Around the nation

Officials watching ‘high risk’ dams

HOUSTON — Two aging dams deemed “extremely high risk” by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are at record pooling levels on Houston’s west side after this week’s torrential rainfall, but are working well and have undergone improvements in recent years, authorities said Wednesday.

The dams — at 50 percent capacity — are classified as high risk only because they’re about two decades beyond their life expectancy and in a populated area, said Corps spokeswoman Sandra Arnold.

However, a Corps report issued on the dams in 2012 offered more worrying criteria for the classification, noting that such structures are “critically near failure or at extremely high risk under normal operations.”

GEORGIA

Cops: Man staged his own disappearance

SAVANNAH — When Cody Magee’s wife reported that her husband hadn’t returned from a kayaking trip off the Georgia coast, the Coast Guard launched a two-day search.

Magee was eventually found alive — in Oklahoma. Authorities say he staged his disappearance to escape prosecution on charges that he sought sex with a child.

Magee, 38, of Savannah was being held Wednesday in Oklahoma City after failing to appear in court Monday on charges of child pornography and attempted child molestation in Effingham County west of Savannah, said Savannah-Chatham County police spokesman Sonny Cohrs.

CALIFORNIA

Drug tunnel found; pot, cocaine seized

SAN DIEGO — U.S. authorities said Wednesday that they discovered a cross-border tunnel that ran a half-mile from a Tijuana house equipped with a large elevator to a lot in San Diego that was advertised as a wooden pallet business, resulting in seizures of more than a ton of cocaine and seven tons of marijuana.

It was the 13th sophisticated secret passage found along California’s border with Mexico since 2006, including three on the same short street in San Diego that runs parallel to a border fence with a densely populated residential area on the Mexican side. The tunnel was only about three feet wide, equipped with a rail system, lighting and ventilation.

NEW JERSEY

Nun convicted of

DUI gets $257 fine

WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP — A Philadelphia nun and schoolteacher was convicted Wednesday of drunken driving charges despite her assertion that she had taken a sedative and doesn’t remember crashing her car into a New Jersey building.

Washington Township Municipal Court Judge Martin Whitcraft suspended Sister Kimberly Miller’s license for 90 days and fined her $257 plus fees.

Miller, 41, is a librarian and theology teacher at Little Flower Catholic School in Philadelphia. She was arrested in November 2015 after she drove her car into an auto repair shop. Police say she had a blood-alcohol level twice the legal limit to drive.

WASHINGTON

Orca tagging stops after whale death

SEATTLE — Federal biologists have temporarily stopped tagging endangered killer whales in Washington state’s Puget Sound after a dead orca was found with pieces of a dart tag lodged in its dorsal fin.

Researchers use a dart projector to fire the small satellite-linked transmitters into the animals to track where they go in the winter and how they find food. An initial exam of the 20-year-old whale found floating off Vancouver Island last month did not find a clear cause of death, but some advocates fear tagging injures the animals.

Wire reports