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CHP Officer Adam Garcia said CHP dispatch received a call about 8:30 a.m. from some boaters who said they saw a motorcycle down an embankment just off Highway 20, west of Bruner Drive in the Kono Tayee area.
Garcia said the CHP's preliminary investigation indicates that the motorcyclist was riding at a high rate of speed heading westbound on Highway 20 and failed to negotiate a curve in the road.
The rider and motorcycle flew over the road edge and landed in a rocky area of Clear Lake's shoreline, said Garcia.
Garcia said it appeared that the rider – whose name has not been released pending family notification – died on impact, but the final determination will be made by a coroner's report.
The investigation, Garcia reported, is continuing, led by CHP Officer Brian Engle.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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ABBOTT MINE – A massive mine cleanup project of two south county mercury mines begun last fall officially wrapped on Thursday.
The Abbott and Turkey Run mines, minus the mountains of mine tailings and buildings that once marked the site along Highway 20 near Walker Ridge Road, were shown off Thursday by officials from El Paso Corp. of Colorado Springs, Colo., and the US Environmental Protection Agency.
The cleanup project began Oct. 10, 2006, said Clay Bowers, project manager for Camp, Dresser and McKee (CDM), the Cambridge, Mass.-based contractor that El Paso hired to complete the cleanup job.
Daniel Schnee, senior legal counsel for El Paso, said EPA's Region Nine Office, based in San Francisco, contacted El Paso in June 2006 to inquire if the company had ever conducted mining operations at the two mines.
El Paso's business is centered mostly in the southwest, where spokesman Richard Wheatley said they have some 43,000 miles of natural gas pipeline. That puts their current operations nowhere near Lake County.
However, Schnee said El Paso conducted an internal review and found that one of the subsidiaries it had purchased over the years, COG Minerals Corp., had, indeed, been responsible for mining operations at the site.
This wasn't the first mine cleanup El Paso has undertaken. Wheatley said the company also has been involved with cleanup of the famous Comstock Mine, which produced Nevada's silver Comstock Lode.
Schnee said the Abbott Mine claim was filed in 1866. There is some uncertainty about the Turkey Run's history, he added, although the company believes that the Turkey Run claim was filed in 1893. The two mines consolidated operations in 1900.
The mines were highly productive, yielding between 50,000 and 60,000 flasks of mercury during operation, which ceased in 1961, said Schnee. A flask is the size of a three-liter soda bottle and weighs 76 pounds.
The project gets started
Marc Ferries, El Paso's environmental remediation director, said the company was, at first, admittedly reluctant to spend the $5 million needed to carry out the cleanup.
However, he said El Paso's leadership decided it needed to be proactive and clean up the site, which also was in keeping with its corporate vision of being "the neighbor to have."
Schnee added that it came down to trust. "We are very conscious of the public's view of our company and our reputation means a lot to us."
By taking the lead on the project, El Paso also made a smart business decision financially.
EPA was poised to move forward with the cleanup, even if El Paso wasn't, said Schnee. Had the company chosen to contest its liability, Schnee said it would have resulted in an estimated cleanup cost three times the amount the company paid to do the work on its own.
So El Paso moved forward quickly, hiring CDM to lead the cleanup, said Schnee. El Paso Remediation Manager Bart Wilking; Janet Yocum, EPA's onsite coordinator; and Dale Evans of CDM, an expert in mine remediation, designed the project.
Schnee said work began only four months after EPA's initial contact with El Paso.
A unique factor to the cleanup is that El Paso, although held as a responsible party through its subsidiary holdings, doesn't actually own the property, said Schnee. There are now between four and six private owners who own the land through old mine patents passed down to them. Lake County News could not reach them for comment for this story.
El Paso had other challenges, said Evans, including unbelievably steep terrain, with grades as high as 52 degrees in some places.
And besides the mine they had to clean up 23 abandoned vehicles and tons of illegally dumped garbage, company officials reported.
There also was the matter of a squatter who had lived on the land for eight years and created a compound of sorts that included old trailers. Schnee said eventually the company reached a settlement with the man, who left.
Landscape a challenge
Pointing across the landscape, Evans said, "The terrain was obviously a challenge."
In some cases, it was a study in geometry, he said.
Much credit was given to CDM's heavy equipment operators, whose virtuoso skills on bulldozers helped carry out the work. Evans joked that the men were "part mountain goat"; so skilled were the operators that they were able to take the dozers down the incredibly steep slopes safely.
On the topic of safety, El Paso representatives on Thursday were very proud of the absence of any safety concerns or accidents as the project – which required 20,000 man hours – took place.
Evans explained that they removed tons of mine tailings – the waste left over after the mercury is extracted from the rock – from the hillsides and roads, including one mountain of tailings that had formed out from the natural hillside.
Bob Cornez, CDM's lead site construction supervisor, said they looked at the materials and judged whether they were leachable or nonleachable. If they were likely to leach mercury into the soil, those materials were removed completely, he said.
