Nearly 400 people on Jan. 20 march from the Hard Rock in Stateline to Lakeview Commons in South Lake. Photo/Kathryn Reed

By Kathryn Reed

Last year those who didn’t understand the women’s marches across the globe thought it was all about the 2016 election. And in some ways it was. But it was also about the person elected, what he represents and that based on the popular vote he lost by millions. It was also about his belief that grabbing a woman’s pussy is his right.

Sexual assault is not a right. It is a crime.

It is not locker room banter.

Parents march for their rights and those of their children. Photo/Kathryn Reed

A year later, on Jan. 20 – the one-year anniversary of the last presidential inauguration – women, men, children and dogs took to the streets again. Today the outcry is the same, yet different. It’s not just about what is going on in Washington, D.C., as unbelievable as that seems at times, but it’s about the abuses women have been suffering for centuries that are just now coming to light.

What is it with men? Why do they think it’s OK to sexually, physically, emotionally or in any other way abuse women?

Does it really make you feel powerful? Do you really not care about the person you are victimizing?

A man holds a sign telling the world what he thinks. Photo/Kathryn Reed

By no means are men as a whole abusers. I’d argue more are gentlemen than not. At the marches it’s wonderful to see all the men standing right beside the multitudes of women. They are as appalled as the women at what is going on.

The marchers, they want men everywhere, not just politicians to figure out what the #MeToo movement is all about. To think hard if they have been part of the problem. No matter the answer, it’s time to be part of the solution.

South Shore women show their solidarity. Photo/Kathryn Reed

The president of the United States thinks there are shithole countries. The way he treats the office, women and people in general is appalling, degrading, shameful and embarrassing. Instead of making America great, he seems to be turning it into a shithole – at least when it comes to common decency.

Revelations about his sexual escapades keep making headlines, including interactions with multiple porn stars during the American Century Championship celebrity golf tournament in Stateline in 2006. This, while his wife was at home with their young son.

He has stained the oval office in a way that hasn’t been done since that famous blue dress.

A couple makes their opinions known at Lakeview Commons. Photo/Kathryn Reed

Even a consenting intern is not excusable. It’s still abuse of power, and certainly the office. Men degrading women crosses political aisles and permeates all professions.

It has to end. That is what these marches are about. It’s about no longer being silent. It’s about solidarity. It’s about making a statement for what is right. It’s about equality.

It’s time for change: march, vote, educate, stand up, speak out, say no, report the abuse, be intolerant of intolerance.

By Daniel Rothberg, Bloomberg

Between droughts and floods, the last decade has offered water managers in the southwest a preview of how climate change could impact a supply largely dependent on winter snow. This year’s disappointing snowpack has them worried again. 

“Water and climate change are joined at the hip,” said Brad Udall, a researcher at Colorado State University who published a paper earlier this year showing how climate change has reduced flows in the Colorado River. “One of the primary impacts of a warming atmosphere are changes to our water cycle.”

Snowpack is 50 percent lower than the average at this point in the winter at dozens of basins in the region. It’s a major concern in a region with a growing population where water supplies are often pushed to their limits, even in good years. In addition to fueling the West’s winter tourism industry, the snow provides a steady supply of water for the Colorado River, which serves 40 million people spread from Denver to Los Angeles.

Read the whole story

Hundreds of people on Jan. 18 help raise money for Bread & Broth 4 Kids at the chamber’s mixer at Riva Grill. Photo/Kathryn Reed

By Kathryn Reed

Food that rivals most restaurants on the South Shore – that’s how good dinners are at Bread & Broth.

While it’s only open one day a week, it is a lifeline for so many in the community. It’s not unusual for 100 people to show up at St. Theresa’s Grace Hall in South Lake Tahoe on a Monday. Many are there every Monday.

Everyone is invited. No proof of income, or lack of it, is required.

Seconds are available for those who are still hungry. The stragglers are often able to leave with leftovers. Plus, there are always bags of food for the taking.

