Remember When for the week of 8/1/17
120 years ago
It was announced that Susanville would be one of the stops on a proposed extension of the Great Northern Railroad. The new route would connect Butte, Montana through Boise, Idaho to San Francisco. It was reported many residents had long awaited the decision and coupled with the government’s proposed enlargement of the post office, businesses were anticipating an increase in revenue.
70 years ago
Sparks from a burner lit a four-alarm blaze that swept through the dry lumberyard of the Red River Lumber Company’s Old Cedar Mill. Only a fraction of the destroyed lumber was insured against damages, which hit the six-figure mark. Fire crews from Westwood and Susanville helped fight the fire, which took two days to extinguish.
45 years ago
The biggest tax increase in California’s history took effect under Governor Ronald Reagan’s bill to raise $900 million per year. The increase was targeted to balance the state’s budget by raising the sales tax to five cents per dollar and inflating the cigarette tax.
35 years ago
A Westwood-bound tanker truck overturned and spilled an estimated 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel into Deer Creek. The tractor’s trailer tipped over while rounding a curve five miles east of Chester. Department of Fish and Game officials said the spill had immediately caused harmful effects to the creek’s fish and more problems were expected to surface in the future.
30 years ago
The Susanville Little League Majors won its third straight District 48 title by defeating Burney 30-3.
25 years ago
Local rider Patty Reuck emerged from a field of more than 1,100 entries as one of the top winners in the Honey Lake Valley Riders Summer Quarter Horse Show. Reuck, of Susanville, won classes in showmanship; hunt seat equitation and western horsemanship in the Novice Amateur division. Her months of preparation with her young horse, I’m A Ramblin’ Dude, brought her great satisfaction from their first local show.
16 years ago
Dry conditions and a 20-mile per hour wind spurred an Antelope Lake lighting strike into a 3,560-acre blaze Thursday, July 26. As of July 30, costs on the Stream Incident are estimated at $3.7 million. Also in the news, the nearly $68 million Lassen County budget for 2001-2002 calls for deficit spending of almost $700,000, while it places most assistant department heads in higher salary ranges. Supervisor Everd McCain said the county should be reducing salaries instead of paying some mid-level managers more to equalize the salaries of those with similar responsibilities.
11 years ago
A dangerous heat wave with recordbreaking temperatures in California and other parts of the Western United States continued to tax the electricity system to the limits of capacity for more than two weeks with only a few days relief in sight. The demand for electricity reached a level the California Independent System Operator had not projected until the year 2011. On July 20, the CISO expected a peak demand of 45,431 megawatts and on July 24, the system operator expected the demand to reach 52,000 megawatts. The excess demand has caused a number of localized outages, fires and heat-related casualties.
Last year
Local social media discovered a new topic about 9:30 p.m. last Wednesday evening — bright, mysterious lights streaming across the darkened sky. In the next few hours, many theories surfaced fall over the Western United States — little green men in their UFOs, the early arrival of the Delta Aquarids Meteor Shower, a comet skirting the upper atmosphere, a commercial jet liner breaking up and even an International Space Station disaster. But by Thursday morning, national and international news sources had gotten to the bottom of the matter, and they attributed the event to debris from the second stage of a Chinese Chang Zheng 7 rocket as it burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.