Authorities, homeowners puzzled as houses in Northern Calif. subdivision sink into hillside

• 

  In this photo taken Monday, May 6, 2013 Robin and Scott Spivey walk past the wreckage of their Tudor-style dream home they had to abandon when the ground gave way causing it to drop 10 feet below the street in Lakeport, Calif. Officials believe that water that has bubbled to the surface is playing a role, in the collapse of the hillside subdivision that has forced the evacuation of 10 homes and the notice of imminent evacuation of another 10 in this upscale subdivision.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)The Associated Press

• 

  This photo taken Monday, May 6, 2013 shows the wreckage of the Tudor-style dream home of Robin and Scott Spivey who were forced to abandon after the ground gave way causing it to drop 10 feet below the street in Lakeport, Calif. Officials believe that water that has bubbled to the surface is playing a role, in the collapse of the hillside subdivision that has forced the evacuation of 10 homes and the notice of imminent evacuation of another 10 in this upscale subdivision.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)The Associated Press

• 

  In this photo taken Monday, May 6 2013, Randall Fitzgerald checks a fissure that has opened in a lot near his home in the Lakeside Heights subdivision in Lakeport, Calif. Fitzgerald, who bought his home a year ago, has seen several of his neighbors move away as the sinking ground threatens the collapse of their homes, and is concerned that he will have to leave as more fissures appear. Officials believe that water that has bubbled to the surface is playing a role, in the collapse of the hillside subdivision that has forced the evacuation of 10 homes and the notice of imminent evacuation of another 10 in this upscale subdivision.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)The Associated Press

• 

  In this photo taken Monday, May 6, 2013, the bedroom carpets hang from the home of Jagtar Singh, left, after the ground gave way in Lakeport, Calif. Shortly after Singh moved his wife, 4-year-old daughter and his parents the hill behind his home collapsed taking the underside of his home. Officials believe that water that has bubbled to the surface is playing a role, in the collapse of the hillside subdivision that has forced the evacuation of 10 homes and the notice of imminent evacuation of another 10 in this upscale subdivision.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)The Associated Press

• 

  In this photo taken Monday, May 6 2013, is a crack in the wall of the home of Jagtar Singh in Lakeport, Calif. Shortly after Singh moved his wife, 4-year-old daughter and his parents, the hill behind his home collapsed. Officials believe that water that has bubbled to the surface is playing a role, in the collapse of the hillside subdivision that has forced the evacuation of 10 homes and the notice of imminent evacuation of another 10 in this upscale subdivision.(AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)The Associated Press

Next Slide Previous Slide

LAKEPORT, Calif. –  Scott and Robin Spivey had a sinking feeling that something was wrong with their home when cracks began snaking across their walls in March.

The cracks soon turned into gaping fractures, and within two weeks their 600-square-foot garage broke from the house and the entire property — manicured lawn and all — dropped 10 feet below the street.

It wasn't long before the houses on both sides collapsed as the ground gave way in the Spivey's neighborhood in Lake County, about 100 miles north of San Francisco.

"We want to know what is going on here," said Scott Spivey, a former city building inspector who had lived in his four-bedroom, Tudor-style dream home for 11 years.

Eight homes are now abandoned and 10 more are under notice of imminent evacuation as a hilltop with sweeping vistas of Clear Lake and the Mount Konocti volcano swallows the subdivision built 30 years ago.

The situation has gotten so bad that mail delivery was ended to keep carriers out of danger.

"It's a slow-motion disaster," said Randall Fitzgerald, a writer who bought his home in the Lakeside Heights project a year ago.

Unlike sinkholes of Florida that can gobble homes in an instant, this collapse in hilly volcanic country can move many feet on one day and just a fraction of an inch the next.

Officials believe water that has bubbled to the surface is playing a role in the destruction. But nobody can explain why suddenly there is plentiful water atop the hill in a county with groundwater shortages.

"That's the big question," said Scott De Leon, county public works director. "We have a dormant volcano, and I'm certain a lot of things that happen here (in Lake County) are a result of that, but we don't know about this."

Other development on similar soil in the county is stable, county officials said.

While some of the subdivision movement is occurring on shallow fill, De Leon said a geologist has warned that the ground could be compromised down to bedrock 25 feet below and that cracks recently appeared in roads well beyond the fill.