It requires money to keep this 29-year-old nonprofit in business, especially as it has expanded its services through the years. Bread & Broth has a partnership with the Presbyterian Church in town, which serves soup on Fridays. And now there is Bread & Broth 4 Kids.

The youth oriented program provides weekend food bags to more than150 students in grades K-8. With more than 60 percent of the students in Lake Tahoe Unified School District eligible for a free or reduced lunch, it means many of them have little to eat when school isn’t in session.

Bread & Broth 4 Kids is designed to be that bridge between Friday and Monday. Much of the food items are things youngsters can easily make for themselves like soup, macaroni and cheese, tuna and other canned products. It includes packets of applesauce and protein bars – things that can be eaten on the go, or stuffed into a pocket.

Bags of donated food will help feed local students. Photo/LTN

The community came together Thursday to help these kids. The evening marked the ninth annual charity mixer put on by the Lake Tahoe South Shore Chamber of Commerce. For the past few years Bread & Broth has been the recipient, with the Jan. 18 event specifically for Bread & Broth 4 Kids.

“We choose Bread & Broth as the recipient because their supplies are often depleted after the holiday season, and we understand the importance of helping to alleviate the food insecure on the South Shore,” Brittani Curtis with the chamber told Lake Tahoe News. “Through the help of the South Shore community, we raised $1,299 at the 2017 Connect for a Cause Charity Mixer.”

The goal this year was to raise $1,500. The tally from the entrance fee, raffle ticket sales and silent auction have not been tallied yet.

The chamber hopes to host more Connect for a Cause Mixers with different nonprofit organizations. 

In addition to raising cash for Bread & Broth 4 Kids, guests were asked to bring non-perishable food items. Bags and bags filled a table and the space below it.

While the kids are getting quick items, those who show up for the Monday hot meal receive a well-balanced dinner that includes a protein like beef, chicken or fish, vegetables, bread, salads, and dessert. The latter is provided by area businesses.

All ages – including families – partake in the Monday meal.

While it’s a restaurant grade kitchen where the cooking takes place, there are plenty of things besides the clientele that separates Bread & Broth from a traditional dining establishment. Cooks often don’t have formal culinary training. Instead of having the luxury of a set menu to work from, they arrive that day to see what is in the kitchen and pantry. Creativity is essential.

(This reporter works one day a month at Bread & Broth serving food and working cleanup.)

The nonprofit might think about inviting a broader cross section of the community and charging a nominal fee or asking for a donation from those who can afford to give. The food is worth it.

For more information about Bread & Broth, or to donate or volunteer, go online.

By Lindsay Beevers, The Conversation

Last year unleashed some catastrophic weather across the world. At the beginning of 2017, Australia experienced one of the hottest summers on record in Sydney and Brisbane, followed by a killer summer heatwave across southern Europe and wildfires triggered by heat in California.

The Atlantic hurricane season was particularly active, recording three mighty category 5 hurricanes – Harvey, Irma and Maria – resulting in significant casualties. The cost of the damage across the American continent was in excess of $260 billion.

At the same time, the 2017 monsoon season brought considerable rains to the Indian subcontinent, and resulted in devastating floods in parts of India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh (one of the most flood vulnerable countries in the world), causing more than 1,000 deaths.

At the end of 2017, we could look back at the statistics and see that globally it was the warmest non-El Nino year on record. El-Nino is the warming part of the El-Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle which affects global ocean and atmospheric currents and can create powerful storms and hurricanes.

In a world that is getting warmer, what does that mean and what might 2018 hold for weather across the globe? Are we destined to see more and more of these “unusual” and catastrophic weather events which result in significant devastation? What effect will climate change have on our weather and will this become the new norm?

Looking at the facts

First, we need to untangle the difference between weather and climate change, something President Trump seems to confuse. In a nutshell, the difference is time. Weather is the conditions in the atmosphere over a short period of time. Climate is how the atmosphere behaves over a longer period of time. When we talk about climate change, that generally means changes in long-term averages of daily levels of temperature and rainfall. So we may see a change in average or typical weather over a number of years, but we can still experience extremes in any one year.

