Here is preliminary information regarding an aircraft incident that occurred this morning in the vicinity of Jasper County Airport.
6:52 am cdt- Call from Chicago Center asking if an aircraft made it on the ground. They cleared an aircraft to make an instrument approach and haven’t heard back from the aircraft. We did not have the aircraft on the ground at the airport.
7:04 am cdt- Call from 911 dispatch asking if we were expecting an aircraft and that a report of a possible crash behind Dollar General came in.
7:10 am cdt- I arrived to find police, sheriff, fire, and ems on scene. They confirmed 1 injured person was on board and was being transported to a hospital.
7:23 am cdt- FAA field office was contacted
7:28 am cdt- NTSB was contacted
No other information is available at this time. All other updates will come from City of Rensselaer and Rensselaer Fire Department.
I went to the area and found three police cars parked at the west end of Vine Street. Faintly visible through the heavy fog in a field about a third of mile to the north was what looked like a backhoe. I took a few pictures but as you can see, they do not show much.
The Rensselaer City Council met Monday evening. It approved the gas tracker reduction of a bit under 4¢ per hundred cubic feet before moving on to the pole rental contract with NITCO. The price of pole rental remains the same and the main change was that NITCO will extend service to Brookside Park. That will add $75 to the City's monthly bill but it will add a link from the security cameras there to the Police Department.
Next up was a discussion of the Safe Halloween Event, otherwise known as trunk or treat. It will continue to be held at the Fair Grounds and the best night, the one that does not conflict with other rental events at the Fair Grounds, is a Sunday night. This year Halloween falls on a Saturday, so the Safe Halloween Event organizers asked the City Council to declare that trick-or-treat hours will be from 5-8 on October 25. The Council approved the last Sunday of October to be the trick-or-treat day for Rensselaer for 2020 to 2022. The event spends about $2500 for candy each year and received about $900 from a bar-stool golf event. The Council gave them $250 from the public relations fund.
Rock the Arts wants to move from Potawatomi Park this year and have the festival as part of Mural Week. It will be held on July 4, which is a Saturday, and the location will be the alley between Front Street and Van Rensselaer Street. It was unclear exactly how much of Front and Van Rensselaer Streets would need to be closed as well, so the Council approved the request to close alley and streets pending review and approval by the City's Project Coordinator, Jerry Lockridge.
The Fire Department has finished compiling the specs for a new aerial truck and requested permission from the Council to get bids or quotes. The Council approved. The Council also approved a motion to allow the Police Department to commit to helping the Sheriff's Department purchase new dispatch software. The City is required to file a wastewater budget with either a state or federal entity by March 1 and it has done so. The Council approved the budget it submitted.
Clean-up week will be May 4-9 and the town-wide garage sale will be May 2. Pipeline awareness and the Gas Department open house will be May 1. A topic for the next meeting will be well-head protection.
Tuesday night saw another City meeting, this of the Rensselaer Board of Zoning Appeals. The topic of the meeting was a conditional use application for cat and dog boarding on land located near the theater in the Drexel Industrial Park. Apparently the zoning code is not clear about what veterinary services are allowed on this land given its zoning, so to make sure there are no problems in the future, the issue was brought to the BZA. The petitioner, Dr Mallory, currently operates a veterinary clinic on North Cullen with pet boarding. She would like to move the clinic and eventually the boarding to this site. The zoning allows the clinic, but she does not want to build unless she can also in the future add a boarding facility. The item passed unanimously.
There will be another BZA and probably also a Planning Committee meeting on April 14 that will deal with something that is Fire Department related
I noticed a new sign going up on what was Fiesta Salons in the College Mall. It will now be a SuperCuts. SuperCuts is a franchise and Fiesta Salons may also be.
I have begun to moderate all comments left on this blog because I am getting far more spam comments than legitimate comments. (Nine comments have been posted since Feb 24 and all have been spam.) The spam seems to be part of search engine optimization: pages that have the more sites linking to them get displayed before similar pages with fewer sites linking to them. So I am getting links put in the comments that direct people to pages in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and other places that have no possible connection to the topics this blog writes about. I encourage comments, but you will not see your comment immediately appear because I am hoping that moderation will kill off most of the spam. You probably never see it because I delete it immediately when I see it. But it usually stays up for a few hours. Now it will never appear. I am sorry for the inconvenience that this may cause to legitimate comments.
UPDATE: Below is a picture of the plane from Vine Street. There is one spot along the street where a small hill does not obscure the view.
Update 2: More on the crash from the Rensselaer Republican here.
2 comments:
I stopped in R&M this afternoon, Wednesday, and bought some bacon and steaks. The shelves were still being emptied, but the meat and dairy aisles were well stocked. I shall miss them. The clerk said that business had been declining for a while, but the daily traffic has dropped off even more since the fire took out the businesses across the street.
I hope they rethink having Rock the Arts in the alley. We have a park and they should use it! Some businesses don’t care to have crowds of people around their buildings.
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