"Considering this is a low rainfall year and the fact it's letting go now after all of these years, and the magnitude that it's letting go, well it's pretty monumental," De Leon said.

County officials have inspected the original plans for the project and say it was developed by a reputable engineering firm then signed off on by the public works director at the time.

"I can only presume that they were checked prior to approval," De Leon said.

The sinkage has prompted county crews to redirect the subdivision's sewage 300 feet through an overland pipe as manholes in the 10-acre development collapsed.

Consultant Tom Ruppenthal found two small leaks in the county sewage system that he said weren't big enough to account for the amount of water that is flowing along infrastructure pipes and underground fissures, but they could be contributing to another source.

"It's very common for groundwater to shift its course," said Ruppenthal of Utility Services Associates in Seattle. "I think the groundwater has shifted."

If the county can't get the water and sewer service stabilized, De Leon said all 30 houses in the subdivision will have to be abandoned.

The owners of six damaged homes said they need help from the government.

The Lake County Board of Supervisors asked Gov. Jerry Brown to declare an emergency so funding might be available to stabilize utilities and determine the cause of the collapse. On May 6, state Sen. Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, wrote a letter of support asking Brown for immediate action. The California Emergency Management Agency said Brown was still assessing the situation.

On Wednesday, the state sent a water resources engineer and a geologist to look at the problem. Sen. Dianne Feinstein sent a representative the next day.

Lake County, with farms, wineries and several Indian casinos, was shaped by earthquake fault movement and volcanic explosions that helped create the Coast Ranges of California. Clear Lake, popular for boating and fishing, is the largest fresh water lake wholly located in the state.

It is not unusual for groundwater in the region to make its way to the surface then subside. Many natural hot springs and geysers receded underground in the early 1900s and have since been tapped for geothermal power.

Homeowners now wonder whether fissures have opened below their hilltop, allowing water to seep to the surface. But they're so perplexed they also talk about the land being haunted and are considering asking the local Native American tribe if the hilltop was an ancient graveyard.

"Someone said it must be hexed," said Blanka Doren, a 72-year-old German immigrant who poured her life savings into the house she bought in 1999 so she could live on the rental income.

The home shares a wall with her neighbor, Jagtar Singh — who had two days of notice to move his wife, 4-year-old daughter and his parents before the hill behind the back of his home collapsed — taking the underside of his house and leaving the carpet dangling.

Doren is afraid that as Singh's house falls it will take hers with it. Already cracks have spread across her floors.

Damaged houses in the subdivision have been tagged for mandatory removal, but the hillside is so unstable it can't support the heavy equipment necessary to perform the job.

"This was our first home," said Singh, who noticed a problem in April when he could see light between the wall and floor of his bedroom. A geotechnical company offered no solutions.

"We didn't know it would be that major, but in one week we were gone," he said.

So far insurance companies have left the owners of the homes — valued between $200,000 and $250,000, or twice the median price in the county — dangling too. Subsidence is not covered, homeowners said. So until someone figures out whether something else is going on, they'll be in limbo.

"It's a tragedy, really," contractor Dean Pick said as he took photos for an insurance company. "I've never seen anything like it. At least that didn't have the Pacific Ocean eating away at it."

____

To reach Tracie Cone: www.twitter.com/TConeAP

View the original article here

US authorities interview Boston bombing suspects' parents in Russia

• 

  The parents of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Anzor Tsarnaev and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, will be interviewed by U.A. authorities regarding the Boston Marathon bombing on April 15 that killed three people and injured nearly 200 others. (AP)

U.S. authorities were on their way to a mountainous region in southern Russia to interview the parents of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, as more details emerged about the brothers' recent activities in the U.S., including word of where the deadly explosives may have been purchased and that the family relied on welfare for at least some of their time here.

A U.S. Embassy official said the Americans traveled from Moscow to the predominantly Muslim province of Dagestan "because the investigation is ongoing, it's not over."

The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said Wednesday that the team is working with the Russian security services, the FSB.

The mother of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is being interviewed Wednesday in the FSB building in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. The official said one positive development from the Boston tragedy might be closer cooperation with the Russian government on security issues.

Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, who was arrested in the United States in June on charges of shoplifting, has told The Associated Press that her son Tamerlan greatly enjoyed his time with her relatives during a trip to his ancestral homeland in southern Russia last year. But Tsarnaeva said he never traveled to her native village in a mountainous region of Dagestan, which is a hotbed of an ultraconservative strain of Islam known as Wahabbism. Wahabbism was introduced to the Caucasus in the 1990s by preachers and teachers from Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, new information surfaced Wednesday about the older of the two brothers, as the manager of a New Hampshire fireworks store said 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev was seen buying two mortar kits at the store in February.

April Walton, of Phantom Fireworks, says Tamerlan bought two "Lock and Load" reloadable mortar kits with 24 shells each.

Company Vice President William Weimer says FBI agents visited the Seabrook store on Friday, interviewed staff and checked its computers.

He says the amount of gunpowder that could be harvested from the kits would not have been enough to detonate the Boston bombs.

Walton says Tsarnaev paid $200 cash but scanned his driver's license into the company's computer system as required by store policy. Walton says the employee who handled the sale described it as a routine transaction.

Faisal Shahzad, who has pleaded guilty for his attempted Times Square bombing on May 1, 2010, also purchased fireworks used to build his failed car bomb from the same company. Shahzad bought consumer-grade fireworks from Phantom Fireworks' showroom in Matamoras, Pa.

"We were just shocked," Weimer told the New York Daily News from the company's store in Seabrook, N.H. "After our Times Square experience, we said, 'It can't happen twice.'"

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was also living on taxpayer-funded state welfare benefits while he was "delving deep" into the world of radical anti-American Islamism, the Boston Herald reports.

State officials confirmed to the newspaper late Tuesday that Tsarnaev, who was killed during a gun battle with police on Friday, was receiving benefits along with his wife, Katherine Russell Tsarnaev, and their 3-year-old daughter. 

The state’s Executive Office of Health and Human Services said those benefits ended in 2012 when the couple stopped meeting income eligibility limits. Russell Tsarnaev’s attorney has claimed Katherine — who had converted to Islam — was working up to 80 hours a week as a home health aide while Tsarnaev stayed at home, the newspaper reports.

“The brothers were not receiving transitional assistance benefits at the time of the incident and have not received any transitional assistance benefits this year," Massachusetts Health and Human Services communication director Alec Loftus told the newspaper in a statement. "The Tsarnaevs’ parents are former recipients of transitional assistance benefits, and both Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev received benefits through their parents when they were younger. Separately, Tamerlan and his family received benefits until 2012, when the family became ineligible based on their income.”

Meanwhile, the body of Tamerlan Tsarnaev has reportedly not been claimed by either his parents or his 24-year-old widow.

ABC News reported Tuesday that medical examiners had completed their autopsy and the body is ready to be claimed for burial, but so far no one has done so.

Lawyers for Russell Tsarnaev have said she "is doing everything she can to assist with the investigation," and is mourning the victims of the bombings.

The area near the Boston Marathon finish line also reopened to the general public early Wednesday. Traffic was allowed to flow all the way down Boylston Street for the first time since two explosions on April 15 killed three spectators and hospitalized 260 others.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Click for more from the Boston Herald.

Related Stories

Thousands expected at memorial service for MIT police officer

Senators raise concerns about government response to Boston bombing

View the original article here

Texas shootout may be tied to Colorado correction chief's murder, authorities say

• 

DECATUR, Texas –  A man who may be linked to the slaying of Colorado's state prison chief led authorities in Texas on a harrowing, 100 mph car chase Thursday that ended after he crashed into a semi and then opened fire before being shot down by his pursuers, authorities said.

A federal law enforcement official has confirmed the man to be is 28-year-old Evan Spencer Ebel, who is a paroled prison inmate, the Associated Press reports.

The official was not authorized to speak publicly about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Legal records show Ebel was convicted several crimes in Colorado dating back to 2003, including assaulting a prison guard in 2008.

He was spotted driving a car that matched the description of the vehicle seen leaving the home of prisons chief Tom Clements Tuesday night around the time he was shot.

Ebel is "basically legally deceased" while still hooked up to equipment for organ harvesting at a Fort Worth hospital, Wise County Sheriff David Walker said at an afternoon news conference in Decatur.

The possible link to the Tuesday night slaying of Colorado prison director Tom Clements is tentative but intriguing enough to put Colorado investigators on a plane to Texas. The black Cadillac Ebel drove, with Colorado license plates, matches the description of a car spotted outside Clements' home just before the Department of Corrections chief was fatally shot while answering his front door.

