Journal of Mistress Kat

Posted by Michael Rocha

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/22/map-heres-where-the-small-plane-crashed-into-a-san-diego-neighborhood/

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A small plane crashed into a San Diego neighborhood during foggy weather early Thursday, setting about 15 homes on fire as well as vehicles.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/22/map-heres-where-the-small-plane-crashed-into-a-san-diego-neighborhood/

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Posted by Paul Rogers

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/22/senate-votes-to-kill-california-electric-car-mandate/

https://www.mercurynews.com/?p=12041648

The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to block California’s first-in-the-nation regulations that would ban the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles statewide in 2035, setting up a certain legal battle over the future of electric cars in the United States.

By a vote of 50-44, the Republican-led chamber voted to revoke permission that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration had given to California to set the rules.

Republicans said California’s rules were overbroad and would effectively set a national standard because California is the largest car market in the United States and under the Clean Air Act, other states are allowed to copy its rules.

“The Biden Administration wanted to use California as a model to slap a radical and unprecedented mandate on our country,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, “cutting down the marketplace of affordable, reliable vehicles that everyday Americans choose to drive.”

Environmental groups, California’s two Democratic senators and Gov. Gavin Newsom opposed the vote. Newsom announced Thursday that California will file a lawsuit to overturn the decision.

“This isn’t complicated,” Newsom said at a news conference with Attorney General Rob Bonta. “This is about pollution. Pollution is a subsidy. It’s an act of theft against our kids and grandkids. This act allows polluters to pollute more — impacting you and impacting all of us.”

For more than 50 years since President Nixon signed the Clean Air Act in 1970, federal law has allowed California, which often has had the nation’s smoggiest skies in Southern California, to set its own tailpipe standards. Those can be stricter than federal standards, and other states are allowed to copy the rules California sets.

Since automakers don’t want to build different models of cars for different states, that has meant California has often set clean air rules for cars and trucks, which other states and then eventually the federal government and the industry implement nationwide.

But there’s a catch: The Clean Air Act says California can only set those stricter standards if it receives permission, called “a waiver” from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Since the 1970s, Republican and Democratic presidents have routinely approved those waivers, and vehicles today are dramatically cleaner than they were a generation ago, with catalytic converters, on-board computer systems and other technology that has cut tailpipe pollution by 95% or more from new cars compared to models from the 1970s and 1980s.

In 2020, saying more action was needed to curb climate change and the wildfires and droughts associated with it, Newsom signed an executive order to prohibit the sale of all new cars and light trucks that run on gasoline starting in 2035.

More than a dozen countries around the world already have similar laws imposing a ban between 2030 and 2040, including England, Germany, France, Mexico, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Israel, China and India.

But Newsom’s move to make California the first U.S. state to take such a step was historic. It was reinforced in 2022 by the California Air Resources Board, and copied by 11 other states: New York, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland.

Auto industry officials have pushed back on the regulations. In December, a month before he left office, former President Biden’s EPA granted California the waiver to approve them. President Trump campaigned on overturning them.

“We will revoke the electric vehicle mandate, saving our auto industry and keeping my sacred pledge to our great American autoworkers,” Trump said in his inaugural address on Jan. 20. “In other words, you’ll be able to buy the car of your choice.”

Californians buy more electric vehicles than any other state. Last year, 25% of all new car sales in California were electric.

Newsom’s phase-out of gasoline-burning passenger vehicles would not affect the sale of used cars. It would prohibit automakers from selling new cars, SUVs and minivans by 2035 in California. Polls show the measure is controversial.

Last July, 77% of Californian adults described climate change as a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” threat to the state’s economy and environment in a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. But just 39% said they supported the state’s looming ban on new gasoline vehicles by 2035, with 60% opposing it.

The auto industry on Thursday celebrated the Senate vote, which follows a similar vote in the Republican-controlled House three weeks ago. The measure heads now to Trump’s desk.

“The auto industry has invested billions in electrification and has 144 electrified models on the market right now,” said John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry group. “The concerns were about the mandate, not the technology. You can be against the mandates — we were — and believe that transportation is trending toward a range of electrified products like battery electric vehicles, hybrids and plug-in hybrids. It is.”

Senate Republican leaders took the rare step Thursday of overruling the Senate parliamentarian, a non-partisan referee who said that the authority senators used, the Congressional Review Act, only applied to regulations and not EPA waivers.

“This vote is an unprecedented and reckless attack on states’ legal authority to address the pollution causing asthma, lung disease and heart conditions,” said Manish Bapna, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group. “After a multi-million dollar lobbying campaign from Big Oil, Republicans readily jettisoned their long-held view that states can best enact measures that reflect the values and interests of their residents.”

“If other states don’t like California’s approach, they don’t need to follow it,” Bapna said. “But federal lawmakers shouldn’t be intervening to block states from providing cleaner air and a healthier environment.”

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/22/senate-votes-to-kill-california-electric-car-mandate/

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Posted by Teri Figueroa, Kristina Davis, Tammy Murga, Karen Kucher

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/22/at-least-two-killed-when-small-plane-crashes-into-military-homes-in-tierrasanta/

https://www.mercurynews.com/?p=12041728&preview=true&preview_id=12041728

A small plane crashed in dense fog in a Murphy Canyon neighborhood early Thursday morning, killing at least two people on the plane and burning several cars and homes in a neighborhood of military families.

The plane, a Cessna 550, crashed east of Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport around 3:45 a.m., according the Federal Aviation Administration. Officials were not immediately able to say how many people were onboard the Cessna, which holds eight to 10 people.

