MILPITAS, Calif. — As scores of students swarmed out of their Milpitas elementary school on a recent afternoon, a lone bald eagle perched high above them in a redwood tree — only occasionally looking down on the after-school ruckus, training his eyes on the grassy hills along the western horizon.

The week before, his mate was electrocuted on nearby power lines operated by PG&E.

Kevin Slavin, principal of Curtner Elementary School, said the eagles in that nest are so well-known and beloved here that they were made the school’s mascots and the “whole ethos of the school has been tied around them” since they arrived in 2017.

What exactly happened to send Hope the eagle off the pair’s nest in the dark of night and into the live wires on the night of Nov. 3 is not known (although there’s some scandalous speculation it involved a mysterious, “interloper” female).

According to a spokesperson from PG&E, an outage occurred in the area at around 9 p.m. Line workers later discovered it was caused by the adult eagle.

The death, sadly, is not atypical for large raptors, such as bald and golden eagles.

According to a 2014 analysis of bird deaths across the U.S., electrocution on power lines is a significant cause of bird mortality. Every year, as many as 11.6 million birds are fried on the wires that juice our televisions, HVAC systems and blow driers, the authors estimated. The birds die when two body parts — a wing, foot or beak — come in contact with two wires, or when they touch a wire and ground source, sending a fatal current of electricity through the animal’s body.

Because of their massive size, eagles and other raptors are at more risk. The wingspan of an adult bald eagle ranges from 5.5 to 8 feet across; it’s roughly the same for a golden eagle.

According to a report from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Forensics Laboratory, which analyzed 417 electrocuted raptors from 13 species between 2000 and 2015, nearly 80 percent were bald or golden eagles.

Krysta Rogers, senior environmental scientist at the California Department of Fish and Wildlife Investigations Laboratory, examined the dead eagle.

She found small burns on Hope’s left foot pad and the back of her right leg. She also had singed feathers on both sides of her body, but especially on the right, where Rogers said the wing looked particularly damaged. She said most birds are electrocuted on utility poles, but Hope was electrocuted “mid-span,” where the wires dip between the poles.

Melissa Subbotin, a spokesperson for PG&E, said the poles and wires near where the birds nested had been adapted with coverings and other safety features to make them safe for raptors.

However, it appears the bird may have touched two wires mid-span. Subbotin said the utility company spaces lines at least 5 feet apart — a precaution it and other utility companies take to minimize raptor deaths.

“Since 2002, PG&E has made about 42,990 existing power poles and towers bird-safe,” Subbotin said. The company has also retrofitted about 41,500 power poles in areas where bird have been injured or killed.

In addition, she said, in 2024, the company replaced nearly 11,000 poles in designated “Raptor Concentration Zones” and built them to avian-safe construction guidelines.

Doug Gillard, an amateur photographer and professor of anatomy and physiology at Life Chiropractic College West in Hayward, who has followed the Milpitas eagles for years, said while there is safety equipment near the school, it does not extend into the nearby neighborhood, where Hope was killed.

Gillard said a photographer who lives in the neighborhood took a photo of the eagle hanging from the wires that Gillard has seen. The Times was unable to access the photo.

Not far from the school is a marshy wetland, where ducks, geese and migrating birds come to rest and relax, a smorgasbord for a pair of eagles and their young. There are also fish in a nearby lake.

Gillard said one of the nearby water bodies is stocked with trout, and that late fall is fishing season for the eagles. He said an army of photographers is currently hanging around the pond hoping to catch a snapshot of the father eagle catching a fish.

Rogers said the bird was healthy. She had body fat, good muscle tone and two small feathers in her gut — presumably the remnants of a recent meal. She also had an enlarged ovary and visible oviduct — an avian fallopian tube — suggesting she was getting ready for breeding, which typically happens in January or February.

Slavin, the principal, said that a day or two before the mother’s death, he saw the couple preparing their nest, and saw a young female show up. “It was a very tense situation among the eagles,” he said.

Gillard, the photographer, said the “girlfriend” has black feathers on her head and in her tail, suggesting she isn’t quite five years old.

Gillard and Slavin say they’ve heard from residents there may have been some altercation between the mom and the interloper that sent Hope off the nest and into the wires that night.

The young female remains at the scene, and is not only being “tolerated” by the father, but occasionally accompanies him on his fishing trips, Gillard said.

Eagles tend to mate for life, but if one dies, the other will look for a new mate, Gillard said. If the female eagle sticks around, it will be the dad’s third partner.

