LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Lake County Animal Care and Control has dozens of pets waiting to be adopted.

Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of Anatolian shepherd, Australian shepherd, border collie, boxer, German shepherd, Great Pyrenees, hound, husky, Labrador retriever, pit bull, Queensland heeler, shepherd and terrier.

Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.

Those dogs and the others shown on this page at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption.

Call Lake County Animal Care and Control at 707-263-0278 or visit the shelter online for information on visiting or adopting.

The shelter is located at 4949 Helbush in Lakeport.

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.

 

Is or was there life on Mars? That profound question is so complex that it will not be fully answered by the two NASA rovers now exploring it.

But because of the literal groundwork the rovers are performing, scientists are finally investigating, in-depth and in unprecedented detail, the planet’s evidence for life, known as its “biosignatures.” This search is remarkably complicated, and in the case of Mars, it is spanning decades.

As a geologist, I have had the extraordinary opportunity to work on both the Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions. Yet as much as scientists are learning from them, it will take another robotic mission to figure out if Mars has ever hosted life. That mission will bring Martian rocks back to Earth for analysis. Then – hopefully – we will have an answer.

From habitable to uninhabitable

While so much remains mysterious about Mars, there is one thing I am confident about. Amid the thousands of pictures both rovers are taking, I’m quite sure no alien bears or meerkats will show up in any of them. Most scientists doubt the surface of Mars, or its near-surface, could currently sustain even single-celled organisms, much less complex forms of life.

Instead, the rovers are acting as extraterrestrial detectives, hunting for clues that life may have existed eons ago. That includes evidence of long-gone liquid surface water, life-sustaining minerals and organic molecules. To find this evidence, Curiosity and Perseverance are treading very different paths on Mars, more than 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometers) from each other.

These two rovers will help scientists answer some big questions: Did life ever exist on Mars? Could it exist today, perhaps deep under the surface? And would it be only microbial life, or is there any possibility it might be more complex?

The Mars of today is nothing like the Mars of several billion years ago. In its infancy, Mars was far more Earth-like, with a thicker atmosphere, rivers, lakes, maybe even oceans of water, and the essential elements needed for life. But this period was cut short when Mars lost its magnetic field and nearly all of its atmosphere – now only 1% as dense as the Earth’s.

The change from habitable to uninhabitable took time, perhaps hundreds of millions of years; if life ever existed on Mars, it likely died out a few billion years ago. Gradually, Mars became the cold and dry desert that it is today, with a landscape comparable to the dry valleys of Antarctica, without glaciers and plant or animal life. The average Martian temperature is minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 62 degrees Celsius), and its meager atmosphere is nearly all carbon dioxide.

Early exploration

Robotic exploration of the Martian surface began in the 1970s, when life-detection experiments on the Viking missions failed to find any conclusive evidence for life.

Sojourner, the first rover, landed in 1997 and demonstrated that a moving robot could perform experiments. In 2004, Spirit and Opportunity followed; both found evidence that liquid water once existed on the Martian surface.

The Curiosity rover landed in 2012 and began ascending Mount Sharp, the 18,000-foot-high mountain located inside Gale crater. There is a reason why NASA chose it as an exploration site: The mountain’s rock layers show a dramatic shift in climate, from one with abundant liquid water to the dry environment of today.

So far, Curiosity has found evidence in several locations of past liquid water, minerals that may provide chemical energy, and intriguingly, a variety of organic carbon molecules.

While organic carbon is not itself alive, it is a building block for all life as we know it. Does its presence mean that life once existed on Mars?

Not necessarily. Organic carbon can be abiotic – that is, unrelated to a living organism. For example, maybe the organic carbon came from a meteorite that crashed on Mars. And though the rovers carry wonderfully sophisticated instruments, they can’t definitively tell us if these organic molecules are related to past life on Mars.

But laboratories here on Earth likely can. By collecting rock and soil samples from the Martian surface, and then returning them to Earth for detailed analysis with our state-of-the-art instruments, scientists may finally have the answer to an age-old question.

Perseverance

Enter Perseverance, NASA’s newest flagship mission to Mars. For the past three years – it landed in February 2021 – Perseverance has been searching for signs of bygone microbial life in the rocks within Jezero crater, selected as the landing site because it once contained a large lake.

