SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Jesalyn Harper, the only full-time code enforcement officer for the small, agricultural city of Reedley in California’s Central Valley, was responding to a complaint about vehicles parked in the loading dock of a cold-storage warehouse when she noticed a foul smell and saw a garden hose snaking into the old building.

A woman in a lab coat answered her knock, and behind her were two others in plastic gloves and blue surgical masks, packing pregnancy tests for shipping. Harper said they spoke broken English and told her they were from China. Walking through the lab, she found dozens of refrigerators and ultralow-temperature freezers hooked to illegal wiring; vials of blood and jars of urine in shelves and plastic containers; and about 1,000 white lab mice being kept in crowded, soiled containers.

The women said the owner lived in China, provided a phone number and email address and asked her to leave. Alarmed by what she saw, Harper, whose work mostly entails ensuring people have permits for yard sales and are keeping their lawns mowed, contacted Fresno County health officials and then the FBI.

The discovery last December launched investigations by federal, state and local authorities who found no criminal activity at the medical lab owned by Prestige Biotech Inc., a company registered in Las Vegas, and no evidence of a threat to public health or national security. Nonetheless, it was just the beginning of a case that this summer fueled fears, rumors and conspiracy theories online about China purportedly trying to engineer biological weapons in rural America.

During a March inspection of the lab in Reedley, a city of about 25,000 people some 200 miles (320 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco, officials did find infectious agents in the refrigerators including E. coli, coronavirus, malaria, hepatitis B and C, dengue, chlamydia, human herpes, rubella and HIV.

But the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there was no sign that the lab was illegally in possession of the materials or had select agents or toxins that could be used as bioweapons.

“CDC has taken no further action in this matter,” the agency said in an email to The Associated Press, referring further questions to county and state officials.

After company representatives stopped communicating with city and county officials, they got a court order to shut down the operation, euthanized the mice and cleaned the biological materials. Officials thought that would be the end of it.

Then on July 25, the Mid Valley Times, a local online news outlet, published a story about the lab that quoted court documents saying a representative of Prestige Biotech, which makes pregnancy and coronavirus tests sold online, told officials in March that the mice had been genetically modified to catch and carry the virus that causes COVID-19.

That was likely a miscommunication by Prestige Biotech representative Wang Zhaolin, whose English is not perfect, Harper said.

“She stated that the mice were bred, and then she hesitated and said they were modified to carry COVID,” Harper said Zhaolin told her and other officials. After the lab was shut down, she added, Wang stopped cooperating with them.

Wang’s comment prompted Reedley authorities to hire Nina Hahn, an attending veterinarian at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to examine the mice. Hahn found they had not been injected with any infectious agent and were simply used to grow COVID-19 antibody cells to make testing kits. She also determined they were not subjected to experimentation, Harper said.

But that hasn’t stopped the furor, however.

After the Mid Valley Times article, national media outlets published stories saying the lab had bioengineered mice to carry COVID-19. A Fresno city official questioned the lab’s proximity to Lemoore Naval Air Station, about 35 miles (55 kilometers) away in neighboring Kings County. In a war with China, the official said, fighter jets would deploy from the base.

Last week House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican who represents a Congressional district neighboring Reedley’s, said during a visit to a nearby town that he plans to raise concerns over the “very disturbing” case with colleagues on the Select Committee on China and follow up with the FBI.

“My concern is to get to the bottom of what happened here but to also look at where this is happening in other parts of this country as well,” McCarthy said.

Lok Siu, a professor of Asian American and Asian diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley, said the fears being fanned online reflect anti-Chinese sentiments that have existed in the United States for centuries and were heightened during the pandemic.

“Ultimately all Chinese people are connected to the Chinese state. They’re not given the ability to act as responsible or irresponsible individuals and they are seen as agents, and the only reason for that is because ethnic Chinese people are seen as not loyal and always foreign,” Siu said.

In Reedley, where the laboratory failed to officially register, officials took a dim view of the operation.

“They were bad actors. They never came to the city and they moved in in the middle of the night. Those are pretty big elements that tell us they did not want us to know they were here,” said Nicole Zieba, Reedley’s city manager.

The California Department of Public Health said in a statement that all clinical laboratories must get state and federal licenses to operate, and it is still investigating whether Prestige Biotech has a state license. Federal officials said they found no illegalities.

Several Prestige Biotech representatives including attorney Michael Lin in Las Vegas did not respond to emailed requests for comment sent by AP.

