LAKEPORT, Calif. – The investigation into the cause of a weekend fire at a senior apartment complex that claimed a woman's life and injured several others is still under way, while officials work to find temporary housing for the dozens of residents the incident displaced.

The fire at Lakeview Housing senior apartment complex, located at 525 Bevins St., occurred on Sunday evening, as Lake County News has reported.

Lakeport Police Chief Brad Rasmussen said Wednesday that police were not yet ready to release the name of the woman who died in the fire, and were working to determine if her family had been notified before doing so.

Rasmussen said the woman's body was found in an elevator. Based on the investigation so far, authorities believe the woman had initially made it out of the building safely then, for a reason that's still not known, she went back inside.

“That's still under investigation,” Rasmussen said.

Additionally, there were four residents injured in the fire. Rasmussen said one woman who suffered burns was taken to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento for treatment.

He said police had been in contact with the woman, who remains hospitalized but has been moved out of the burn unit.

Three other people were transported to Sutter Lakeside Hospital for treatment of smoke inhalation. Rasmussen said one of those individuals has since been released from the hospital. He didn't have specific updates on their conditions.

Rasmussen said Lakeport Police Det. Dale Stoebe is working with investigators from local fire districts on the investigation into the fire's cause.

One of the considerations is whether there is negligence and, if so, if it needs to be prosecuted. “That's part of the investigation that we're doing right now,” he said.

“We want to make sure that we do a very thorough investigation, particularly in light of the fact that there was a fatality,” said Rasmussen.

He said the last major fire in the city that affected homes was some 20 years ago, when a wildland fire in the area of Sixth Street and Central Park Avenue burned several residences.

The 36-unit Lakeview Housing complex is owned by the Ukiah-based Rural Communities Housing Development Corp., or RCHDC, which according to its Web site manages more than 1,000 units of multi-family low-income housing for both elderly and families in Lake, Mendocino and Humboldt counties.

Rasmussen and City Manager Margaret Silveira said the city is working with RCHDC to find shelter for the 32 residents who are still out of their apartments.

Rasmussen said that, initially, the city was told it would be a week before residents return home. However, that estimate has been extended to as many as three weeks due to the need to clean out smoke damage and rebuild portions of the complex that were destroyed by the fire.

He said the unit where the fire began was destroyed, and one next to it had significant damage. “The majority of them just need to be cleaned out,” and utilities safely restored, Rasmussen said.

RCHDC Chief Executive Officer Brad McDonald told Lake County News that the organization is meeting on Thursday with its insurance adjuster and the contractors who will be rebuilding and cleaning the facility, and so later this week he should have a better idea of what repairs will be necessary, as well as a timeline.

City officials said a number of the complex's displaced residents have been sheltered since Sunday at a shelter run by the Red Cross at the Lakeport Seventh-day Adventist Church, which has been used as an emergency shelter for the Clayton fire as well as during last year's wildland fire-fraught summer.

Rasmussen said that, on the night of the fire, there were 18 people staying there.

Since then, the number has dropped a little as residents have found some other places to stay temporarily with friends and family, said Silveira. She estimated the shelter's most recent census was 13.

She said she has been working with RCHDC to try to find other temporary housing – particularly, motels or hotels – for the seniors since the Red Cross plans to end its operations on Friday.

Trying to find enough accommodations in town before Friday – and for an extended period of time – is challenging, said Silveira, especially in light of upcoming weekend events.

Silveira said there also is a concern about not wanting to have to move the seniors from one place to another while they're waiting to return home.

She said the church has offered to allow the residents to stay beyond Friday, which would necessitate volunteers operating the facility.

“They've been very gracious,” Silveira said of the church.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – Two years ago, on Aug. 24, 2014, just south of Napa, a fault in the Earth suddenly slipped, violently shifting and splitting huge blocks of solid rock, 6 miles below the surface.

The underground upheaval generated severe shaking at the surface, lasting 10 to 20 seconds.

When the shaking subsided, the magnitude 6.0 earthquake – the largest in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1989 – left in its wake crumpled building facades, ruptured water mains, and fractured roadways.

But the earthquake wasn't quite done.

In a new report, scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and elsewhere detail how, even after the earthquake's main tremors and aftershocks died down, earth beneath the surface was still actively shifting and creeping – albeit much more slowly – for at least four weeks after the main event.

This postquake activity, which is known to geologists as “afterslip,” caused certain sections of the main fault to shift by as much as 40 centimeters in the month following the main earthquake.

This seismic creep, the scientists say, may have posed additional infrastructure hazards to the region and changed the seismic picture of surrounding faults, easing stress along some faults while increasing pressure along others.

The scientists, led by Michael Floyd, a research scientist in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, found that sections of the main West Napa Fault continued to slip after the primary earthquake, depending on the lithology, or rock type, surrounding the fault.

The fault tended to only shift during the main earthquake in places where it ran through solid rock, such as mountains and hills; in places with looser sediments, like mud and sand, the fault continued to slowly creep, for at least four weeks, at a rate of a few centimeters per day.

