By Kate Mather, Tony Perry and Hailey Branson-Potts, Los Angeles Times
August 9, 2013, 3:15 a.m.
Authorities searching for a missing San Diego County teenager allegedly abducted by a family friend stretched warned that her alleged abductor might be using explosives.
The suspect, James Lee DiMaggio, 40, might have abandoned his blue Nissan Versa and left it booby-trapped with explosives, authorities said, warning people that if they find the vehicle or anywhere he might have stopped, they should stay away.
DiMaggio is an avid outdoorsman, and authorities are also urging people to be on the lookout at campsites and other rural areas where he might be hiding.
Four days into the search for 16-year-old Hannah Anderson, authorities were no closer to finding her or DiMaggio, though numerous tips have poured in to law enforcement agencies in multiple states.
“Basically, the search area is the United States, Canada and Mexico,” said Lt. Glenn Giannantonio of the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department. “The search area is North America.”
As the search fanned out Thursday, authorities had no confirmed sightings of Anderson or DiMaggio, who is believed to have abducted the teenager Sunday after killing her mother and 8-year-old brother in Boulevard, a rural border town in eastern San Diego County.
An Amber Alert for Hannah Anderson and her brother Ethan was active in four states Thursday, though authorities said it was possible she might have been taken to Texas, or even Canada. Boulevard is about five miles north of the Mexican border, and the FBI was working with Mexican authorities to search for DiMaggio, Giannantonio said.
New details in the case emerged Thursday about the death of Hannah’s mother, 44-year-old Christina Anderson of Lakeside, another community east of San Diego. Anderson died of blunt force trauma and may have been hit with a crowbar, a source close to the investigation said.
Anderson’s body was found in a stand-alone garage near DiMaggio’s burning home, the source said. The body of a child was found in the house. Although the child has not been identified because the body was badly burned and DNA difficult to obtain, family members have said they believe it to be Ethan.
Christina Anderson’s dog was also found dead on the property, Giannantonio said.
An arrest warrant for murder has been issued for DiMaggio, and a judge agreed to set bail at $1 million if he is arrested, San Diego County sheriff’s officials said Thursday.
As the Amber Alert widened to Nevada, authorities said DiMaggio might have changed vehicles.
Residents listen to speeches before releasing balloons in support of the three women found in a house on Seymour Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio May 9, 2013. (AP/David Duprey)
The three women held for years by Ariel Castro have used their public stature to highlight the child abduction problem.
In Cleveland, kidnapping survivor Michelle Knight watched Tuesday as the house that served as her prison for a decade was torn down. Surrounded by members of the county prosecutor’s office and a group of Guardian Angels grasping dozens of yellow balloons — each representing a child that was abducted but not recovered — which she released, Knight stated that her visit had a simple purpose: that there is hope.
“Nobody was there for me when I was missing, and I want the people to know, including the mothers, that they can have strength, they can have hope, and their child will come back,” Knight said.
Knight, Gina DeJesus and Amanda Berry were kidnapped and held captive by Ariel Castro at his home at 2207 Seymour Ave. until Berry kicked her way through the front door with the assistance of a bystander and escaped last May. On August 1, Castro was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole plus an additional millenium in prison after pleading guilty to the 937 counts he was indicted with, including multiple counts of rape, kidnapping and murder.
Since their release, all three women have used the public attention afforded them to highlight the child abduction problem in this country. “Our work is not done. We gotta keep our eyes and ears open. Don’t let these girls go in vain,” said Felix DeJesus, father of Gina DeJesus, at Cleveland’s Latino Fest parade last weekend.
Child abductions in America
According to the last comprehensive national study taken on the state of missing children, completed in 1999, there are approximately 800,000 children under the age of 18 reported missing in the United States, with more than 58,000 estimated to have been abducted by non-family members. 115 of these cases are estimated to be a “stereotypical” kidnapping, in which a stranger kidnapped the child, held him/her 50 miles or more away from the abduction site, and killed, ransomed or committed to permanently holding the child.
The remainder fall into categories including sex trafficking, familial abductions, assisted runaways and random assault. The recovery rate of missing or abducted children stands at 97 percent today — a 35 percent increase from 1990. However, for the approximately 24,000 children that have yet to be found, the road home may be hard and even impossible to find.
“It was a regular shopping mall that my parents and I went school shopping at every year, but this guy managed to exchange phone numbers with me,” said Holly Smith, a child sex trafficking survivor, to HuffPost Live in reflection of her own abduction story. Smith was interviewed after the announcement that the FBI has recovered more than 100 victims of child sex trafficking and arrested 150 pimps in a three-day nationwide sweep. Smith was 14 when she was abducted and was held for only 36 hours before being arrested for prostitution. “We talked on the phone for about two weeks, and he sort of tapped into my interests and my concerns and he was able to play off my vulnerabilities.”
“He was able to lure me away from home with things like — he could help me become a model, he could help me become a songwriter because I really wanted to join a rock band. Things that might sound not so real to an adult. They worked well on me at 14. And so he lured me away from home, and within hours of running away, I was forced into prostitution in Atlantic City, N.J.”
Stories such as Smith’s and the case of Jocelyn Rojas — a 5-years-old Lancaster, Penn. girl who was saved from abduction by an attentive 15-years-old boy, Temar Boggs, who noticed a car being driven in a peculiar manner — seem to capture the public’s imagination and draw a prompt response. But what happens when the abduction case does not draw a public response?
