LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County is among five communities hit hardest by the devastating wildfires in 2018 that will receive $40.7 million in new federal aid to support community development and help communities reach full economic recovery after a disaster.

The funding will not only benefit the hundreds of Californians who participate directly in the workplace training and development programs but creates long-term economic and social benefits for the communities.

“Even after the housing and infrastructure are rebuilt, communities hurt by wildfire can continue to suffer from trauma and economic impacts for years to come,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom. “We are grateful to the Biden Administration for its ongoing support to help Californians rebuild their lives and economies. We will keep advocating for our communities and their access to disaster relief and recovery.”

The funding comes from the federal 2018 Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery Workforce Development, known as the CDBG-DR-WD program.

These awards will go to communities in the counties of Butte, Lake, Los Angeles, Shasta and Ventura.

The federal funding will go to programs that provide free job training and supportive services to low- to moderate-income individuals in the community, with the goal of improving job placement opportunities for residents.

Eligible applicants included local jurisdictions, nonprofit organizations, post-secondary education institutions, and local workforce development boards in areas designated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In Lake County, the Workforce Alliance of the North Bay will receive more than $4.7 million for the Lake Workforce Program to better equip the region for long-term recovery and rebuilding efforts and enhance resilience to future disasters.

Workforce Alliance of the North Bay did not immediately respond to a request from Lake County News for comment about its program plans on Friday.

“In addition to rebuilding housing and infrastructure, fostering economic recovery is critical after a natural disaster,” said HCD Director Gustavo Velasquez. “Following disasters, many communities face a challenge in finding people locally with the skills to rebuild better and with greater resilience. We are proud to partner with HUD to create these career paths for 2018 wildfire survivors and to help these hard-hit communities grow with an eye toward a strong and sustainable future.”

“CDBG-DR provides communities with important resources to help rebuild in the worst of times. With this investment, young people and others building job skills can focus on their futures. HUD is proud to work with the State of California to ensure resilience across their communities,” said HUD Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development Marion McFadden.

In addition to Lake County’s plans, the projects funded are as follows.

Butte County — The town of Paradise will receive nearly $17.9 million to establish the Paradise Resilient Infrastructure and Sustainable Education Center, or Paradise RISE, on the Paradise High School campus to train 500 local LMI residents in the construction trades — including specialized fields such as plumbing and electrical—or as certified nursing assistants.

Los Angeles County — Two organizations, Tradeswomen and Women in Non-Traditional Employment Roles, have been awarded $2 million to provide training and employment opportunities for underserved populations in the construction trades — particularly focusing on women and other marginalized populations.

Shasta County — The city of Redding will receive more than $8.6 million to launch its Workforce Recovery Training Program, providing online, remote, virtual, and in-person training for 200 LMI residents.

Ventura County — The county received $7.5 million to fund workforce training for 215 LMI county residents in healthcare occupations, restoring healthcare infrastructure, creating job opportunities, promoting community well-being, strengthening disaster preparedness, and ultimately building a more resilient healthcare system and community. The county will also acquire a mobile unit to reach out to communities that may have transportation barriers or difficulty accessing traditional job centers, vital for residents in rural areas of Ventura County.

A new state insurance regulation is aiming to bring more insurance coverage to areas of California that have been hard hit by wildland fires and, as a result, have seen customers receiving nonrenewals.

The California Department of Insurance has submitted the final wildfire catastrophe modeling regulation to the Office of Administrative Law, or OAL, for approval.

The regulation, which the agency said is the first of its kind in California’s history, strengthens Prop. 103 by establishing unprecedented coverage commitments from insurance companies, aimed at stabilizing the insurance market and expanding options for homeowners and business owners in high wildfire-risk areas.

The submission follows several months of extensive public input, expert consultations, and multiple public hearings and workshops held by the Insurance Department.

“Consumers want solutions to our state’s insurance crisis. My new regulation will make insurance more available across the state,” said Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara. “As California experiences more intense climate impacts, technology will tell us where the risks truly are and accurately price rates that reflect mitigation and hardening investments.”

“I appreciate Commissioner Lara for moving this forward,” Sen. Bill Dodd, D-Napa, said in response to the announcement. “It’s a complex problem and there isn’t a panacea, but this is one part of the equation that has the ability to help. It will be critical that insurance companies are held accountable towards renewing and writing new policies.”

Under Prop. 103, insurance companies are allowed to raise rates on homeowners, businesses and consumers, but are not legally required to offer coverage in wildfire-prone areas.

