Thursday, April 12, 2012

Milton Anderson memorial this Saturday

For those that have been waiting for this announcement, they will be having services for Milton Anderson at The Begginings in Briceland:
There will be a celebration of life to laugh and share in remembering Milton’s life on April 14 at Beginnings in Briceland at 1 p.m. Please bring potluck side dishes. Barbecue will be provided.

Rest In Peace old friend.


Click here for Milton Anderson's Obituary in the Redwood Times

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Treyvon Martin, George Zimmerman


For Your Information.

By now, everyone has heard about the shooting death of Treyvon Martin, a 17 year old 6 foot 1 inch, 150 lb, black young man, George Zimmerman is a 5 foot 9 inch, 170 lb, 28 year old Hispanic man that says that he shot Martin in self defense on the "stand your ground law" in Florida.

The news is abuzz with the Treyvon Martin shooting death by George Zimmerman. I myself just want to know the truth. I want a full and complete investigation by an independent party, then I want the details and reasons for what ever conclusion that they find. For some reason we never hear why the police reach the conclusions that they do. They never justify why they did or didn't do drug testing on either party. They don't explain what happened to set the public at ease that the police have done the right thing. Is it perhaps that they didn't do the right thing? I need assurance, the same as many others, that the police have reached the right decisions.

Why has most all the news services chosen to misrepresent the facts? NBC fraudulently doctored the 911 tapes. Why has Treyvon been pictured as a 13 year old kid in all the pictures? Is George Martin an aggressor? Did he chase down Treyvon and get in a scuffle and kill him, or did he turn around when he told the 911 dispatcher that he was following Treyvon and the dispatcher told him "I wouldn't do that".

The other thing that amazes me is that there are so many people able to reach dramatic conclusions on practically no bona-fide evidence. Also, why is it that the conclusions are so sharply divided along racial lines. I don't know enough to say who is at fault. I do know that most news services are no longer of any real service when most of them spread bald faced lies disguised as "News.

What about the lawyers? Why are they all going on television try to upstage each other. The DA says that she doesn't trust a Grand Jury to come to the right decision on whether to prosecute George Martin, so she is going to decide herself. That sounds a whole lot more like ego than judgement. And, two defense lawyers are out there jockeying for the best position to get their face on camera. They claim that they quit because they haven't heard from George Martin. I kind of wonder if Martin Really retained them in the fist place. The whole thing is shaping up like a civil rights and racism disaster.

The following is a Reprint From Politico
By DARIUS DIXON, 4/6/12 7:30 AM EDT

Americans are divided sharply along racial lines when it comes the shooting death of a black Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, a recent Gallup survey found. African-Americans are nearly five times more likely to be convinced that gunman George Zimmerman is “definitely guilty” of a crime than non-blacks, according to the Gallup poll released Thursday. Also striking: Blacks are twice as likely as non-blacks to believe that Zimmerman would have been arrested if the person he shot was white — 75 percent to 35 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, 49 percent of non-blacks believe Martin’s race didn’t play a factor, compared to 20 percent of blacks.Yet, an equal portion of blacks and non-blacks surveyed — 21 percent — think Zimmerman is “probably guilty” of a crime. The survey results were derived from a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted between April 2 and April 4 of 3,006 Americans, including 242 blacks, as part of Gallup Daily tracking.

Thursday’s Gallup poll gelled with the findings of an earlier survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press that found opinions about the media coverage of the Martin case were sharply divided on race. Of those saying there was too much coverage of Martin’s death, 16 percent were black while 43 percent were white. In the Tuesday survey, 56 percent of Republicans say there’s been “too much” media about the February shooting, while only 25 percent of Democrats agreed.

Read more: Treyvon Martin

Friday, April 6, 2012

Columbus Day Windstorm, October 12th 1962. Humboldt Version

Steven Norman. Arcata forest blowdown (Not 1962)

Robin Shelley said that 70 mph wind, something I wasn't used to in L'ville, can be downright scary


I whole heartedly agree with her. Wind really bothers me. The scariest rescue calls that I go on with the fire department are windstorm calls. I’m reminded of Indiana Jones lowering himself by rope into and underground chamber, he holds out his torch and looks around on the floor and sees hundreds of snakes. He shudders and says, “Snakes! Why does it always have to be snakes!”. That’s the way that I feel about windstorms, “Wind! Why does it always have to be wind.” When the wind blows at night, I lay awake and listen to it hiss through the trees and wait for my pager to alert me to a wind rescue call. Most often our wind rescue calls are in lower Redway, where a virgin old-growth redwood forest exists. People love to live in, and about, the majestic redwood trees… that is until the wind blows and they start falling

Always, not just sometimes, the fire department gets called out when a strong wind blows. I always dread going on calls during a windstorm. I have been through way too many windstorms. I could tell wind stories for a week and not tell the same story twice. Some of the highlights are that trees and power lines are always down and people need to be evacuated. We had to rescue one lady numerous times, in numerous storms. She was in a wheel chair and couldn’t get out when the wind blew. She was always our first call in Redway in a windstorm. She lived the furthest in the back of the forest, so we would start with her and work our way out. Large, well established redwoods seldom blow over. Most often there limbs break off. The tree sacrifices it’s limbs to save the tree. As the limbs break off, the wind is less likely to push the tree over. In a strong wind, redwood limbs fall like rain, and often after a storm the forest floor is littered with limbs and duff. They are very dangerous. A person should never be in a redwood forest in the wind if it is at all possible to leave. One time this poor lady had seven limbs hit her roof. Several of them punctured straight though roof and through the floor in her living room. Needless to say she was terrified. Four of us grabbed her wheel chair, we packed her out and put her in the van and left. I think that was the fastest rescue we ever made. Nothing like limbs poking through the room to hurry you along!