Adult abductions and law enforcement inadequacies
Last week, one of the three men held captive by 31-year-old Walter Renard Jones, William Merle Greenawalt, 79, has died of complications due to malnourishment. Jones has been charged with two counts of elderly abuse with serious bodily injury. It has been alleged that Jones held Greenawalt, Dean Cottingham, 59, and John Edward Padget, 64, in his garage so that he could collect on the men’s assistance checks.
In cases such as this, the inadequacies of the way law enforcement handles such situations start to show. While recent efforts, such as the AMBER Alert System, have resulted in a net improvement in recovery rates, abducted adults are considered low-priority. Many police departments will not take a missing person case for an adult prior to 24 hours after the disappearance, and most will not extend full resources to the case, due to the possibility that the missing person wishes to not be found.
While police response rates for abducted children to the child’s home or scene of abduction are modest — an estimated 68 percent, according to the 1999 Second National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway, and Throwaway Children (NISMART-2) — the response rate for adult disappearances is dramatically less. Recently, Butte County has been profiled in the media for its efforts to create its first master list of missing persons.
“It’s not completely surprising that there was no master list. If someone is missing today, they most likely will still be missing tomorrow. But if a homicide or some other serious crime occurs today, limited investigative resources would be more productively spent on those immediate cases,” reported the Chino Enterprise-Record on the Butte County Sheriff’s Office’s efforts. “That’s how a file on the missing might go missing as well. It’s not that it’s unimportant. It’s just that it’s not as timely.”
In light of dwindling budgets, shifting priorities and an ill-defined division of jurisdictions between the federal government and local authorities in missing persons cases, many cases get overlooked or ignored, and situations such as the Jaycee Dugard abduction — in which Dugard was held captive for more than 18 years by a sex offender who was enrolled as a parolee — and the Ariel Castro case are allowed to proliferate. For those still waiting to be found, more needs to be done.
About once a month, the residents of Bayou Corne, La., meet at the Assumption Parish library in the early evening to talk about the hole in their lives. “It was just like going through cancer all over again,” says one. “You fight and you fight and you fight and you think, ‘Doggone it, I’ve beaten this thing,’ and then it’s back.” Another spent last Thanksgiving at a 24-hour washateria because she and her disabled husband had nowhere else to go. As the box of tissues circulates, a third woman confesses that after 20 years of sobriety she recently testified at a public meeting under the influence.
“The God of my understanding says, ‘As you sow, so shall you reap,’” says Kenny Simoneaux, a balding man in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt. He has instructed his grandchildren to lock up the ammunition. “I’m so goddamn mad I could kill somebody.”
But the support group isn’t for addiction, PTSD, or cancer, though all of these maladies are present. The hole in their lives is a literal one. One night in August 2012, after months of unexplained seismic activity and mysterious bubbling on the bayou, a sinkhole opened up on a plot of land leased by the petrochemical company Texas Brine, forcing an immediate evacuation of Bayou Corne’s 350 residents — an exodus that still has no end in sight. Last week, Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the company and the principal landowner, Occidental Chemical Corporation, for damages stemming from the cavern collapse.
Texas Brine’s operation sits atop a three-mile-wide, mile-plus-deep salt deposit known as the Napoleonville Dome, which is sheathed by a layer of oil and natural gas, a common feature of the salt domes prevalent in Gulf Coast states. The company specializes in a process known as injection mining, and it had sunk a series of wells deep into the salt dome, flushing them out with high-pressure streams of freshwater and pumping the resulting saltwater to the surface. From there, the brine is piped and trucked to refineries along the Mississippi River and broken down into sodium hydroxide and chlorine for use in manufacturing everything from paper to medical supplies.
What happened in Bayou Corne, as near as anyone can tell, is that one of the salt caverns Texas Brine hollowed out — a mine dubbed Oxy3 — collapsed. The sinkhole initially spanned about an acre. Today it covers more than 24 acres and is an estimated 750 feet deep. It subsists on a diet of swamp life and cypress trees, which it occasionally swallows whole. It celebrated its first birthday recently, and like most 1-year-olds, it is both growing and prone to uncontrollable burps, in which a noxious brew of crude oil and rotten debris bubbles to the surface. But the biggest danger is invisible; the collapse unlocked tens of millions of cubic feet of explosive gases, which have seeped into the aquifer and wafted up to the community. The town blames the regulators. The regulators blame Texas Brine. Texas Brine blames some other company, or maybe the regulators, or maybe just God.
Bayou Corne is the biggest ongoing industrial disaster in the United States you haven’t heard of. In addition to creating a massive sinkhole, it has unearthed an uncomfortable truth: Modern mining and drilling techniques are disturbing the geological order in ways that scientists still don’t fully understand. Humans have been extracting natural resources from the earth since the dawn of mankind, but never before at the rate and magnitude of today’s petrochemical industry. And the side effects are becoming clear. It’s not just sinkholes and town-clearing natural gas leaks: Recently, the drilling process known as fracking has been linked to an increased risk of earthquakes.
“When you keep drilling over and over and over again, whether it’s into bedrock or into salt caverns, at some point you have fractured the integrity of this underground structure enough that something is in danger of collapsing,” observes ecologist and author Sandra Steingraber, whose work has focused on fracking and injection wells. “It’s an inherently dangerous situation.”
Jerry Dubinsky for Leanweb.org/LMRK.orgThe sinkhole forced the entire town of Bayou Corne to evacuate.
