A member of Brawley’s Brandt family is in the early stages of attempting to reopen the shuttered National Beef plant to operate a niche-market processing facility that would return jobs to the Valley and restore local ownership to the former Brawley Beef.

Eric Brandt, whose One World Beef LLC is in negotiations to buy the facility, made the announcement Tuesday in a joint statement with National Beef.

“We are very excited about this. There is a long way to go,” Brandt said. “A lot of stars have aligned to get us to this point and it’s certainly going to take a lot more to make this come to fruition. We’re going to be asking for a lot of community support.”

National Beef announced the closure of its Brawley plant in February 2014, ceasing operations last spring and laying off around 1,300 workers directly and indirectly employed by the plant.

If One World Beef is able to acquire the...

Twenty-five-plus years ago, Imperial County farmers planted melons every fall and spring, making for a robust piece of the local ag puzzle.

Then the whitefly infestation hit, decimating the fall melon crop, and costing farmers about $250 million. The effect was such that fall melons are all but history.

Imperial County farmers and ag officials — as in most agricultural communities — have had an extensive history with battling invasive pest species to various degrees of success.

In the 1950s the community fought Khapra beetles, which wreaked havoc in grain stores around the county; so much so that Khapra beetle traps can still be found today due to how difficult it was to deal with the pest, Imperial County Agricultural Commissioner Connie Valenzuela said.

In that instance, Valenzuela said, the beetle was ultimately eradicated.

In other cases, it is not so easy to simply get rid of a...

If you know David Varela, you know he has a bit of an obsession with pizza.

The founder of Starts with Arts Foundation liberally peppers the foundation’s Instagram account with equal parts art, pizza and artistic renderings of pizza.

It was only fitting, perhaps, that all things pepperoni pie would be the final children’s workshop the foundation staged Saturday heading into its third anniversary since becoming a nonprofit dedicated to arts education and youth art outreach.

On March 31, 2012, Varela and his Starts with Arts partner Alex Tamayo were granted 501©3 status for an organization that has donated money, supplies and time to the El Centro Elementary School District over the years and has consistently held free art workshops for children focusing on everything from silk-screen printing, painting and photography to writing, guitar and weekend afternoons just dedicated to...

It’s been five years, so Nelva Marcus doesn’t quite remember the baby’s name. But for one afternoon, they were attached at the hip, with Marcus as protective and attentive as if the girl was her own.

Marcus, a registered nurse, was assigned to the neonatal intensive-care unit at El Centro Regional Medical Center, where she was attending to the needs of a 7-day-old baby born prematurely at 33 weeks. The little girl was on oxygen and had been having apneic episodes — periods where the baby stopped breathing — throughout the night.

When the Easter Sunday earthquake of 2010 ripped through the Imperial Valley at 3:40 p.m. April 4, El Centro got some of the worst of the shaking, and its hospital took on some of the worst damage. El Centro Regional lost its fairly new outpatient building off of Ross Avenue, and with the Maternal-Child Department net yet seismically updated, mothers and their...

Marci Mange is still known to refer to daughter Demi as her “Little Shaker Bunny.”

Genesis Rivas, she likes to call her daughter, Natasha, “Little Terremoto.”

Natasha and Demi turned 5 years old Saturday, born about 12 minutes apart in Pioneers Memorial Hospital in Brawley, where their mothers were recovering from childbirth and the babies themselves were resting peacefully.

Then 3:40 p.m. came, and with it a magnitude-7.2 earthquake that grew more and more powerful as it went, lasting about a minute and a half — what must have seemed an eternity for the moms fretting over the safety of their new babes.

Although the epicenter of what locally is referred to as the 2010 Easter Sunday earthquake was anywhere from 60 to 70 miles south of Brawley, it’s effect was no less traumatic to Mange, of Holtville.

“We thought it was just a little earthquake, and then it started to really shake,”...

Orlando Teran is a month away from publishing a peer-reviewed scientific article that could change the way development occurs along fault lines in California.

He has the 2010 Easter Sunday earthquake to thank for that discovery.

The five-year-old magnitude-7.2 earthquake centered in southeastern Mexicali Valley is known as the El Mayor-Cucapah Earthquake to the scientific community, named for a major fault system that runs through the Cucapah Mountains near Cerro Prieto.

The destructive quake caused untold millions of dollars of damage to the Mexicali area, injuring hundreds, killing two and displacing thousands of residents whose homes were felled and farms were made uninhabitable.

For scientists in the United States and Mexico, however, the April 4, 2010, quake was a revelation, credited with unlocking several secrets and proving numerous theories about what major earthquakes are...

Cecilia Vigil has witnessed strength in numbers. Chris Nunn has, too. Yet they stand on the opposite ends of an uneven distribution, by all outward appearances.

Vigil was among a small gathering of pro-choice advocates lost in an avalanche of pro-life demonstrators amassed at El Centro City Hall nearly two weeks ago. Besides her and her four friends, what Vigil estimates was fewer than two dozen other like-minded individuals who had never met before linked up over social media to support each other at the March 3 meeting.

And they would need it. Nunn was one of the principal figures in mobilizing that pro-life movement in numbers unlike anything seen in this area in years. Maybe ever. He and other members of the church-driven Imperial Valley Coalition for Life had been able to draw somewhere between 1,500 and 3,000 mostly peaceful pro-life demonstrators to City Hall.

“We had...

IMPERIAL — A significant public library expansion in this climate of city and county austerity up and down the state? Good luck with that.

Yet if all goes according to plan, the city of Imperial will see its Public Library, through creative financing and the homegrown talent of city staff, undergo an $800,000 expansion and renovation by November.

Imperial sits in the economic “friend zone,” somewhere between the steamy passion of consistent residential growth and the fickle nature of slow, incremental commercial development. So money can be tight, resulting in too few people to answer the phone at City Hall, department heads who hit the streets rather than sit behind a desk, and a council that has to consistently watch its spending, aware that houses do not fill the general fund budget.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars on consultants to investigate, design and engineer a new library...

IMPERIAL — More than a decade in the making, the $13 million Worthington Square building, intended to be a focal point of the downtown’s ongoing revitalization, is moving forward.

A three-story building combining commercial space on the bottom floor with apartments on the top two floors right in the heart of downtown at the corner of Barioni Boulevard/Worthington Road and H Street, funding for the private development has been all but secured and the city could sign off on the plans as soon as March 18, City Manager Marlene Best said.

“We’re looking forward to this project,” Mayor Mark Gran said. “It will add ambiance to the area because it will be nice-looking.

“It’s the kind of project we want in Imperial,” he said, “people living in the downtown and commercial space.”

The site is now a vacant lot across from El Sol Market and the Imperial Public Library and close to a bus stop, all...

IMPERIAL — Just past the midpoint of the California Mid-Winter Fair & Fiesta, local youths and their animals have made the journey from showcasing all that hard work, to preparing for this weekend’s livestock auction.

There are many aspects to prepping livestock for competition and auction, and much of that effort starts well before the fair begins.

But once it does, ensuring that the livestock is healthy and free of disease that could impact other animals or the public itself is an important part of Kelly Secord’s job.

Secord, of Oak Hills, is the fair-contracted livestock coordinator. Her seventh Imperial County fair, Secord arrives in the Valley about a week before the fair starts and leaves about a week after it closes.

In addition to an action-packed agenda of tasks to accomplish in that time, animal health is key, and that means inspections, outreach and having local...