There were also questions from some about why the federal investigation was not made public until the Mid Valley Times reported on it.

Zieba said that early on, state and federal officials advised the city to not share information with the public about the lab, which had been operating illegally in the city since October 22, because the investigation was still ongoing.

And after California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control checked the air and water and found no threat, she decided to heed that advice.

“It was fairly quickly apparent to us that there was nothing airborne, nothing in the water, nothing in the sewer system, so our public was safe,” Zieba said. “Had there been any hazard to their safety, we would have immediately notified the public.”

Reedley officials said what has been most concerning about the discovery was finding out there is no single government entity overseeing private medical laboratories.

“What’s frustrating is that we’re focusing on these myths, bioengineered weapons and stuff like that, rather than the real issue, the lack of regulation of these private labs,” Harper said.

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“Your new employer, Lao Ting, welcomes you to America!” says the charismatic Wang Chao to a group of Chinese immigrants arriving in 1878 San Francisco. But if first impressions were anything to judge by, the Land of Opportunity doesn’t seem very welcoming at all.

Ah Sahm has little interest staying in America longer than he needs to. He’s only arrived in order to find his sister, Xiaojing, and bring her back home to China. He brings good news—her abusive husband is finally dead.

But just moments after stepping off the boat, Ah Sahm gets into a fight with three angry Irishmen picking on another Chinese immigrant—and Ah Sahm easily beats them, gaining the attention of Wang Chao, a powerful black-market businessman. Chao takes him to be sold to the Hop Wei tong, a Chinese gang that’s hoping to reclaim control of the opium trade from a rival tong, the Long Zii.

According to a report by Pluggedin.com, it’s not long before Ah Sahm confronts the Long Zii while on his search for his sister. And he finds her there—her name voluntarily changed to Mai Ling. But Mai Ling’s not being held captive—she’s a willing member of the Long Zii, and she’s got a secret plan to take the whole tong over.

Realizing his sister has no plans of leaving, Ah Sahm asks Chao to get him a boat back to China, but Chao just shakes his head. Because like it or not, Ah Sahm is part of the Hop Wei tong now, and he’s never allowed to leave.

But let’s expand our scope a bit because San Francisco isn’t struggling with crime just because the Chinese tongs have turf wars with each other. No, the whole city is filled with crime and debauchery. After all, the turf wars are being partially orchestrated by Deputy Mayor Walter Buckley, and gangs of Irishmen are starting to turn their distaste of the Chinese violent.

It’s bad news for Mayor Samuel Blake, since re-election is coming up, and no one wants to vote for the guy whose term saw crime get worse. He’s trying to appease influential Irishmen to get their votes, but they’ll never really be happy so long as they have to work alongside the growing influx of Chinese (and the feeling’s mutual among the Chinese).

The best Samuel can do is commission the police to start patrolling Chinatown, where crime is most rampant. To that end, he’s initiated a Chinatown squad, led by Sergeant Bill O’Hara, a man with a gambling problem who was just asking to be taken out of the district.

But even with a police presence in Chinatown, there’s not much change to be had. Compared to the Chinese tongs and Irish gangs, they have little power, something that new recruit Richard Lee has trouble accepting. And despite the fact that Richard ranks among the most racially tolerant in San Francisco, his own colleagues have trouble accepting him because his family fought on the Confederate side of the Civil War.

Come Season Three of Warrior, and San Francisco is no saintlier than it was two seasons prior. In fact, it’s gotten a lot worse.

Ah Sahm and Mai Ling have climbed the respective ranks of their tongs, with Mai Ling the de facto leader of the Long Zii. And since they’ve joined the brawl, lots of people have met their demise in a variety of gruesome and gory ways.

And that’s where we must extend an extreme word of caution for prospective viewers of Warrior. When Warrior deals with an issue, it jumps in the deep end. That means that the violence is bloody, the sex is explicit, and the language is frequent.

Allow me to explain what that means: when gangs go to war, we’ll see heads decapitated and entrails spilled. Most disturbingly, we’ll see a group of female sex slaves being raped in the seventh episode of Season Two. When people get naked, we’ll see full-frontal nudity (with the exception of male genitalia), and we’ll sit through many sex scenes, both hetero- and homosexual. And as for the language, if you can think it, someone’s probably said it.

Despite an admittedly engaging plot and interesting characters, Warrior ultimately remains a battlefield for viewers who understand how such content can harm our hearts.