The domes are not just harvested for their salt. Over the last 60 years, in the Gulf Coast — and to a lesser extent in Kansas, Michigan, and New York — industry has increasingly used the sprawling caverns that result from injection mining as a handy place to store things — namely crude oil, pressurized gases, and even radioactive materials. The federal government considers salt tombs in Louisiana and Texas ideal for the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The hundreds of salt caverns that honeycomb the substrata, as companies like Texas Brine take pains to point out, are mostly safe, most of the time. But when something goes wrong, the results are disastrous — sometimes spelling the end for nearby communities. The dangers are myriad, from sinkholes to natural gas explosions to toxic-fume releases. Salt caverns account for just 7 percent of all natural gas storage facilities in the United States (although that number is increasing) but 100 percent of all major accidents, according to one industry analyst.
Bayou Corne residents need only drive a quarter mile down Highway 70 to see the worst-case scenario. On Christmas Day 2003, a methane leak from a Napoleonville Dome salt cavern storing natural gas forced residents of Grand Bayou, a neighboring hamlet, to evacuate. Dow Chemical, which owned the cavern, bought out the mostly elderly residents, leaving only concrete slabs behind. In places like Barbers Hill, Texas, similar leaks have turned once-thriving neighborhoods into ghost towns. A 2001 cavern leak in Hutchinson, Kan., spewed 30-foot-tall geysers of gas and water and caused an explosion that left two people dead.
“I hate to say, but it’s not an unusual event,” says Robert Traylor, a geologist at the Railroad Commission of Texas, the state’s oil and gas regulator. “These things happen. In the oil business, a million things can go wrong, and they usually go wrong.”
But disasters like the one in Bayou Corne have done little to slow the growth of injection mining. Last spring, lawmakers in Baton Rouge pushed through a handful of modest reforms in response to the sinkhole, but the toughest regulations were knocked down by the chemical industry. New caverns continue to be permitted. It’s not a question of whether there will be another Bayou Corne — but where, and how big.
On a scorching June morning, I board a Cessna to survey the sinkhole. My 45-mile flight passes through the heart of southern Louisiana’s industrial jungle, a continuous series of pipelines and processing plants that line the Mississippi as it twists like a busted-up slinky toward the gulf. The smoking skyline gives way to a checkered ribbon of cane and soybean fields and at last to the swampy interior of Assumption Parish.
You notice the booms first, bright yellow plastic rolls designed to trap the oil and brine that collect on the surface and prevent them from seeping into the surrounding waterways. A grove of cypress trees has been stripped bare and sits gray and rotting. At 500 feet, the air is thick with the smell of crude, and the water has a rainbow sheen; in the last few hours, the sinkhole has burped again, and workers are scurrying to contain the new release.
The Acadians — the French Canadian refugees who settled here in the 1700s — were drawn to the bayous by their bounty of gators and crawdads and spoonbills. Petrochemical giants came for other reasons: the chemicals in the salt domes and the oil and gas reserves that surround them. Gas and brine pipelines cross over and under the town and its surrounding swamps, carving up the basin into a web of rights of way for companies including Chevron, Dow, Crosstex, and Florida Gas.
Texas Brine’s Oxy3 cavern, one of 53 in the Napoleonville Dome and one of six operated by the company, is more than a mile below the surface. At that depth, 3-D seismic mapping is both time-consuming and expensive, and as a consequence, injection-mining companies often have only a foggy — and outdated — idea of what their mines really look like. “Everybody wants to do it within a certain budget and a certain time frame,” explains Jim LaMoreaux, a hydrologist who organizes an annual conference on salt-cavern-caused sinkholes. In some cases, he says, it’s possible that companies cut corners and fail to commission the proper studies.
Texas Brine’s first and last mapping project was in 1982, and by the company’s own admission, it understated Oxy3′s proximity to the edge of the salt dome and the possibility of a breach. When another company surveyed the dome a few years ago, it found that Texas Brine’s cavern was less than 100 feet from the outer sheath of oil and gas, far closer than is permitted in other states. While Louisiana had restrictions on gas storage caverns, it had nothing on the books for active brine wells — only what regulators called a “rule of thumb” that wells be set back 200 feet.
When Texas Brine applied for a permit to expand Oxy3 in 2010, the company pressure-tested the cavern as mandated by the state, but it was unable to build up the requisite pressure, let alone sustain it. “At this time, a breach out of the salt dome appears possible,” Mark Cartwright, a Texas Brine executive, notified the state’s Department of Natural Resources. The DNR asked Texas Brine to “plug and abandon” the well. The agency did not, as it sometimes does, request further monitoring. Both parties expected the cavern to hold its shape, and it did until early June 2012, when Gary Metrejean felt the ground shake.
“I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want everyone to think I was crazy,” he says. But his neighbors noticed it, too. And they also saw something else unusual — bubbles of gas (“like boiling pasta,” one resident recalls) appearing around the bayou.
Oxy3 was starting to cave in, but at the time the community was at a loss. The state’s experts first suspected a leak from a natural gas pipeline, but that turned up nothing, so they investigated and ruled out the possibility that the bubbling might be “swamp gas” — naturally occurring emissions from decaying plant life. The U.S. Geological Survey confirmed an increase in seismic activity but couldn’t determine its exact source — there are no fault lines in the area. At the end of July 2012, with tremors and bubbling increasing and no clear signs of subsidence, Texas Brine, which had emerged as a possible culprit, told state officials that a sinkhole was highly unlikely.
On Aug. 3, Bayou Corne residents awoke to the smell of sweet crude emanating from a gaping pit on the other side of the highway. Gov. Bobby Jindal issued an evacuation order that afternoon. Texas Brine got a permit to drill a relief well. When the company finally accessed the plugged chamber, they found the outer wall of the salt dome had collapsed. The breach allowed sediment to pour into the cavern, creating a seam through which oil and explosive gases were forced up to the surface.
