Environmental

In keeping with its commitment to protect customers and the environment from the threat of natural disasters, NV Energy is working to improve situational awareness of fire and other weather-related threats by installing wildfire cameras and weather stations in natural disaster risk zones across its service territory.

CARSON CITY — Local non-profit greenUP! is proud to announce its participation in Plastic Free July, an international awareness month focused on the environmental and health impacts of plastic pollution. greenUP! will be sharing Plastic-Free challenges each Wednesday of the month, and they invite the community to join them.

Featured speaker at Monday's virtual Democratic luncheon will be Patrick Donnelly, Nevada State Director of the Center for Biological Diversity. He will explain the Center's opposition to the proposed expansion of the Long Canyon Mine near Wells.

The Nevada Department of Agriculture announced 13 organizations will be awarded Community Food Response relief funding through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act.

It’s all hands on deck this 4th of July weekend as game wardens from the Nevada Department of Wildlife, along with law enforcement agencies from across the state, will be targeting boaters operating under the influence (OUI) as part of Operation Dry Water.

In response to the Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant Program (CDBG) has allocated the Nevada Non-Entitlement CDBG Program through the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development the amount of $283,213 to Carson City.

As demand soars for watercraft inspections at Lake Tahoe, agencies preventing the introduction of aquatic invasive species into the lake’s pristine waters caution boaters to expect delays and to be prepared to change boating plans through the July Fourth weekend.

Moved by the tragedy of the 2018 Camp Fire, a team of engineers and scientists are coming together in a new 5-year project to develop a comprehensive, holistic, computational live, digital platform to predict and monitor wildfire risk that can be used by wildfire managers, emergency responders and utility companies to plan for, respond to and remediate wildfires.

CARSON CITY — Governor Steve Sisolak announced Monday the Clean Cars Nevada initiative, which will evaluate the adoption of new regulations to provide Nevadans with more choices for low and zero emission electric passenger cars and trucks at dealerships throughout the state beginning in 2024.

On Friday, June 26, Lake Tahoe is entering the next phase of watercraft inspections for the prevention of aquatic invasive species and opening for all boats by appointment, agencies announced.

In a program similar to PG&E and other electric utilities in California, NV Energy announced last week that it will implement its own plan that would shut off power to reduce wildfire risk in the Lake Tahoe area in the event of weather-related events such as strong, gusty winds.

UPDATE 11:14AM: The National Weather Service has issued a Red Flag Warning from noon to 8 p.m. Friday for the following areas: Southern Mono County, Southern Sierra Front including Alpine, Northern Mono, Southern Lyon, and Western Mineral Counties, West Humboldt Basin in Pershing County and Lahontan Basin including Churchill and Eastern Mineral counties. The Weather Service has issued a Wind Advisory for Mono County, Mineral and Southern Lyon counties, Hawthorne, Yerington, Smith Valley, Mina, Schurz, Fernley, Fallon, Lovelock, Silver Springs, Nixon, and Imlay. Carson City, and Carson Valley are not in the Wind Advisory area.
***
Strong winds expected Friday has prompted the National Weather Service to issue high wind and fire weather watches for portions of Northern Nevada.

The UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center released findings Wednesday from its annual Lake Tahoe Clarity Report, which showed In 2019 the lake's famed clarity decreased nearly 8 feet from the previous year’s dramatic 10-foot improvement. The average annual value in 2019 was 62.7 feet. The lowest value was recorded in 2017, when clarity was 60 feet.

Kyle Roerink, Executive Director of the Great Basin Water Network, will be the featured speaker at Monday's virtual Democratic luncheon.

Kyle served as a subject matter expert for Rep. Dina Titus, then as principal advocate for the YES on Question 6 campaign to mandate that 50% of Nevada's electricity be from renewable sources by 2030.

The Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources is excited to announce that Coeur Rochester, Inc. a wholly-owned subsidiary of Coeur Mining, Inc. and Crawford Cattle, LLC have entered into a first-of-its-kind agreement to protect critical sagebrush habitat in Nevada while ensuring continued environmentally sensitive and sustainable mining practices.

Late Spring is in full swing in the Tahoe Basin and Tahoe black bears are searching for food. Intentional or unintentional feeding of bears results in unwanted bear behaviors, increased human-bear conflicts, and public safety issues as well as fines and possible jail time for violators.

Each decade, Nevada grows by about two basketball courts. It’s hard to quantify, state geologist Jim Faulds says, but the comparison is about right.

Beginning Wednesday, the Carson City Green Dining District will feature a special program to help customers support local businesses while reducing their environmental footprint.

MASON VALLEY — The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection says work to revitalize and restore the former Anaconda Copper Mine site continues to progress on schedule. The first phase of the project began in August 2019, and all necessary construction work at the site is on track to be complete by 2029.

Grocery shopping and produce safety have been concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Desert Farming Initiative, part of the University of Nevada, Reno Experiment Station, provides information to help producers and consumers minimize food-safety risks.

RENO — With wildland fires eating up the forests and rangelands of Nevada each summer, and fire season now upon us, University of Nevada, Reno scientists are examining how drought, climate change and land management will affect future fire activity and how fires can in turn influence plant, soil and hydrologic processes.

Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team member, Tahoe Douglas Fire Protection District, is planning to conduct understory burns in Glenbrook on Tuesday, May 12 and in Zephyr Cove on May 20, 2020, weather permitting.

The Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) has announced a phased approach to boating that discourages out-of-area visitation as part of state and local coordination on recreation guidelines for Lake Tahoe this season.

RENO — The forest of the Sierra Nevada mountains is an important resource for the surrounding communities in Nevada and California. Thinning the forest by removing trees by hand or using heavy machinery is one of the few tools available to manage forests.

Editor’s Note: This week's guest writer is Bridget Gordon-Johnson. She is a counselor at Carson High School. This is her report.

Staying connected to students, virtually, is the biggest challenge every educator is facing right now. Teachers, paraprofessionals, school counselors, administrators, school secretaries, custodians, and everyone for that matter is missing the energy and life students bring to our worlds.

The Assembly Republican Caucus addressed its plan Monday to reopen Nevada, proposing a framework, establishing a regional plan and a bi-partisan task force to advise on a strategy. It calls for Nevada to join the California, Oregon and Washington Western States Pact; establish a regional plan to modify Nevada’s stay at home orders and the caucus wants to immediately establish a curbside model that will allow non-essential retail businesses to open.

In late March, the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe sent a letter to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation requesting that the agency delay a public comment period for a controversial and complicated project to do maintenance on the Truckee Canal, a manmade diversion off the Truckee River.

With the deployment of Point of Care Machines and an expansion of recent efforts to manufacture collection kits to use in testing for COVID-19, The Nevada Independent once again talked with the director of the Nevada State Public Health Lab, Dr. Mark Pandori, to learn where the state is with its various testing efforts.

RENO, Nev. — The COVID-19 pandemic has caused much uncertainty and change at all levels of education. Medical education is no exception. While the COVID-19 outbreak has complicated the learning process, University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine (UNR Med) students are taking what they’ve learned in the lecture halls and during clinical rotations to mobilize in response to the COVID-19 crisis, bolstering the health care workforce in northern Nevada.

Grocery stores are perhaps the most essential of businesses. As the COVID-19 outbreak has grown in northern Nevada, checkout stations in grocery stores have had to adapt to the biological reality of safely doing business during the novel coronavirus pandemic.