Perseverance is the first step of the Mars Sample Return mission, an international effort to collect Martian rock and soil for return to Earth.

The instrument suite onboard Perseverance will help the science team choose the rocks that seem to promise the most scientific return. This will be a careful process; after all, there would be only 30 seats on the ride back to Earth for these geological samples.

Budget woes

NASA’s original plan called for returning those samples to Earth by 2033. But work on the mission – now estimated to cost between US$8 billion to $11 billion – has slowed due to budget cuts and layoffs. The cuts are severe; a request for $949 million to fund the mission for fiscal 2024 was trimmed to $300 million, although efforts are underway to restore at least some of the funding.

The Mars Sample Return mission is critical to better understand the potential for life beyond Earth. The science and the technology that will enable it are both novel and expensive. But if NASA discovers life once existed on Mars – even if it’s by finding a microbe dead for a billion years – that will tell scientists that life is not a fluke one-time event that only happened on Earth, but a more common phenomenon that could occur on many planets.

That knowledge would revolutionize the way human beings see ourselves and our place in the universe. There is far more to this endeavor than just returning some rocks.

Amy J. Williams, Assistant Professor of Geology, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

MENDOCINO NATIONAL FOREST, Calif. — Mendocino National Forest staff are reopening off-highway vehicle, or OHV, trails and a campground after a closure lifts on Saturday, March 16, at midnight.

Upper Lake Ranger District OHV trails and the Deer Valley Campground had been closed due to extensive storm damage since mid-February.

Forest leadership mobilized volunteers and staff from recreation, fire, fuels and engineering to help with trail cleanup during the monthlong closure.

One campsite in the Deer Valley Campground will remain closed. A picnic table was destroyed by a fallen tree, and staff plan to restore the site when the ground is drier. Forest staff also continue to clear trails and conduct tread repair.

Forest officials caution visitors to be aware of their environment. Trees may continue to fall, and
trail riders can expect to encounter downed trees on trails.

Roads in the forest can become impassable at any time due to downed trees, rockfall or slides. In higher elevations, roads remain impassable due to snow and ice.

BERKELEY, Calif. — The Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, or MVZ, at the University of California, Berkeley, contains more than 300,000 vertebrate specimens — the majority of them reptiles and amphibians — preserved in alcohol and tucked away for current and future generations of scientists who want to study their anatomical and genetic diversity.

Now, those specimens are gradually gaining a new life online as part of an effort by 25 museums across the U.S. to obtain 3D scans of as many vertebrate groups as possible and make them available free to the general public in a searchable database.

A summary of the six-year project, called openVertebrate (oVert), was published this week in the journal BioScience, offering a glimpse of how the data might be used to ask new scientific questions and spur the development of innovative technology.

But scientists aren't the only ones who find the scans useful. Artists have used the 3D models to create realistic animal replicas, photographs of oVert specimens have been displayed as museum exhibits, and specimens have been incorporated into virtual reality headsets that give users the chance to interact with and manipulate them.

Carol Spencer, staff curator of herpetology in the MVZ, has a 3D-printed version of one specimen — the skull of a horned lizard — sitting on her desk. Anyone can access the 3D scans online at MorphoSource, download the data and send them to a 3D printer to produce their own skeletal models.

"You can actually print them and then use them in a classroom. We have lots of people using them for teaching in colleges or high schools," Spencer said.

Of the approximately 1,000 MVZ specimens scanned over the past six years through oVert, one — a juvenile Australian platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus — is the second most downloaded in the database.

"We've had this platypus in ethanol in a big tank, but it's never been loaned out. The only people who have ever gone to look at this are people that come here to our collection; it's maybe been looked at twice in its entire history here at MVZ. But in six years, it's been downloaded 320 times," Spencer said. "That's a huge expansion of use."

Spencer recently fielded a request from a professor at Towson University in Maryland to download CT scans for a course in which students compare the cranial anatomy of vertebrates and print 3D models for study.

