THE ANNUAL RANCHERIA RESCUE, 2012. Usually it happens this way: A kayaker, or a group of them, underestimates the time it will take to schwoosh the rain-swollen Rancheria from Mountain View Road to Hendy Woods. They put in at the bridge on Mountain View about five miles west of Boonville while their significant others wait at Hendy with rum, blankets, rum, dry clothes, rum and transportation. This year the annual rescue was different, odder, actually. Dave Severn takes it from here:
“I went up Mountain View Road Monday morning to get some water. On the way back I saw some kayakers going up the road. It seemed like they were on their way to put their kayaks into the river at the Rancheria bridge further up Mountain View Road. So I turned around and came up on the two guys who were getting ready to kayak down the Rancheria in its full flow after these recent rains. They invited me to come along. They were about 45 or 55 years old. They said it would take about four hours to navigate from the bridge down to somewhere near Philo. That seemed a little long so I declined. They each had individual kayaks.
“In mid-afternoon I took my three grandchildren down to the river near Shenoa. We played there for a while on shore and watched the high water go by.
The next thing we knew at about 2:30 a kayaker floated down and pulled his kayak up and ran up to us and shouted “Call 911! I lost my buddy!” He said that he thought he lost him about two miles upriver. He said his friend fell out of the canoe-like vessel and was lost and he didn't know where he was. The empty kayak without its rider was being pulled by the first guy with a rope. I didn't have a radio or cellphone with me, so the three kids and I started running back up Ray's Road to get help.
“I sent John Finn (age seven) ahead to go home and call 911 while I took the younger kids up the road. On the way we came across a Mexican guy who was outside his house and he let us use his cell phone to call 911. In a matter of minutes search and rescue units started arriving — fire engines, helicopters, search and rescue SUVs — where we were gathered around Shenoa above the bridge. As the story developed we learned that somehow the guy must have hit something, maybe an underwater rock, and fallen out of the kayak. Then the other guy, still in his kayak, got hold of the empty kayak by the rope and the guy who'd fallen out grabbed his kayak and together they were caught in a eddy to the side of the river, not moving downstream. In the confusion the guy who had fallen out lost contact with the kayak he was holding on to and disappeared. The first guy had no idea what happened or where his partner went.
“The river is running pretty high now because of the heavy rains and at times it can get to three to six feet or more. It's fast and deep. It's also very muddy, you can't see in it at all. It's certainly not walkable.
“Don Gowan, the volunteer fire department’s Philo battalion chief, was in charge of the rescue operation. Another helicopter arrived; more search and rescue units arrived. Don has plenty of experience with these kinds of things so he sent a guy down to the Philo-Greenwood bridge just to make sure that the missing guy hadn't somehow gotten further downstream from his partner. Lo and behold, there he was — alive and still in his wetsuit. Somehow he had gotten around or under his partner and floated all the way down two miles past where his partner first came ashore.
“Don called off the operation at a little before 4pm Monday. I assume the dumped kayaker will get a bill for all that search and rescue effort. We still don't know exactly how they got separated or how the guy who fell out got past the guy who didn't fall out. The man who'd stayed in his kayak said he was going as slow as he could to search for his partner. So maybe the guy who had fallen out somehow slipped past him. We still don't know why the guy who had fallen out didn't just make his way to the side of the river instead of floating all the way down to the Hendy Woods bridge.
“I've seen kayakers in there at even higher levels, but you better know exactly what you're doing when you try that trip. There's nothing back there for miles. How this guy got so far downstream after dumping is a mystery to me.”
BEING A BOONVILLE-CENTRIC publication, we've come to judge the severity of Mendocino County storms by what happens to the Navarro River. A day of heavy rains after the ground has become saturated by earlier storms, means the river is likely to rise so rapidly it will flood Highway 128 from Flynn Creek Road to the ocean, making the road impassable. If 128 is forced to close, it means all of the Northcoast has been pounded, and flooding and weather-related disasters will occur everywhere north of the Golden Gate Bridge. A second reliable storm indicator is how severely storms affect that community of hardy souls who live at the mouth of the Navarro, or within a couple of miles of the mouth on the flats to the east. One of those stalwarts writes of the Christmas rains now subsiding on Wednesday, “No flooding at my place… only one third of my backyard is filled with water as it creeps toward my office and cabin. During the last big rain it got halfway full with water running off from the hills because it rained on consecutive days, several times. Since it's due to be a wet winter and it's barely begun, the only way I'd feel safe from the ravages of flood is if I was up on water buoys. Big expense — can't do. The dirt road I drive in on is feeling wear from the tear-cracks that develop into slips, slips into slides. We have several potential slide spots. I can swim but my house can't.”
SUPERVISOR JOHN McCOWEN the Board on the status of the Mental Health Court planning earlier this month. The seed for the proposal was planted last August when the Board voted unanimously not to adopt Laura's Law as a way to deal with chronically, perhaps dangerously, mentally ill Mendolanders, many of them driven temporarily insane by methamphetamine.
“Along with Judge Moorman and Chief Probation Officer Brown and I and Mental Health Director Pinizotto and several other county partners all attended the Napa County mental health court to see first hand how that court operates. Supervisor Hamburg and I had a meeting last night with the mental health court committee and our folks are chomping at the bit to get this up and running. I don't know how quickly we will be able to achieve that. One of the key elements is who will provide case management? How will that be done? We do believe there are some county dollars within existing budgets that can be used for that. But whether it will be provided by county staff or by contractor or community partner which would be part of an RFP, what the exact qualifications of the person will be, etc. Those are all kind of still in discussion.”
