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September 2006
Gas leak contained that closed Ga. 92
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A gas leak near Ga. 92 and Bascomb Road in Woodstock was finally contained at 4:20 p.m.
A section of Ga. 92 that had been closed for five hours reopened when the leak was contained with a cap.
The gas leak, which occurred after a construction crew struck a gas main, happened at 11:15 p.m. About 100 people were evacuated from a nearby shopping center and 9 or 10 houses.
“Everything’s back to normal,” said Lt. Dan King, public information officer for the Woodstock Police.
Gwinnett intersection reopens
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gwinnett firefighters and utility crews have repaired a gas leak at the busy intersection of Pleasant Hill Road and Old Norcross Road.
The cutting of the 6-inch line apparently was caused by a construction crew.
The intersection reopened around 3 p.m.
Three businesses, including Atlanta Toyota and Eckerd Drugs, were evacuated, according to reports. No injuries were reported early Tuesday afternoon.
Gas crews dug in three locations to repair the cut in the line, according to the Gwinnett County Fire Department.
Pleasant Hill closed near Gwinnett Place
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A major Gwinnett County intersection was expected to be shut down for much of the afternoon Tuesday while crews worked to repair a punctured gas main.
The six-inch main under Pleasant Hill Road at Old Norcross Road near Gwinnett Place mall was cut at about noon by a construction crew.
Gwinnett fire Lt. Thomas Rutledge said Atlanta Gas Light crews were on the scene for an “extended operation.
“The line is a three-directional feed and will require them to dig in three separate locations,” Rutledge said. No injuries were reported, he said.
Firefighters had evacuated Atlanta Toyota and a nearby Eckerd Drugs.
Voter photo ID law dead for 2006
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Photo ID will not be required to vote in the Nov. 7 general election.
The state election board voted Friday to appeal Tuesday’s ruling by Fulton Superior Court Judge Jackson Bedford that voided current state law, but not until after the general election.
The law, pushed by Republicans as a ballot security measure, would have required voters to show one of six forms of government-issued photo ID at the polls, including a driver’s license, military ID or passport.
But a coalition of groups led by Common Cause Georgia challenged the law in federal court, claiming that the photo ID requirement poses an unnecessary burden on the right to vote, particularly to elderly, poor, disabled and minority voters. Emmet Bondurant, a Common Cause lawyer, argued in federal court that those groups often lack the education or mobility required to get such an ID.
Former Gov. Roy Barnes, back to practicing law, made similar arguments in Judge Bedford’s court, claiming the photo ID law violates the state Constitution.
Overpass sitter had climbed out of bus
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Northbound lanes of I-85 through midtown Atlanta were shut down for more than an hour Thursday after a woman jumped out a bus window and crossed several lanes of traffic before threatening to jump from an overpass, police said.
The incident began about 8:15 a.m., and ended about 9:30, when police took the woman into custody.
Atlanta police spokesman James Polite said the woman, who appeared to be in her late 40s or early 50s, was on a Greyhound bus that had originated in Nashville.
The bus was in stop-and-go rush hour traffic when the woman went into the Greyhound’s restroom, and then jumped out the restroom window, Polite said.
The woman crossed several lanes of traffic, then straddled the concrete wall along I-85 northbound, on the overpass over the I-75 southbound HOV lane.
Police negotiators were called to the scene, and about 9:30 were able to take the woman, who said she wanted to talk to her daughter and mother, into custody, Polite said. She was taken to Grady Memorial Hospital for an examination, but did not appear to be injured.
Polite said a “large collection of empty medication bottles” was found in the woman’s purse. He said reckless conduct charges were pending against the woman, whose identity had not been determined.
Traffic on the northbound Downtown Connector backed up about 8 miles, to Langford Parkway, according to John Stansberry, a spokesman for the state Department of Transportation.
The southbound HOV lane on I-75 was also shut down while police negotiated with the woman on the bridge overhead.
Peachtree Street to close at night
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A portion of Peachtree Street in Midtown will be closed overnight on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday as part of Atlanta’s replacement of the water main along Peachtree Street.