Recently, scientists have used robust event attribution where natural or human influences on particular events are studied to understand the role climate change may play in particular weather events. This can help support future regional contingency planning.

This also helps us to understand the role climate change has played in past events such as heatwaves, wildfires, droughts, or extreme flooding and some of their large-scale drivers such as ocean and atmospheric patterns of warming and cooling, like El-Nino.

Looking at the past there are many factors which control the onset, spread and eventual impact of a big weather event. But not all of these factors are climatic and many relate to things such as urbanisation, engineering interventions or land-use changes.

What the future looks like

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC, an international body set up to assess the science of climate change, we can continue to expect an increase in the average global temperature. That means we will be experiencing warmer years in the future.

But at the same time, we may see changes to the extremes, which could become more frequent in the case of high temperature or heavy rainfall, or less frequent in the case of extreme cold. This means that the distribution, occurrence and expected averages of our weather (for example, temperature and rain) throughout the year may change, resulting in warmer years on average with more extreme hot days, and fewer extreme cold days in the future.

This pattern has a direct link to such phenomena as heatwaves, which are caused by more extreme temperatures. The links to droughts or periods of extreme low flows in rivers are more complex. Global Circulation Models (GCMs) – a collection of numerical models that provide a 3D analysis of global climate interactions such as atmosphere, oceans, ice and land – predict increases in temperatures for some regions, such as southern Europe.

In terms of tropical cyclones, the effects of climate change on these phenomena is an active area of research as the processes are complex. For example, the Clausius-Clapeyron relationship which can be related to the water vapor-carrying capacity of the atmosphere, may have an impact on the strength and intensity of such storms.

The relationship states that for every degree rise in temperature, the water-holding capacity of the atmosphere increases by 7 percent, so in a warming ocean, the air above the water has a much greater capacity to hold water and thus store more rain that can feed more powerful storms.

But sinking cold air from the upper atmosphere may prevent storms from rising in the first place. If this happens more frequently with climate change then we can expect fewer such storms. That means in the future there may be fewer tropical cyclones forming, but those that do will be stronger and more intense.

Wet, wet, wet

In a warming world, we can expect it to get wetter. The distribution of the rainfall throughout the year could change as we experience longer, drier spells, although when rain falls it may be in intense bursts. Recent research by Newcastle University analyzed the results from finer scale GCMs climate projections and suggests we may expect more intense summer rainfall in the UK in future. New climate projections from GCMs are being prepared for the UK to help predict what the future climate may look like.

Flooding from intense rainfall or river sources has many complex drivers which cause the damage in catchment areas. For example, land use changes (such as intensive farming practices or deforestation) and the degree of urbanization both play a part in flood risk. Recent research for the UK suggests that we will see an increase in the frequency of extreme river flooding.

So what can we expect for 2018? Already Australia is experiencing extreme heat, while the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is suffering a severe cold spell, and the west coast devastating mudslides that have killed 17 people. So far 2018 seems to be picking up right where 2017 left off.

Governments need to recognize and absorb that extreme weather across the globe is likely to become more common and start to adapt accordingly, rather than treat it as shocking one-off events. Otherwise we risk increasing loss of life and environmental damage in the future.

Lindsay Beevers is a professor and chair of the Futures Forum at Heriot-Watt University.

By U.S. Ski and Snowboard

After a storied 18-year career, Olympic champion Julia Mancuso  of Squaw Valley hung up her tiara and took a victory lap on Jan. 19 in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy – which happens to be the first track she podiumed on in January 2006.

Mancuso will move on to the next chapter of her career in PyeongChang, South Korea – this time not on the mountain, but with the NBC Olympics team in PyeongChang.

As a junior ski racer, Mancuso came blazing on to the scene – grabbing an American record eight Junior World Championship medals. A four-event athlete from the beginning, Mancuso started World Cup racing and was a NorAm champion at 16, competed in the Olympics at 17, set a U.S. record for Junior World Championships medals before she was out of her teens, and then started her twenties by capturing two World Championships medals.