“From what we found so far on scene, we do believe we have multiple fatalities,” San Diego Fire-Rescue Department Assistant Chief Dan Eddy said during a news conference.

He said no one on the ground was seriously injured, although officials later said one person from an evacuation site was taken to a hospital after she reported an injury. Two others were treated and released.

More than 10 homes caught fire, as did several cars. Several large oil spills were seen in the road and the smell of jet fuel hung in the air hours after the crash in the area of Sculpin Street and Santo Road, southeast of Interstate 15 and Aero Drive.

“When it hit the street, as the jet fuel went down, it took out every single car that was on both sides of the street,” Eddy said. “You can see that every single car was burning down both sides of the street.”

RELATED: Map shows where the small plane crashed into a San Diego neighborhood

San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said about 50 officers were on the scene within minutes.

“I can’t quite put words to describe what this scene looks like, but with the jet fuel going down the street and everything on fire all at once, it was pretty horrific to see the police officers and firefighters to run in there start trying to evacuate people out of the way,” Wahl said. “Doing anything and everything they could to try to save somebody’s life is really heroic.”

About 100 residents were evacuated to nearby Miller Elementary school, which was closed Thursday to serve as an evacuation and daycare site. Hancock Elementary was also closed, a San Diego Unified School District spokesperson said.

The neighborhood is military housing. San Diego Naval Base commander Capt. Robert Healy said the “foremost concern right now is to make sure that we have the safety of our families who reside in the neighborhood.”

Thick fog blanketed the area, creating only about a half-mile of visibility at the time of the crash, according to the National Weather Service. “You could barely see in front of you,” the assistant fire chief said.

Montgomery Field did not file a weather report Thursday morning. The automated weather observation report that pilots can tune into over the air traffic control frequency was “missing” or “not available,” according to radio traffic.

The plane is registered to a limited liability company out of Homer, Alaska, according to the FAA registry. The plane departed from Teterboro, N.J., on Wednesday, then stopped in Wichita, Kan., before departing on the three-hour flight to San Diego, according to Flightaware.com. Records show the plane had flown into Montgomery earlier this month.

Eddy said the crash left “a gigantic debris field” in the densely packed neighborhood. He said all the fires were doused within a few hours, save for “one stubborn car fire that will not go out.”

A loud noise that sounded like a jet, followed by a big boom jarred area resident Gilbert Gonzalez from sleep. His Salmon Street house shook. His wife told him she saw a flash.

He was five houses from the crash site.

Gonzalez quickly dressed, slipped on flip-flops and ran outside. “You could see the entire strip of flames across the street,” he said.

Gonzalez, who works as a Navy damage controlman or firefighter on the USS Essex, saw neighbors using garden hoses trying to fight the fire..

He said the house that was directly hit by the plane “was just demolished.” He and others went to help a family in a neighboring home, draping his ladder over a back fence to provide the family an exit route.

Someone handed him two small children. He carried them to a nearby home, then returned to help their mother over the fence. He also helped get the family dogs to safety.

“It is unreal,” he said a short time later in a nearby Navy Exchange parking lot. “We are in the flight line of this airport. We see these things coming over our houses every day. And you think about it — what if it just dropped one day. Never thought it would actually happen this way.”

Some residents who evacuated from their homes, many still clad in pajamas, gathered in the NEX parking lot early Thursday, where they were approached by volunteers and people offering water and food and diapers and other supplies.

Christopher Moore, who lives one street over from the crash site, said he and his wife were awakened by a loud bang and saw smoke when they looked out the window.

They grabbed their two young children and ran out of the house. On their way out of the neighborhood, they saw a car engulfed in flames.

“It was definitely horrifying for sure, but sometimes you’ve just got to drop your head and get to safety,” he said.

Before his alarm went off at 5:30 a.m., Austin Lariccia’s cell phone was flooded with text messages from friends and coworkers asking if he was OK. What happened, he asked. Headlines indicated a plane crash in San Diego.

As soon as he read that the small aircraft had crashed in his Murphy Canyon neighborhood he rushed to the front door of his home along Taussig Street and found a row of burned, parked vehicles from the aftermath. A couple hours before, a river of flames illuminated Sample Street, facing Lariccia’s house.

“Once I read the article, I was like, Oh, that’s like right in my front yard,” he said. “This car was still on fire. You see on the news all the plane crashes happening and then you see so many planes flying over us and wonder if that’s gonna happen here, you know.”

Lisa Monroe lives east of Canyon View South. She and her husband heard numerous sirens around 4 a.m.

She quickly moved through rows of vehicles parked at the Navy Exchange gas station on Santo Road and Gurnard Street. She was spreading the word to families that had evacuated that food and shelter was available at Miller Elementary. A few families, many with children and pets, who weren’t sure when they’d be able to return to their homes agreed to stop by.

“As soon as we learned what had happened, my husband and I, we started gathering food and water for folks,” she said. “All the teachers and everyone are helping out, coming together to help.”

The San Diego Humane Society has teams of its law enforcement officers responding to calls for pets who need to be rescued from homes or may need medical attention.

One call was from a person who needed help with five puppies and three adult dogs, with an unknown owner, said Humane Society spokesperson Nina Thompson.

In October 2021, two people were killed and two others injured when a small plane crashed in a residential neighborhood in Santee, destroying two homes and a UPS delivery truck. It was headed to land at Montgomery Field.

Staff writer Gary Robbins and the Associated Press contributed to this report.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/05/22/at-least-two-killed-when-small-plane-crashes-into-military-homes-in-tierrasanta/

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