Tests

Another electrical failure hit an already darkened Corona del Mar High School on Thursday as teachers and administrators held an emergency staff meeting at a church across the street. The problem was linked to a Tuesday night power surge that knocked out the school's electricity just a week before final exams and that will keep the campus doors shut to students through Monday.

Responding to last week's explosion in Echo Park that injured five people, the Los Angeles City Council has called on the Southern California Gas Co. to cease pressure testing of its lines immediately and asked the Public Utilities Commission to review its procedures governing gas pipeline testing. The blast Friday hurled large chunks of asphalt and concrete into the air and created a 100-yard trench along Glendale Boulevard when a subterranean gas pipeline undergoing a pressure test ruptured.

Several South County cities and unincorporated areas near the San Onofre nuclear power plant will conduct a test of 50 community alert sirens between 10 a.m. and noon Wednesday, officials said. Residents within 10 miles of the plant can expect to hear two siren blasts lasting three to five minutes each, said Southern California Edison spokesman Ray Golden.

In Karin Salber's final-exam nightmare, she finds herself before a psychology class to give a 25-minute oral presentation, but she is up to her waist in notes. Frantically diving through the paper, she fails to retrieve the printout of her presentation. As if that weren't enough, the next night, the 21-year-old Cal State Fullerton undergrad has final-exam nightmare part two. She is to give a slide presentation for the same class but, somehow, vacation slides end up in the projector.

Two years ago, the state of California unveiled the first results from an ambitious new kind of academic exam. Educators vowed that it would produce better information on what students know than traditional, multiple-choice standardized tests used in schools. Students' performance in reading, writing and math on the California Learning Assessment System, or CLAS, was generally awful.

This coastal town plays host to a number of 5K races every year, but none set out to help ensure ocean water quality. Until now. The Surfrider Foundation and a city agency will sponsor the Bay to Beach 5K run-walk Oct. 14 to raise money for the testing of coastal water for bacterial contaminants.

Stephen Moe skims the lake shortly after dawn in a 16-foot aluminum boat and begins another day of what he calls "the greatest job I have ever had." "I get to work outside with wildlife," Moe said. "Ride a boat on a lake, help improve the area and, most of all, I get paid for it." Moe's job does not take him to a lake in a remote area fed by mountain streams.

Whooooooever thought a bird couldn't slow down a multimillion-dollar rocket development project never met the not-so-wise old owl who somehow mistook a steel tower for a hollow oak tree. Rocketdyne engineers were prepped and ready to test a rocket propulsion system last Saturday when they found a great horned owl's nest discreetly tucked in the center of a six-story engine test tower just west of Chatsworth in Ventura County.