Photographers can identify the father, who neighbors just call “Dad,” by the damaged flexor tendon on his right claw, which makes it appear as if he is “flipping the bird” when he flies by.

WILLOWS — As hospital staff carted away medical equipment from abandoned patient rooms, Theresa McNabb, 74, roused herself and painstakingly applied make-up for the first time in weeks, finishing with a mauve lipstick that made her eyes pop.

“I feel a little anxiety,” McNabb said. She was still taking multiple intravenous antibiotics for the massive infection that had almost killed her, was unsteady on her feet and was unsure how she was going to manage shopping and cooking food for herself once she returned to her apartment after six weeks in the hospital.

But she couldn’t stay at Glenn Medical Center. It was closing.

The hospital — which for more than seven decades has treated residents of its small farm town about 75 miles north of Sacramento, along with countless victims of car crashes on nearby Interstate 5 and a surprising number of crop-duster pilots wounded in accidents — shut its doors on Oct. 21.

McNabb was the last patient.

Nurses and other hospital workers gathered at her room to ceremonially push her wheelchair outside and into the doors of a medical transport van. Then they stood on the lawn, looking bereft.

They had all just lost their jobs. Their town had just lost one of its largest employers. And the residents — many of whom are poor— had lost their access to emergency medical care. What would happen to all of them now? Would local residents’ health grow worse? Would some of them die preventable deaths?

These are questions that elected officials and policymakers may soon be confronting in rural communities across California and the nation. Cuts to Medicaid funding and the Affordable Care Act are likely rolling down from Washington, D.C., and hitting small hospitals already teetering at the brink of financial collapse. Even before these cuts hit, a 2022 study found that half of the hospitals in California were operating in the red. Already this fall: Palo Verde Hospital in Blythe filed for bankruptcy and Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine sought emergency funds.

But things could get far worse: A June analysis released by four Democrats in the U.S. Senate found that many more hospitals in California could be at risk of closure in the face of federal healthcare cuts.

“It’s like the beginning of a tidal wave,” said Peggy Wheeler, vice president of policy of the California Hospital Assn. “I’m concerned we will lose a number of rural hospitals, and then the whole system may be at risk.”

Glenn Medical’s financing did not collapse because of the new federal cuts. Rather, the hospital was done in by a federal decision this year to strip the hospital’s “critical access” designation, which enabled it to receive increased federal reimbursement. The hospital, the only one in Glenn County, is just 32 miles from the nearest neighboring hospital under a route mapped by federal officials — less than the 35 miles required under the law. Though that distance hasn’t changed, the federal government has now decided to enforce its rules.

Local elected officials and hospital administrators fought for months to convince the federal government to grant them an exception. Now, with the doors closed, policy experts and residents of Willows said they are terrified by the potential consequences.

“People are going to die,” predicted Glenn County Supervisor Monica Rossman. She said she feared that older people in her community without access to transportation will put off seeking care until it is too late, while people of all ages facing emergency situations won’t be able to get help in time.

Kellie Amaru, a licensed vocational nurse who has worked at Glenn Medical Center for four years, reacts after watching a co-worker leave after working their final shift at the hospital.

But even for people who don’t face a life-or-death consequence, the hospital’s closure is still a body blow, said Willows Vice Mayor Rick Thomas. He and others predicted many people will put off routine medical care, worsening their health. And then there’s the economic health of the town.

Willows, which sits just east of I-5 in the center of the Sacramento Valley, has a proud history stretching back nearly 150 years in a farm region that now grows rice, almonds and walnuts. About 6,000 people live in the town, which has an economic development webpage featuring images of a tractor, a duck and a pair of hunters standing in the tall grass.

“We’ve lost 150 jobs already from the hospital [closing],” Thomas said. “I’m very worried about what it means. A hospital is good for new business. And it’s been hard enough to attract new business to the town.”

Dismantling ‘a legacy of rural healthcare’

From the day it started taking patients on Nov. 21,1950, Glenn General Hospital (as it was then called) was celebrated not just for its role in bringing medical care to the little farm town, but also for its role in helping Willows grow and prosper.

“It was quite state-of-the-art back in 1950,” said Lauren Still, the hospital’s chief administrative officer.

When the hospital’s first baby was born a few days later — little Glenda May Nieheus clocked in at a robust 8 pounds, 11 ounces — the arrival was celebrated on the front page of the Willows Daily Journal.