"All of these specimens are gaining sort of a new digital life," said Michelle Koo, the MVZ's staff curator of biodiversity informatics. "Specimens are collected all the time, and museums have to justify taking an animal out of the wild and make sure that it has the highest value possible to current and future research. It's part of our responsibility as curators to seek out and help keep developing these new uses and ways of accessing specimens to make sure that they stay relevant and useful for these new cutting-edge tools."

A new digital life

Between 2017 and 2023, oVert project members led by David Blackburn at the Florida Museum of Natural History captured CT scans of more than 13,000 specimens with representative species across the vertebrate tree of life. These scans included more than half the genera of all amphibians, reptiles, fishes and mammals.

CT scanners use high-energy X-rays to peer past an organism’s exterior and view the dense bone structure beneath. While skeletons make up the majority of oVert reconstructions, a small number of specimens were also stained with a temporary contrast-enhancing solution that allowed researchers to visualize soft tissues, such as skin, muscle and other organs.

The models give an intimate look at internal portions of a specimen that could previously only be observed through destructive dissection and tissue sampling, Blackburn noted.

“Museums are constantly engaged in a balancing act,” he said. “You want to protect specimens, but you also want to have people use them. oVert is a way of reducing the wear and tear on samples while also increasing access, and it’s the next logical step in the mission of museum collections.”

Because CT scans yield a series of slices through the specimen, most of the images on MorphoSource are cross-sections that must be assembled into a 3D rendering that can be spun and manipulated in a 3D viewer. But software that does this is readily available, Koo said.

The CT scans resemble what she laboriously assembled as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1990s, when she was studying the unique skulls of a small group of salamanders. Then, she sliced the bodies into thin sections to study the internal anatomy, but hadn't the ability to assemble them into a 3D picture that people could readily appreciate.

"Today, I might still have to do histology, but now that we have a digital rendering of it, I can send them a picture," Koo said. "It's the same thing that I saw when I was looking under the microscope and trying to explain to people."

Though funding for oVert from the National Science Foundation has ended, many museums are continuing to scan their collections, often focusing on specific groups. Spencer noted that MVZ has over 800,000 total vertebrate specimens, pickled in alcohol or dry, that could potentially be scanned and made available online.

Initially, UC Berkeley didn't have one of the micro-CT scanners used by the oVert group, so the MVZ sent specimens to other institutions for scanning. Integrative biology professor Jack Tseng has since acquired one for projects, such as a study of fish and mammal skulls, within his department.

Spencer regularly sends MVZ specimens to other institutions where ongoing studies require a scan. She and Koo are continuing the scanning work started by oVert in a collaboration with the University of Colorado in Boulder, for example, which is leading a project to CT scan and high-resolution 2D image 1,100 species of Central American reptiles and amphibians. About 80 turtles from the MVZ are being scanned by the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, while some of the museum's legless lizards and cave salamanders are being scanned at other institutions for a study of their evolution. MVZ director Michael Nachman is CT scanning mice to study the connection between tail length and adaptation to heat, and the role maternal genes play in this adaptation.

"oVert's goal was to try to get one of every genus of vertebrate. But then you don't have all this variability within species," Spencer said. "And so really what we need is huge data sets of multiple animals per species. And the only way we're going to get that is if we convince everyone to make their data public through sites like MorphoSource. So when I mail specimens out to someone, and then they do CT scans, I require them to put those CT scans, when they're done with their research, on MorphoSource so that other people can use them."

oVert was funded with an initial sum of $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation, along with eight additional partnering grants totaling $1.1 million that were used to expand the project’s scope.

Robert Sanders writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.

CLEARLAKE, Calif. — Clearlake Animal Control has many more new dogs awaiting their families this week.

The Clearlake Animal Control website lists 52 adoptable dogs.

This week’s dogs include “Annie,” a female Siberian husky mix with a white coat and blue eyes.

There also is “Rose,” a female pit bull terrier mix with a copper and white coat.

The shelter is located at 6820 Old Highway 53. It’s open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.

For more information, call the shelter at 707-762-6227, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.

This week’s adoptable dogs are featured below.

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.

UC San Francisco researchers have designed a candidate drug that could help make pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, a treatable, perhaps even curable, condition.

The new drug candidate permanently modifies a wily cancer-causing mutation, called K-Ras G12D, that is responsible for nearly half of all pancreatic cancer cases and appears in some forms of lung, breast and colon cancer.