It has been well established that structurally challenged caverns, owing to a lack of maintenance or poor planning, can cause sinkholes. In 1954, the collapse of a brining cavern at Bayou Choctaw, north of Baton Rouge — located in the same dome that today houses part of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve — created an 820-foot-wide lake. In 2008, a 150-foot-deep crater known as “Sinkhole de Mayo” opened up over a cavern 50 miles northeast of Houston that had been used for storing oil drilling waste. But those disasters were all due to top-down pressure. Oxy3 collapsed from the side, something regulators and briners had previously considered impossible — highlighting, once again, how poorly understood the geology of salt caverns truly is.
Texas Brine’s official line is that it has no idea why its cavern suddenly gave way; a mess appeared on its property without warning, and it is doing the responsible thing by cleaning it up. Yet it didn’t begin paying buyouts to evacuees until nine months after the collapse, when Jindal threatened to shut down its Louisiana operations if it didn’t. The settlements come with no admission of wrongdoing — to the contrary, the company insists the town is perfectly safe, and that residents (some of whom have defied the evacuation order) are taking advantage of Texas Brine’s generosity by accepting weekly $875 stipends for living expenses while never leaving their homes. Only 59 homeowners have taken deals so far; others have signed onto a class action lawsuit against the company that’s set to go to trial next year. Celebrity activist Erin Brockovich has been shuttling back and forth to Bayou Corne enlisting plaintiffs. “I just don’t think anyone’s gonna live there again,” she says. “And if no one lives there, what desire is there for Texas Brine to clean it up? It’s a tragedy really all the way around.”
I meet Millard Fillmore ”Sonny” Cranch, a crisis PR specialist retained by Texas Brine, in a trailer a hundred yards from the edge of the sinkhole. Nearby are two storage silos emblazoned with the company’s slogan, “Texas Brine. Responsible Care.” Cranch is a self-described “old fart” with Harry Potter glasses that wrap around his curly white hair and a habit of pounding the steering wheel when he wants to make a point.
The company’s cleanup crew is rounding the “clubhouse turn,” he explains, and they believe the sediment level in the cavern is stabilizing; the sinkhole may still expand slightly, and the burps might continue, but the worst is in the past. Truth be told, he’s not even sure why the evacuation order is still active, but hey, if there’s a “perceived risk,” then safety first, right? According to Cranch, most of the gas that has been detected in explosive levels under the community is “naturally occurring swamp gas.” (State officials aren’t so sure.) Besides, Cranch tells me, it’s not as if there’s anything particularly menacing about hydrogen sulfide. “Flatulence is H2S,” he says, sensing a chance to lighten the mood. “You’re producing H2S as we speak right now.”
In the car, Cranch says this morning’s burp hadn’t released much oil, but once we get to the site and inhale the fumes, he quickly revises his estimate upward: “I lied — that’s more than five gallons.” While the DNR warns that accurate measurements are difficult, John Boudreaux, the Assumption Parish director of emergency preparedness, told me more than 300 gallons had surfaced. (In July, Boudreaux double-checked the company’s estimate of the sinkhole’s depth — 140 feet, Texas Brine claimed — and found that it had understated the figure by a factor of five.)
Given the class action, Texas Brine has a financial interest in deflecting the blame. During our outing, Cranch floats two possible culprits for the sinkhole: an oil well that another company drilled just outside the edge of the dome in the 1950s, or perhaps an earthquake. This isn’t the official Texas Brine position, he’s careful to add — “that’s just Millard Cranch, theorizing.”
The locals find such theories particularly irksome. “They think we’re just a bunch of ignorant coonasses,” says Mike Schaff, who like a few dozen Bayou Corne residents has ignored the evacuation order and stayed in his home. “We may be coonasses — but we’re not ignorant.”
Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is inextricable from what happened in Bayou Corne. Not only do Louisiana regulators have a poor grasp on how miners may be disturbing subsurface geology, they also have a pretty vague sense of how many caverns are located close to the outer ring of salt domes. In January, the Department of Natural Resources ordered companies with salt caverns to provide their most recently updated maps, and the agency is working on rules that would require additional modeling of the 29 caverns that are within 300 feet of an edge. And the agency is proposing regulations mandating that caverns be shut down and monitored for five years, rather than simply plugged and abandoned, if they fail a mechanical integrity test.
That’s a start. But Wilma Subra, a MacArthur “Genius Grant”-winning chemist who advises the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, a group that’s been monitoring the Bayou Corne sinkhole, is dubious that any meaningful action will be taken. “The regulatory climate is such that agencies are only allowed to put forth regulations that the industry supports,” Subra says. Meanwhile, she adds, “What occurred in Bayou Corne shows what could potentially occur in any number of the other salt domes that have storage caverns.”
Just down the road from what’s left of Bayou Corne, the slabs and dead grass of Grand Bayou stand as a warning, albeit one nobody paid much attention to. There’s a road sign on the water’s edge bearing an Oliver Wendell Holmes quote: “Where we love is home — home that our feet may leave but not our hearts.” The sign includes a date to mark the beginning of the settlement. There’s no year of death, but it reads like the town’s tombstone.