"We don't know yet exactly whether this is the guy," Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper told reporters earlier on Thursday. "There's some indication. I hope it is."

Also heading to Texas were detectives from Denver and Golden who are investigating whether Ebel is linked to the shooting death of a pizza delivery driver in Colorado on Sunday, Denver police spokeswoman Raquel Lopez said. She said the agencies were working with El Paso County, Colo., sheriff's officials, who are investigating Clements' death, and she couldn't comment on evidence from the car that crashed in Texas.

Montague County sheriff's deputy James Boyd tried to pull over the Cadillac at about 11 a.m. Thursday, though officials wouldn't elaborate on the reason.

The driver opened fire on Boyd, wounding him, Walker said. He then fled south before crashing into a semi as he tried to elude his pursuers.

Walker said Colorado investigators were heading to Texas to determine whether Ebel is connected to Clements' killing. Boyd was wearing a bulletproof vest and is at a Fort Worth hospital, authorities said. Officials had said he wasn't seriously injured but later said his condition was unknown.

Decatur Police Chief Rex Hoskins said Ebel appeared to be a white man in his 30s. Ebel shot at Hoskins four times as the chief tried to set up a road block to halt him. He left his car after it crashed and opened fire on the authorities around him, Hoskins said.

"He wasn't planning on being taken alive," Hoskins said. In a brief interview, he added that Ebel had no identification on him.

El Paso County sheriff's investigators have been looking for a dark, late-model car, possibly a Lincoln or a Cadillac, that a neighbor spotted near Clements' home around the time of the shooting. Lt. Jeff Kramer refused to say what other clues may have been found after officers canvassed Clements' neighborhood.

Clements, 58, was killed as he answered the door to his home Tuesday night in Monument, a town of rolling hills and alpine trees north of Colorado Springs. His death stunned law enforcement colleagues in Colorado and Missouri, where he spent most of his career as a highly respected corrections official.

Police haven't said if they think his death was linked to his job.

Denver's KMGH-TV reported Thursday that Clements may have put a bicycle up for sale for $1,200 on Craigslist. Kramer told the station, "I can't speak to the efforts behind this tip, or the level we are giving it."

In recent weeks, Clements had requested chemicals to plan for the execution of a convict on Colorado's death row and denied a Saudi national's request to serve out the remainder of a sentence in his home country. Officials refused to say whether they were looking at those actions as possible motives.

Clements came to Colorado in 2011 after working three decades in the Missouri prison system. Missouri Department of Corrections spokeswoman Mandi Steele said Thursday the department was ready to help in the probe if asked.

"Tom regularly commented that corrections is inherently a dangerous business, and that's all that I'll say," said Alison Morgan, a Colorado corrections spokeswoman who worked closely with Clements.

Officials in positions like Clements' get a deluge of threats, according to people who monitor their safety. But it can be hard sorting out which ones could lead to violence. A U.S. Department of Justice study found that federal prosecutors and judges received 5,250 threats between 2003 and 2008, but there were only three attacks during that time period.

The last public official killed in Colorado in the past 10 years was Sean May, a prosecutor in suburban Denver. An assailant killed May as he arrived home from work. Investigators examined May's court cases, but the case remains unsolved.

View the original article here

Small jet crashes into homes in Indiana neighborhood; authorities report injuries

Published March 17, 2013

Associated Press

SOUTH BEND, Ind. –  Authorities say a private jet apparently experiencing mechanical trouble has crashed in an Indiana neighborhood, resulting in injuries.

Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Roland Herwig says the Beechcraft Premier I twin-jet had left Tulsa, Okla.'s Riverside Airport and crashed near the South Bend Regional Airport on Sunday afternoon.

Herwig says there's "an indication of a mechanical problem." He says injuries resulted from the crash, but he doesn't know if they occurred on the aircraft or on the ground. He says he doesn't know how many people were aboard the jet.

The neighborhood has been evacuated because of a gas leak.

Neighborhood resident Stan Klaybor says the aircraft clipped the top of one house, heavily damaged a second, and came to rest against a third. He says one resident hasn't been seen.