Mancuso’s first FIS Ski World Cup was in 1999, and her first World Cup podium was a super-G silver in Cortina. Known for her renegade style and her ability to perform on the big stage, Mancuso donned a tiara on the podium in 2006 and 2010 when she won Olympic gold and silver.

Mancuso’s career highlights:

• Most decorated big event American female athlete (nine medals: four Olympics, five World Championships)
• Most Olympic medals for an American female ski or snowboard athlete (four)
• Medals in three consecutive Olympic Games
• Gold, giant slalom, Torino, Italy, 2006
• Silver, downhill, Vancouver, Canada, 2010
• Silver, super combined, Vancouver, Canada, 2010
• Bronze, super combined, Sochi, Russia, 2014
• Four Olympic Teams
• Seven World Cup victories across four disciplines (city event, downhill, super-G, alpine combined)
• 36 World Cup podiums
• 398 World Cup starts
• First World Cup start November 20, 1999 – Copper Mountain, Colo.
• Nicknamed “Super Jules” and often sporting superhero attire, Mancuso led a fun-focused, unconventional career, splitting her time between surfing in Maui and traveling the world chasing snow in the winter. In between, she captured more major event medals than any other American woman with nine – four Olympic and five World Championship medals.

For Mancuso, it wasn’t just about fun on piste, though. In 2010, Mancuso proved to the snowsports world that she was one of the most well-rounded and gifted skiers, grabbing a third in the Extreme Verbier Freeride event. Growing up in Squaw Valley, Mancuso was always inspired by the mountain and had a love for freeskiing too.

Mancuso’s passion for the remoteness of backcountry slopes and deep powder were a big reason she participated in friend and Austrian free kier Sandra Lahnsteiner’s production “Shades of Winter: BETWEEN.” During the filming of the all-women ski film, she was able to fulfill a lifelong dream of skiing in Hawaii on Mauna Kea.

Since she was 18 years old, though, Mancuso battled issues with her hip. Hip surgery after the 2014-15 season had Mancuso sidelined from World Cup competition for two full seasons, but with an extreme fighter mentality, she made her return to competition in St. Moritz, Switzerland, in December 2017.

“It has been an epic battle with my hip injury, and the past three years I have put everything into returning to competition at the highest level and the goal to reach my fifth Olympic Games,” reflected Mancuso. “There have been really promising days during this challenging process, and I have kept my spirits up despite many who questioned or doubted me. Sadly, I haven’t found the progression to compete with the best in the world again, but I’m proud to have fought until the very end. It is with a heavy heart that I say goodbye to ski racing, but I do so with a full heart.”

Mancuso looks forward to the next chapter of her career, where she will join the NBC Olympics team in PyeongChang. Mancuso will contribute features on a variety of platforms including the Olympic Zone – a nightly 30-minute show that airs on NBC affiliates – and will also serve as a reporter, covering venues and locations throughout the Games. Mancuso worked for NBC in a similar capacity at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

“I am so grateful for all the incredible opportunities I’ve been provided and the amazing friendships I’ve made along the way,” Mancuso said. “I’d also like to thank my family, sponsors, and my team for believing in me, my doctors and fans, and especially my husband who has supported me through these difficult times. I am happy that I got to ski my last race here in Cortina – one of my favorite stops on the tour. I had my first podium here, and now I get to say farewell. I’m excited to see where skiing and life’s adventure will take me next.”

By Kathryn Reed

Houses have holes in them that owners don’t always think about, but which fire seems to know exist. That is one of the conundrums when it comes to fire prevention.

Building codes continually change to help suppress fire. Vegetation through defensible space has been a help for years.

Windows and vents are likely the next areas where fire prevention is headed.

“The next iteration is the shuttering concept,” South Lake Tahoe Fire Chief Jeff Meston told Lake Tahoe News. “I think this is where we are going. It will take a while. Then we will have a fire-proof house.”

Shutters over windows have existed for decades in Europe. They were instituted a century ago to protect buildings during the wars because of the fire bombings.