Traffic will be limited to one lane in each direction from 10:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. while the city’s contractor transfers water service from old pipes to new ones.
This is the schedule: Wednesday: Between 4th and 6th streets. Thursday: Between 6th and 7th streets. Sunday: Between Peachtree Place and 11th Street.
Motorists and pedestrians are requested to avoid the construction zone or to use extreme caution while going through it.
Water main break shuts Peachtree Road
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A 12-inch water main break shut down a stretch of busy Peachtree Road in Buckhead at the height of the evening rush hour Tuesday.
The break, in front of the InterContinental Buckhead hotel, has prompted officials to close Peachtree Road between Piedmont Avenue and Lenox Road, while they try to locate the valve to shut off the water.
Janet Ward, spokeswoman for Atlanta’s Watershed Management Department, said a crew had been working on a gas line in the area for the last several months. The work was completed, and the contractors were filling back the hole when a backhoe punctured the water main.
“Right now, we don’t know how bad the break is. We’re trying to isolate the valve to get it turned off,” Ward said.
Officials could not immediately say how long it would take to turn off the water or how many businesses or residences in the area might be affected.
Weeping cherry tree emblematic of mood
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For about 20 minutes Monday, the lawn of Snellville’s City Hall seemed not so far away from Ground Zero.
Marking the 5th anniversary of a war that still is being fought, about 150 people solemnly observed the date in a ceremony filled with symbols of loss and remembrance.
A color guard was led by a riderless horse with a firefighter’s boot backwards in the stirrup.
A monument honoring all those who died in the terrorist attacks was rededicated, after being moved from the old City Hall building.
A firefighter, a police officer, and a civilian planted a weeping cherry tree.
Draped from a fire truck, a 24X14-foot American flag billowed like a full sail in the breeze.
Snellville Mayor Jerry Oberholtzer said it was appropriate that people all over America stopped briefly to consider the tragedies and the lessons of 9/11.
“9/11 has become common ground for all of us,” Oberholtzer said. Just about every American can recall their experience of that day. “Everyone can answer the questions “Where was I? How did I find out.”
One of the heroes of the 9/11 aftermath, Gwinnett County firefigher Jimmy Cook, participated in the tree planting. Cook arrived at Ground Zero on the day after the attacks, and he spent the next two weeks working there in the rescue efforts.
It is still difficult to talk about his experience, Cook said. “It was very overwhelming,” he said. One thing he does remember is that he got little or no sleep in that time.
Now, five years later, Cook said he would like to see American flags flying from every home.
“I just hope nobody has forgotten,” Cook said.
Permalink | Categories: 9/11 Anniversary
Liberty Elementary marks anniversary
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
More than 1,400 Liberty Elementary students dressed in red, white and blue took time Monday morning to sing patriotic songs and remember Sept. 11, 2001.
The Cherokee County school, which opened in 2002, was named in honor of the Sept. 11 victims.
Before the moment of silence at 8:46 a.m., Principal Karen Hawley asked her students to think about how their llives have changed in the last five years.
“Think about what you were doing five years ago,” she said. And Hawley encouraged the children to “look for the good in people.
“I want you to be the kind of people who love mankind.”
During the ceremony, Hawley read a proclamation from President George Bush and Assistant Principal Beth Long read a book called “September 12th: We Knew Everything Would Be All Right.” And music teacher Dan Detweiler directed 200 fifth-graders in singing “American Tears,” “This Day of Peace” and “America the Beautiful.”
Cherokee County Sheriff Roger Garrison skipped the official county remembrance to attend the school event.
“I love being with the kids. I’ve been here several times (for Sept. 11),” Garrison said. “I appreciate that they take time to pay respect for the police officers and firefighters who lost their lives. Our struggle for freedom in this country is a continuous battle.”
Permalink | Categories: 9/11 Anniversary
Ft. Mac official remembers Pentagon attack
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Five years later, the “shock and awe” of terrorist attack on the Pentagon still resonates with 911 survivor Randolph Flisak.
