The winter of 2014 continues to break records in West Virginia.The National Weather Service says a blast of arctic air on Tuesday broke low temperature…
The winter of 2014 continues to break records in West Virginia.
The National Weather Service says a blast of arctic air on Tuesday broke low temperature records for March 4 in Wheeling, Morgantown, Elkins and Lewisburg.
In Elkins, the temperature dropped to minus-10 degrees. The previous record was minus-7 degrees in 1996.
Lewisburg recorded minus-2 degrees, breaking the previous record of 5 degrees in 1996.
The temperature in Morgantown fell to 1 degree, breaking a record that had stood since 1972. The previous record was 4 degrees.
Wheeling recorded 2 degrees on Tuesday. The previous record was 10 degrees in 2002.
On Wednesday, Wheeling tied its record for March 5 with a low temperature of 14 degrees.
An arctic blast in January also broke cold temperature records across the state.
The Senate recently passed the “Move to Improve Act” which could change the daily grind in state classrooms. The bill is in response to the Healthy…
The Senate recently passed the “Move to Improve Act” which could change the daily grind in state classrooms. The bill is in response to the Healthy Lifestyles Act, which was passed by the legislature in 2005 without a mechanism to assure implementation. Lawmakers say they’re trying to address an epidemic of childhood obesity in West Virginia.
Children and teens spend more than half of their waking hours at school.
West Virginia has some of the highest rates of the highest-cost health problems related to obesity and physical inactivity such as type 2 diabetes and obesity-related cancers.
About 33 percent of children age 10 to 17 in the state are overweight or obese according to a national survey taken between 2011 and 2012.
Senate majority leader John Unger is one of the main sponsors for Senate Bill 455. It would mandate 30 minutes of physical activity three days a week in elementary schools.
It’s meant to help address the growing health problem and possibly save the state some cash.
The bill states that in West Virginia, the direct medical cost of obesity was $8.9 million in 2009.
In elementary schools, some teachers say the transition would be simple.
Mercer County Kindergarten Teacher Billie Wood says she already uses movement in her lessons and it’s the way to go.
“We put motions to songs we’ll do Vimeo with the smart board where they actually get up and move and dance and it’s surprising how fast they learn with movement,” Wood said.
Wood says she also uses ‘old time records’ like Whip Hap Palmer to help children in her classroom move to the educational beat, and she often joins them in the dance.
Still a lack of resources, pressure to increase test scores, and even age create challenges. Elementary students are generally easier to motivate with physical activity during a lesson than say a middle school or high school student.
But science teacher Edward Evans is finding a way. His students keep moving – frequently walking around to different stations for lab.
“Is it challenging, yea,” Evans said. “Is it doable, absolutely. It’s just a matter of creative scheduling.”
The bill requires middle-school students to attend at least one full period of physical education per day with 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity.
High school students would need one full course of physical education for graduation and would have the opportunity to enroll in an elective lifetime physical education course.
West Virginia Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers in West Virginia have both supported the bill.
The West Virginia company at the center of a January chemical spill is hiring experts to preserve emails and phone records for ongoing investigations.
Freedom Industries will pay Vestige Ltd. about $42,500 to maintain electronic evidence, which is needed for a U.S. Attorney’s Office investigation and other chemical spill inquiries.
Freedom attorney Steve Thompson says the data firm started collecting information around Feb. 1, when the U.S. Attorney’s Office was issuing grand jury subpoenas. Judge Ronald Pearson approved Freedom’s request in bankruptcy court Tuesday.
Thompson says some records are with former Freedom executives.
Court documents show the company’s environmental cleanup bill topped $911,000 in January. Freedom expected another $1.7 million in environmental costs from mid-February to mid-March.
Freedom’s Jan. 9 spill contaminated drinking water for 300,000 people for days.
Northfork has been on a boil water advisory since July 2013, even longer than the folks in neighboring Wyoming County in Bud/Alpoca. It’s the seventh boil water advisory since 2009. Some residents in higher elevations have gone more than five weeks without water in their homes. But like in Alpoca, once again, part of the problem is an outdated water treatment system.
The latest boil water advisory for about 180 customers on the town’s water system was issued after the filter basically stopped working.
Credit Jessica Lilly
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The water system is located inside a cinder-block building in Northfork along the Elkhorn Creek River.
Credit Jessica Lilly
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To cope, worker Larry Porterfield (far right) says they flush the system about every other day which causes pressure to drop.
“That’s what they recommend but now we have to do it every other day because the filtration material has got to its limit where it’s not working any more,” Porterfield said. “So we need to replace that and that will filter the water better.”
The rust runs deep inside the two story cinder block building. Upstairs is access to two water filters.
Credit Jessica Lilly
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The gauge read a high reading on this day.
The workers say that the water comes from a deep well under the building. The water is fed to a tank on a hill and then flows back to the pump-house to be filtered, put in a clear well and finally pumped to customers.
Downstairs Porterfield shows me the pressure reading. On this day, it was high.
“Everybody should be having good pressure,” Porterfield said, “but like when the pressure goes down to 60 sometimes 40 and folks on the higher elevations don’t have any water.”