Another woman in lower Redway, and her infant baby, had three large trees go through her house. Someone had told her that the safest place to stand was in a doorway, so, she was still standing in her doorway holding her baby when we found her. By then the storm had long past. We had to cut trees out of the road to get rescue vehicles in. The only part of her house still standing was the doorway that she was standing in and the fireplace across the room from the doorway. The trees that fell through her house had cut clear though her house and driven the foundation down flush with the ground. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it wasn’t the doorway that saved her, because if a tree had hit where she was standing she surely would have been killed.

This same storm, an older, very overweight man that a neighbor routinely took care of because of his inability to move around very much from being overweight, suddenly became weightless as he ran across the road to his neighbor’s house. The neighbor said that he shined a flashlight across the street toward the overweight man’s house to see how he was. Much to his surprise the man came running across the street…. Strip bare naked, with blubber bouncing in all directions. He said he looked like a great white whale running in slow motion. Shortly after he ran across the street, a top to one of the trees falling through the mother and babies house smashed through the porch where the naked man had just been standing.

In a different storm, a lady lived just north of the brass Rail in Redway just south of her house were two large trees. She was sitting on her couch holding her dog on her lap. In similar circumstance to the mother and child, the ladies couch was across the room from the fireplace. The two trees blew down together. One skimmed off the fireplace to the left and the other to the right, both trees missed the lady and her dog, one to each side of her. We put her in a kitchen chair and packed her over the trees to get her out.

Sadly, not all are as lucky. One night we got called out in a windstorm that a tree had fallen lengthwise of a trailer house. We made a cursory inspection. The only place that was inaccessible was the couch that the tree was squarely on top off. Everything was pancaked between the rubble from the roof the couch and the floor. We determined that if she was on the couch there was no hope. We advised everyone to get to safety because other trees were still falling, we told them that we would return when we cleared all the other scenes, and we left on other calls. The family of the woman refused our advice to leave. They took chainsaws, cut the tree in chunks and removed it. Their worst fears were realized. I felt bad that we had left, we rehashed things at the fire hall when we got done. We were all pretty convinced that we did the right thing by continuing on with our calls. I’m not sure the family felt that way, and I can’t say that I blame them. That is the trouble with rescues… Sometime they make you feel really good, and other times, they make you feel really bad.

The worse windstorm that I remember was on October 12th 1962. I was seventeen at the time and not part of any rescue group. We called the storm “the Columbus Day Storm” because October 12th is Columbus Day. Original, right? I remember whole forests being blown down, all laying in the same direction. The loggers had a real good season the next summer, with all the trees laying in the same direction and they were easy to buck up and get to the mill. Part of the “poor logging practices” that the newcomers like to point to, were not logging practices at all, but a clean-up of blown down timber. Then, as everybody already knows, the 1964 flood followed closely after the blow-down. You knew that didn’t you? It caused quite a mess. But, you knew that too, didn’t you?

There used to be a very thick forest north-east of the Garberville airport, where the roping arena and log ranch house stand now. Most of that forest was flattened. Two men in a jeep pick-up were driving through there when the trees blew down. One tree fell across the passenger side of the Jeep killing one man instantly. The driver lived with non-life-threatening injuries.

All the roads around Garberville were closed from the downed trees. Pete Starr was a mechanic that had a house in Garberville, but his shop was in Briceland. When the wind came up, he decided to head home. He made it as far as the South Fork of Eel River bridge in lower Redway. Just as he approached the bridge, a huge redwood tree went through the bridge. It was an Iron arch type bridge. The tree stopped all traffic in both directions, and the bridge was severely damaged. Pete turned around and tried to head back to Briceland, he no more than got turned around and the wind really started kicking up. Limbs and trees were falling everywhere. He got out of his truck and ran for Whitemore Valley. (now Ruby Valley, the post office changed the name) He said that limbs and trees were hitting all around him. He thought about going back to his truck, but his feet wouldn’t let him they just kept running. He got hit with a few minor limbs and he was able to eventually get back to Briceland. He spent the night there and headed back over the Old Briceland Road to Garberville. Downed trees were everywhere. Foot was the only way that anybody could travel for quite a few days. Of course some bridges were damaged by trees and some were destroyed. It was just going into winter, which didn’t help with the road openings and cleanup work.

The only way that a person could check on their family was to travel on foot. We were very primitive back then, we didn’t even have cell-phones!

The strange thing about the Columbus Day windstorm is that it was far worse to the north of us, up into Oregon and Washington. It was the worse wind in recorded history. Wind meters where ripped apart. Nobody really knows how strong the winds were except through extrapolation. Please follow this link for a Wikipedia version of the Columbus Day Wind storm.