Permits for Hog Island Oyster revised

Changes are coming for Hog Island Oyster Company, after the California Coastal Commission updated the company’s permits this month. Although the new permit terms mostly reflect the company’s current practices, they also authorize a possible doubling of Hog Island’s cultivated acres on Tomales Bay, and come with a series of new environmental mitigation measures. The company, which has been operating since 1983, is the largest grower on the bay and the second local grower to update its coastal permits following a 2013 statewide initiative. Although that effort was meant to simplify and streamline the permitting process for shellfish growers, it also led to the discovery that many growers’ practices had slipped outside the terms of their coastal permits...

Main break left Inverness boiling water

One hundred and eighty-five Inverness households were instructed to boil their water for six days after a water main broke during the peak of last week’s storm, which dropped more than six and a half inches in town over the course of several days. At around 3 a.m. last Thursday,...

Storm made for difficult electric repair in Stinson

Last week’s storm system took down numerous power lines in a canyon above Stinson Beach, cutting electricity to nearly 1,000 homes from Wednesday morning until Friday evening while PG&E crews and the Stinson Beach Volunteer Fire Department worked around the clock. “It was awful,” said Betsy Wood, a realtor with Seadrift Realty, which canceled all vacation rentals for the three-day weekend, though half of the renters ended up coming anyway on Saturday. PG&E spokeswoman Deanna Contreras said that normally the company would have accessed the fallen lines—which were on poles about halfway up the canyon, near “flat rock”—by helicopter, but the storm made flying conditions unsafe. Instead, employees had to hike in, clearing debris along the way...

Bookstore talk will explore immigration, children and the border crisis

New York City writer Valeria Luiselli will speak about her new book, “The Lost Children Archive,” on Friday, March 1 at Point Reyes Books. The work is “the most honest take I’ve read” on issues of immigration, family separation and the border crisis, said bookstore owner Stephen Sparks, who said his shop is just one of two stops Ms. Luiselli will make on a Northern California tour. The book has received praise for the innovative way it handles its themes with humor, depth and a human touch; defying categorization, it is both a critique of the media’s approach to immigration, a magical-realism novella of Ms. Luiselli’s own making and a compelling narrative of a family slowly coming undone...