Coats for kids

This holiday season, News 10 is providing a drive for coats for kids. Coats can be dropped off in the El Dorado Hall, Nursing Division until Dec.17.

Volunteers needed

The Giving Tree Program needs 20 volunteers to wrap gifts for children in families affected by HIV/AIDS Dec. 10 from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. See Leslie Lindsey in The University Union Programs Office to schedule times.

Ride, glide and shop

Every Sunday through Jan. 16, passengers who ride Regional Transit to the Westfield Holiday Ice Rink will receive a free skate rental and holiday gift coupon with their validated ticket, transfer or monthly pass. Check in to the concierge desk on the lower level of Downtown Plaza, 7th and K Streets from noon to 8 p.m.

Active Bay area fault

PITTSBURG, Calif. (AP) — It may not be as well-known as the San Andreas, but a long-dormant fault that runs through the city of Pittsburg is not only active but capable of producing a magnitude 7.0 earthquake, according to a recent study.

Although the Pittsburg fault is far less likely to produce a major earthquake in a given year than other San Francisco Bay area faults, it last shook the area about 3,000 years ago, meaning the time could be getting close for another big one.

“I would consider it a sleeping giant,” said Patrick Williams, a consulting geologist from Massachusetts who helped discover the fault more than a decade ago while mapping Bay Area faults for the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park.

Many residents of this fast-growing suburb 40 miles northeast of San Francisco, population 57,000, have never heard of the fault, which runs southeast into town from the Sacramento River Delta alongside power plants and under a school.

But city officials nonetheless have updated the town’s general plan to include evaluating new construction to determine if it can withstand the type of earthquake the Pittsburg fault is likely to let loose.

Doctor diagnosed

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Fate has played a cruel trick on a San Francisco doctor who is one of the nation’s leading clinical experts on Lou Gehrig’s disease.

After devoting his career to caring for patients with the neuromuscular disorder, Dr. Richard Olney, 56, has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

“It still is hard to believe, even now,” said Cathy Lomen-Hoerth, a neurologist who trained under Olney at the ALS clinic he founded at the University of California, San Francisco, and is now treating her former mentor as a patient. “You see him getting worse and so you know it’s true. But it’s so hard to believe he could actually get this disease that he has worked so hard to impact over the years.”

Olney found out he had ALS in June and resigned as clinic director over the summer when he started having trouble standing up and conducting medical exams. The disease, which is not contagious but strikes one out of every 1,000 people randomly during their lifetimes, causes the nerve cells that drive muscles to degenerate and eventually becomes fatal by affecting breathing.

The clinic Olney founded is one of only two in California and 19 in the country certified as a regional center by the ALS Association.

While Olney’s condition has shocked former patients and colleagues at UCSF, which has scheduled a Dec. 17 ALS research symposium in his honor, the doctor is more matter-of-fact about it.

Given the prevalence of the disease in the general population, he figures that someone who specializes in ALS should be diagnosed with it once every five or 10 years. From that perspective, he told the San Francisco Chronicle, a case like his was overdue.

“ALS is really not as rare as you might think,” Olney said.