Back at the Assumption Parish library, Candy Blanchard has the floor and she’s rolling. The exodus is on everyone’s mind. She and her husband were planning out their retirement in a community their families had called home for generations. “Anybody who stays here and camps here, you gotta wanna be here,” she says. “I mean, it’s not a booming place.” They hunt, they fish, they frog — or they did, anyway. But for the last 10 months, they’ve been crashing with friends in Paincourtville, and her husband has fallen into depression. Every morning, Blanchard, an elementary school teacher, breaks down on her drive to work and collects herself in the parking lot. But there’s something about her odyssey her students seem to grasp immediately. “I taught migration this year,” she tells the sniffling room. “It was the easiest lesson I’ve taught in my entire life.”
SEATTLE (AP) – The Washington State Patrol says it has received several unconfirmed reports of people spotting a car wanted in connection with two deaths and a child abduction in Southern California.
Sgt. Jason Hicks says people up and down the Interstate 5 corridor have reported seeing the blue Nissan Versa being sought by authorities. Some reports have come in from the Vancouver, Wash., area and others from the Tacoma area.
There was also an unconfirmed sighting on the Olympic Peninsula, in which the caller reported seeing a blue Nissan hatchback with a man driving and a female passenger in the back. The caller said the car appeared to have California plates.
Troopers have been responding to each report but haven’t located the car.
Hicks also says State Patrol personnel at Washington’s ferry terminals are keeping an eye out, and that once the Patrol received information about the Amber Alert from California authorities, it forwarded the information to Canadian officials, the U.S. Border Patrol and Idaho police.
The Amber Alert was expanded to Oregon, Washington and Nevada as authorities search for James Lee DiMaggio, 40, who is believed to have kidnapped 16-year-old Hannah Anderson. DiMaggio is believed to be driving a blue 2013 Nissan Versa with California plate 6WCU986.
Anyone who sees DiMaggio or the car is asked to call 911.
DiMaggio is also a suspect in the death of Christina Anderson, Hannah’s mother, and the possible death or abduction of her 8-year old son Ethan.
On Sunday night, authorities found the body of Christina Anderson near a dead dog when they extinguished flames at DiMaggio’s rural home. A child’s body was found later as they sifted through rubble in Boulevard, a remote hamlet 65 miles east of San Diego on the U.S.-Mexico border.
San Diego County Sheriff’s Capt. Duncan Fraser said Thursday that evidence recovered at James Lee DiMaggio’s home east of San Diego suggests he might have fled with homemade explosives.
Fraser says it’s possible DiMaggio was infatuated with the girl and her grandfather said Wednesday it appeared DiMaggio had carefully planned the abduction.
Also Wednesday, a friend of Hannah Anderson said DiMaggio told Hannah he had a crush on her and would date her if they were the same age.
“She was a little creeped out by it. She didn’t want to be alone with him,” said the friend, Marissa Chavez.
Lauren Salcedo Members of the Marysville Youth Football Association’s Junior Black Chargers get warmed up during practice on Thursday, Aug. 1.
Lauren Salcedo, Marysville Globe
MARYSVILLE — The Marysville Youth Football League began practicing the week of July 29, and the nearly 250 local players will spend each weekday practicing until school starts, as just a small part of what makes the league one of the most competitive in the area.
“The league in Marysville is great,” said Kevin Gallo, head coach of the Senior Black Chargers. “It is so competitive. Marysville always has a team in the championship every year.”
Gallo noted that M-P’s quarterback Jake Luton went through the program when he was younger, and his younger brother is currently competing.
“We have a lot of the players from both Marysville-Pilchuck and Marysville Getchell who started out with Marysville Youth Football,” he said. “There are so many kids in the area who have a lot of talent, and there is a lot of great coaching out here. I think the coaches know that Marysville is known for being competitive so they really step their game up. Marysville has set a tone, so if you’re going to coach you know you are going to have to put a championship team on the field.”
Each year, more and more kids sign up for MYFL, and the program continues to grow. This year, the league has one Pee-Wee team, three 8-9 year-old teams, three junior teams and two senior teams.
“Marysville really teaches the kids how to play the game, and they focus a lot on sportsmanship,” said Donny Giles, assistant coach for the junior team. “Competitive teams always make people turn their heads and look at the league. We have 250 kids and everyone can play the whole year. We make sure that no matter what the score is, we are making sure that the other team knows we are there to play a game.”
The league is a feeder organization for both Marysville-Pilchuck and Marysville Getchell high schools, so the teams wear either a Tomahawk or Charger helmet and jersey.
“It’s important for us to be representing the schools in our city,” said Giles, who noted that the equipment for each player was purchased through funds raised by the Powder Puff football game.
“Without the Powder Puff game, there would be no equipment,” said Gallo. “They have new helmets, new pads, new jerseys. It’s amazing.”
Gallo also mentioned that for kids who have not signed up for MYFL this season, the Marysville Stealth Organization hosts a winter arena football league.
“It runs from February to May, and you can tell the kids who are playing for both football leagues,” he said. “It keeps the game fresh in their mind.”
File Photo From left, Alondra, Maria, Suzie and Khiara Morgan browsed over a table of gourmet dog treats during last year’s Homegrown Festival, which this year has been rechristened the Marysville Street Festival: Handmade & Homegrown.
MARYSVILLE — The Marysville Street Festival: Handmade & Homegrown has been rechristened this year, but it still promises to offer the same features that have become familiar favorites through its nearly three decades, according to vendor coordinator Vicki Miniken of The Vintage Violet.
“There were a number of reasons for changing the name,” Miniken said. “We’ll get more regional recognition as the Marysville Street Festival than as just ‘Homegrown,’ but the emphasis remains on ‘Handmade & Homegrown,’ which we’ve kept in the title to help people search for us on the Internet. After 28 years, we still have people who live in Marysville asking, ‘What’s Homegrown?’ So we needed to boost its profile.”