But as a small hospital in a small town, the institution struggled almost immediately. Within a few years, according to a 1957 story in the local newspaper, the hospital was already grappling with the problem of nurses leaving in droves for higher-paying positions elsewhere. A story the following year revealed that hospital administrators were forcing a maintenance worker to step in as an ambulance driver on weekends — without the requisite chauffeur’s license — to save money.

In a sign of how small the town is, that driver was Still’s boyfriend’s grandfather.

Still, the institution endured, its grassy campus and low-slung wings perched proudly on the east end of town. Generations of the town’s babies were born there. As they grew up, they went into the emergency room for X-rays, stitches and treatment for fevers and infections. Their parents and grandparents convalesced there and sometimes died there, cared for by nurses who were part of the community.

“They saved my brother’s life. They saved my dad’s life,” said Keith Long, 34, who works at Red 88, an Asian fusion restaurant in downtown Willows that is a popular lunch spot for hospital staff.

Glenn Medical’s finances, however, often faltered. Experts in healthcare economics say rural hospitals like Glenn Medical generally have fewer patients than suburban and urban communities, and those patients tend to be older and sicker, meaning they are more expensive to treat. What’s more, a higher share of those patients are low-income and enrolled in Medi-Cal and Medicare, which generally has lower reimbursement rates than private insurance. Smaller hospitals also cannot take advantage of economies of scale the way bigger institutions can, nor can they bring the same muscle to negotiations for higher rates with private insurance companies.

For more than two decades across California, rural hospitals have been running out of money and closing their doors.

T-Ann Pearce, who has worked at Glenn Medical Center for six years, sits in the medical surgical unit during one of her last shifts with only a few remaining patients left to care.

In 2000, Glenn Medical went bankrupt, but was saved when it was awarded the “critical access” designation by the federal government that allowed it to receive higher reimbursement rates, Still said.

But by late 2017, the hospital was in trouble again.

A private for-profit company, American Advanced Management, swooped in to rescue Glenn Medical and a nearby hospital in Colusa County, buying them and keeping them open. The Modesto-based company specializes in buying distressed rural hospitals and now operates 14 hospitals in California, Utah and Texas.

The hospital set about building back its staff and improving its reputation for patient care in the community, which had been tarnished in part by the 2013 death of a young mother and her unborn baby.

“We’ve been on an upswing,” Still said, noting that indicators of quality of care and patient satisfaction have risen dramatically in recent years.

Then came the letter from the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. On April 23, the federal agency wrote Glenn Medical’s management company with bad news: A recent review had found that Glenn Medical was “in noncompliance” with “distance requirements.” In plain English, federal officials had looked at a map and determined that Glenn Medical was not 35 miles from the nearest hospital by so-called main roads as required by law — it was just 32. Nor was it 15 miles by secondary roads. The hospital was going to lose its critical access designation. The hit to the hospital’s budget would be about 40% of its $28 million in net revenue. It could not survive that cut.

At first, hospital officials said they weren’t too worried.

“We thought, there’s no way they’re going to close down hospitals” over a few miles of road, Still, the hospital’s chief executive, said.

Especially, Still said, because it appeared there were numerous California hospitals in the same pickle. A 2013 federal inspector general’s report found that a majority of the 1,300 critical access hospitals in the country do not meet the distance requirement. That includes dozens in California.

Still and other hospital officials flew to Washington to make their case, sure that when they explained that one of the so-called main roads that connects Glenn Medical to its nearest hospital wasn’t actually one at all, and often flooded in the winter, the problem would be solved. The route everyone actually used, she said, was 35.7 miles.

“No roads have changed. No facilities have moved,” administrators wrote to federal officials. “And yet this CMS decision now threatens to dismantle a legacy of rural health care stability.”

Without it, the administrator wrote, “lives will be lost for certain.”

But, Still said, their protestations fell on deaf ears.

In August came the final blow: Glenn Medical would lose its critical access funding by April 2026.

The news set off a panic not just in Glenn County but at hospitals around the state.

At least three other hospitals got letters from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid saying their status was under review, Wheeler said: Bear Valley Community Hospital in Big Bear Lake, George L. Mee Memorial in Monterey County and Santa Ynez Valley Cottage Hospital in Solvang. The hospitals in Monterey and Big Bear Lake provided data demonstrating they met the requirements for the critical access status.

Cottage Hospital, however, did not, despite showing that access in and out of the area where the hospital is located was sometimes blocked by wildfires or rockslides.

Cottage Hospital officials did not respond to questions about what that might mean for their facility.

Asked about these situations, officials at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid said the law does not give the agency flexibility to consider factors such as weather, for example, in designating a critical assess hospital. They added the hospital must demonstrate there is no driving route that would make it ineligible based on driving distances included in the statute.

Jeff Griffiths, a county supervisor in Inyo County who is also the president of the California Assn. of Counties, said he has been following the grim hospital financing news around the state with mounting worry.

The hospital in his county, Southern Inyo, came close to running out of money earlier this year, he said, and with more federal cuts looming, “I don’t know how you can expect these hospitals to survive.”

“It’s terrifying for our area,” Griffiths said, noting that Inyo County, which sits on the eastern side of the Sierra, has no easy access to any medical care on the other side of the giant mountain peaks.

‘This is the final call’

In Willows, once word got out that the hospital would lose its funding, nurses began looking for new jobs.

By late summer, so many people had left that administrators realized they had no choice but to shutter the emergency room, which closed Sept. 30.

Helena Griffith, 62, one of the last patients, waves goodbye as patient transport Jolene Guerra pushes her wheelchair down the hallway on October 20, 2025.

Through it all, McNabb, the 74-year-old patient receiving intravenous antibiotics, remained in her bed, getting to know the nurses who buzzed around her.

She became aware that when they weren’t caring for her, many of them were trying to figure out what they would do with their lives once they lost their jobs.

On the hospital’s last day, nurse Amanda Shelton gifted McNabb a new sweater to wear home.

When McNabb gushed over the sweetness of the gesture, Shelton teared up. “It’s not every day that it will be the last patient I’ll ever have,” she told her.

As McNabb continued to gather her things, Shelton retreated to the hospital’s recreation room, where patients used to gather for games or conversation.

With all the patients save McNabb gone, Shelton and some other hospital staff took up a game of dominoes, the trash talk of the game peppered with bittersweet remembrances of their time working in the creaky old building.

Registered nurse Ronald Loewen, 74, looks out the window on closing day at Glenn Medical Center on October 21, 2025. Loewen, who grew up and attended school in Willows, had four children delivered at Glenn Medical, two of them survived, and took care of former classmates at this hospital, says the hospital closing is, “a piece of our history gone.”

Shelton said she is not sure what is next for her. She loved Glenn Medical, she said, because of its community feel. Many people came for long stays or were frequent patients, and the staff was able to get to know them — and to feel like they were healing them.

“You got to know people. You got to know their family, or if they didn’t have any family,” you knew that too, she said. She added that in many hospitals, being a nurse can feel like being an extension of a computer. But at Glenn Medical, she said, “you actually got to look in someone’s eyes.”

The building itself was in dire shape, she noted. Nothing was up to modern code. It didn’t have central air conditioning, and it was heated by an old-fashioned boiler. “I mean, I have never even heard of a boiler room” before coming to work there, she said.

And yet within the walls, she said, “It’s community.”

Bradley Ford, the emergency room manager, said he felt the same way and was determined to pay tribute to all the people who had made it so.

At 7 p.m. on the emergency room’s last night of service, Ford picked up his microphone and beamed his voice out to the hospital and to all the ambulances, fire trucks and others tuned to the signal.

He had practiced his speech enough times that he thought he could get through it without crying — although during his rehearsals he had never yet managed it.

“This is the final call,” Ford said. “‘After 76 years of dedicated service, the doors are closing. Service is ending. On behalf of all the physicians, nurses and staff who have walked these halls, it is with heavy hearts that we mark the end of this chapter.”

Nurses and other staff members recorded a video of Ford making his announcement, and passed it among themselves, tearing up every time they listened to it.

In an interview after the hospital had closed, Ford said he was one of the lucky ones: He had found a new job.

It was close enough to his home in Willows that he could commute — although Ford said he wasn’t sure how long he would remain in his beloved little town without access to emergency medical care there.

Rose Mary Wampler, 88, waits to have blood drawn at the lab beside a cordoning off, signaling the closure of the hospital side of Glenn Medical Center, on October 22, 2025. Wampler lives alone across the street from the hospital.

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Rose Mary Wampler, 88, has lived in Willows since 1954 and now resides in a little house across the street from the hospital. Her three children were born at Glenn Medical, and Wampler herself was a patient there for two months last year when she was stricken with pneumonia and internal bleeding. She said she was fearful of the idea of driving more than 30 miles for healthcare elsewhere.

She looked out her window on a recent afternoon at the now-shuttered hospital.

“It looks like somebody just shut off the whole city, there’s nowhere to go get help,” she said.

Glenn Medical Center patient Richard Putnam, 86, closes the window in his hospital room. A month shy of it’s 75th year, the hospital closed on Oct 21, 2025.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

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Times photographer Christina House contributed to this report.