Pancreatic cancer is less common than these other cancers, but the lack of treatment options makes it more deadly, and it claims more than 50,000 lives each year in the United States.

“We’ve worked for 10 years to bring pancreatic cancer therapies up to speed with therapies for other cancers,” said Kevan Shokat, PhD, a professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology who led the work. “This breakthrough is the first to target G12D and gives us a firm foothold to fight this devastating mutation.”

The findings appear March 5, 2024, in Nature Chemical Biology.

Shokat and his colleagues developed the first cancer drugs to stop a different K-Ras mutation, G12C, in 2013. Since then, two therapies have been approved for use in lung and breast cancer, but the advance didn’t move the needle for treating pancreatic cancer.

An extremely common mutation

K-Ras mutations are extremely common in pancreatic cancer, explaining 90% of cases. About half of these mutations are G12D, which differs from most other K-Ras mutations by a single amino acid substitution.

This difference between healthy and cancer-causing proteins, in which glycine (G) becomes aspartate (D), presented a monumental challenge for chemists.

“There are very few molecules out there that can sense the difference between the cancer-causing aspartate and the glycine,” Shokat said. “To make good therapies, we need drugs that work on the tumor cells only, without affecting healthy cells.”

Shokat’s team envisioned a molecule that fit into a pocket of the K-Ras protein, then firmly – and irreversibly – bound to the rogue aspartate. The explosion of research that followed Shokat’s 2013 discovery enabled them to develop a template for chemicals that reliably found their way into that corner of the protein.

“Once we had that structure for our molecules, we knew they were sitting in the protein at the right spot,” Shokat said. “Then we could explore the little nooks and crannies that we needed to discover the chemistry of the aspartate.”

Could a bend in a molecule lead to a cure?

The scientists went through dozens of chemicals.

“It’s like climbing a new route on a mountain, you may be strong but the lengths of your arms limit what you can do,” Shokat said. “It was a lot of trial and error, tweaking the branches of these molecules to position them in this incredibly tight space around G12D. Some got close, then failed, and we would start over.”

Eventually, they found a winning molecule. It settled into the appropriate corner of K-Ras and bent into a new shape that reacted strongly with the aspartate.

The molecule put the brakes on tumor growth from G12D in cancer cell lines, as well as an animal model of human cancer. And it never attacked healthy proteins.

The scientists are now optimizing the molecule to be durable enough to fight cancer in the human body. With the traction gained from this study, Shokat said, new therapies for pancreatic cancer could enter clinical trials in as little as two to three years.

“We’ve learned a lot from other targeted therapies and know how to quickly translate discoveries like these for the clinic,” said Margaret Tempero, MD, director of the UCSF Pancreas Center. “An effective drug targeting K-RAS G12D could be transformative for patients with pancreatic cancer.”

For funding and disclosures, see the paper. Other UCSF authors are Quinheng Zheng, Ziyang Zhang, and Keelan Z. Guiley. Zhang is now a professor at UC Berkeley.

Levi Gadye writes for the University of California, San Francisco.

In a series of studies, a team of astronomers has shed new light on the fascinating and complex process of planet formation. The stunning images, captured using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) in Chile, represent one of the largest ever surveys of planet-forming discs. The research brings together observations of more than 80 young stars that might have planets forming around them, providing astronomers with a wealth of data and unique insights into how planets arise in different regions of our galaxy.

“This is really a shift in our field of study,” says Christian Ginski, a lecturer at the University of Galway, Ireland, and lead author of one of three new papers published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “We’ve gone from the intense study of individual star systems to this huge overview of entire star-forming regions.”

To date more than 5000 planets have been discovered orbiting stars other than the Sun, often within systems markedly different from our own Solar System. To understand where and how this diversity arises, astronomers must observe the dust- and gas-rich discs that envelop young stars — the very cradles of planet formation. These are best found in huge gas clouds where the stars themselves are forming.

