TEAM EFFORT
Music fest ready to rock
El Dorado cross country outpaces five area high schools.
The Hangtown Music Festival brings worldclass acts to El Dorado County. News etc., B1
Sports, A8
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C a l i f o r n i a ’ s O l d e s t N e w s pa p e r – E s t. 18 51
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Volume 170 • Issue 121 | 75¢
mtdemocrat.com
Friday, October 15, 2021
New roads lead way to destroyed flumes Michael Raffety Mountain Democrat correspondent Replacement of four burned El Dorado Irrigation District flumes is likely to be complete by midDecember. The new flumes will allow EID’s canal to fill with water and refill Forebay and Jenkinson lakes, according to a report given to the EID Board of Directors Monday by Cary Mutschler, civil engineer assigned to Project 184, which includes 22 miles of canals, tunnels and flumes. So far contractor Syblon Reid has built 6 miles of road, providing access to flumes damaged by the Caldor Fire — Flume 30, Flume 4 and Flumes 5 and 6.
Geotechnical studies are complete as is 30% of the flumes’ designs. Mutschler, along with engineering consultant GHD Inc., are working to stay ahead of actual flume reconstruction. Site clean up, including ash removal, was expected to be completed earlier this week. An engineering staff meeting with EID’s general manager was due to follow the Oct. 12 board meeting in which it would be decided how to proceed with actual flume replacement. The scenario so far looks like rebuilding Flume 4 as a wooden flume and coming back “later” to change it to concrete. Flume 30 would be a U-channel
Photo courtesy of EID
See Flume work, page A9
Demolition work takes place on a segment of the El Dorado Irrigation District’s Flume 5, which was lost in the Caldor Fire.
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Olympian comes home
Photo courtesy of U.S. Forest Service
Excavators work to repair dozer lines constructed along powerlines.
Not enough snow to contain Caldor Mountain Democrat staff While much progress has been made on Caldor Fire clean up and suppression repairs, the blaze continues to consume acres of unburned forest within the burn area and is proving stubborn where the containment line is not secure. Caldor grew 22 acres Wednesday, taking total acreage burned to 221,798. Those additional acres come off the 2019 Caples Fire burn scar where a pocket of trees burned over the past few days. “We expect to see minor increases in acreage as isolated pockets of unburned vegetation dries out and burns,” stated Incident Commander Jeff Knudson with Great Basin Incident Management Team 7 in a Thursday morning update. Fire officials say they expect low to moderate fire behavior until a “season-ending event” and until then, suppression repair work remains the main objective. Weather could hamper repair efforts as precipitation and winds increase the likelihood of n
PLACE ADDRESS LABEL HERE
Oak Ridge High School alum and 2021 Olympic swimmer Bryce Mefford, above, greets his hometown fans at the ORHS Homecoming game last Friday night. Mefford, who swims for Cal Berkeley, placed fourth in the Olympics’ 200-meter backstroke. Bryce Mefford, right, signs autographs and meets students, parents and faculty.
Photos by Natalie Samrick
See Fire, page A9
Zodiac may have hung woman’s remains in tree Bill Rozak Tahoe Daily Tribune A pine tree stands tall next to a grove of aspen. It’s a few feet outside a popular Tahoe campground and steps away from the lake. It may be where local woman Donna Lass’ remains were hung high up after she was murdered by the Zodiac more than 51 years ago. Lass, a nurse from Stateline, went missing in September 1970. The Tahoe Daily Tribune obtained a bootleg copy of a yet to be published memoir called “Catching Zodiac” by Peabody Award-winning TV journalist Dale Julin more than a year ago that
possibly unmasks the killer, deciphers previously unsolved encrypted puzzles and through those, found possible macabre treasure maps to Lass’ remains in Zephyr Cove. In his memoir, Julin names the deceased Gary Francis Poste, who lived in a small community in Northern California, as the Zodiac. A cold case crime scene investigation team, The Case Breakers, has been performing their own investigation from information in the book and have named Poste as a suspect. The Case Breakers said in an Oct. 6 press release that they believe hairs found in the Cheri Jo Bates murder more than 55
years ago in Riverside could belong to the recently deceased Poste, who they think shot, stabbed or choked to death as many as 10 people between 1962 and 1970, including Lass who went missing on or around Sept. 6, 1970.
‘The she in the tree’ The Zodiac sent anagrams and taunting letters to law enforcement and newspapers which has spawned many amateurs and professionals throughout the years to try and solve the anagrams, and the mystery. Julin, a TV news anchor from WJCL TV-22 in Savannah, Ga., spent hours, days n
See zodiac, page A6
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