“We found that after the earthquake, there was a lot of slip that happened at the surface,” Floyd said. “One of the most fascinating things about this phenomenon is it shows you how much hazard remains after the shaking has stopped. If you have infrastructure running across these faults – water pipelines, gas lines, roads, underground electric cables – and if there's this significant afterslip, those kinds of things could be damaged even after the shaking has stopped.”

Floyd and his colleagues, including researchers from the University of California at Riverside, the U.S. Geological Survey, the University of Leeds, Durham University, Oxford University, and elsewhere, have published their results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Right time, right place

Floyd and co-author Gareth Funning, of UC Riverside, have been studying fault motions in Northern California for the past seven years.

When the earthquake struck, at about 3:20 a.m. local time, they just happened to be stationed 75 miles north of the epicenter.

“At the time, I did stir, thinking, 'C'mon, go back to sleep!'” Floyd said. “When we woke up, we turned on the news, figured out what happened, and immediately got back in our cars, picked up the instruments we had in the field, drove down the freeway to American Canyon, and started to put out instruments at sites we had measured just a few weeks before.”

Those instruments made up a network of about a dozen GPS receivers, which the team placed on either side of the fault line, as close to the earthquake's epicenter as they could.

They left most of the instruments out in the field, where they recorded data every 30 seconds, continuously, for three weeks, to observe the distance the ground moved.

“The key difference between this study and other studies of this earthquake is that we had the additional GPS data very close to the epicenter, whereas other groups have only been able to access data from sites farther away,” Floyd said. “We even had one point that was 750 meters from the surface rupture.”

Creeping faults, silent shadows

The team combined its GPS data with satellite measurements of the region to reconstruct the ground movements along the fault and near the epicenter in the weeks following the main earthquake.

They found that the fault continued to slip – one side of the fault sliding past the other, like sandpaper across wood – at a steady rate of several centimeters per day, for at least four weeks.

“The widespread and rapid afterslip along the West Napa Fault posed an infrastructure hazard in its own right,” the authors wrote in the paper. “Repeated repairs of major roads crosscut by the rupture were required, and in some areas, water pipes that survived the [main earthquake] were subsequently broken by the afterslip.”

The earthquake and the afterslip took many scientists by surprise, as seismic data from the area showed no signs of movement along the fault prior to the main shock.

Regarding the afterslip's possible effects on surrounding faults, the researchers found that it likely redistributed the stresses in the region, lessening the pressure on some faults.

However, the researchers note that the afterslip may have put more stress on one particular region near the Rodgers Creek Fault, which runs through the city of Santa Rosa.

“Right now, we don't think there's any significantly heightened risk of quakes happening on other nearby faults, although the risk always exists,” Floyd said.

Curiously, the scientists identified a large region beneath the West Napa Fault, just northwest of Napa, which they've dubbed the “slip and aftershock shadow” – a zone that was strangely devoid of any motion during both the earthquake and afterslip. Floyd said this shadow may indicate a buildup in seismic pressure.

“The fact that nothing happened there is almost more cause for concern for us than where things actually happened,” Floyd said. “It would produce a fairly small quake if that area was to rupture, but there's just no knowing if it would continue on to start something more.”

Floyd said that in developing seismic hazard assessments, it's important to consider afterslip and slowly creeping faults, which occur often and over long periods of time following the more obvious earthquake.

“There are some earthquakes where we think we might be seeing some activity even 15 years after the main quake,” Floyd said. “So the more examples of an earthquake happening followed by afterslip that we can study, the better we can understand the entire process.”

Jennifer Chu writes for the MIT News Office.

NICE, Calif. – Firefighters quickly contained a late Wednesday night fire off Highway 20 that reports indicated may have been intentionally set.

The fire was reported just after 11 p.m. near The Harbor restaurant at 4561 E. Highway 20 in Nice, according to the initial dispatch.

Lake County Central Dispatch reported that several people had called to report seeing a subject who was believed to have set the fire leave the area.

Several deputies also responded to try to apprehend the person, although it was not clear if they located the individual.

Northshore Fire and Cal Fire units quickly arrived at the scene, with the California Highway Patrol asked to respond for traffic control, according to radio reports.

Reports from the scene said the fire burned half an acre of grass before it was fully contained just after 11:30 p.m., with an hour of mop up.

The Northshore Fire battalion chief on scene requested a Cal Fire investigator respond, reporting that there was a witness to the fire being started.

The California Highway Patrol reported that the highway was closed briefly while firefighters worked in the area.

The roadway was fully reopened just before 12:30 a.m. Thursday, and fire units reported clearing the scene shortly before 1 a.m.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Lake County Fair Foundation has elected Middletown natives Grant and Ross Hardester as the grand marshals for the 2016 Lake County Fair.

The Hardesters will lead the fair’s 5:30 p.m. kickoff parade and ribbon cutting ceremony at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 1, beginning the “Party with the Animals.”