Flisak, who was in a Pentagon office just 17 windows from where a hijacked jetliner hit, said the confusion, cries for help from the injured, and his inability to assist remains fresh in his memory.
The Deputy Director of the Army Reserve Internal Review shared his story during a special program held at Fort McPherson commemorating the tragedy that took nearly 3,000 lives at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.; World Trade Centers in New York; and in Shanksville, Pa.
Flisak, who is currently based at Fort McPherson, said he was on special assignment at the Pentagon when the attack occurred.
A staffer, he said, initially suggested that the blast was from a building boiler, but he thought otherwise.
The full scope of the terrorist plot on the nation didn’t become fully clear to him until after he and other survivors were evacuated to a nearby Macy’s Department store, Flisak said.
“I tried to tell myself that this was a move and we were actors,” Flisak told about 400 civilian and military personnel in attendance. “It didn’t work. This was real.”
In commemoration of the lives lost, Flisak wore the same charcoal suit, white shirt, blue and grey necktie and black wingtip shoes he had on five years ago Monday — minus the soot and ash from the burning Pentagon.
The 911 survivor urged the nation to “be engaged and stay engaged,” be thankful and resolved in the fight for justice and peace.
Permalink | Categories: 9/11 Anniversary
Atlanta protesters assail Bush
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A crowd of about 80 protesters brought an array of signs and occasional touches of guerrilla theatre as they lined South Cobb Drive for almost two hours Thursday morning to denounce the Iraq war and President Bush’s speech on combating terrorism at the Cobb Galleria.
The group included nine people clad in bright orange prison jumpsuits and four protesters had covered their heads with black hoods to symbolize detainees held in the war against terror.
Justin Carter of Atlanta, a sophomore at Georgia State University, said he was wearing a prisoner’s outfit “to try and bring attention to detainees being held all over the world on bogus charges.”
Four of the protesters had covered their heads with black hoods to symbolize detainees held in the war against terror.
“U.S. out of the Middle East! No justice, no peace!” chanted protesters, accompanied by a dirge-like drum beat from a colleague. Deborah Cornelius and Julie Robertson donned male clothing and rubber masks and trod the sidewalk to mock the nation’s two top elected officials. Cornelius, a Decatur resident who grows plants for business and professional offices, posed as a grinning George Bush as she held a makeshift book labeled “My Pet Goat “ — the story the president was reading with a class of Florida school children when he was told of the 9/11 attack. She also carried an oil container labeled “Noble Cause Motor Oil.”
Robertson, an Atlanta artist, wore a Dick Cheney mask, complete with wire rimmed glasses, as she trailed behind Cornelius, controlling “Bush” with marionette strings. The protesters initially numbered about two dozen as they gathered aroud 9 a.m. along the sidewalk on the Cumberland Mall side of south Cobb Parkway. As the crowd grew, they were moved by Cobb Sheriff’s deputies to a public sidewalk near the Galleria’s entrance, well out of eyesight from seeing the president enter the Galleria. They were a long distance from where Bush would be entering the mall.
Passing traffic passing along South Cobb Drive proceeded without hindrance; a couple motorists blew their horns. occasional others flashed their lights. “This is a work day,” said Dianne Mathiowetz, of the International Action Center, Atlanta, and a veteran local activist “I believe everybody here represents 1,000, maybe 2,000 people who would love to join us, but they can’t. They have to work, and be paid substandard wages.
Also among the organizers of the protest was the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition and which has arranged several local peace demonstrations against the Iraq War.
But Mathiowetz added that Thursday’s protest was “not just to demand the troops come home now. “We want Bush to know he can’t go anywhere without meeting a majority of 60 percent in this country as long as he continues to send our men and women to kill and be killed in a senseless and brutal war,” she said.
“We’re trying to spread democracy around the world, and we’re losing here at home,” said Tim Franzen, a Marietta therapist for adolescent children as he counted the ten police cars parked along South Cobb Drive. “They need this many cops to watch us?”