Miniken explained that last year’s extension of the Street Festival from two to three days was so successful that it was continued this year, with the event running from Aug. 9-11.
“Aug. 11 is Kids’ Day, which is new this year,” Miniken said. “Kids will be able to enter hula-hoop and veggie-carving contests, bounce until they drop in a bouncy house and visit with Lolly the Clown, who was a big hit last year, or Danny the Uncanny Magician, who’s new this year.”
While the kids are being entertained during Kids’ Day and through Lang’s Traveling Pony Rides, the latter available on all three days of the Street Festival, adults can take in the musical lineups on Aug. 9 and 10, in between shopping from two blocks of more than 100 vendors, which Miniken estimated to be at least as many as last year’s count.
“Among our new vendors are Magic Magpie Studio, which does henna art, and the Longneckers Alpaca Ranch, which will be bringing alpacas for people to see up close and personal,” Miniken said. “Of course, Colors by Carla is returning, with her tie-dye clothing, as are the Mai Houa Garden and Frontier Flyers Honey. Mr. Kitty’s Soap Shop of Seattle is another one that’s become a hit, because men love their toiletries.”
Another new feature this year is an interactive art exhibit, courtesy of the Marysville Arts Coalition, and Miniken was quick to credit the hard work of all those involved in making the Street Festival a reality each year.
“All the members of the Downtown Marysville Merchants Association work together to bring more business to this corridor, which is what this is all about,” Miniken said. “It’s not just one person who does any of this.”
Among the challenges that the Downtown Marysville Merchants Association is faced with is ensuring both breadth and diversity in the Street Festival’s selection of vendors.
“We have to make sure we don’t have too much of any one thing, but we still have enough of everything,” Miniken said. “We want everyone to be able to participate, but we don’t want the Street Festival dominated too much by any one field. And obviously, we won’t put two vendors in the same field right next to each other, because we want to keep harmony,” she laughed.
For all the time, effort and planning that everyone involved invests in the Street Festival, Miniken believes its rewards make it more than worthwhile.
“The best thing is the day of the event itself, when you get to see everybody having a great time selling their wares, strolling down the street to shop and enjoying the music,” Miniken said.
For more information on the Marysville Street Festival: Handmade & Homegrown, log onto www.marysvillemerchants.com.
Marysville Street Festival schedule:
Friday, Aug. 9:
All day — Lang’s Traveling Pony Rides.
12:45 p.m. — Music by Jed Skenandore.
3 p.m. — Music by Earl Gray.
5 p.m. — Music by The Bobbers.
6 p.m. — Activities in the Outer Court.
Saturday, Aug. 10:
All day — Lang’s Traveling Pony Rides.
Noon — Music by The Tarentellas.
1 p.m. — Music by The Magic Roads.
4 p.m. — Music by Rare Elephant.
Sunday, Aug. 11 — Kids’ Day:
All day — Bouncy house and Lang’s Traveling Pony Rides.
11 a.m. — Lolly the Clown.
1 p.m. — Danny the Uncanny Magician.
1-3 p.m. — Hula-hoop, veggie-carving and minute-to-win-it contests.
My culture teaches that as an Ojibwe I have an inherent obligation to not only protect myself, my family, and my tribe but ultimately all humanity, including the environment that sustains us. We are spirit beings who came into this world to live the human experience. That spirit is love and it resides in our hearts.
My own struggle began early as I found a place of equality among my family, friends, and community because I was born lesbian and enjoy my life as a two spirit person. The Creator has smiled on me by giving me the opportunity to help others struggling with the still prevalent homophobic and sexist attitudes; not to mention that we also live as a conquered nation of people.
I have protested, walked picket lines, and was arrested for protecting Camp Coldwater back in 1999. These confrontation tactics seem no longer effective and may in fact, hinder progress for change. Earlier in my career I took a different approach by working within the political system. While there have been minor but important victories in a few social policy areas, I remain somewhat disappointed that more have not been moved to action.
In recent years, I have led two water walks to pray for the water and to raise the public awareness about the pollution affecting our waters. As I have crossed the United States twice from south to north and north to south, I have observed the individuals who have taken this journey with me. Carrying the water in a ceremonious way every day creates transformation. The water is a living entity and as such, it has a spirit. This spirit responds to the love shown to it. In this way, we have changed the way we think, feel and act toward our mother earth and the water.
At recent events, a white, female environmental scientist suggested that environmentalists were the new “abolitionists.” That one way to create change was to practice civil disobedience and populate the jails to save the environment. I wondered if she realized that 80% of the jails are already filled with people of color. Also many people of color do not have the luxury of taking 15 days off without pay to make a statement. I wondered what Black people might think of her analogy likening environmentalists to abolitionists. It took the abolitionists 100 years to end slavery. I’m not sure we have 100 years to save ourselves.
Meanwhile, Native peoples are taking a stand for clean water and land issues, by protesting against corporations and governments building the pipelines, blocking roads and railroad tracks, even confiscating a “thumper truck” to stop shale oil exploration in New Brunswick, Canada.
More direct actions are being planned all summer long. I respect the choices and the stands they are willing to take for sovereignty, for the land, for the water. However, some of what I hear is disturbing. For example the desire to renegotiate the terms of the agreements for mineral, oil and gas extraction so native people get a fair share of the profits. We could spend an entire article discussing the wrongs of capitalism that promotes hoarding and greed. Exactly opposite of what our ancestors valued. What does it matter who benefits or gets richer if we lose our precious water and continue to destroy the land?