In a case that calls into question plant clearing techniques that have become fundamental to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, the San Diego Superior Court has ordered the agency to amend a program to reduce wildfire risk across the state because it could make things worse.

The years-long legal action filed by the California Chaparral Institute and Endangered Habitats League against the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection within Cal Fire, highlights deep rifts between ecologists’ and firefighters’ approaches to solving California’s wildfire crisis.

Richard Halsey, director of the California Chaparral Institute, was elated. “Chaparral and sage scrub is more than 10% of the state,” he said.

“Despite all the rhetoric about how we love biodiversity, you’re going to wipe out where most of the biodiversity is in the state,” and in the process make the landscape more flammable, Halsey said of the Cal Fire plan.

Cal Fire’s Vegetation Treatment Program aims to use prescribed fire plus tree and brush cutting to reduce the risk of a wildfire igniting, exploding out of control and jeopardizing lives and property. In doing so, the agency also tries to nurture the biodiversity of native species and protect clean water and soil health.

“The California Vegetation Treatment Program is one critical tool of many to address the state’s catastrophic wildfire crisis,” Tony Andersen, executive officer of the Board of Forestry and Fire Protection, said in a statement. “We appreciate the months of collaborative work spent with the Chaparral Institute, Endangered Habitats League, and others to find interim solutions that address their feedback.”

In California’s conifer forests, this often looks like thinning an unnaturally high density of trees and brush that fuel exceptionally severe fire.

But in Southern California, much of the wildlands are home to chaparral ecosystems of shrubs, oak trees, native grasses and flowers, and the typical approach is to cut fuel breaks: long strips along ridgelines and roadways devoid of all vegetation that can stop creeping ground fires in their tracks and give firefighters safe access to battle wind-driven blazes that can easily jump.

Severe and frequent wildfires are already causing some areas with trees to become chaparral and some areas of chaparral to become just flammable grasses. The legal action claimed that Cal Fire’s chaparral firebreaks can cause this “type conversion.”

When native chaparral is cleared from a landscape, whether by a wildfire or through a vegetation management project, it’s often not native plants that grow back, but instead opportunistic fast-growing invasive grasses.

Cal Fire argued that its program addressed this in its environmental impact review. But the California Chaparral Institute and Endangered Habitats League said the department did not take into account that these invasive grasses are much more flammable than the native species it is cutting down — meaning it could increase fire risk.

The Vegetation TreatmentProgram guides real work on the ground. So far this year it has completed more than 5,400 acres of work on 26 projects. About 13% of the work was in shrublands, like chaparral.

The ecology organizations filed the petition in 2020, and in 2023 the San Diego Superior Court ruled for Cal Fire. The organizations appealed, and, in May 2025, California’s 4th District Court of Appeal reversed the trial court and ordered it to determine how to remedy the problem.

On Nov. 14, the lower court ordered Cal Fire to address the potential for type conversion to worsen wildfire risk and until it does so, barred individual projects in the Vegetation Treatment Program from relying on the program’s blanket environmental review to comply with the California Environmental Quality Act.

The order does not apply to new fuel break projects that already have a plan to prevent flammable grasses from growing, nor to maintaining existing fuel breaks. Projects on forestlands and grasslands may also continue unimpeded, as may projects on land that has already lost its trees or chaparral to type conversion.

Ecologists and fire officials ultimately have the same goals: reduce devastating wildfires and protect native biodiversity. After all, fire can wipe out thousands of acres of native ecosystem — and the non-native ecosystems that plague the region can much more easily ignite.

But ecologists tend to favor solutions preserving native ecosystems (such as programs focused on reducing the chance of fire starting in the first place), whereas fire officials tend to gravitate toward solutions that view plants as “fuel” for a potential fire (such as cutting away vegetation to create fuel breaks).

Fire officials argue fuel breaks give crews a much needed strategic advantage when they’re working to protect communities. However, some ecologists question whether breaks even help in ember-driven fires and whether fire departments actually staff fuel breaks during an emergency.

These differences came into full focus as fire departments and land managers in the Santa Monica Mountains began a project to build a network of fuel breaks throughout the region in September, thanks to an expedited approval process created by Gov. Gavin Newsom and funding from the $10-billion climate bond that California voters approved last November.

As the board updates the program, “we’re taking stock of what’s working and boosting progress,” Andersen said. The board is working to find opportunities to “balance environmental and ecological protection with keeping communities and people safe. We can do both and the program is working to show how.”