Worried about Mai Ling’s push for power and the Hop Wei tong’s tense decline, Ah Sahm goes to Wang Chao for advice—and what Chao gives him is much more useful than mere words.

A woman’s breasts are visible. Two women kiss. We see them laying naked in bed, their critical parts covered by the sheets after presumed sex. A man and woman kiss. Someone crassly alludes to sex.

In an extended fight scene, Ah Sahm fights dozens of members of another tong; in this fight, someone takes a hatchet to the neck and dies, various arms and legs are snapped, a man has his hand cut off, and another has his fingers gruesomely cut off. Another man is impaled with a knife, and someone is splattered with pig entrails. In other scenes, a man’s head is slammed against the wall, and another is smashed against a window. Someone takes a throwing knife to the chest and is stabbed many times before being tossed into the ocean. Another man is pushed so that his head is impaled by a large spike in the wall. A gun misfires, burning the face of the user, who is then hit with a throwing knife.

Someone says that cause and effect is “very Buddhist.” People drink alcohol. A man smokes.

The f-word is used more than 30 times, including two instances that are preceded by “mother.” The s-word is used twice, and the c-word is used once. We also hear “a–,” “d–n,” “h—,” “b–tard,” and “p-ss.” God’s name is abused twice.

Ah Sahm arrives in San Francisco hoping to locate his sister. But when he finds her, his life changes forever.

In this episode alone, viewers will see nearly a dozen naked women—and the full-frontal nudity of about half of those women. We see the rears of a couple of men. A prominent character runs a brothel, and we’ll often see women dressed in revealing clothing (if they’re not already naked). Sex is also prevalent on the screen, including a threesome, in which we’ll hear and see everything (except for the man’s genitals). A man brings in a man and a woman so he can have (offscreen) sex with both of them. There’s an extended scene of a man and woman kissing as they move toward having sex. Someone makes a joke about orgasms, and someone else talks about a man’s genitals. A man engages in crude conversation about going to a brothel.

A man’s head is gruesomely smashed in with a hammer, while another man’s body is beaten with a metal pipe. Two men are urinating on the street when they’re attacked, and the decapitated head of one man falls into the urine stream of the other. The other man is violently stabbed multiple times, and blood spills from the wound in his neck. A blood-covered man falls to the ground, dead. A woman admits how her husband beat and raped her many times. We see several fistfights; in one of them, a man’s arm is audibly and visibly snapped. As initiation into a tong, Ah Sahm is branded. A chicken’s head is cut off. Someone talks about stringing someone up by his genitals.

We hear some racist comments; an

Credit: pluggedin.com

ENND

Happy New Month

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From Mary K Jacob

June 13, 2023 | 5:50 p.m

The Millennium Tower, cheekily dubbed the Leaning Tower of San Francisco, finds itself in trouble when even a single earthquake shakes the city, The Post has learned.

Located at 301 Mission St., the 545-foot-tall building has steadily tilted and sunk further west since 2015, though the architects have tried their best to stabilize the swanky building.

The multimillion-dollar-per-unit tower slopes more than 29 inches at the corner of Fremont Street and Mission Street — a slope more than half an inch lower than previously announced.

Consulting engineer Robert Pyke, who specializes in geotechnical and seismic engineering, blamed designer Treadwell & Rollo – a company later acquired by Langan – for the foundation problems, citing a time crunch they found themselves in during the 2008 market crash were.

“There is a real possibility that the building will be red marked after an earthquake,” Pyke told The Post of the tower — a 58-story, 419-unit apartment building that was completed in 2009.

When a building is marked red, it means that the structure has been marked as so badly damaged that it is too dangerous to inhabit and entry to the property is prohibited without written permission from the regulatory authority.

Pyke cites the Hayward Fault Zone — a geologic zone located primarily at the western foot of the hills on the east side of San Francisco Bay — as capable of triggering destructive earthquakes.

A view of the Millennium Tower on August 11, 2016 in San Francisco.Getty Images

“A quake on the Hayward Fault in the East Bay could happen any day,” Pyke said. “And even this Hayward earthquake could be strong enough to significantly shake buildings in San Francisco, like the Millennium Tower. So I think there’s a longer-term risk that homeowners will actually have to move out, at least temporarily.”

In addition, Pyke stated that the tower would never get back to the same height.

