWPP to reduce wildfire risk, create a fire resilient community, and restore healthy landscapes.

“We have all the ingredients for a major wildfire disaster here in Shelter Cove, but by far the most threatening hazard we face is the large amount of overgrown private parcels adjacent to homes,” said Nick Pape, Shelter Cove Fire Chief. “This funding is a game changer allowing us to create defensible space around every home in the community giving our firefighters the best chance to defend homes!”

“This project will build upon the success of nine years of grassland restoration in the King Range National Conservation Area but will focus on the safety of residents. Lack of periodic fire, both wild and prescribed, have created dense young thickets of encroached Douglas-fir into historic grasslands and a buildup of fuels within forests and residential areas. We are excited to continue treatments that will not only protect our residents but help to build resilience in our grasslands and forests and thereby decrease the risks from wildfire and drought,” said Ali Freedlund, Interim Executive Director of the Mattole Restoration Council.

“The Briceland Volunteer Fire Department covers 40 square miles of densely forested and rugged terrain, with many residents living several miles away from county-maintained roads. Thanks to a generous grant from the USDA, we will be constructing around six miles of shaded fuel break along critical access roads, providing improved emergency access and evacuation routes for hundreds of rural residents. Together with other wildfire defense projects in adjacent districts, we hope to greatly reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire in southern Humboldt County,” said Briceland Volunteer Fire Department Public Information Officer Camilo Stevenson.

Funded by President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program helps communities, tribes, non-profit organizations, state forestry agencies and Alaska Native corporations plan for and mitigate wildfire risks as the nation faces an ongoing wildfire crisis. USDA’s Forest Service worked with states and tribes through an interagency workgroup to develop the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program, originally announced in June of 2022. Grant proposals underwent a competitive selection process that included review panels made up of state forestry agencies and tribal representatives.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Mattole Road Closed Just West of Weott for the Foreseeable Future Due to Storm Damage

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Press release from California State Parks:

Newly resurfaced Mattole Rd. in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Photo: California State Parks.

California State Parks will reopen the Mattole Road in Humboldt Redwoods State Park on Friday March 31st, at 4pm. A half-mile section of the road had been closed due to a landslide that occurred on January 17th. The closure was located 1.5 miles west of the juncture with Highway 101. Mattole Road runs west from the highway at the confluence of the south fork and main stem of the Eel River, then traverses through Humboldt Redwoods State Park.

California State Parks has been monitoring the slide and its impacts to the road as well as the surrounding landscape. The landslide was roughly 90 acres and extended north of Bull Creek to the top of the adjacent ridge. Multiple old-growth redwood trees toppled as a result of ground subsidence. The road was impassable due to large fissures and buckling of the asphalt.

Over the last several weeks, geoengineers have bored holes deep beneath the road surface and have employed inclinometers to assess the underlying geology. During that period the road has not moved appreciably. Parks will continue to monitor the road and will close it again if warranted.

The area where the road had been impacted is now resurfaced with gravel. Drivers should be aware that there is a 25 mph speed limit and to proceed with caution in the impacted areas due to the abrupt change from asphalt to gravel. The adjacent Rockefeller Loop Trail is currently closed and will be reopened once hazard trees have been assessed.

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Press release from PG&E:

Today, March 31, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) will be doing post-storm aerial inspections of its power lines in the Swains Flat area (Bridgeville/Carlotta) of Humboldt County off Highway 36 from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m., barring unforeseen schedule changes due to weather or visibility.   

The surveys are to collect more data on trees near the Van Duzen River in the wake of recent storms that caused many trees to topple, and determining our options for mitigation to ensure the overhead electric facilities remain safe.

The inspections will be conducted using a helicopter, an A-Star 350 B-3, that could fly low, from 200 – 500 feet if needed.

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Eureka City Manager Miles Slattery recently gave the Outpost’s John Kennedy O’Connor a status update on various city projects — among them, downtown and waterfront development, the teardown of the Lloyd Building and, of course, the city’s efforts to park a floating dorm in Humboldt Bay.

Video above, transcript below.

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JOHN KENNEDY O’CONNOR:

Well, welcome to another Humboldt Conversation. I’m here today with Miles Slattery, who is of course the city manager for the city of Eureka. Miles, welcome to Humboldt Today.

