Environment Northern California

All Mike Rudd wanted to do was build a commercial building in the heart of this quaint, dilapidated beach town. But when he struck oil, his hope of revitalizing the town was doomed. Rudd, the owner of an Avila Beach bikini shop, discovered oil that had leaked for decades from Unocal Corp. pipelines running under the main street of town.

A prominent California congressman is pushing to undo key elements of the Yosemite Valley preservation plan that is meant to reduce traffic and keep campsites away from ecologically sensitive areas. As the new chairman of the House's national parks subcommittee, Rep. George P. Radanovich (R-Mariposa) has raised questions about what he considers too few parking spaces and campsites allowed by the Yosemite planning blueprint, which he considers biased against the needs of tourists.

With the last hurdle cleared, beleaguered Avila Beach is finally ready to rebuild. The Central Coast community has struggled for years to recover from the leak of thousands of gallons of oil from pipelines beneath the town, an environmental disaster that precipitated a massive cleanup and forced the demolition of Avila's tiny business district.

A judge signed an agreement forcing five major oil companies to clean up sites they own that have been contaminated with the gasoline additive MTBE as part of a settlement with a San Francisco Bay Area environmental group. Communities for a Better Environment said the companies knew the chemical could leak into ground water. The group sued Shell, Chevron, Texaco, Equilon Enterprises, Unocal, Arco, Tosco, Exxon and Mobil in 1998. The first five settled and are covered by the judge's order.

Very quietly, during the dog days of summer, this seaside town has been working around the clock to help clean up one of the most troublesome oil spills ever to mar California's coast. "I'll tell you, it will blow your mind to understand what we've been doing in the last few weeks," said William Gengler, spokesman for the Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response in the California Department of Fish and Game. Unocal Oil spilled 150 barrels of oil on the evening of Aug.

Covered with sage and rising as high as 90 feet, the sand dunes at the mouth of the Santa Maria River are home to bobcats, mule deer and endangered snowy plovers that nest on the beach. But below this plethora of animal and plant life is a huge layer of refined oil moving steadily toward the sea. Used for 40 years by Unocal Corp. to thin tar-like Santa Maria crude, the refined oil is spread out under the former Guadalupe Oil Field in one of the biggest spills in U.S. history.

President Clinton signed into law Monday a bill authorizing the federal portion of a $900-million plan to clean up Lake Tahoe, an environmental initiative that drew rare bipartisan support. The rescue effort was pushed by Clinton and Vice President Al Gore at a 1997 environmental meeting at the lake on the California-Nevada border. The bill that Clinton signed enjoyed strong Republican support as it made its way through Congress.

A bulging mountain of scrap tires six stories high caught fire in the northern San Joaquin Valley early Wednesday, spewing a black plume of smoke 3,000 feet in the air and sprinkling soot for miles. Favorable winds initially blew clouds of the noxious smoke away from populated areas. But a wind shift was expected, and Stanislaus County officials--declaring a local state of emergency--warned residents to prepare to evacuate or remain inside their homes with the windows closed.

All his life, Luke Robison assumed it was his birthright to farm the fertile fields in this northeast corner of the state where two generations before him raised potatoes, sugar beets and barley. Now 17 and preparing to graduate from high school, he is wondering how much longer farming will continue as a way of life in Tule Lake Basin.

Creative, clean and high-tech, it seemed like the sort of entrepreneurial enterprise tailor-made for a California economy in dire need of fresh capital and pollution-free industry. A Los Angeles lawyer with a scientific bent figured out a cheap way to recycle chemicals vital to the manufacture of computer circuitry.

About 100 farmers used an irrigation line to bypass a canal head gate on the California-Oregon border Sunday, sending water down an irrigation canal that has been parched since water was shut off in April to protect threatened and endangered fish.

A narrowly divided U.S. Senate blocked legislation Thursday that would suspend new environmental requirements for Upper Klamath Lake created to help save the endangered sucker fish. Rather than keep the requirements in place, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.), wanted the government first to implement a plan outlined in 1993 to boost the fish's population.

A stand of redwoods the size of San Francisco and home to 23 endangered species would be preserved in a $60-million plan between the state, a timber company and a Bay Area open-space group. The Save the Redwoods League hopes to buy 25,000 acres along California's North Coast from Simpson Lumber Co. and turn it over to the state. Known as the Mill Creek property, it is three times the size of the Headwaters Forest, the preservation of which attracted stiff opposition in 1998.

The state's largest owner of private timberland is dramatically reducing the amount of Sierra Nevada acreage it plans to clear-cut over the next century, officials announced Thursday. Executives at Sierra Pacific Industries said they will scale back clear-cuts by 70% in response to pressure from residents near its vast logging holdings, scattered from Yosemite to the Oregon border.

These are the facts in this hiccup of a town on California's far north coast: Most tourists drive through as fast as they can, while Aleutian Canada geese love the place. More and more of the once nearly extinct wildfowl return every year for a leisurely spring visit. Recognizing those facts, the Del Norte County town is trying to turn the Aleutian into the goose that lays the golden egg of ecotourism.

The Navy has decided to do a full environmental review of its proposal to expand its practice runs at a target in Ft. Hunter Liggett, about 40 miles south of Big Sur. The Navy is proposing to increase its practice runs, during which dummy bombs are dropped on a 500-foot diameter target of shipping containers, from as few as 200 sorties to more than 2,900. That translates to about four flights a day with three planes in each flight. U.S. Rep.

Flexing its newfound political muscle, an organization of surfers announced Monday that two pulp mill operators will pay nearly $5.8 million in fines and stop polluting the ocean off Humboldt County--one of the best surfing spots in the state. The settlement--the second-largest ever under the federal Clean Water Act--also will require Louisiana-Pacific Corp. and Simpson Paper Co.

Pacific Lumber Co. began salvage logging in an old-growth redwood grove in the privately owned Headwaters Forest on Monday, a week after signing an accord to protect some of the forest's most sensitive trees. Environmentalists condemned the return of loggers' saws to the Headwaters, where timber cutting had been suspended to protect a threatened sea bird, the marbled murrelet, and while negotiations were underway to bring the forest under official protection. Deputy U.S.

While the foul-smelling gasoline additive MTBE has contaminated water wells around California, perhaps nowhere has it raised a bigger stink than in the picturesque tourist destination of Morro Bay. After the chemical compound was found near city wells, an investigation turned up one bombshell after another. A former gas station employee testified in January that records had been falsified to hide leaks from gasoline storage tanks.

A coalition of environmental groups filed court papers Tuesday, seeking to save a federal act that protects giant sequoia trees. The coalition is seeking to join the U.S. government as defendants in a suit brought by logging interests, recreational groups and Tulare County. If the motion is granted, the coalition will move to dismiss the suit, said Michael Sherwood, an attorney with Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund.