DAVIS (CBS13) – In the current economy, a rapidly growing number of college graduates cannot find a job, but not all of them.

Some are getting phone calls from employers and offering them jobs.

These days, some of UC Davis senior Kimi Wong’s study breaks are spent sending out applications.

Finding out firsthand, a good job right out of college is far from a sure thing, unless you’re someone like Sean Southard.

Southard is a senior in high demand by employers. CBS13 asked what it’s like to be in high demand when a lot of his friends may not be.

“It’s a lot of going, well, how much you gonna pay me?” said Southard.

The senior is going to be an actuary, working with statistics, landing him on an exclusive list of students virtually guaranteed to find work.

According to a new report from CNN Money, four majors have a 0 percent unemployment rate, actuarial science, astrophysics, geophysics and pharmacology.

“I’ve had three job interviews this week, kinda crazy,” said Southard, who graduates in June.

You don’t hear that very often, or this: Sean says potential employers are actually calling him.

He’s already had several internships in a field with little local competition and extremely high demand.

“Only 25 stats majors graduate a year and they have a lot of exchange students, so very few coming out of Davis stay in the US,” said Southard.

So while his friends test a turbulent job market, Southard can sit back and let the offers flood in.

“There’s a couple [job offers], hopefully a few more coming in soon, so we’ll see,” said Southard.

TRACY (CBS13) – A small mistake at the Tracy Municipal Airport is now causing a big problem.

Business at Tracy Municipal isn’t flying high and business owners say they’re worried about keeping the business they do have, following a two inch snafu on it’s runway.

A small mistake at the Tracy Municipal Airport is now causing a big problem.

It started as a numbers game, but now the length of the airport’s runways has turned into a numbers crunch.

But now the length of the airports runways has turned into a numbers crunch.

“Right now the big story is, do we have minus four or plus four, said Ron Dement, airport employee.

Four thousand that is, the magic number the airport’s runways need to be for some jet planes to be able to land. The problem is that one runway is marked a few feet shy, while the other is just two inches short.

“Recently we did a repaving out here, or a slurry seal,” said Dement. “They claim the slurry wasn’t put out to the entire runway; it was just shy.”

It’s 3,999 feet and 10 inches, still not quite 4,000.

Business owners and the Tracy Air Association say it’s no laughing matter. They say the FAA has issued a notification to pilots about the runways, and now the airport’s fuel business isn’t taking off because some planes won’t touch down on the runways.

“Now that it’s showing below 4000 feet, there’s insurance issues. They may not want to come in here no more, or they won’t because of the insurance issue,” said Dement.

According to Airnav.com, Tracy Airport jet fuel is priced the lowest in 40 miles. The owner says it’s a response to the significant drop in business.

The city has promised to fix the problem, and some businesses say it can’t happen soon enough.

Dement says there’s a concern it will be classified as a small airport and receive fewer federal funds.

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) – It is the Sacramento City Fire Department’s first burning brush battle along the Sacramento River this season.

“We had a lot of growth this year, not a lot of fires last year,” said the fire department chief.

There’s plenty to burn and a small fire along the river is certainly a cause for concern, not because of its size but its spot.

“I looked out, we had flames so we called 911,” said Genie Hansen.

Firefighters feared flames and flying ash along the Sacramento River could hop the levee, and it already crept its way up a dry oak tree.

Yeah, it’s pretty breezy, especially along the river,” said the chief. “It goes right along the riverbanks.”

The wind whipped and the dry fuel for a fire turned out to be a pain at the pump.

Fire engines carry about 500 gallons of water and had to go back and forth to fill up at hydrants. So they decided it was time to be a bit more efficient.

They called in a boat for back up and were able to use unlimited Sacramento River water to push out 125 gallons a minute.

“The winds starting to pick up a little bit, so we wanted to put it out a little quicker,” said the chief.

The dousing on a windy day is a relief from the river for people living right next to the flames.

STOCKTON (CBS13) – A big rig hauling tankers overturned in Stockton on Wednesday afternoon on Highway 4 near the offramp to Wilson Way.

A big rig sits on its side after overturning on Highway 4 in Stockton on Wednesday, May 22, 2012. (credit: CBS13)

The accident happened at 12:20 p.m. and blocked the freeway for hours as crews worked to clean up the scene. The tankers were carrying fertilizer.

“Stockton Fire Department were on scene. Their quick actions to the leak prevented the material from getting into any waterways or drains,” California Highway Patrol Sgt. Steve True said.

All eastbound lanes were closed while crews worked to flip the truck and get the tankers upright. As of the 5 p.m. commute, the highway was still blocked as Caltrans crews continued to clean up the spill.

No one was injured in the accident.

Payton Hensley, 13, voluntarily left a facility in the 3000 block of Subaru Court in the Rosemont area on May 7.

Armando Rivera-Juanico

Hensley left the facility in a gray 1994 Plymouth Grand Voyager Van (California license plate 3JUN734) that is registered to Armando Juanico Rivera, 27.