Flushing combined with a bitter cold winter, several private busted pipes, and almost constantly running water to keep pipes from freezing creates very low pressure at times.
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The access port for the filter discharge to the finished water clear well.
Northfork worker Joe Gadberry says finding and fixing underground leaks is another challenge.
"We basically create miracles with what we got," Gadberry said. "What we got is we maintain to make we got water. It would be nice to have a backhoe but most of the times we dig it by hand."
To top it off, the main meter that measures the amount of water leaving the pumphouse, is broken.
Inside the building to the right of the metal stairs, a large pipe runs parallel to the ground. The pipe eventually curves through the floor. At the bend, sits a meter covered in what appears to be a mixture of moisture, rust and corrosion. I ask Porterfield about it.
At city hall, I find city Councilman Curtis Spencer, who also serves as chairman of the water board.
“It’s an old system,” Spencer said. “We’re just trying to make it last until the PSD come down but there’s not definite date when they going to be here.”
Credit Jessica Lilly
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The main water meter is broken.
Northfork will eventually be a part of the Elkhorn Water Project. The project is broken down into four phases with plans to pick up old coal camp towns along route 52 starting just past the Mercer/McDowell line where a new water plant will be located. The initial waterline will be installed from there through Maybeury, and eventually ending up in Northfork Hollow.
Bids for Phase one go out this month and construction is expected to be complete after one year. Phase two, which is still at least two years away, is expected to bring a dependable clean water supply to Northfork. The McDowell County Public Service District has been working to coordinate the project as quickly as possible. Executive Director Mavis Brewster says it just takes time.
“A lot of times with the residents they don’t understand the process,” she said. “They just have a need for the water and they don’t understand all the hoops that you have to jump through.”
“But it’s so rewarding once you see those residents actually having good safe quality water that they’ve never had before.”
Brewster says the biggest challenge is securing funding. She hopes Small Cities Block grants will pay for phase two.
The water board was created late December 2013 to make improvements to the system and collect on delinquent accounts. Board president Curtis Spencer says about 40 percent of the customers have stopped paying their bills.
“Some of them can’t,” he said. “The town has been real lenient with them. We’re getting to the place where we just going to have to get tough on them.”
Phase two is dependent upon an election in neighboring Keystone. The town has to tie into the PSD in order to move the project along.
Rocket Girls and Astro-nettes is the story of women in the ultimate Man’s World – the labs and Shuttle crew cabins of NASA.
Catch the broadcast Thursday March 12 at 9 pm.
Told in the first person, these stories explore the experiences of NASA’s first woman engineers and scientists and its first astronauts. It also tells the fascinating story of a group of women pilots who – in the early 1960s – were led to believe that they would be America’s first women astronauts and were given the exact same physical tests are the Mercury astronauts.
The program is narrated by Eileen Collins, the first woman commander of a Space Shuttle
But for several towns in rural West Virginia, going without clean water is a way of life.
We’ve followed the story about the folks in Bud/Alpoca, an area of Wyoming County that remains on a boil water advisory that’s been in effect since September. There the water runs different shades of brown that stains clothes.
Across the border in McDowell County you’ll find several more communities coping with limited access to clean water.
Northfork has been on a boil water advisory since July 2013 yet, the situation hasn’t merited much attention or a state of emergency.
Including the active advisory, the town of about 180 customers has been on seven boil water advisories since 2009, some lasting for months. It’s been an ongoing issue for years.
“I know this is not how it’s supposed to be,” Northfork resident Micole Bright said. “This is like a third world country or something.”
Bright welcomes me into her home and explains that the white plastic buckets stacked at the door are for holding water. The family has to be prepared for the next time they go without water.
Another stack of plastic containers are piled in the hallway just outside the bathroom. This stack is to flush the toilets.
You see- here the biggest challenge is having water at all.
“The water goes off pretty often and it stays off for about last time was 27 days,” Bright said. “It’s real hard with the kids going to school and cleaning and washing clothes and cooking and doing dishes it’s just real hard.”
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Micole Bright lives in a Northfork home at the end of the service lines. She loses water service when while other residents don’t. Still the dated water system creates outages for the entire town.
Bright says this time she lost water on January 13 and it remained off for more than five weeks. Bright says she tries not to bother the folks at city hall too much. Bright only calls after the water service has been out for three or four days. Some residents don’t call at all.
The water system operated by the town of Northfork, is outdated, and the filter needs to be replaced. So employees have to flush the system about every other day, causing the pressure to drop especially for customers like Bright who live at higher elevations.
“It just seems like sometimes when you live in a place like this you’re not heard as well as you would be if you were somewhere else in a different town or something like that,” Bright said. “Here it’s like, OK you’re in Northfork, so what? You’re in McDowell County what do you expect.That kind of attitude.”
Water for Northfork will eventually come from the McDowell County Public Service District but that’s not expected to happen for years. The PSD is phasing in an expansion of service and Northfork is part of the second phase. Bids for phase one go out this month.
In the meantime, Northfork residents remain without access to clean water and on a boil water advisory.