MILES SLATTERY:

Thank you for having me.

O’CONNOR:

Well, it’s a real pleasure. Now, tell us the history of this painting.

SLATTERY:

You’re going to heckle me, huh?

O’CONNOR:

Yeah, absolutely.

SLATTERY:

Yeah, I don’t have any clue. I told you if Pam was here, we’d let you know.

O’CONNOR:

I love the fact that there’s a guardrail.

SLATTERY:

I know that it has some historical significance, and I’m told that it’s very valuable.

O’CONNOR:

The area was built on the back of the redwood industry, but actually downtown right now, the Lloyd Building is coming down. It’s coming down very, very slowly. Why is the demolition taking quite so long?

SLATTERY:

So the initial part of it was just to deal with asbestos and some issues that needed to be abated prior to taking it down. So we had to hire, we had Mercer Fraser as a general contractor, they had to hire an asbestos, certified asbestos contractor to come in and remove the asbestos. And then now just because of concerns about safety and stuff like that, you know, the demolition ball probably didn’t, wasn’t the best mode.

O’CONNOR:

No wrecking ball.

SLATTERY:

No wrecking ball. Well, see they’re taking the bricks out. Well, I don’t know if the costs keep going up, we may just do the wrecking ball. 

O’CONNOR:

Okay. And has the city taken possession of the land?

SLATTERY:

No, no, no, no, no. It’s still owned by the private property owner. We need to abate the safety issue.

O’CONNOR:

So what’s going to happen there? What’s the plan for that area? I mean, there are a number of empty lots now in the city, either the buildings that came down through fire or whatever. Is this just going to be another empty lot?

SLATTERY:

So it, you know, as of right now, you know, we don’t own it. And so depending on what happens with that, there’s going to be obviously a big abatement lien on it because of this. And so what happens after that is, you know, I can’t really say — it’s private property right now. There’s not going to be any more need to abate the property, obviously, because it’s going to be gone. But as far as what happens to it will be up to the property owner for now.

O’CONNOR:

Now the waterfront is another area that’s been undeveloped for such a long time. There’s just those sort of gravel pits that stand there. But there has been some movement recently. And there are some plans, I believe, to really bring that area back to life.

SLATTERY:

Yeah, so that’s a part of we added those properties to our housing element. We included that as well as the property adjacent to the Lloyd Building, 5th and D parking lot. They’re incorporated into our housing element and they are slated for development for housing. At that particular location it’s in a zoning designation where you have to have a mixed use. So the first floor of that development will have to have some visitor serving aspect whether it’s retail, a convention center, whatever it may be. And then housing on the upper stories, it could even be a hotel with housing combined with it. That’ll be up to the people that respond to the RFP. And so those two properties are gonna be going to council on Tuesday for requests for proposals for developers to come and develop them. We’ve included in that RFP some of the designs that were came up by the community in 2017, I believe it was. We did a bunch of design charrettes. And so we’ve incorporated those designs into the RFP as a kind of suggested type of development that we’d like to see there.

O’CONNOR:

So it’s moving forward, but any sort of timeline when you think we might, you might see some development on that side.

SLATTERY:

So, you know, it’s been through many iterations. There’s been two different RFPs that went out previously. They both, unfortunately, ended up in lawsuits. And so because of the urgency of the state and some of the regulations that have passed recently and some of the stuff that we’ve adopted, we think that housing being there will make it a much more likely candidate for development, especially with the mixed use that’s available there. So we’re hoping that this will do that. There will be some interim. There’s been a lot of concern from the business community about the condition of that lot. Because of the heavy rains that we’ve had, we haven’t been able to address that. But come the dry moments, which hopefully happen soon, we’re hoping by May that that’ll be all regraded and we’re going to do more substantial regrading of it so that those potholes and stuff like that aren’t there. We also have some kind of interim potential uses, but that’ll be determined on who responds to the RFP and who gets awarded the RFP as to how much time we’ll have to do something different there.

O’CONNOR:

Now one big change to the city that might be coming, might not, it’s been a big story recently, is the possibility of a floating student accommodation with a very large ship being berthed to accommodate the capital of the city.