This new wildfire catastrophe modeling regulation, as part of Commissioner Lara’s comprehensive Sustainable Insurance Strategy, introduces a requirement for insurers to increase their policy offerings in underserved areas as a condition of incorporating catastrophe modeling into ratemaking.

Providing insurers the ability to better assess risk allows them to more accurately price insurance and make coverage more available to homeowners and businesses who live and operate in wildfire-prone areas all the while ensuring that insurance companies commit to increase their writings of these wildfire distressed properties across the state, the Department of Insurance reported.

In addition, over the past several years, California has invested billions of dollars in wildfire risk reduction and, under Commissioner Lara’s leadership, the Department has implemented several programs designed to reward homeowners and businesses for safety improvements, such as home hardening, property mitigation, and other fire-resistant modifications.

These programs are intended to align insurance practices with the state’s overall wildfire mitigation efforts and investments, which must also be incorporated into catastrophe models as part of this regulation.

The Sustainable Insurance Strategy has already led major insurers like Allstate and Farmers to announce plans to resume or expand their coverage offerings in California when its reforms take full effect.

Key highlights of the wildfire catastrophe modeling regulation include:

Expanded public engagement: The Insurance Department held three workshops and hearings in 2024, which were attended by more than 1,000 interested parties, gathering input and receiving hundreds of public comments which helped shape this regulation.

Increased coverage in high-risk areas: Insurance companies must increase the writing of comprehensive policies in wildfire distressed areas equivalent to no less than 85% of their statewide market share, whereas there is no current legal requirement for insurers to commit to providing any coverage in high-risk areas.

Incorporation of wildfire mitigation efforts: Building on Commissioner Lara’s “Safer from Wildfires” initiative — the nation’s first wildfire safety discount program — the regulation requires catastrophe models to account for mitigation efforts by homeowners, businesses, and communities, something not currently possible under existing outdated regulations today.

Enhanced model integrity: The Insurance Department is finalizing the hiring of a model advisor to examine model integrity, and ensure public review and compliance with Prop. 103.

Implementation timeline: Once approved by OAL, the regulation should take effect by year’s end, with the model review process set to begin on January 1, 2025.

In a parallel initiative, Commissioner Lara and Cal Poly Humboldt have established a strategy group to develop the nation’s first public wildfire catastrophe model.

This partnership with California’s research institutions is designed to create an accessible, science-based model for predicting wildfire risks, ultimately supporting fair and accurate insurance rates.

Expected to provide recommendations by April 2025, the group will further support California’s efforts to build safer communities and expand insurance options statewide.

By increasing insurance availability, the Insurance Department’s approach aims to achieve greater affordability and stability within California’s insurance and real estate markets.

The Insurance Department is on track to complete the regulatory reforms under Commissioner Lara’s comprehensive Sustainable Insurance Strategy by the end of 2024 in order to address current climate risks and increase insurance protection for California consumers.

The Insurance Department’s role includes regulating insurers to ensure accountability, confirm that claims are paid, and verify that consumers are not charged beyond what is necessary and fair.

Through the Insurance Department’s rate regulation experts, each and every rate application filed will be thoroughly reviewed to make sure they are compliant with insurance laws, justified and transparent under Prop. 103, and that consumers are protected.

The Office of Administrative Law is now reviewing the regulation for compliance and, once approved, it will become effective by the end of December.

 

CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control’s roundup of dogs this week includes canines of many breeds and sizes waiting for new homes.

The shelter has 50 adoptable dogs listed on its website.

This week’s dogs include “Oreo,” a 4-year-old male mixed breed dog with a beige, white and black coat.

The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.

This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

Scientists using observations from NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory have discovered, for the first time, the signal from a pair of monster black holes disrupting a cloud of gas in the center of a galaxy.

“It’s a very weird event, called AT 2021hdr, that keeps recurring every few months,” said Lorena Hernández-García, an astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics, the Millennium Nucleus on Transversal Research and Technology to Explore Supermassive Black Holes, and University of Valparaíso in Chile. “We think that a gas cloud engulfed the black holes. As they orbit each other, the black holes interact with the cloud, perturbing and consuming its gas. This produces an oscillating pattern in the light from the system.”

A paper about AT 2021hdr, led by Hernández-García, was published Nov. 13 in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The dual black holes are in the center of a galaxy called 2MASX J21240027+3409114, located 1 billion light-years away in the northern constellation Cygnus. The pair are about 16 billion miles (26 billion kilometers) apart, close enough that light only takes a day to travel between them. Together they contain 40 million times the Sun’s mass.