View the original article here

Authorities arrest head of Mexico's powerful teachers' union on embezzlement charges

MEXICO CITY –  The head of Mexico's powerful teachers' union was arrested at an airport near Mexico City Tuesday for alleged embezzlement, with federal officials accusing her of using union funds to pay for plastic surgery, to buy a house in San Diego and even to pay her bill at Neiman Marcus.

Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said that Elba Esther Gordillo, who has led the 1.5 million-member National Union of Education Workers for 23 years, was detained in Toluca on charges that she embezzled 2 billion pesos (about $160 million) from union funds.

The office didn't say whether Gordillo, a colorful woman long seen as a kingmaker and power-behind-the-scenes in Mexico, was arriving or leaving Toluca airport, or whether she was handcuffed. Murrillo said two other people were also arrested by did not name them.

The arrest of the 68-year-old Gordillo marks the downfall of a woman who rose from being a school teacher to one of Mexico's most powerful political operators, displaying her opulence openly with designer clothes and bags, bodyguards, expensive cars and properties including a penthouse apartment in Mexico City's exclusive Polanco neighborhood. She has been widely lampooned for her many plastic surgeries and depicted in political cartoons as ghoulish.

Meanwhile, Mexico's teachers are poorly paid and public education has long been considered sub-par.

"We are looking at a case in which the funds of education workers have been illegally misused, for the benefit of several people, among them Elba Esther Gordillo," Murillo Karam said.

Gordillo did not respond publicly to the accusations against her and was reportedly en route to Mexico City to appear before a judge.

Her detention came a day after President Enrique Pena Nieto signed Mexico's most sweeping education reform in seven decades into law, seeking to change a system dominated by Gordillo in which teaching positions could be sold or inherited.

Prosecutors said they had detected nearly $3 million in purchases at Neiman Marcus using those funds, as well as $17,000 in U.S. plastic surgery bills and the purchase of a million-dollar home in San Diego.

Assistant Attorney General Alfredo Castillo displayed a series of charts at the press conference with arrows detailing the allegations of illicit transfers from teachers' union accounts to personal accounts in the names of three union workers, Nora Guadalupe Ugarte Ramirez, Isaias Gallardo Chavez and Jose Manuel Diaz Flores, as well as a real estate company.

None were authorized to deal with finances. It wasn't clear if they were among those arrested.

"Between 2008 and 2012, there was systematic embezzlement of union accounts," Murillo Karam said.

Some funds eventually ended up in bank accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Castillo said that in one case they transferred $1 million to a Swiss account for a company owned by Gordillo's mother. Those funds were then used to buy a million-dollar house in the island of Coronado in San Diego.

The overhaul of Mexico's education system was Pena Nieto's first major proposal since taking office Dec. 1 and was considered a political blow to Gordillo.

Gordillo had organized a string of protests by teachers against the reform, which moves much of the control of the education system to the federal government from the teachers' union. Gordillo was elected to another six-year term as union leader in October.

The reform creates a system of uniform standards for teacher hiring and promotion based on merit instead of union connections. It also allows for the first census of Mexico's education system, which Gordillo's union has largely controlled for decades, allegedly padding the payroll with thousands of phantom teachers.

So great is the union's control that no one knows exactly how many schools, teachers or students exist in Mexico.

For years, she has beaten back attacks from union dissidents, political foes and journalists who have seen her as a symbol of Mexico's corrupt, old-style politics. Rivals have accused her of corruption, misuse of union funds and even a murder, but prosecutors who investigated never brought a charge against her.

She was expelled from Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party in 2006 for supporting other parties' candidates and the formation of her own New Alliance party.

Gordillo's arrest recalled the 1989 arrest of another once-feared union boss, Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, known as "La Quina." The longtime head of Mexico's powerful oil workers union, Hernandez Galicia was arrested during the first months of the new administration of then-President Carlos Salinas.

Like Gordillo, Hernandez Galicia's power was believed to represent a challenge to the president, and his arrest was interpreted as an assertion of the president's authority. He was freed from prison after Salinas de Gortari left office.

In 1988, he criticized Salinas' presidential candidacy and threatened an oil workers' strike if Salinas privatized any part of the government oil monopoly, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex. On Jan. 10, 1989, — about a month after Salinas took office — soldiers used a bazooka to blow down the door of Hernandez' home in the Gulf Coast city of Ciudad Madero.

View the original article here