An exception is a reserve in Canada where the people stand to earn over 59 million dollars selling solar energy. I wish more of our tribes would invest in renewable energy and create employment for their people.
Perhaps there will come a time again, where I am willing to engage in confrontation and I will be willing to put my life on the line, but for right now, I will choose ceremony allowing the asemaa to lead me.
I plan to continue walking the rivers that are endangered. I believe love is the healing grace. I choose to move forward in the spirit of love and bring people along with me in ceremony. The spirit lives in love, love is where the spirit lives.
Can an Indigenous world-view of respect, love, and kindness create a revolution founded in these values to create a shared world of love and respect for the Earth, our mama akii and the water, sacred water, m’de nibi?
Sharon Day, Ojibwe, is the executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Task Force.
Only a full ban on fracking will do. Regulations can neither prevent nor mitigate the disastrous consequences inherent to fracking. We need to keep the carbon in the ground. Photo: Californians Against Fracking
A year after buying his dream home in Los Angeles, Gary Gless started falling down and breaking bones.
Fourteen years and one thousand doctors visits later, his neuromuscular disorder hasn’t been specifically diagnosed. He survives on painkillers and sleep aids.
Gless’s backyard overlooks the Inglewood Oil Field, the largest urban oil field in the nation. Within the field, gas companies have been secretly fracking in the middle of this community of 300,000 residents for nine years.
Many of Gless’s neighbors also suffer from neurological, auto-immune and respiratory diseases and several types of cancers. Many have died. Homes and swimming pools are cracking.
None of these people will be helped by passage of the only fracking bill still alive in California’s legislature: Senate Bill 4. That’s because the regulations in SB 4 do nothing to actually make fracking safer.
Instead, the flawed bill sets up a process for notification, disclosure, monitoring and permitting and simply calls for future regulations by other agencies and a scientific study.
Telling someone when you’re going to frack, where you’re going to frack and what chemicals you will use, is like a murderer telling you he’s going to shoot you on your front porch at noon tomorrow using an AK-47.
At the end of the day, you’re still dead.
The State of Play
Worse than having no regulations, weak regulations provide political cover to legislators who could otherwise be pressured to vote for a moratorium on the practice.
58% of Californians want a moratorium on fracking. The state Democratic Party, the majority party, passed a resolution calling on legislators to impose a moratorium.
Activists were also able to get two strong moratorium bills introduced in the legislature. Only one made it to the full Assembly.
Worse than having no regulations, weak regulations provide political cover to legislators who could otherwise be pressured to vote for a moratorium on the practice.
Had 18 Democrats voted “yes” instead of abstaining, the bill would have passed. When asked why they didn’t vote for a moratorium, many said they were planning to vote for SB 4 instead.
Passage of this bill will remove the regulatory uncertainty currently surrounding fracking. It will give the green light to Big Oil to frack the Monterey Shale, the largest oil play in the nation holding nearly 2/3rd of all US reserves.
But even the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Fran Pavley, calls this bill a compromise.
“We’re trying to put regulations in place that will address public concerns,” Pavley said in an April interview. “This bill does not place a moratorium on the process. It will go on. I consider this a compromise measure.”
Although industry representatives testified against the bill, they tempered their criticisms. It’s an indication this bill is seen as preferable to those placing a moratorium on fracking.
“I’ve told the oil companies that the public is going to go there if it thinks they have something to hide,” she said, suggesting that lack of legislative action could potentially lead to a ballot initiative to ban fracking in California.
Big Oil also loves the “big fat compromise.”
“It is in our best interest that we have disclosure,” said Western States Petroleum Association’s spokesman Paul Deiro. “To calm the fears that are out there is in our interest, because we believe it’s a safe technology.”
Dissecting the Bill
Fran Pavley is known as an environmental hero for authoring the Global Warming Solutions Act and the Clean Car Regulations.
She accepts no money from Big Oil and is considered by many “the best friend environmentalists have in California.” Platitudes aside, this bill does no favor to the environment or to public health.
While proclaiming to provide full public disclosure of fracking chemicals, exceptions are provided for “proprietary trade secrets.”
As Kathryn Phillips, legislative director of Sierra Club California states, this would be “the first overt statutory recognition in the nation that fracking fluids qualify for trade secret protections. This would set us back, not forward, in our efforts to make sure that fracking in this state does not harm public health and the environment.”
For this reason, Sierra Club opposes this bill, as do Food and Water Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility and most of the other organizations in the coalition Californians Against Fracking.
Furthermore, we already know the chemicals used in fracking.
They were disclosed to the Pennsylvania Department of the Environment and the US House Energy and Commerce Committee. Of the thousand of possible products frackers use, 650 contain chemicals that are known toxins or carcinogens.
In the Inglewood Oil Field, the operator also released the list of 40 chemicals used. They include benzene, toluene, lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, and formaldehyde, all known carcinogens.
As to the notification, giving someone 30 days notice before doing a frack job is not much comfort. Making matters worse, groundwater monitoring is to be conducted by the oil company, a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house.
A permit would be denied if it presents “an unreasonable risk.”
Are these considered reasonable risks? If so, what risk would fracking have to pose before this bill would prohibit it?
The bill also directs other agencies to make regulations, failing to specify what those regulations should be.
No regulations can prevent leaks. 6% of wells leak immediately; and 50% leak within 20 years. If the industry could make well casings leak proof, they’d do it. It’s their own valuable product that is lost.
The bill calls for an independent scientific study on the effects of fracking. Originally the bill said that if the study were not completed by January 1, 2015, there would be a moratorium on all new fracking. But Pavley was pressured to remove this moratorium provision from the bill.
