Articles by Deborah Schoch

Firefighters battling to protect Big Sur are working in forests riddled with many thousands of flammable dead oak trees, making the savage Basin Complex fire burn hotter and and travel faster, forest experts said Sunday.Hundreds of thousands of oak trees in the area have been killed in recent years by a disease known as sudden oak death, producing fuel that allows flames to spread more quickly through redwoods and other evergreens, they said. Read more

As flames swirled toward their family homestead, the Curtis brothers figured they’d get no help and had no choice: The only way to hold on to their 55-acre compound would be to fight fire with fire. Read more

Long Beach has been preening its oceanfront image for more than a decade by pouring money and support into a wealth of new projects on its shores: a $117-million aquarium, gleaming Miami Beach-style condominium towers, a waterfront shopping center with sea-themed eateries, such as Gladstone’s and Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. Read more

The Day of the Lotus might as well be called the Day of the Dead. Read more

The Long Beach City Council has hired an engineering firm to study the effects of removing or reshaping part of a massive breakwater that shields the city’s pollution-plagued beaches from ocean surf. Read more

Hoping to wring water from the skies, a parched Los Angeles County plans to launch an $800,000 cloud-seeding project in the San Gabriel Mountains that officials believe will boost rainfall and raise the levels of local reservoirs.The project, which will rely on injecting clouds with silver iodide particles, has won county supervisors’ backing and is slated to begin this winter. Read more

A new city audit released this week raises thorny questions about management of the Long Beach Museum of Art, including what it calls the improper spending of $1.6 million in restricted funds earmarked to pay off bonds for the museum’s $6.5-million expansion. Read more

Traffic is flowing again at two trouble spots along the Interstate 5 freeway after a series of truck accidents and a small brush fire halted morning commuters near Pyramid Lake and on an entrance ramp near downtown Los Angeles. Read more

Two elderly hikers found dead last week in a remote Sierra Nevada wilderness both died of natural causes, one from a heart attack and the other of injuries and exposure to freezing temperatures, an El Dorado County Sheriff’s Department lieutenant said today . Read more