Much like mature planetary systems, the new images showcase the extraordinary diversity of planet-forming discs. “Some of these discs show huge spiral arms, presumably driven by the intricate ballet of orbiting planets,” says Ginski. “Others show rings and large cavities carved out by forming planets, while yet others seem smooth and almost dormant among all this bustle of activity,” adds Antonio Garufi, an astronomer at the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory, Italian National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF), and lead author of one of the papers.

The team studied a total of 86 stars across three different star-forming regions of our galaxy: Taurus and Chamaeleon I, both around 600 light-years from Earth, and Orion, a gas-rich cloud about 1600 light-years from us that is known to be the birthplace of several stars more massive than the Sun. The observations were gathered by a large international team, comprising scientists from more than 10 countries.

The team was able to glean several key insights from the dataset. For example, in Orion they found that stars in groups of two or more were less likely to have large planet-forming discs. This is a significant result given that, unlike our Sun, most stars in our galaxy have companions.

As well as this, the uneven appearance of the discs in this region suggests the possibility of massive planets embedded within them, which could be causing the discs to warp and become misaligned.

While planet-forming discs can extend for distances hundreds of times greater than the distance between Earth and the Sun, their location several hundreds of light-years from us makes them appear as tiny pinpricks in the night sky.

To observe the discs, the team employed the sophisticated Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument, or SPHERE, mounted on ESO’s VLT. SPHERE’s state-of-the-art extreme adaptive optics system corrects for the turbulent effects of Earth’s atmosphere, yielding crisp images of the discs.

This meant the team were able to image discs around stars with masses as low as half the mass of the Sun, which are typically too faint for most other instruments available today.

Additional data for the survey were obtained using the VLT’s X-shooter instrument, which allowed astronomers to determine how young and how massive the stars are. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in which ESO is a partner, on the other hand, helped the team understand more about the amount of dust surrounding some of the stars.

As technology advances, the team hopes to delve even deeper into the heart of planet-forming systems. The large 39-meter mirror of ESO’s forthcoming Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), for example, will enable the team to study the innermost regions around young stars, where rocky planets like our own might be forming.

For now, these spectacular images provide researchers with a treasure trove of data to help unpick the mysteries of planet formation.

“It is almost poetic that the processes that mark the start of the journey towards forming planets and ultimately life in our own Solar System should be so beautiful,” concludes Per-Gunnar Valegård, a doctoral student at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, who led the Orion study.

Valegård, who is also a part-time teacher at the International School Hilversum in the Netherlands, hopes the images will inspire his pupils to become scientists in the future.

THIS STORY HAS BEEN UPDATED.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lake County Registrar of Voters Office on Thursday offered an update on the work to complete the official canvass for the March 5 presidential primary.

The 28-day canvass period began the day after the election. Until it is complete and the election is certified, the election results are not final.

Since the last update, the March 12 deadline passed to receive ballots postmarked by the end of Election Day.

The elections office said that approximately 7,415 vote-by-mail, or absentee, ballots remain to be counted. That’s about 600 less than the last count, which was impacted by those additional ballots continuing to come in by mail.

There also are 266 provisional or conditional ballots, and 266 vote-by-mail ballots that require further review for various reasons, the agency reported.

The elections office said the grand total of ballots remaining to be counted as of Thursday was 7,947.

Effective this year, AB 63 requires that the elections office update vote results and unprocessed ballot counts at least once per week and post the updated information on its website.

Registrar of Voters Maria Valadez said her office may stop posting results if the only ballots left to count are the ballots for which voters have the opportunity to either verify their signature or provide a signature, or until they certify election results.

For more information, visit the Lake County Registrar of Voters website or call 707-263-2372 OR toll-free at 888-235-6730.

Editor’s note: This story has been corrected to state that the canvass period is 28 days, not 30, and to add information about AB 63.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The county of Lake is now accepting applications to a newly formed municipal advisory council.

On Tuesday, March 12, the Lake County Board of Supervisors approved the establishment of Big Valley Advisory Council, or BVAC, as Lake County News has reported.

The purpose of BVAC is to advise the board on matters relevant to the Big Valley area as may be designated by the board, including, but not limited to public health, safety, welfare, public works, economic development, planning and land use.

A group of interested Kelseyville residents came together in early 2024 to determine the best way to increase participation of Big Valley area residents in public decision-making processes.