SLATTERY:

Would you not want to be my roomie? I mean, come on, that would be insane, wouldn’t it?

O’CONNOR:

It could be fun actually, it did draw very mixed reactions, students were very unhappy, what’s the possibility?

SLATTERY:

No, some of them actually received an email from an incoming student who said they would be stoked. Well yeah, it’s still being considered. We’ve hit some hiccups with the State Lands Commission about public trust property and being able to put housing there. So we’re trying to work around that. It’s definitely been delayed. It was intended to go as soon as August and that’s definitely not going to meet that time frame. But we definitely intend on continuing to pursue that because of the housing crisis that we’re in right now. I think there needs to be a temporary suspension of the prohibition of housing on state lands. It’s very odd to me and talking to state lands, you know, they allow for liveaboards at marinas and those type of things and it’s justified by the sense of something to do with security measures. And so I would say that a lot of the waterfronts up and down the coast of California have those same security issues and that allowing this temporary removal of prohibition I think is totally justifiable. And so we’re trying to get to that point and hopefully we can. We’re also looking at other alternatives for that now but it’s not dead in the water yet.

O’CONNOR:

Literally. Now if it does go ahead though, it’s going to be a massive structure. I mean one of the largest structures actually that will be in Eureka.

SLATTERY:

really over inflating this thing. I’ve seen the pictures. It’s 300 feet by 900. It’s smaller than a block. And so it’s 300 feet by 90 feet. The one that was being pursued originally, it’s a little bit different. It’s now five stories. It’d be four. What we were looking at was potentially 150 rooms that could house three students per room. So it wasn’t quite the same size it was before. But we’ll still continue to pursue that. I see it as a huge opportunity not only for interim housing for students to deal with the shortage that we have now up until we can get more permanent housing, but I also see it as a huge benefit for the big projects that we see on the horizon here. You have wind energy coming in here. You’re going to have a lot of people from out of the area that are going to need to do that work. And it’s going to impact our housing stock here. Having something like this and the availability for that would be a huge benefit for Eureka and future development when you’re having these huge projects come in here that are going to have hundreds of workers that have the place to go.

O’CONNOR:

The ship that was being proposed, that is actually one of the things it was used for originally, was docking in Singapore, I believe.

SLATTERY:

Uh… Alaska, Singapore, all over the world

O’CONNOR:

Now you’ve touched on housing as being one of the biggest issues that faces the city and it’s something that a lot of people talk about. What are the plans to develop more affordable housing for Eureka?

SLATTERY:

So I talked about that the RFP is going out and that’s going to be Going to council on Tuesday and then that gets approved It’ll go out for a solicitation probably a four to six week period and then once those responses come in staff will review them and make Recommendations it’s very similar to what we’ve done with the link projects we put out an initial RFP for three of the properties — on Eighth and G, Sunny and Myrtle, and Sixth and M — and those are going through the funding phase right now, and once those get funded they’ll put in I think 97 units That’ll be built We’re hoping that this a six grant that they just went for which is affordable housing sustainable communities grant for 35 million dollars would be a big step in the direction of getting all the funding for that and then they’ll get that for their tax credits and then that should be up and running. That’ll be 97, but then we have close to 210. Ten more that are being put out in this RFP and then we’re also looking at some agreements for the sunset properties on Fairhaven between Harrison and Henderson as well as the Earth Center project that’s going to be going in behind the Lost Coast Brewery Cafe. So all told there’ll be 309 total units. We have a lot of private development that’s doing housing right now. We have the property on Second and E that’s going to have 12 units going in there of market rate housing. We also have another development by the same developer going on in at Third and G, kind of by the Earth Center. That’s going to have another 11 units. And then we have the Lundbar Hills Subdivision that just got approved by council — that would be 66 single-family residential units, so we’re definitely have a big emphasis on on getting our housing crisis at least alleviated for the time being. Well, that’s all I have to say

O’CONNOR:

There is definitely momentum happening and there are as many projects happening as you just said. Miles, thank you so much for joining us for a Humboldt Conversation. A real pleasure to meet you. Good to see you. You too. Thank you.