“We can’t legislate Mother Nature. She wins every time.”

— South Lake Tahoe Fire Chief Jeff Meston

Most are made of aluminum or steel. They can drop automatically based on temperature, then gravity brings them down.

Murray Milne, a research professor of architecture at UCLA in a paper about designing a home to survive a wildfire, wrote, “Windows are the weakest link in defending your building, but there are clever ways to protect them. Radiant heat alone from the fire can shatter glass or ignite combustibles inside your living room, without the flames actually reaching your house. Single glazing is particularly vulnerable; a better choice is double glazing with tempered glass on the exterior. However, the safest solutions are roll-down metal fire doors built into the roof overhangs or side recesses, and released automatically by fusible links.”

Meston also recommends using tempered glass instead of plate glass because it can withstand higher temperatures.

Other holes, so to speak, are the outside vents on a building. If an ember enters this way, it’s easy to ignite insulation or some other combustible source. It could smolder for a while, without anyone knowing what is going on until the flames erupt in the attic or crawl space.

“Continuous roof ridge and soffit vents are very effective as attic ventilators, which makes them extremely difficult to protect from wind-driven sparks and embers,” Milne wrote in his paper.

While the vents are necessary to prevent wood decay, Meston suggests screens that prevent objects larger than one-quarter inch from entering.

With devastating fires becoming more the norm, especially in the West, people are looking at ways to keep structures standing.

Money will always be an issue. The more rules, the more expensive construction becomes. Retrofitting might not even be possible depending on what the regulations are.

Then there are those who would argue not everything is supposed to be saved. And firefighters know that not everything can be saved.

“When the wind blows hard there is not much we can do,” Meston said. “We can’t legislate Mother Nature. She wins every time.”

He pointed to how even when everything is done correctly, there are no guarantees a building will still be standing after the fire is suppressed. A Kmart in Santa Rosa that had sprinklers was reduced to ashes last fall.

That’s one of the conundrums – best practices aren’t always enough.

But what Meston, who is the president-elect of the California Fire Chief’s Association, and his peers are talking about is how to keep the fire from entering a house.

Ultimately 254 houses burned in the Angora Fire in 2007. Photo/LVFPD

South Lake Tahoe prepares

Meston is in the process of putting together a study called the Standards of Cover. The 18-month project is expected to culminate this summer. It is an in depth look at all the safety issues in the city. Every dwelling in the city is being recorded – including the type of siding, construction materials and vegetation.

Firefighters go into as many buildings as they can to see what they would encounter in an emergency. It’s called pre-incident planning.

Socio-economics play a role in all of this. Squalor is one way to describe some of the hotel rooms in town, even traditional residences. A match could torch these places; it wouldn’t need to be a horrific fire like those that ravaged the Wine Country and Southern California last year.

“Usually in a wildland fire you decide which you can save and which you can’t,” Meston said. Firefighters know which roads to bring rigs onto based on how easily they can exit.

When smoke is thick it’s hard to see obstacles, like trees in the middle of the road – which exist in the Al Tahoe area. And if firefighters are coming from out of town to provide aid, detailed data will help them be safe as they work to control whatever disaster is unfolding.

Once the report is complete it will be presented to the City Council and to the public.

By Benjamin Spillman, Reno Gazette-Journal

What’s the difference between one snow drought and the next?

More than most people realize.

And those differences have implications for everything from skiing conditions to water supply in the western United States.

That’s according to a paper by two Nevada researchers in the journal Earth Interactions.

The researchers took a deep dive into the history of Sierra Nevada snow from 1951 until 2017 to understand the forces that shape the region’s snowpack.

Read the whole story

By Tony Bizjak, Sacramento Bee

In the tiny town of Plymouth, gateway to Amador County’s growing wine tourism area, road crews recently ripped out the four-way stop on a busy section of Highway 49 to replace it with a traffic approach that literally will have drivers going in circles.

