Humboldt County Ca

A former employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration pleaded guilty Thursday to illegally profiting from his position by taking money from a DEA vendor that he managed, federal authorities said. Leopoldo B. Villanueva, 63, admitted that he received $13,500 from Redline Towing at the same time he was working for the DEA as a contracting officer in charge of negotiating and managing contracts with vendors.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency in Humboldt County, where transportation officials ordered an unsafe bridge immediately closed. The Martins Ferry Bridge links California 101 and 169 and is often the only access from the coast into the northeastern part of the county. An inspection this month revealed critical problems with the bridge's foundation. Since then, drivers have been sent on a 100-mile detour. The governor said an alternate route needs $1.

Nearly four dozen sirens have arrived in Humboldt County as part of a warning system for earthquake-generated waves along the north coast. Some of the 47 sirens will be placed along tsunami-prone areas and tied into a system that emergency officials are just beginning to create.

City welfare officials have agreed to stop sending homeless people to Humboldt County without notifying their counterparts in the far northern county. The agreement reached Friday resolves a dispute that began after Humboldt County officials learned that San Francisco had sent at least 13 homeless people north on one-way bus tickets over the last year.

Pacific Lumber Co., a financially troubled titan of California's timber industry, is offering to sell more than a quarter of its 220,000 acres of land in Humboldt County, a spokesman said Friday. The company informed federal securities regulators that it was marketing ranch lands, recreational areas and timberlands that did not figure in its core business as a major redwood lumber producer.

A former official of the North Coast timber giant Pacific Lumber Co. contends in a lawsuit that the company's president ordered him to conceal the presence of underground contaminants to avoid a costly cleanup and to expedite construction of sawmill facilities in Humboldt County. A Pacific Lumber spokesman said the allegations were not true and added that the plaintiff's contention that he had been fired also was not true. Humboldt County Dist. Atty.

Sky-high redwoods, a fogbound coast and unabashed liberalism: It's the last that drew Ohio transplant John Emig to Humboldt County, where one recent night he cold-called dozens of residents in a campaign to all but kill corporate spending in local elections. "I love the politics here," Emig said, putting aside a half-eaten slice of cold pizza in the downtown Eureka headquarters of Measure T. "In the Midwest, I felt like a voice in the wilderness."

President Bush on Tuesday signed legislation granting wilderness protection to 275,000 acres of federal land in Northern California, including a spectacular stretch of coastline in Humboldt County. The largest addition to wilderness in the state in more than a decade, the bill also gives wild and scenic protection to 21 miles of the Black Butte River in Mendocino County. The bill is one of only a few wilderness proposals to win approval from this Congress.

Nobody told me to stop shaving before visiting Humboldt County, but I figured it couldn't hurt. More than a few friends had described this stretch of coast and mountains 250 miles north of San Francisco as "granola central." As if on cue, the morning after my arrival in late May, the front page of the Eureka Times-Standard ran a photo of 550 area kids lying on a beach to form a yin-yang symbol. The reality of the place, however, is more than just whole-grain goodness.

Down, down, down the robotic rover descended into the Pacific Ocean's cold-hearted depths, searching for signs of a 46-foot commercial fishing vessel that had gone missing. Veteran captain Bill Burchell and his two crewmen aboard the trawler Marian Ann vanished one evening in late September as the trio worked the long nets they used to scour for rock cod 40 miles northwest of this scenic fishing port. With all three men presumed lost at sea, U.S.