A truck hitting a utility pole anchor, breaking the pole and shorting out the electric lines triggered a major outage Wednesday morning affecting several industrial and commercial locations in Falconer.
Spokeswoman Becky Robbins with the Jamestown Board of Public Utilities says the truck hit the anchor, and broke the pole about 9:45 a.m. at the corner of Dow and Allen Streets.
Robbins says the power outage impacted SKF Aerospace, Truck-Lite, Schwann, Jones-Carroll, Kingsview Paving and others. She says electricity to South Dow Street customers was restored in about an hour. All remaining customers had power back by about 11:30 a.m.
The New York Air National Guard is deploying more resources to Texas to help out with the response to Harvey's record-breaking flooding.
New York officials say a search and rescue aircraft carrying 15 airmen from the 106th Rescue Wing was headed to Fort Hood in Texas on Tuesday. A regional medical plans officer will head to Texas on Thursday to help with the evacuation and transportation of patients from local hospitals. This is in addition to the 104 Airmen already dispatched to the area along with rescue helicopters and watercraft.
The city of Houston has set a new single-storm rainfall record for the continental U-S with more than 50 inches of rain due to Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey.
That's a lot more than the heaviest rainfall amounts ever recorded in Western New York. That from Forecaster Jon Hitchcock with the National Weather Service in Buffalo who says the wettest 5-day period in Western New York resulted from the remnants of Hurricane Agnes in 1972.
Hitchcock says some locations including Olean and Wellsville had upwards of 13-inches of rain. He says Wellsville had a record 13.9-inches from Agnes.
Hitchcock says 50 inches of rainfall in such a short-time in Western New York is not likely because we are not in a tropical environment right off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Still, the remnants of Agnes caused some of the worst flooding in recorded history across parts of the Southern Tier including Olean, Elmira and Corning.
We are expected to get some rain from the remnants of Harvey by late next weekend.
The price of gasoline in the Jamestown-area has risen sharply late yesterday at some gasoline stations with a number of refineries in southeastern Texas shut-down due to Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey.
While the price had stayed steady the past few days it's gone up 9 to 10 cents a gallon since yesterday morning at some service stations.
The AAA's Fuel Gauge Report said the average price yesterday was still about $2.44 cents a gallon. During the lunch hour we had a chance to check some prices in the area and, some had already gone up to $2.53 and $2.54 a gallon while a few others were still at $2.44 a gallon for regular, unleaded.
Nationally the price was up four-cents to $2.37 a gallon as of late Monday.
Local Congressman Tom Reed has signed-on as a co-sponsor of legislation proposed by another member of the House from western New Yorker he says would guarantee American's second-amendment rights.
The Corning Republican adds that the Second Amendement Guarantee Act would also make New York's controverial SAFE Act null-and-void.
The Corning Republican said Tuesday that he has signed onto the legislation authored by Clarence Republican Chris Collins.
Reed says he believes the issue of gun violence can be addressed in other ways than restricting gun rights and, the focus needs to be on mental health and, violent criminal activity. He has often discussed the need to deal with Mental Illness issues better as opposed to limiting access to guns. He calls this a protective measure and feels that an attack against citizen's Second-Amendment is "not the right way" to go.
The SAFE Act otherwise known as the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement Act was proposed by Governor Cuomo in 2013 in the wake of the mass shooting deaths of more than two-dozen people, mostly young children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. So far it has withstood court challenges.
Chautauqua County Executive Vince Horrigan has now held the first two of three public hearings on a county-wide shared services plan.
Horrigan held the first hearing at the Fredonia Technology Incubator in Dunkirk and, the second was last night at the county's EMS Office in Mayville. He says turnout was light for the first one but there was generally positive feedback about a proposal to look at the consolidation of the County's court system from those involved. He says people want some more information though.
Horrigan says he is outlining the current proposals they have and, the final hearing will be tonight in Jamestown at the BWB Building on West Third Street. Horrigan says it'll begin in the second-floor conference room at 6:30 p.m.
