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- Written by: Lake County News Reports
MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – It was trench football. It was hit-to-hit, yard-to-yard, down-to-down good old-fashioned mud bath football.
In short, it was the kind of game the Middletown Mustangs – with their stalwart defense and nose-to the-grindstone offense – excel at.
And excel they did, knocking out the Healdsburg Greyhounds – the North Coast Section (NCS) Division IV tournament’s No. 1 seed – 10-0 Friday night in Middletown before a large, raucous crowd.
“It was a battle,” Mustangs Head Coach Bill Foltmer said after the game. “Every yard, every run, every play was hard-fought yards. Both sides took a beating; it was a very physical football game.”
Sure, it was yet another Mustang shutout, and those statistics – five of their last six games have been shutouts, and eight of 13 games this season – are impressive by themselves, but this shutout was different.
This was no cakewalk; this was a battle of wills. And that battle was lead by Middletown’s hard-hitting, aggressive running back and linebacker Jacob Davis.
“Jake Davis is amazing,” Healdsburg Head Coach Tom Kirkpatrick said about the Middletown senior. “There were plays that looked like we were going to have some room to run, and he would just fly into the ball – an outstanding player.”
The action started early, on the Mustangs’ opening possession.
With Middletown trying to establish a running game and Healdsburg pushing back hard, David Pike caught a Kyle Brown screen pass on third and 16, broke a couple of tackles and streaked 79 yards downfield to score the game’s only touchdown.
Surefire kicker Danny Cardenas put the extra point through the uprights, the Mustangs took the lead 7-0, and the slog continued.
Healdsburg used most of the remaining first quarter to grind downfield, starting from their own 15 and needing two critical fourth-and-inches to make it down to Middletown’s 10-yard line, but on their second fourth-and-short and with their backs against the wall in the red zone, offensive lineman Luke Parker broke through the Healdsburg line and stopped the Greyhounds short.
“Our kids played hard tonight, and I’m so proud of them,” a jubilant Foltmer said after the game. “It was a great win against a great opponent.”
The game’s only other score came in the second quarter, when the Mustang’s needed 12 plays, a pass interference call and a horse-collar penalty before Cardenas kicked a 27-yard field goal to put Middletown ahead 10-0.
Of the Cardenas field goal, Foltmer said, “That was big, because now it’s a two-score game.”
Although the Greyhounds found some hard-earned forward progress in the second quarter, their attempts to even the score were twice thwarted by critical interceptions from cornerback Andres Fernandez, and the clock ran out with Healdsburg trailing 10-0.
“They did a good job of stopping us, and I thought we did a good job of stopping them,” Foltmer said about the game. “It was just a battle, you know?”
The second half was more of the same – a back-and-forth struggle in the trenches, fueled by the Middletown loud crowd, with both teams slogging downfield at times, only to see their efforts come up short.
Healdsburg’s fate was sealed with two and a half minutes left in the game, when Connor Chick intercepted a Max Opperman pass at Middletown’s 31-yard line, and the Mustangs ran out the clock to end the classic struggle.
“They played really hard, they played as hard as they could,” Kirkpatrick said about his Greyhounds, “and I told them, there was no problem with effort. This was not an effort game; this was an execution game.”
The Greyhounds successfully executed 12 out of 23 passes (with three interceptions) for 145 yards, while rushing 83 yards in 21 carries. The Mustangs logged 143 yards in the air on four of 10 passing, and 132 yards in 36 carries.
Having now secured a spot in the finals of the NCS tournament, Foltmer lamented, “People don’t understand: it’s not that easy to get there. My last time we were in the finals was 10 years ago.”
He added, “Normally, we tell the kids, ‘Hey, make the best of your year,’ and if it doesn’t work out this year for me, I’ve always got next year. But I’ve been telling this group that this might be my best shot at a section title with this group of kids.”
In a bit of irony, the Mustangs will end the season as they began it: by playing the Salesian Pride, who advanced to the NCS finals with a 76-28 trouncing of the Ferndale Wildcats Saturday in the tournament’s other semifinal game.
Middletown lost to Salesian 57-52 in that game – their season opener, and their only loss of the year – but powerhouse Jake Davis sat out the game with a broken jaw.
The Mustangs-Pride final will be held at Alhambra High School in Martinez on Saturday, Dec. 11, at 7 p.m.
“Yeah, we’ll go scout Salesian and Ferndale tomorrow,” Foltmer said Friday night about the other NCS semifinal game, “but we worked so hard this week, and with a big win like this, I just want to enjoy it.”
Healdsburg’s Kirkpatrick looked across the field to the Middletown side after the game and said with simple admiration, “That’s a great high school team right there.”
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The pageant, now in its 17th season, is festive Christmas entertainment, resplendent with madrigal singing, colorful period costumes and an original script that changes each year.
In addition, a medieval-style feast is served to the guests that function as members of the court of Greystone Castle (into which the Middletown Community United Methodist Church transforms for the yearly performances).
I enjoyed every aspect of the event nine years ago (as I have in the years since then), but the food especially piqued my interest.
Chicken flavored with cinnamon provided a savory entrée with a hint of sweetness. It was served on a round of flat bread that functioned as our dish, and eating it made our role as guests of Lord and Lady Greystone all the more plausible.