Scientists estimate the black holes complete an orbit every 130 days and will collide and merge in approximately 70,000 years.

AT 2021hdr was first spotted in March 2021 by the Caltech-led ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was flagged as a potentially interesting source by Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events, or ALeRCE.

This multidisciplinary team combines artificial intelligence tools with human expertise to report events in the night sky to the astronomical community using the mountains of data collected by survey programs like ZTF.

“Although this flare was originally thought to be a supernova, outbursts in 2022 made us think of other explanations,” said co-author Alejandra Muñoz-Arancibia, an ALeRCE team member and astrophysicist at the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics and the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the University of Chile. “Each subsequent event has helped us refine our model of what’s going on in the system.”

Since the first flare, ZTF has detected outbursts from AT 2021hdr every 60 to 90 days.

Hernández-García and her team have been observing the source with Swift since November 2022. Swift helped them determine that the binary produces oscillations in ultraviolet and X-ray light on the same time scales as ZTF sees them in the visible range.

The researchers conducted a Goldilocks-type elimination of different models to explain what they saw in the data.

Initially, they thought the signal could be the byproduct of normal activity in the galactic center. Then they considered whether a tidal disruption event — the destruction of a star that wandered too close to one of the black holes — could be the cause.

Finally, they settled on another possibility, the tidal disruption of a gas cloud, one that was bigger than the binary itself. When the cloud encountered the black holes, gravity ripped it apart, forming filaments around the pair, and friction started to heat it. The gas got particularly dense and hot close to the black holes. As the binary orbits, the complex interplay of forces ejects some of the gas from the system on each rotation. These interactions produce the fluctuating light Swift and ZTF observe.

Hernández-García and her team plan to continue observations of AT 2021hdr to better understand the system and improve their models. They’re also interested in studying its home galaxy, which is currently merging with another one nearby — an event first reported in their paper.

“As Swift approaches its 20th anniversary, it’s incredible to see all the new science it’s still helping the community accomplish,” said S. Bradley Cenko, Swift’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “There’s still so much it has left to teach us about our ever-changing cosmos.”

NASA’s missions are part of a growing, worldwide network watching for changes in the sky to solve mysteries of how the universe works.

Goddard manages the Swift mission in collaboration with Penn State, the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Dulles, Virginia. Other partners include the University of Leicester and Mullard Space Science Laboratory in the United Kingdom, Brera Observatory in Italy, and the Italian Space Agency.

Jeanette Kazmierczak works for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Registrar of Voters Office reported Thursday on the progress being made to complete the count of unprocessed ballots from the presidential election.

The elections office has 28 days to complete the official canvass for the Nov. 5 election, which means the full tally must be complete by Dec. 3. The Secretary of State’s Office will certify results on Dec. 13.

Until the results are certified, the general election results aren’t final, the Registrar of Voters Office reported.

The first count the elections office issued on unprocessed ballots two days after the election put the total at 19,021 ballots, including 17,445 vote-by-mail ballots, 1,453 provisional/conditional ballots and 123 vote-by-mail ballots that require further review for various reasons.

The updated unprocessed ballot count the registrar issued on Thursday totaled 18,952, including 17,247 vote-by-mail ballots and 1,453 provisional/conditional ballots.

Additionally, the number of vote-by-mail ballots requiring review grew from 123 to 252, the elections office reported.

The Secretary of State’s Office reported that, as of Thursday evening, 14,599,593 ballots had been processed statewide.

Ballots still to be counted in California’s 58 counties total 1,513,597.

That includes:

• 157,952 vote-by-mail ballots received after election day. The Secretary of State’s Office said vote-by-mail ballots that are mailed must be postmarked on or before Election Day and received by a county election office no later than seven days after Election Day in order to be counted.
• 70,371 provisional ballots.
• 331,842 conditional voter registration ballots.
• 44,644 ballots classified as “other.” “This category includes unprocessed ballots that are damaged or could not be machine-read and need to be remade, and ballots diverted by optical scanners for further review,” the Secretary of State’s Office reported.

In addition, the state reported that there are 132,612 ballots left to cure, which refers to the process of addressing errors that led to a ballot’s rejection.

Editor’s note: On Friday, the Registrar of Voters Office issued a revised ballot count. This article has been revised to reflect those numbers.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, and on Bluesky, @erlarson.bsky.social. Find Lake County News on the following platforms: Facebook, @LakeCoNews; X, @LakeCoNews; Threads, @lakeconews, and on Bluesky, @lakeconews.bsky.social.