And while collapse is unlikely, since it would require a “tens of feet” of incline, Pyke said if the tower got any closer to 40 inches, the elevators and plumbing would stop working, and neither would the occupants forced to move out.

The current solution hasn’t worked and probably won’t work because its original 2005 build switched from steel to concrete — making the change harder and harder, Pyke said.

“It turned out to be wrong because the effective increase in building weight was quite significant. It was a third or more higher than before. And so, technically, there was an overuse of the Old Bay Clay layer that was underneath the sand layer.”

The tilt was reportedly achieved by half an inch when engineers dug under the sinking condominium earlier this year to support the weight of the tower – which was built on a former landfill site – on either side.Bloomberg

Pyke said to prevent another tipping he would abandon the current attempt at repair, which he says “introduces too many uncertainties”.

Instead, he drilled bores (a cutting process that uses an indenting tool or drill head to enlarge an existing hole in a workpiece) on the south and east sides of the tower to remove some of the soil in the Old Bay Clay layer to level the building.

“Carefully!” said Pike.

“It’s similar to what was done on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Probably then the progression of colonization would stop or slow down enough that it doesn’t matter, but if it does continue I might consider freezing the Old Bay Clay!”

Meanwhile, project engineer in charge of the building, Ron Hamburger, told NBC in a statement that roof data is vulnerable to weather variations and said foundation-only data is more reliable.

“We are absolutely confident that once the remaining design load has been transferred to the piles, there will be no further westward movement of the roof,” Hamburger said.

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LOS ANGELES — Rain and snow battered huge swathes of California on Friday, forcing statewide highway closures and a major dam to open its spillway for the first time in nearly four years.

About 9,000 people were under evacuation orders in the state, said Nancy Ward, director of the California Office of Emergency Services.

In Tulare County, evacuation orders have been issued for parts of the small community of Springville and the city of Exeter due to flooding and swollen waterways, the sheriff’s office said. Evacuation warnings were issued along the Tule River in Porterville of 62,000 people.

President Joe Biden on Friday approved an emergency motion from Gov. Gavin Newsom, triggering federal assistance to state “tribal and local response efforts” caused by ongoing “severe winter storms, flooding, landslides and mudslides,” the White House said.

“We’ve been here about 20 years and really haven’t seen anything of this magnitude,” said Eric Diekmann of Soquel in Santa Cruz County, whose home is across a washed-out road.

Even after Friday night’s flood concerns taper off, more bad weather is in store for the weekend and the coming days, National Weather Service forecaster David Lawrence said.

John Bays clears snow from his driveway on March 8, 2023 after a series of storms in Lake Arrowhead, California.Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP

“We will see more rounds of rain and heavy mountain snow throughout much of northern and central California throughout the weekend,” Lawrence told reporters at OES headquarters in the Sacramento suburb of Mather. “And we’ll also likely see that weather pattern continue as we head into at least the first half of next week.”

Weeks of incessant snowfall have kept the state transportation agency busy clearing roads of 45 million cubic yards of snow over the past month, enough to “fill more than 100 rose bowls,” said California Department of Transportation assistant director Mike Keever.

Recent storms prompted the state to release water from the main spillway at Lake Oroville on Friday noon, with snowmelt likely to continue to raise lake levels in the coming months.

This is only the second time water has been released from the rebuilt spillway, following the 2017 disaster that turned life upside down around Gold Country and forced the evacuation of more than 180,000 people.

People walk along a path at the Golden Gate Overlook in San Francisco on Thursday.Jeff Chiu/AP

Some of California’s most famous and busiest roads were temporarily closed Friday due to flooding.

• A portion of Monterey County’s Scenic Highway 1 has been closed due to falling rocks, water and debris.
• U.S. Highway 101 southbound near Gilroy State’s Garlic Center could not be used.
• Interstate 580, a major highway through San Francisco’s East Bay, finally reopened around noon.
• Main Street in Soquel, a Santa Cruz County community of about 9,900, was washed away. Evacuation orders were issued in Kernville, northeast of Bakersfield, due to flooding in the Kern River.

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State authorities have warned California residents that lots of running water can be dangerous.

As little as 6 inches of flowing water can easily knock a person off their feet, while one foot of water has the power to sweep a car away, the San Luis Obispo Office of Emergency Services warned Central Coast residents Friday.

“Remember, don’t walk, swim or drive through flood waters and avoid unnecessary travel today,” the agency said.

Transportation Department officials urged residents of the state to check their weather before going outside.

The department warned drivers to “be prepared for delays and pack extra food, water, blankets and other essentials, and pack cell phone chargers.”

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The heaviest rain had pulled out of northern California by Friday afternoon, but not before dumping about 3 to 4 inches of rain in parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, according to the National Weather Service.

Flood watches were in place for San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties through 4 a.m. Saturday, but the National Weather Service in Oxnard said Friday night the heavy rain had stopped and the water was beginning to recede.

More than 10 inches of rain fell in Rocky Butte in San Luis Obispo County through 10 p.m., the weather service said, although other areas were lower. More than 5 inches of rain fell in the village of Cambria, where evacuation orders had been issued for some residents but were later lifted.

In Paso Robles, Chimney Rock Road was washed away. A spokesman for the San Luis Obispo County said they had had road problems and temporary fixes since January, but these failed as of Friday morning.

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Fresno County first responders rescued, including three women, two in their 80s and one in 104, who were trapped in their home after a culvert was washed out, Sheriff John Zanoni said Friday.

Difficult weather conditions will also bring heavy snow to parts of the northern plains on Friday and parts of the upper Mississippi Valley on Saturday.

Rain is also expected to develop over parts of the middle Mississippi Valley and snowfall is expected to make its way to the Great Lakes by Sunday.

A storm system threw snow and rain across the Great Lakes of the Northeast and Southeast on Friday, with totals of 12 inches in Mequon, Wisconsin, 10 inches in Milwaukee, 9 inches in Woodstock, Illinois and 4 inches around Detroit.

Rain and snow showers will continue to move from the eastern Great Lakes through the mid-Atlantic region.

Western New York and Northeast Pennsylvania could get between 4 inches and 8 inches of snow.

Alicia Victoria Lozano is a California-based reporter for NBC News, focusing on climate change, wildfires, and the changing politics of drug laws.

Chantal Da Silva is the Breaking News Editor at NBC News Digital, based in London.

David K. Li is a senior breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.

Phil Helsel is a reporter for NBC News.

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In addition, The Senior Citizens League has “seen no reports to indicate whether savings [with the ACO program] will be financially advantageous for beneficiaries as well. Will ACOs slow the rate of increase in base Medicare Part B premiums (currently at $170.10) or pricey supplemental Medigap insurance premiums that currently average $235 a month for beneficiaries?” writes Mary Johnson, the advocacy group’s Social Security and Medicare policy analyst, in its May newsletter.

However, some proponents of the new program stated that “criticism against the [ACO] model are misleading and flat out false,” in a February letter from the National Association of ACOs, which was signed by 200 various health care organizations.

“Traditional Medicare patients maintain their freedom of choice to see any willing provider. They keep all of their rights and protections, and in fact, get more benefits and lower cost care through the model,” they stated. “This is not the end of traditional Medicare … but a way to provide additional beneficial and provider tools as part of the whole-person approach.”

Private Equity and SPACs

But the fear of having ACOs become a key part of traditional Medicare is that the owners are not necessarily health care organizations, such as large physician practice groups. Indeed, there has been a “surge” in investment in ACO groups by private equity firms and insurance companies.

This has become a ripe investment area as the US population ages. And as Miller noted, “most of the investment activity is coming from special-purpose acquisition companies or SPACs, private equity firms and health insurance companies already dominant in the Advantage business.”

And though an AARP spokesperson said in an email to ThinkAdvisor that it had not “commented specifically on the ACO Reach program,” in its letter regarding MA programs, it said that it shares the concern by CMS on third-party marketing of MA programs and a “rise in marketing-related complaints from beneficiaries.”

They note that in 2021 there were 33 different plan options, and determining which is best is a “daunting process for even the most knowledgeable consumers. This challenge has been exacerbated by the MA program’s history of marketing abuses involving enrollment.”

Further, they “strongly” support the proposal to “restore network adequacy review standards when an MA plan applies for a new or expanded service area,” stating that per the previous administration’s rules, a network had to only “attest that it has an adequate network.”

Even the HHS inspector general had some concerns with MA programs, stating in an April report that it found a 13% to 18% rate of denied prior authorization and payment requests that met Medicare coverage rules.