On Monday evening I was again a guest at the castle, this time for a dress rehearsal. The temporary trip back in time rekindled my interest in the cookery of that time, hence the subject of today’s column.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The National Weather Service in Sacramento issued a special weather statement warning of moisture that will “continue to stream across the region for the remainder of the weekend.”
A weak storm front brought in moisture Saturday night, the agency reported.
A stronger low pressure system from the Eastern Pacific is expected to travel through Northern California throughout the day and into the night Sunday, bringing wind, moderate to heavy rain, and snow above 5,000 feet, the National Weather Service said.
Forecasters predict a 60 percent chance of rain Sunday, which will decrease early in the week. Precipitation is expected to return on Wednesday and possibly later in the week.
E-mail Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: Dr. Tony Phillips
Every hundred years or so, a solar storm comes along so potent it fills the skies of Earth with blood-red auroras, makes compass needles point in the wrong direction, and sends electric currents coursing through the planet's topsoil.
The most famous such storm, the Carrington Event of 1859, actually shocked telegraph operators and set some of their offices on fire.
A 2008 report by the National Academy of Sciences warns that if such a storm occurred today, we could experience widespread power blackouts with permanent damage to many key transformers.
What's a utility operator to do?
A new NASA project called "Solar Shield" could help keep the lights on.
“Solar Shield is a new and experimental forecasting system for the North American power grid,” said project leader Antti Pulkkinen, a Catholic University of America research associate working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. “We believe we can zero in on specific transformers and predict which of them are going to be hit hardest by a space weather event.”
The troublemaker for power grids is the “GIC” – short for geomagnetically induced current.
When a coronal mass ejection (a billion-ton solar storm cloud) hits Earth's magnetic field, the impact causes the field to shake and quiver.
These magnetic vibrations induce currents almost everywhere, from Earth's upper atmosphere to the ground beneath our feet.
Powerful GICs can overload circuits, trip breakers, and in extreme cases melt the windings of heavy-duty transformers.
This actually happened in Quebec on March 13, 1989, when a geomagnetic storm much less severe than the Carrington Event knocked out power across the entire province for more than nine hours.
The storm damaged transformers in Quebec, New Jersey, and Great Britain, and caused more than 200 power anomalies across the USA from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Northwest.
A similar series of “Halloween storms” in October 2003 triggered a regional blackout in southern Sweden and may have damaged transformers in South Africa.
While many utilities have taken steps to fortify their grids, the overall situation has only gotten worse.
A 2009 report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and the US Department of Energy concluded that modern power systems have a “significantly enhance[d] vulnerability and exposure to effects of a severe geomagnetic storm.”
Since the beginning of the Space Age the total length of high-voltage power lines crisscrossing North America has increased nearly 10 fold. This has turned power grids into giant antennas for geomagnetically induced currents.
With demand for power growing even faster than the grids themselves, modern networks are sprawling, interconnected, and stressed to the limit – a recipe for trouble, according to the National Academy of Sciences: “The scale and speed of problems that could occur on [these modern grids] have the potential to impact the power system in ways not previously experienced.”
A large-scale blackout could last a long time, mainly due to transformer damage. As the National Academy report notes, “these multi-ton apparatus cannot be repaired in the field, and if damaged in this manner they need to be replaced with new units which have lead times of 12 months or more.”
That is why a node-by-node forecast of geomagnetic currents is potentially so valuable. During extreme storms, engineers could safeguard the most endangered transformers by disconnecting them from the grid. That itself could cause a blackout, but only temporarily. Transformers protected in this way would be available again for normal operations when the storm is over.
The innovation of Solar Shield is its ability to deliver transformer-level predictions. Pulkkinen explains how it works: “Solar Shield springs into action when we see a coronal mass ejection (CME) billowing away from the sun. Images from SOHO and NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft show us the cloud from as many as three points of view, allowing us to make a 3D model of the CME, and predict when it will arrive.”
While the CME is crossing the sun-Earth divide, a trip that typically takes 24 to 48 hours, the Solar Shield team prepares to calculate ground currents.
“We work at Goddard's Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC),” said Pulkkinen.
The CCMC is a place where leading researchers from around the world have gathered their best physics-based computer programs for modeling space weather events.
The crucial moment comes about 30 minutes before impact when the cloud sweeps past ACE, a spacecraft stationed 1.5 million km upstream from Earth. Sensors onboard ACE make in situ measurements of the CME's speed, density, and magnetic field. These data are transmitted to Earth and the waiting Solar Shield team.
“We quickly feed the data into CCMC computers,” said Pulkkinen. “Our models predict fields and currents in Earth's upper atmosphere and propagate these currents down to the ground.”
With less than 30 minutes to go, Solar Shield can issue an alert to utilities with detailed information about GICs.
Pulkkinen stresses that Solar Shield is experimental and has never been field-tested during a severe geomagnetic storm. A small number of utility companies have installed current monitors at key locations in the power grid to help the team check their predictions.
So far, though, the sun has been mostly quiet with only a few relatively mild storms during the past year. The team needs more data.
“We'd like more power companies to join our research effort,” he added. “The more data we can collect from the field, the faster we can test and improve Solar Shield.”
Power companies work with the team through EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute. Of course a few good storms would help test the system, too.
They're coming. The next solar maximum is expected around 2013, so it's only a matter of time.
Dr. Tony Phillips works for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
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