Plopped in the middle of the intersection where Main Street crosses the highway, the big oval forces drivers to slow to 15 mph but doesn’t require them to stop. Instead, traffic from four directions merges and flows in a choreographed, counterclockwise direction.

Roundabouts have suddenly become one of the state’s trendiest traffic calming devices. After shying away from them for years, the state Department of Transportation is on a roundabout building spree, constructing 37, most in the last few years, with 100 more on the drawing boards.

Read the whole story

By Kathryn Reed

Policy is now being made by the part-time city attorney instead of the South Lake Tahoe City Council.

A letter was sent Jan. 11 to owners of shared rentals from the city’s revenue division at the direction of Nira Doherty. Doherty is an attorney with Burke, Williams & Sorensen out of Oakland. The city contracted with the law firm to have Doherty represent South Lake Tahoe after Tom Watson left last fall.

(The firm is contracted to provide 80 hours of legal work a month at a rate of $19,500/month or $234,000/annually. They bill every six minutes. Doherty’s review will be on the Jan. 23 council agenda, at which time the council is expected to discuss if it wants to continue with this type of representation or return to having a staff attorney.)

It is the City Council that is tasked with setting policy, and then staff doing the work to carry out the policy.

According to Mayor Wendy David, “(Doherty) was asked to interpret or clarify the code by the Finance Department. This is a one of the city attorney’s jobs, to assist staff in applying the policies of the council, including codes and ordinances.” 

However, the council at no time gave direction for contents of the letter to become policy. The letter states that those using their property as a shared rental – meaning they allow short-term renters while they stay on the property – must have a business license and pay transient occupancy tax.

“My understanding of the council’s intention was that we wanted to bring back a separate shared rental ordinance,” Councilwoman Brooke Laine told Lake Tahoe News. “I am not aware of any direction that provides for the requirement of a business license.”

The letter explicitly says, “This new VHR ordinance does not regulate shared rentals.”

Doherty and the Finance Department appear to be deciding the regulations for shared rentals, not the council.

Council members were not aware the letter existed until Lake Tahoe News told them about it last weekend.

Councilman Tom Davis said he would answer LTN’s questions by Tuesday. He didn’t. Councilman Jason Collin, per his MO, never acknowledged the questions.

David told Lake Tahoe News, “As you know, the council stated that we would bring back shared rentals at a later date. The date has not been agendized yet. My understanding is that TOT is a part of the shared rental owner expectation.” 

However, that is not what this reporter was told after the council took action last fall when it revamped the vacation rental ordinance. LTN was told that shared rentals would not be regulated in any manner until a separate ordinance was written sometime in 2018.

The city’s policy related to shared rentals has been inconsistent at best. It’s been an on and off again situation when it comes to the requirement to pay transient occupancy tax, or to even have a vacation home rental permit that was different from those renting out their entire house.

At one time in 2017 there was a one-time shared use rental permit that cost $114. This fee was good forever, or so city staff said at the time. However, the permittee never actually got a physical document. This differs from full house rentals which do have a paper document to show they are permitted.

Transient occupancy tax requirements have come and gone at various times. City employees give different information to different people, making it difficult to know what rules to play by. Paying TOT would put these properties on a level playing field with traditional hotels. It would also provide the city added income.

The city’s Finance Department did not respond to questions about who got the letter. It’s unknown if only people in the system already were notified or someone ferreted out the shared rental owners on the various platforms.

This city department has also not clarified why shared rentals need a business permit when owners renting out their dwelling year round or others subletting in the same manner do not have to have such a license.

By Chris Kudialis, Las Vegas Sun

Just over six months after sales of recreational marijuana began in Nevada, the state’s Tax Commission on Tuesday approved permanent regulations to govern the industry.

The eight-member commission voted 8-0 in favor of adopting 258 pages of pot regulations, which replace temporary “early start” regulations put in place to govern the Nevada marijuana industry from July through the end of 2017.

Additions to the permanent regulations adopted this week include guidance for the state’s selection of recipients for 66 new pot licenses and allowance of home delivery.

Read the whole story