Rivera, who also goes by “Fabio,” is believed to be in an intimate relationship with Hensley. Rivera is a transient and has been known to live out of his van in the area of Howe Avenue and Hurley Way, the sheriff’s department said.

He is 5 feet, 6 inches tall, 175 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes, and is known to frequent recycling businesses.

Hensley is a white, 5-foot-5 and about 140 pounds, with blonde hair and blue eyes.

Anyone with information on Hensley’s whereabouts is asked to call the Sheriff’s Department at (916) 874-5115.

The streamlining announced Wednesday represents HP’s largest payroll purge in its 73-year history. The reductions will affect about 8 percent of HP’s nearly 350,000 employees by the time the overhaul is completed in October 2014. The company, which has a big campus in Roseville, didn’t specify from where the cuts would come.

The cuts come eight months after HP hired Meg Whitman as CEO to turn the company around.

HP hopes to avoid as many layoffs as possible by offering early retirement packages.

The company expects to save $3 billion to $3.5 billion annually from the job cuts and other austerity measures.

Word of the mass layoff had leaked out in media reports late last week, so the news didn’t come as a surprise.

Nevertheless, the sobering details overshadowed the release of HP’s latest quarterly results. Although HP’s earnings and revenue declined from a year ago, the numbers were better than analysts had projected. HP also delivered another pleasant surprise by offering a forecast that raised hopes that HP may be poised to bounce back.

“While I wouldn’t say we have turned the corner, we are making real progress,” Whitman told analysts during a conference call.

Echoing comments she made three months ago, Whitman cautioned that “turning HP around is going to be a lot of hard work. It’s going to take time. But we know what needs to be done.”

Investors were pleased, although it wasn’t clear whether their glee had more to do with the cost-cutting or the company’s performance during its fiscal second quarter, which ended in April.

HP shares surged $1.97, or more than 9 percent, to $23.05 in Wednesday’s extended trading. That’s still about half their value before HP parted ways with Mark Hurd, a cost-costing specialist who stepped down in 2010 amid a scandal revolving around the nature of his relationship with a former actress who worked as an HP contractor. An investigation into it uncovered inaccurate expense reports.

The current troubles at HP have been traced both to Hurd, who cut research and development to boost profits, and his successor, Leo Apotheker, who didn’t respond to the threat posed by a shift to computing on smartphones and tablets.

Whitman’s plan calls for less bureaucracy so the company can respond more quickly to customer needs. She also wants to boost research and development to spur more innovation.

HP, which is based in Palo Alto, has been struggling to sell more personal computers and printers, partly because they aren’t needed as much now that people are spending so much time surfing the Web on phones and tablets such as Apple Inc.’s iPad. The company’s efforts to sell more business software and consulting services have been stymied by competition from the likes of IBM Corp. and Oracle Corp.

“Work force reductions are never easy,” Whitman said Wednesday. “They adversely impact people’s lives, but in this case, they are absolutely critical to the long-term health of the company. Our goal is simple: a better outcome for the customers at reduced cost for HP.”

Whitman plans to funnel most of the savings from the job cuts into product development. Some of the extra cash will go toward boosting HP’s earnings, too.

HP’s workforce has undergone several other reorganizations during the past decade. Two of the biggest occurred during Hurd’s regime. HP announced 14,500 job cuts in 2005 in one of his first big acts as CEO. HP also announced 24,600 cuts in 2008 after buying technology consulting service EDS for $13.9 billion.

HP did not say where the latest cuts would come from. HP is combining its printers and PCs division, which could reduce some overhead.

As part of the latest crackdown, Whitman is changing the leadership at HP’s recently acquired Autonomy division, which makes software that finds and analyzes data within companies and government agencies.

Bill Veghte, HP’s chief strategy officer, is replacing Autonomy founder Mike Lynch in an effort to boost the division’s financial performance. The shake-up is likely to amplify investor questions about whether HP blundered last year when it paid $11 billion to buy Autonomy. That deal was announced in August by Apotheker, just a month before he was fired.

Whitman told analysts she still believes the Autonomy acquisition was smart.

The company earned $1.6 billion, or 80 cent per share, in the February-April quarter. That represented a 31 percent decline from $2.3 billion, or $1.05 per share, at the same time last year.

If not for several items unrelated to HP’s ongoing business, the company said it would have earned 98 cents per share. That figure topped the average estimate of 91 cents per share among analysts surveyed by FactSet.

Revenue fell 3 percent from last year to $30.7 billion. That was about $800 million above analyst projections.

To pay for severance and other restructuring costs, HP expects to take a pre-tax charge of about $1.7 billion in the current fiscal year, which ends in October. About $1 billon of those charges will come in the current quarter ending in July. HP expects to take charges of an additional $1.8 billion through fiscal 2014.

The company also expects to register a charge of $1.2 billion to account for the declining value of the Compaq computer brand. HP bought Compaq a decade ago in a deal that many shareholders, including the son of a company founder William Hewlett, tried to block.

(Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.)