Learning from History
Although an independent study sounds better than one conducted by the industry, many “independent” studies are done by firms so entrenched in the oil industry they can’t risk losing future business.
Such is the case with the last two State Department studies on the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Many studies are victims of the political winds of the day. “Gasland Part II,” outlines three EPA studies that proved fracking was contaminating groundwater in Dimock, PA, Pavillion, WY and Parker County, TX.
As soon as President Obama announced in his State of the Union Address that fracking – utilizing American Petroleum Institute talking points – was to be the centerpiece of his national energy policy, those studies were all scuttled within the next year.
Plenty of independent studies already exist, further calling the rationale for the need for “more studies” into question.
Duke University 2011, 2012, and 2013 studies all linked methane contamination of groundwater in Pennsylvania to fracking. Another study from the University of Texas found elevated levels of lead and other heavy minerals close to natural gas extraction sites in Texas.
A Colorado School of Public Health study found fracking increases cancer risk, contributing to serious neurological and respiratory problems in people living near fracked wells.
Fracking’s brief history in the U.S. shows one thing clearly: it creates havoc wherever it goes.
Regulations: Only as Good as the Regulators
In states where there are regulations on fracking, they aren’t enforced either by design, or because agencies are both underfunded and understaffed by state governments often bought and paid for by Big Oil.
Worse, when fracking violates existing regulations, many states simply change the regulations to the benefit of Big Oil.
In Colorado, the Air Quality Control Board is being directed to increase the allowable air pollution because of the air pollution caused by the fracking boom.
If you say that can’t happen here in California, look what’s already happened.
The move was hailed by then State Senator Michael Rubio from Shafter, a community being devastated by fracking.
“We have worked diligently with the governor’s administration to reduce the roadblocks for the oil and gas industries to receive permits,” Rubio said at time.
Five tons of nitrous oxide and two tons of volatile organic compounds were released into a community with the worst air quality in the state. This clearly violated the Air Board’s regulations.
Vintage’s big penalty? $750.
Don’t expect any stronger regulations or enforcement of existing ones to come from Governor Brown. He has already accepted $27,200,the maximum donation allowed, from Occidental Petroleum for his re-election campaign.
Big Oil’s the biggest spender in California politics. The Western States Petroleum Association has already spent $2,308,790 on lobbying efforts in the first half of this year.
Plus, Brown is salivating over the tax revenues he expects from this oil boom.
“One wonders whether there might be the ingredients of a grand bargain – the oil industry is given the green light to develop Monterey shale with some stringent but not crippling regulation, in return for which the state could impose a severance tax on new production that would benefit state and local governments,” Dan Walters pondered in a recent column in the Sacramento Bee.
Ban It
Even if regulations could magically make fracking safe, it uses too much water in a drought prone state. The hundreds of daily diesel truck trips will also cause extensive damage to local roads and increased incidences of asthma and other respiratory diseases.
Fracking causes the industrialization of bucolic landscapes and noise and light pollution. In other states, fracking’s “man camps” are rife with drugs, alcohol, gambling and prostitution. Fracking would also most likely decimate the food and wine industries, which are far more important economically to the state than oil.
Coming full circle, this will prevent California from achieving the 20% reduction in CO2 called for in Pavley’s signature bill, the Global Warming Solutions Act.
Regulations can neither prevent nor mitigate the disastrous consequences inherent to fracking. We need to keep the carbon in the ground.
After a three-hour blockade involving upwards of 150-200 people from the Nez Perce Nation, Idle No More, and Wild Idaho Rising Tide, activists once again dedicated themselves last night to stopping megaload shipments through Idaho.
Omega Morgan, the company responsible for the transport of the 200-ton megaload, has been warned by the Forest Service that the shipment is unauthorized, and the Nez Perce tribe is seeking an injunction. However, Omega Morgan is trying to sneak the megaload through against the law, so direct action must be taken.
The Nez Perce put out a call yesterday for activists to join them in renewed efforts to stop the tar sands equipment from moving through Highway 12. More than 50 protestors came out. They were met by a force of 40-50 police officers in a fleet of cars.
Police gave protesters 15 minutes to speak out as they blocked the roadway, before being forced to move to the shoulder. Some young activists decided to maintain the presence of the blockade by heaving boulders and large rocks into the streets, which held traffic up further.
Several Nez Perce tribe-members were arrested, adding to the 19 arrested on Monday night (including the entire executive committee).
The two penguin chicks were born at The Aquarium of the Pacific in June to undoubtedly nervous first-time parents Floyd and Roxy. Isn’t it a little strange that we don’t know the kids’ names? I mean, they live at the aquarium, so they’ve gotta get used to the celebrity lifestyle (see: a certain royal baby human). Floyd and Roxy sound pretty rock ‘n’ roll, so how about Debbie and The Fonz? (Just give me a cut of their first single.)
The chicks are being raised separately from their parents because one of the eggs was abandoned, a common occurrence in the wild. When the second chick hatched, the first was already twice its size, so biologists raised it by hand to ensure its survival …
Magellanic penguins are native to Argentina and Chile, and it takes 38 to 43 days of incubation for a chick to hatch. The chicks are able open their eyes within a week, but it takes about 90 days for them to fledge, or replace their downy newborn feathers with water-tight adult feathers.
The live cam will be up until August, when Debbie and The Fonz join Floyd and Roxy in a family rock band the aquarium’s June Keyes Penguin Habitat.
By Kate Mather, Tony Perry and Hailey Branson-Potts, Los Angeles Times
