Amid progress, Calif. wildfire still grave threat to property
LOS ANGELES — Authorities lifted evacuation orders for a farm community Saturday as firefighters make progress on a large wildfire northwest of Los Angeles that continues to threaten about 2,500 homes and buildings.
Ventura County officials allowed an unknown number of residents in Somis to return home Saturday morning after firefighters contained 20% of the Maria Fire, which has burned nearly 15 square miles and forced nearly 11,000 people to evacuate.
While fire activity subsided overnight, winds and skin-cracking low humidity were expected to enter their fourth day Saturday and make another difficult day for firefighters.
Moreover, an unexpected area of clouds moved in from the south, threatening to bring lightning strikes and wind gusts of 20 to 30 mph over the region, the National Weather Service said.
Police in Santa Monica urged beachgoers to seek shelter indoors after lightning was reported over the city.
Crews battled to keep the flames away from orchards and farms in the rural area. Three buildings were destroyed.
The fire erupted on a hilltop northwest of Los Angeles on Thursday during what had been expected to be the tail end of gusty Santa Ana winds.
The cause was under investigation but there was a troubling possibility that an electrical line might have been involved — as such lines have been at other recent fires.
Southern California Edison said Friday that it reenergized a 16,000-volt power line 13 minutes before the fire erupted in the same area.
Edison and other utilities up and down the state shut off power to hundreds of thousands of people last week out of concerns that high winds could cause power lines to spark and start fires.
SCE will cooperate with investigators, the utility said.
In Northern California, more people were allowed to return to areas evacuated due to the huge Kincade Fire burning for days in the Sonoma County wine country.
The 121-square-mile fire was 72% contained, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said.
The tally of destroyed homes reached 175 and there were 35 more damaged, Cal Fire said. Many other structures also burned.
Historic, dry winds prompted the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., to initiate four rounds of widespread preemptive shut-offs in Northern California this month to prevent wildfires.
But the Contra Costa County Fire Protection District pegged the utility’s equipment as the cause of three smaller fires that cropped up Oct. 27 in the San Francisco Bay Area suburbs of Martinez and Lafayette.
And while the cause of the Kincade Fire hasn’t been determined, PG&E reported a problem with a transmission tower near the spot where the fire started.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — The inmate’s request was a surprising one, made three days before he was to be executed in October 2018: Edmund Zagorski told the state of Tennessee he’d rather die in the electric chair than receive a lethal injection.
Some took the request as a ploy to buy time. Defense attorney Kelley Henry insisted Zagorski was motivated by a sincere belief the lethal drugs used in Tennessee — anchored by the sedative midazolam — would mean a prolonged and agonizing death.
The state granted his request, and days later on Nov. 1, 2018, Zagorski was strapped into the stout wooden chair nicknamed “Old Sparky” and put to death for shooting and slitting the throats of two men during a 1983 drug deal. Since then, the state has executed two other inmates by electrocution, bringing the total to three in the past year.
Tennessee is one of six states where inmates can choose the chair, but it’s the only state where they’re actually doing so. Courts in Georgia and Nebraska have declared the electric chair unconstitutional and the U.S. Supreme Court has never fully considered its constitutionality.
Zagorski and the others filed court challenges hoping to block their executions, arguing that both the electric chair and Tennessee’s lethal injection procedure violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The courts refused to hear their arguments about electrocution because the inmates had voluntarily chosen that method, even though they said the decision was made under duress.
“Tennessee is the clearest example of several diPenalty Three condemned inmates in Tennessee have chosen the electric chair, claiming lethal injection is worse.
lemmas created by the U.S. Supreme Court on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and on state secrecy,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
In 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that an inmate challenging a specific method of execution as cruel and unusual must show a more humane method is readily available.
Inmates argued last year before the state Supreme Court that Tennessee should copy Texas in adopting a single dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital. That case was dismissed, however, after Correction Department officials testified that pentobarbital was unavailable. The inmates couldn’t effectively challenge that testimony because the process of procuring execution drugs is secret under state law.
No state uses the electric chair as its main execution method. Virginia is the only other state to use the chair this decade and hasn’t done so since 2013. Before Zagorski’s execution, Tennessee had electrocuted only one other inmate since 1960.
According to the Death Information Center, over the past five years, five states have abolished capital punishment or placed a moratorium on executions. Of the 25 states where executions could still be carried out in theory, another seven have not done so this decade. The Death Penalty Information Center doesn’t take a stand on the death penalty though it is critical of its application.
The Tennessee inmates’ decision to request the chair might seem counterintuitive, given those who say lethal injection provides a humane and relatively painless death. But as pharmaceutical companies have worked to keep their drugs out of execution chambers, states have had to revise their protocols to match the drugs they can get their hands on.
In Tennessee, those are midazolam, a sedative used to render the inmate unconscious; vecuronium bromide, to paralyze the inmate; and potassium chloride, to stop the heart.
Expert witnesses for the inmates testified last July that midazolam wouldn’t prevent inmates from feeling pain and that Tennessee’s three-drug combination would cause them sensations of drowning, suffocation and chemical burning while rendering them unable to move or call out.
Because the inmates couldn’t prove pentobarbital was available, the court didn’t consider their evidence.
After inmate Billy Ray Irick received a lethal injection in August 2018 for the slaying of a 7-year-old Knoxville girl decades ago, the inmates tried to challenge the method again. They pointed out that Irick’s death took about 20 minutes, during which he coughed and huffed before turning dark purple. But the courts refused to take up the case.