Steering committee members encourage anyone who is interested in participating in conversations related to BVAC’s purpose to attend council meetings, and anyone who is interested in helping to champion the interests of our community to apply to be a BVAC board member.

Steering committee member, local farmer, businessman and parent, Greg Panella, noted, “The BVAC gives a formal voice to the Big Valley area residents on key issues affecting our community. Prior to the formation of the BVAC, the unincorporated town of Kelseyville and parts of the Big Valley area had no organized and formal representative body to inform policies that affect the community we all call home. BVAC will now provide that forum.”

Any person who resides in the boundaries of the Kelseyville Planning Area may apply to sit on the BVAC Board.

How to confirm eligibility to apply

In the “Layers” section here (in most browsers, users will have to click or tap on the icon that looks like a stack of papers), select “planning areas” (the last of the layer labels).

Once selected, entering your address of residence in the search bar will confirm with which Planning Area the location is associated with:

Applications are due March 27, and may be found here.

Please note, membership on the Big Valley Advisory Council is voluntary.

For additional information, please contact Assistant Clerk of the Board Johanna DeLong at 707-263-2580 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — Amidst a national outbreak of measles, Lake County Health Services is emphasizing the critical importance of vaccination, particularly the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine, in safeguarding communities’ health.

Health officials said it's essential for parents to understand that unvaccinated children are at a higher risk of contracting measles and will be subject to exclusion from school if there are confirmed cases or exposure at their school.

Lake County Public Health emphasizes the importance of vaccination in protecting not only individual health but also the health of the entire community.

To enhance access to MMR vaccination, Lake County Public Health offers free vaccines at our Walk-In Clinic every Wednesday from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., with a lunch break from noon to 1 p.m. No appointment is required; you can just walk in.

Public Health Officer Dr. Noemi Doohan stressed the urgency of the situation. “With the increasing number of measles cases in the USA and now in California, we are at risk for outbreaks of this vaccine-preventable illness in our county. Most of our Lake County schools have excellent measles vaccination rates but a few schools are under vaccinated. When measles vaccination rates are low, it opens the community up for measles outbreaks that can start in schools.”

Doohan said Public Health is grateful for partnerships with organizations such as the Kelseyville Unified School District, which will host a back to school event on May 30 from 3 to 6 p.m., offering free vaccines including the MMR vaccine for eligible children.

Key facts about measles:

• Measles is highly contagious and can be severe, especially in children under 5 years old.
• Measles spreads through the air via coughing or sneezing. Wearing a mask can help prevent its transmission.
• An infected person can spread measles even before developing the rash.
• About 1 in 5 people with measles in the U.S. will be hospitalized, and severe complications can arise, including brain swelling and death.

“As your public health officer, I hope this information is helpful. We have had four confirmed cases of measles in California, since February 2024, most recently in an outbreak in nearby Davis,” Doohan said. “Regarding vaccination rates, Lake County is fortunate to have a relatively high MMR vaccination rate compared to our neighboring counties. However, this does not diminish the need for continued vigilance and promotion of vaccination efforts.”

In the face of the ongoing measles outbreak, Lake County officials remind community members that vaccination is a cornerstone of public health.

“Through our collective efforts we can protect our community from vaccine-preventable diseases and ensure a healthier community for all,” the agency said in a statement.

State Insurance Commissioner Ricardo Lara has released his catastrophe modeling regulation that he said will help restore options for all Californians, the latest phase of his Sustainable Insurance Strategy to safeguard the integrity of the state’s insurance market.

The Department of Insurance will hold a public workshop on April 23 to take input before starting the process of submitting the regulation for approval by the Office of Administrative Law.

Thursday’s announcement keeps California on track for a December 2024 goal of enacting the state’s largest insurance reform in over 30 years.

It follows Commissioner Lara’s release last month of a new regulation to improve oversight and handling of insurance rate filings.

Catastrophic insurance losses are defined as those that are larger and affect multiple policyholders as a result of a severe event, such as a wildfire affecting dozens of homes compared to a common house fire.

For more than 30 years, California regulations have allowed insurance companies to apply a catastrophe factor to insurance rates based on historical wildfire losses.