Fixing Medicare

Many practitioners have advocated keeping Medicare as is, with some tweaks to strengthen it. dr Ed Weisbart, chair of the Missouri chapter of PNHP and assistant professor of clinical medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, told Healthcare Innovation in March 2022:

“There’s a school of thought that drives Medicare Advantage, and drives a lot of the innovation out of Medicare Innovation Center, which says that the root problem is [traditional Medicare] fee for service. And so, they want to move everything over to capitation. And that to me is, on its face, just ridiculous,” he said.

“We really should eliminate [or] greatly reduce the copays and deductibles of traditional Medicare. … This could fix the personal finance aspects of traditional Medicare and then other things could be experimented with like adding in hearing, vision, and dental. These are things that improve health outcomes and should be inexpensive to offer. So, improve traditional Medicare and stop giving an unfair advantage to Medicare Advantage.”

Likewise, Dr. Ana Malinow, past president of PNHP and professor of pediatrics at the University of California-San Francisco, told Healthcare Innovation that “traditional Medicare is working pretty well. … we should be looking at what it is that traditional Medicare is doing better than Medicare Advantage. The profit motive there is not making things better.”

ThinkAdvisor contacted several members of Congress and health organizations who had signed the various letters, as well as the CMS and HHS. They had not responded by deadline.

But as Miller stated: “The ACO model has important implications for the future of one of our most important social insurance programs. It shouldn’t be implemented without a robust discussion — and without the approval of Congress.”

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After 33 years on San Francisco’s Valencia Street, late-night New York-style pizza restaurant Arinell Pizza is in danger of closing.

“We’ll be closing soon if we don’t get an increase in business,” said owner Ron Demirdjian. “The pandemic, of course, destroyed the business.”

Upon realizing there was no true New York-style pizza available in the Bay Area when he first moved here in the ’70s, Demirdjian opened his first Arinell’s location in Berkeley in 1975, followed by the San Francisco location in 1989. He explained that while the Berkeley location is doing alright, a combination of factors put the Valencia Street location in dire straits.

For one, Arinell is running low on Paycheck Protection Program funds.

“The only reason we’re even in business is because of the Paycheck Protection Program, otherwise I would have been long gone,” Demirdjian said. “So without PPP, there is no Arinell. Now, we’re running low on the PPP.”

The restaurant has also experienced staffing issues, with three cooks moving out of California in the past month. Arinell has also yet to see a significant return from the Valencia Street bar-hopping crowd that used to sustain his business. His restaurant used to stay open until 2 am on Fridays and Saturdays to fuel late-night customers, but now Arinell closes at 11 pm on the weekends.

“Arinell at Valencia did an incredible business when the bars were hopping,” Demirdjian said. “We basically fed drunks Friday and Saturday … now, people are not packing up bars. There may be a bit of business, but for us, it’s brutal.”

Arinell Pizza, located at 509 Valencia St. in San Francisco, was a popular late-night bite for weekend crowds. Now, it’s future is uncertain.

Adam S. via Yelp

He also theorized that because Valencia Street has become more of a sit-down dining destination in the past few years, people are no longer choosing to snag a slice to walk around with between bars. He estimated that business is down to 30 or 40% of what it was pre-pandemic.

“The slice mentality has basically disappeared,” he said. “The business model has been destroyed, essentially.”

In addition, Demirdjian explained, that when he bought the Valencia Street location in 1989, he received a hardship waiver due to a bathroom located in a closet that would have been too costly to bring up to code. He says that would not be acceptable today if he tried to sell the place, so it’s essentially impossible business to sell.

“I have to keep one of these businesses alive, and the one in Berkeley is in much better shape,” he said. “…I can’t just sell [the Valencia Street location], which I’d love to, but that’s not possible. So it’s either I keep the business going or I shut it down.”

Arinell is known not only for its hot New York slices, but also for employing its fair share of local musicians over the years. Demirdjian said he likes hiring “rockers” because they’re artists, which means “they dig putting out some good food.”

For those who love the Valencia Street eatery, time is ticking. Demirdjian did not have an exact timeline for a possible closure, but it’s definitely getting down to the wire.

“If we get some more business, we’ve got a chance,” Demirdjian said. “But the way it is now, it’s not sustainable.”

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The San Andreas Fault in California is creeping slowly but may soon give the country a jolt, similar to the 1906 earthquake that killed 3,000 and leveled San Francisco.

The 800-mile-long fault runs from north to south through California and Mexico, forming the boundary between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates. The two plates grind against each other along the fault, producing seismic events, moving 0.79 to 1.38 inches per year in a process called continental drift.