Mine tailings not considered a worry for leaching were capped with a 2-foot-thick layer of clean soil taken from nearby, Wilking said.
Materials considered to be hazardous were loaded, covered and trucked to a hazardous waste site in Nevada, said Wilking.
Cornez estimated that 50 truckloads of the hazardous materials were transported to Nevada.
The mine's buildings, 30-ton furnace and ore bins – the latter considered major contributors to the site's mercury contamination – were completely removed, said Cornez.
Evans said the wooden structures had soaked up mercury and were contaminated.
However, 10 pieces of metal mining equipment that could be decontaminated were saved, said Cornez.
The Lake County Historical Society received several pieces of equipment, according to Greg Dills, who chairs the Historical Society's committee on the Ely Stage Stop Museum, where the equipment eventually will be displayed.
Included was a large winch for raising and lowering people into the mine shafts, a smaller winch, a drag line and a cage used for the ore cars, said Dills. “It's some nice old historic equipment of Lake County's mining.”
Confronting water quality issues
One of the most important aspects of the project was to stop mercury escaping from the site and going into Harley Gulch, at the base of the hillside where the mine was located.
An estimated 10.2 kilograms of mercury in the form of sediment was eroding from the site each year into Harley Gulch, said Wilking. Evans added that Harley drains into Cache Creek about eight miles from the mines.
"We've isolated all that mine waste," said Wilking, with the goal that no more mercury will leach into Harley Gulch or Cache Creek.
That's an important goal; a 2002 report on the Cache Creek Watershed noted that Cache Creek was a major source of mercury to the Bay-Delta, which it drains into.
Wilking said the excavation went down as far as the gulch's flow line; today the gulch is thoroughly riprapped with rock brought from local quarries.
The project was intended to withstand a 100-year flood event, but Evans surmised it could survive much more – possibly a 500-year or 1,000-year event, due in part to the size of the riprap used to secure the site's drainages and creeks.
Evans said they tried to spare as much vegetation and as many trees as possible during the cleanup.
The four to five mine entries, leading to shafts that in some areas led as far as 500 feet into the mountainside, are all now filled and capped, Evans added.
Regulator, company worked well together
El Paso officials cited a great working relationship with EPA, a situation that isn't common between companies and regulators.
"I could not have imagined how good the final project was going to look," said Yocum, who added that the project will greatly benefit the environment.
On behalf of EPA, Yocum thanked El Paso for taking the lead and jumping ahead of EPA's processes. "At every level it's been a great team to work with."
A question company officials couldn't answer is how the site will be monitored going forward. That, said Schnee, has yet to be determined, and could involve not just El Paso but state and federal officials.
Abandoned mines are no small problem for Lake County. Ferries reported that there were 14 mercury mines in the county's Sulphur Bank district.
David Lawler, coordinator of the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Abandoned Mine Lands Program in the California state office, said BLM was currently assessing cleanups of about 10 mines in the county. Lawler estimated that there are 100 mercury mines around Lake County.
The reason, said Lawler, is California's rich mineral deposits. "California has world-class mercury deposits," he said, adding that the state is home to the five largest mercury mines in North America.
Supervisor Ed Robey, one of several visitors to the mine site Thursday, thanked El Paso officials for completing the project. In comparison, he said there has been an ongoing battle over the cleanup of the Sulphur Bank mine.
That mine, which is owned by Bradley Mining, is an EPA Superfund site. Last year EPA completed the first phase of its cleanup of the site, which took place at the Elem Colony.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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A report from the Clearlake Police Department said officers arrested 49-year-old Robert Stuart Enos on Sept. 5 for kidnapping, false imprisonment, terrorist threats and assault with a deadly weapon.
The arrests, the department reported, resulted from an ongoing police investigation.
Enos allegedly kidnapped a 45-year-old woman on the evening of Sept. 1.
He is alleged to have taken the woman to his Clearlake residence, where he held her against her will, threatened and assaulted her with a deadly weapon. Police did not specify what weapon was used.
Clearlake Police reported Enos eventually released the woman, who had no physical injuries.
The woman contacted police, who began an investigation which included serving a search warrant on Enos' home. During the search police found evidence related to the alleged crime.
Enos was arrested and transported to the Lake County Jail, according to the report. He remains in jail on $60,000 bail.
Anyone with information on the case is asked to contact Sgt. Crandall at 994-8251.
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By evening, the county was so socked in with smoke that Mt. Konocti was difficult to see from across the lake and even from nearby homes, according to area residents.
Wildland fires burning around Northern California are the cause of Lake County's smoky skies, according to reports from Forest Service, Cal Fire and the National Weather Service.
The Northern Sacramento Valley on Wednesday morning had a thick haze of smoke hovering over it, with reports throughout the day that the valley's haze came from the Moonlight Fire, burning in the Plumas and Lassen National Forests in northeastern California.