These outdated rules have contributed to rate spikes and balloon premiums following major wildfire disasters without fully accounting for the growing risk caused by climate change or risk mitigation measures taken by communities or regionally, as a result of local, state, and federal investments.

Currently, the Department of Insurance allows the use of catastrophe models for earthquake losses and fire following earthquakes.

The proposed regulation expands the allowable use of catastrophe models to include wildfire, terrorism, and flood lines for homeowners and commercial insurance lines.

Commissioner Lara’s strategy addresses a major limitation of Proposition 103, passed by voters in 1988.

Under that law, insurance companies are free to propose rates at any level needed to cover future losses but, unlike public utilities, are not required to cover all residents.

With the combination of climate-intensified disasters, rising costs of repair and rebuilding, and global economic forces, major companies have increased rates while pulling back from higher-risk properties where the FAIR Plan is now the only option.

“My Sustainable Insurance Strategy is intended to address decades-long neglected issues. Under outdated rules, the growth of climate-driven mega fires has supercharged insurance costs for many Californians while making insurance harder to find,” said Commissioner Lara about the second in a series of a proposed regulatory changes where he is seeking public comment and review. “We can no longer look solely to the past as a guide to the future. My strategy will help modernize our marketplace, restoring options for consumers while safeguarding the independent, transparent review of rate filings by Department of Insurance experts, which is a bedrock principle of California law.”

Commissioner Lara said his proposed regulation will have major benefits for Californians in the form of:

More reliable rates: Insurance consumers will have more stable costs than under current regulations, which have resulted in sudden and steep increases for those at higher risk of wildfire.

Greater availability of insurance: Insurance companies will increase their writing because they can better anticipate future losses, rather than making abrupt decisions to non-renew higher-risk policyholders, pause writing, or rapidly increase rates.

Stronger oversight: The Department of Insurance will have strong public oversight of modeling, which is already being widely used by insurance companies outside of rate-making and across the nation. The Department will have access to models and build expertise, so California can continue to lead on consumer protection.

Safer communities: Catastrophe models can capture efforts taken by federal, state, and local governments, property owners, communities and utility companies to mitigate the exposure of communities to catastrophic events — encouraging and rewarding those efforts.

The regulation corrects a major shortfall of using historical data, which fails to account for wildfire mitigation. The regulation specifies that any model must incorporate the best available scientific information on risk mitigation at the property, community, and landscape scales, including risk mitigation initiated by local and regional utility companies. This forward-looking change will also enhance a recent regulation that Commissioner Lara spearheaded and now enforces, requiring wildfire safety discounts for homeowners and businesses and aligning with record investments in wildfire mitigation by Governor Newsom and the California Legislature.

The regulation complies with California’s strong consumer protection laws, which requires that anytime an insurance company seeks to change its rates, it must provide a complete rate application with all information that the Insurance Commissioner requires for review.

The proposed regulation creates a new process for review of models by a panel of experts overseen by the Department of Insurance — before insurance companies can use them in a rate filing and meet the stringent transparency requirements under Proposition 103.

The panel would evaluate the appropriateness and soundness of each model and a Department of Insurance official would determine what information about the model must be included in rate applications. Any member of the public can participate in this review.

The Department of Insurance will hold a public workshop to take input on the proposed regulation on April 23, at 2 p.m.

Register for the workshop’s Zoom format here.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. — The Lake County Sheriff’s Office has identified the two men who died in a Sunday night crash in which a vehicle went into a swimming pool.

Lauren Berlinn of the Lake County Sheriff’s Office identified the men as Nickolas Wade Dilley, 39, of Perkins, Oklahoma, and Joseph Timothy Torres, 31, of Nice.

The California Highway Patrol’s Clear Lake Area office said that shortly after 10 p.m. Sunday its officers responded to the crash.

A red 2021 Subaru WRX driven by Dilley was traveling on Butte Street in Nice when it went over the embankment, hit a fence and landed upside down in a swimming pool at a residence on Tehama Street, according to the CHP report.

Neither Dilley, in the driver’s seat, nor Torres, who was found in the back seat, were wearing seat belts, the CHP said.

The CHP said the crash’s cause remains under investigation, although alcohol use is suspected to be a factor.

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