The San Andreas Fault is made up of three sections, each shifting independently past each other like two hands being rubbed together. At the northernmost and southernmost ends, the massive continental plates are usually locked together. But as stress increases along the boundaries, the plates may eventually slip violently against each other, causing earthquakes.

At the central section of the fault, the two plates slip past each other at a relatively peaceful rate of just over an inch per year, thus avoiding earthquakes for the most part. This stress avoidance is called aseismic creep.

The map above depicts the San Andreas fault sinking along the California coast and then going inland at San Francisco, which was devastated by an earthquake in 1906. The fault continues to Mexico. The “creeping” central section, subject of a new study, is in yellow. Rock samples from almost 2 miles down were taken at the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth, or SAFOD, marked by the red star. (Adapted from Coffey et al., Geology, 2022)

Rocks from nearly two miles below the Earth’s surface, however, reveal that the supposedly peaceful central section has seen violent earthquakes, some of which have been fairly recent.

In a study published in the journal Geology, chemical analysis of the rocks was used to gauge the heating of rocks, revealing evidence of quakes.

“This means we can get larger earthquakes on the central section than we thought,” said lead author Genevieve Coffey, who conducted the research as a graduate student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “We should be aware that there is this potential — that it is not always just continuous creep.”

History has recorded devastating tremors along the San Andreas Fault. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake registered 7.9 on the Richter scale along the northern section. In 1989, the Loma Prieta quake killed more than 60. The southern section saw the 1994 Northridge quake near Los Angeles, causing another 60 deaths. Stresses are building there for a quake of the same magnitude as the 1906 quake.

Ruins of the city after the earthquake and fire of 1906 in San Francisco, California. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

However, the fault’s central section seems harmless, except for a small area in the south that produces some quakes. Events of a magnitude of 6 take place there about every 20 years. Near Parkfield, California, seismologists drilled a borehole about two miles down to retrieve rock samples, while monitoring seismic activity on the surface and deep within the Earth.

When the plates slip, rocks along the fault line spike in temperature by hundreds of degrees above that of the surrounding rocks, altering organic compounds in sedimentary rock formations along the fault path. Using these so-called biomarkers, scientists used the altered composition of rock to map ancient earthquakes. By calculating the degree of heating, the distance of slippage can be estimated and thus the magnitude of those quakes.

The samples they brought up from the borehole indicated more than 100 tremors have taken place and that the San Andreas Fault jumped about 5 feet each time, representing quakes measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale, roughly equal to the Loma Prieta and Northridge quakes.

But many of the quakes may well have been larger than recent strong tremors. Researchers say quakes along the central section of the San Andreas Fault may have been similar to the devastating 1906 quake.

California’s current hazard model for insurance rates and building codes includes a large central section quake as a remote possibility. However, the new study seems to provide evidence, apart from controversial mathematical models, that large quakes have indeed happened in the central area.

Above is an enlarged microscope photo of sedimentary rock that was structurally altered during an earthquake. The slip layer (green portion) was heated during fault movement. The actual field of view is only about a millimeter across. (Kelly Bradbury/Utah State University)

Coffey said dating the quakes remains an inexact science. By gauging the ratio of argon gas to radioactive potassium in rocks, scientists can estimate the rocks’ age: the higher the amount of argon is, the older the rock is — but not always.

The sedimentary rock they analyzed was formed tens of millions of years ago and comes from the ancient Pacific basin that was subducted or pushed beneath the North American plate. This means that the rocks along the slip zones appear to be as young as 3.2 million years as an upper age limit for the most recent quakes, said Coffey. But some may have occurred a few hundred or a few thousand years ago, she said.

The group is refining the age interpretations because they don’t know how much argon was driven out of the rock and thus how far the geological clock has been reset.

“Ultimately, our work points to the potential for higher-magnitude earthquakes in central California and highlights the importance of including the central [San Andreas Fault] and other creeping faults in seismic hazard analysis,” the authors wrote.

Morgan Page, a seismologist with the US Geological Survey, said the “Big One” — a calamitous earthquake expected by Californians — might start at the southern end of the San Andreas, tear through the creeping center and wind up in the northern section.

“People should not be alarmed,” said co-author Stephen Cox, adding that California’s building codes have improved over the years. “Seismic events are inevitable. Work like this helps us figure out what is the biggest possible event and helps everyone prepare.”

Edited by Siân Speakman and Kristen Butler

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