Hamburg: “By the conclusion of the meeting Judge Moorman said that she hopes to have the program up and running by the end of January. We did get an offer from the Executive Director of Manzanita to provide us with some startup staff, a position that they actually call a navigator which is someone who takes on the client with the knowledge of the array of services that are available in the community in support of the judge and the district attorney and the public defender. The other thing I feel good about it is that unlike some of our other programs including the family dependency drug court program, the mental health court will start off with an equal amount of program on the coast as in the Ukiah Valley. So I think that's a very good thing and that's what we decided at the beginning and that seems to be what will actually come forward. So we are going to start really small, one or two first clients, a couple on the coast, a couple inland, and take it very slowly step-by-step. But it's a good process.”
AT THAT SAME MEETING on December 10, Supervisor John Pinches told the Board about the newly unearthed drawbacks associated with the conservation easements the area's wealthy landowners have taken advantage of to avoid taxes by promising not to do things on their land that they had no intention of doing anyway. Conservation easements for the undeserving have become a minor Mendocino County industry, with non-profits paying people (mostly lawyers) royally to do the paperwork. “At the Mendocino Council of Governments meeting earlier this month the discussion came up over conservation easements and so forth or buying land with easements and I was concerned about the cumulative effect over time. Sue Ranochak, the county assessor, who is on MCOG with us, brought up the fact that many Mendocino County— she is presently reviewing over $300 million worth of assessed valuations that will be removed from the tax base due to conservation easements. I just wanted people to know that. The cumulative effect over time of conservation easements, 63% of that tax money goes to schools, so our schools in Mendocino County are going to be deprived of about $1.8 million annually due to the conservation easements in the county. And the county general fund will also suffer the loss of just under $1 million every year. That's an annual increment of money we don't get anymore because of conservation easements. So I just wanted to bring up that there is a cost to these conservation easements, especially when it reduces the assessed valuation which they all do. Over time it really hurts our school funding and the Mendocino County General Fund by a significant amount. I didn't realize that the number was that huge until Sue Ranochak brought out that fact. But the cumulative effect of it is mounting into the millions and that costs our schools and our county every year.”
SUPERVISOR DAN HAMBURG offered his view of the big meeting on the Coast a few weeks ago concerning the proposed cuts to the Ten Mile Court in Fort Bragg: “I think the most interesting thing that I attended recently was on a dark and stormy night when about 300 coastal citizens got together in the town hall building in Fort Bragg and presiding judge Richard Henderson was there with all of the rest of the Superior Court judges with the exception of Dave Nelson who was down in San Diego, but it was a really memorable event because we had all been hearing about the closure, not a complete closure of the Ten Mile court, but the closure of a significant amount of its activity, and this brought the coast together like no issue since offshore oil. I have never seen so many people. I'm surprised the fire marshal allowed them all to cram their way in. There were people out the door and listening along Main Street through Fort Bragg. And after Judge Henderson gave about a 20 minute description of why this cost-saving step was needed in order to save the Superior Courts he said that in fact he had stubbed his toe on this particular issue and was taking the whole thing back so there were some very happy people except that they had all been dragged out of their homes on a dark and stormy night.”
Supervisor Carre Brown: “I had jury duty on December 3rd and I actually got excused; however there were a lot of coastal people that got called over and drove all the way and were excused. They sat the jury and by the time they were getting to our jury pool they were not happy campers coming over and then just having to drive right back.”
Hamburg: “This issue brought a lot of people together in our county and of course the district attorney and the public defender.”
(The public defender was not involved in the issue at all, no one from the Public Defender's office made any public statement or appeared at the meeting.)
Pinches: “Since the Governor appointed two, filled two judgeships in Mendocino County does that mean that it adds to the overhead of about $350,000 a year? So is there any indication how they are going to meet their budget cuts with that?”
Hamburg: “The presiding judge of course explained that there is absolutely no relationship between those two additional positions and the fiscal problems of the court. You can believe that or not.”
Pinches: “How do they explain that one?”
Hamburg didn’t want to get into it. Judge Nelson is a long-time friend of Hamburg’s going back to when Nelson was Hamburg’s chief of staff while Hamburg was a congressman back in the mid-90s. “I will let Supervisor Smith talk about that if she wants to. [She didn’t, of course. As far as Smith is concerned, the taxpayers can never give local officials enough money.] “But I think what they're going to do is they are going to find the $60,000 that they said would be the savings from letting go of this court reporter from the overall administration of the courts rather than taking it all out of Ten Mile. And also I think the passage of Prop 30 may also have some positive effects.”
Pinches: “I thought that Prop 30 was supposed to go to our schools.”
Hamburg: “I think Prop 30 was for a lot of things. I think it was sold to the public as save our schools, but I think it had many aspects to it. So anyway, the upshot is that the Ten Mile court will continue to operate fully, however I think there was something really good that came out of it which is that the community really looked at, and I'm talking mostly about the legal community, really looked at the importance of that court to what they do as lawyers and to the overall operation of the justice system throughout Mendocino County. So I thought that was a good event.”
COMMENT OF THE DAY: “Do you know why scenes or even just shots of freeways so seldom appear in the movies we watch? Because they are so depressing that nobody can stand to see them. The jolts of terror that you get in a horror movie at least inform you that you're alive, but the sight of a freeway only reminds you of what it's like to be dead.” — James Kunstler
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