The Hardesters' roots go back five generation in Lake County with Ross and Grant’s parents being raised in Middletown.

John Irwin and Reed Hardester started a grocery business in Middletown in 1943. The original name was the "Corner Store.” The Hardester family bought out the Irwins in the 1970s.

Currently, Hardester’s Markets and Hardware have three locations in Southern Lake County – Middletown, Cobb and Hidden Valley. The stores employ 155 people from the local community.

Hardester’s Markets have a longstanding relationship with the Lake County Fair. Since the 1960s, the Hardesters have purchased animals every year from the annual Junior Livestock Auction, as well as supported the fair by selling the fair’s presale tickets to patrons at all their locations.

Grant Hardester has been a member of the Middletown Merchants Association, serving in various leadership roles and on the committee that established the Middletown Area Plan.

Ross Hardester has volunteered with the junior and high school rodeo for the past three years, the Boys Scouts of America, and coaches Little League.

Both of the men helped residents that suffered in last year’s Valley fire and continue supporting residents impacted by the recent Clayton fire.

The Valley fire of 2015 not only changed lives, it changed the business perspective of the Hardesters.

In the early hours of the Valley fire, PG&E delivered a generator providing power to ensure that the Middletown location could serve as a sanctuary to those remaining in the community, fire personnel and news media.

The store was the cornerstone of our community during the devastating fire. The Hardesters exemplified the best in people from our community. Phones rang constantly as the store became an
information center for those that wanted to know how they could help.

Because of the Hardesters, the word community became synonymous with kindness, compassion and
hope. The Hardesters found a positive – our community pulls together like family.

“We are honored to have them lead us this year at the annual Lake County Fair’s
parade,” said Fair Chief Executive Officer Debbie Strickler.

The fair kicks off on Thursday, Sept. 1, with a parade up Main Street, followed at 6 p.m. by the opening ceremonies at the main entrance. The fair ends Sept. 4.

The fair is one of Lake County’s favorite summertime events enjoyed by more than 35,000 people each year, featuring a variety of free entertainment, food, exhibits, carnival and livestock shows.

More information can be obtained at www.lakecountyfair.com .

CLEARLAKE OAKS, Calif. – Caltrans will hold a public meeting this week to offer the community information on a proposed roundabout project at the intersection of Highway 20 and Highway 53 east of Clearlake Oaks.

The meeting will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 25, at the Clearlake Oaks Moose Lodge, 15900 E. Highway 20, which is located near the project site.

The drop-in style meeting will have displays of the proposed project, and Caltrans staff will be on hand to answer questions, according to Caltrans spokesman Phil Frisbie.

Frisbie said installing a roundabout at the Highway 20 and Highway 53 intersection is meant to improve the intersection's safety and operation.

The roundabout project currently is scheduled to go to construction in 2018. Frisbie said the current estimated total cost at completion is about $9.8 million.

This would be the fourth roundabout on the state highways in Lake County, and the fifth in the county overall, counting the first that was completed in Lakeport more than a decade ago at Lakeport Boulevard and Parallel Drive.

Previous roundabout projects overseen by Caltrans have been completed at the intersection of Highway 20 and the Nice-Lucerne Cutoff in Nice and the intersection of Highway 20 and Highway 29 in Upper Lake.

A third roundabout at Highway 29 and Hartmann Road in Middletown is just ahead of the Clearlake Oaks project. Frisbie said the Middletown roundabout is still on schedule for construction in 2018.

Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. . Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.

KELSEYVILLE, Calif. – Historian Ruby Glebe will return to the Ely Stage Stop on Saturday, Aug. 27, to share more stories from the past during the museum’s Living History Day.

Glebe preserves and promotes Lake County’s historical resources.

On the fourth Saturday of each month local historians come to the Ely Stage Stop to visit with guests and answer questions regarding different aspects of Lake County history.

As these visits are recorded by Ely volunteers, the stories of Lake County's history are being preserved for future generations.

Glebe will be talking about the Pine Flat Community of 1870, once a quicksilver mining boomtown in the rugged Mayacamas Mountains that straddle Lake, Napa and Sonoma counties. Nothing remains of the once thriving community turned to bust due to the plummeting price of quicksilver and periodic wildfires that plague the area.

Her presentation will begin at noon. Admission is free with donations accepted.

The Lake County Historical Society’s Ely Stage Stop & Country Museum is located at 9921 State Highway 281 (Soda Bay Road) in Kelseyville, near Clear Lake Riviera, just north of Highway 29-Kit's Corner.

Current hours of operation are 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. each Saturday and Sunday. Living History events are held on the fourth Saturday of each month from noon until 2 p.m. Fiddlers’ Jams occur the first Sunday of every month from noon until 2 p.m. Private tours can be arranged by appointment.

Visit www.elystagestop.org or www.lakecountyhistory.org , check out the stage stop on Facebook at www.facebook.com/elystagestop or call the museum at 707-533-9990.

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