The National Weather Service reported that northeasterly wind flow across the northern Sierra Nevada and the western foothills was spreading considerable amounts of smoke from the Moonlight Fire into the Sierra's northern foothills, across the central and southern portion of Sacramento County, the northern San Joaquin Valley and into the Sacramento Bay-Delta.
The Moonlight Fire, located about 12 miles southwest of Susanville, has burned 18,500 acres since it began Monday afternoon. It was only five percent contained on Wednesday evening, according to a report from Cal Fire and the National Forest Service. The fire's cause has yet to be determined.
Officials reported that winds from the northeast were pushing the fire to the south and southeast; those same winds also were responsible for pushing smoke into the Sacramento Valley and then across into Lake County, according to Cal Fire.
At the same time, the Yolla Bolly Complex, located 20 air miles northeast of Covelo, continued to burn Wednesday, and officials warned of smoke traveling to the Sacramento Valley and outlying areas.
As Lake County News previously reported, the Yolla Bolly Complex – composed of several fires in a portion of the Mendocino National Forest and the Shasta-Trinity National Forest – was ignited by lightning strikes Aug. 29.
Mendocino Forest spokesperson Punky Moore reported that forest officials had issued a red flag warning due to strong, gusty northeast winds on the complex, which were hampering firefighting efforts and pushing smoke south.
The Yolla Bolly Complex is close to 300 acres in size, according to Moore. No report on its percent of containment was available.
Strong winds also were affecting efforts to battle the Lazy Fire, part of the lightning-caused Yolla Bolly Complex burning in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, according to a Forest Service report. The 500-acre fire was 30 percent contained Wednesday, with full containment expected Sunday.
The National Weather Service forecast north winds through Thursday over the fire area, which could push the fire south onto the Mendocino National Forest, with smoke moving over the northern Sacramento Valley.
Smoky conditions, the National Weather Service reported, are expected to persist until midday Thursday, when prevailing winds are expected to shift, allowing conditions to improve.
People with vulnerable respiratory systems are advised to take precautions, including staying indoors and avoiding strenuous physical activity, until the smoke clears, the National Weather Service advised.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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County resident Mark Elsa, 23, has been diagnosed with a rare synovial sarcoma cancer, said his brother, Tyler.
While the cancer usually is found in the body's joints, Mark's cancer has moved to his lung, according to Tyler Elsa. Two large tumors – one measuring 4 inches, another 6 inches – have been found on his right lung.
Mark requires several rounds of chemotherapy, which already have been started, according to information provided by his brother. He may also be facing lung surgery to move the cancerous growths, followed by radiation treatments.
The lengthy treatment process will likely involve weeks of hospitalization at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and University of California, San Francisco's hospital, according to information provided by his family.
Because of the astronomical expenses involved, Mark's family is working to raise money to pay for his care.
A benefit pasta feed is planned on Friday, Sept. 7, from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Lakeport Elks Lodge, 3775 Lakeshore Blvd., Tyler Elsa reported. The cost is $8 per person, and includes spaghetti, salad, coffee and dessert.
Donations to help fund Mark's care – including personal expenses, transportation, lodging and medical bills – also are being accepted, his family reported.
The family reported that donations can be made to the Mark Elsa Cancer Fund at any Bank of America branch. They thank the community for any and all donations.
Most of all the family asks that everyone keeps Mark in their prayers.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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Lt. Cecil Brown of the Lake County Sheriff's Office reported that 36-year-old Troy Allen Crabtree was arrested in the incident.
Brown reported that Sgt. Kip Ringen was driving a marked patrol car near the intersection of Highway 29 and Live Oak Drive in Kelseyville at about 3 p.m. Monday when he saw a black Suzuki GSXR 1000 motorcycle traveling north on Highway 29 on its rear wheel.
Ringen attempted to stop the motorcycle and contact the rider, later identified as Crabtree, Brown reported.
Instead of pulling over, Crabtree accelerated to more than 100 miles per hour, Brown reported. He passed four northbound vehicles over the double yellow line, and caused two southbound vehicles to pull off of the roadway to avoid a collision with the motorcycle.
Brown's report said Ringen pursued Crabtree on Highway 29, Merritt Road, Renfro Drive and Bell Hill Road, where he lost sight of the motorcycle.
As Ringen approached Hummell Lane, he saw a man pointing down Hummell Lane, according to Brown's report.
Ringen subsequently found the Suzuki on its side in a cloud of dust on the shoulder of Hummell Lane, with Crabtree running from the motorcycle, still wearing his helmet, Brown reported.
Brown reported that Ringen pursued Crabtree on foot, and as he began to overtake him he ordered Crabtree to stop.
At that point, Crabtree finally stopped and submitted to arrest, Brown reported.
Crabtree was booked into the Lake County Jail for evading a peace officer and reckless driving. He has since posted bail for $11,000 and was released.
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