Heather Barbour, an Atlanta elementary school teacher, supported a large banner with a picture of Bush that asked that “Got Fascism?” mocked the president’s characterization of the “war on terror” as a battle with radical Islamist “fascists.”
“He’s trying to tie it in with World War II, which was a unifying cause. But he has it wrong — his ‘war on terror’ is closer to Vietnam — it’s a war that can’t be won with anything that could be called ‘victory.’” Most of the signs mocked Bush and criticized the invasion of Iraq and warned against any military strike on Iran. Maxwell Goberman, however, carried a black, foam board coffin in memory of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. “The People of New Orleans — Victims treated as criminals and left for dead.”
“We let the people of New Orleans die and wait for rescue while the government did nothing —- now that’s bad management,” said Goberman. Most of the signs mocked Bush and criticized the invasion of Iraq and warned against any military strike on Iran. However, at least two were critical of Israel, alleging excessive use of force in Lebanon.
The protest folded their signs and banners around 10:40 a.m. “This is our decision to leave now,” said Mathiowetz. “We know Bush’s car isn’t going to pass us, and that doesn’t matter. We have made our point.”
Bush: Terrorists will face “unrelenting pressure”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
President George W. Bush told a crowd of about 600 in Cobb County Thursday that Americans are safer in the war on terror because of steps that his adminsitration has taken.
Bush, who gave his 30-minute address to an invited audience at the Cobb Galleria Center, billed his speech as “a progress report on the steps taken since 9/11 to protect our people.”
“In order to protect this country, we will keep steady pressure, unrelenting pressure, on Al Qaeda and its associates,” Bush said to applause during the speech.
The president landed at Dobbins Air Force Base at around 10 a.m. where he was met by Gov. Sonny Perdue. His motorcade then proceeded to the Cobb Galleria Center.
The president said the country “still faces determined enemies, and we will not be safe until those enemies are finally defeated.”
He issued a call for the country to stay the course in Iraq.
Recalling the memory of Army 1st Lt. Noah Harris of Ellijay, who died in in Iraq last year, Bush said to his greatest applause: “We will stay, we will fight, and we will win in Iraq.”
The speech was sponsored by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. Afterward, the president headed back to Dobbins, where he met the Little League World Series championship team from Columbus on an air strip before leaving aboard Air Force One shortly before noon.
The team gave the president a pair of baseballs, team caps and t-shirts signed by the team. On the back of the caps, they wrote “W” and “First Lady.”
The players all wore t-shirts of the team-color powder blue with red lettering on the front that bragged: “Columbus, Georgia, 2006 Little League World Series Champions.”
“This is an ultimate honor for them,” said Coach Randy Morris. “Only a select amount of people has the chance to meet the man who runs this country. For these 12-year-olds to win the championship, to meet the president, is a dream for them.”
Before his address, a crowd of about 70 antiwar protesters gathered outside the mall.
The group included nine young men clad in bright orange prison jumpsuits.
Justin Carter of Atlanta, a sophomore at Georgia State University, said he was wearing a prisoner’s outfit “to try and bring attention to detainees being held all over the world on bogus charges.” Four of the protesters had covered their heads with black hoods to symbolize detainees held in the war against terror.
“U.S. out of the Middle East! No justice, no peace!” chanted protesters, beating on a drum.
The first protesters gathered on the sidewalk on the Cumberland Mall side of south Cobb Parkway. As the crowd grew, they were moved by Cobb Sheriff’s deputies to a public sidewalk near the Galleria’s entrance. They were a long distance from where Bush would be entering the mall.
The protest was organized by a number of antiwar, anti-Bush organizations. The umbrella organization is the Georgia Peace and Justice Coalition, which has arranged at least four local protests in recent months. It dispersed shortly before 11 a.m.
Diane Mathiowetz, of the International Action Center of Atlanta, a longtime activist, said the protest was “not just to demand the troops come home now.
“We want Bush to know he can’t go anywhere without meeting a majority of 60 percent in this country as long as he continues to send our men and women to kill and be killed in a senseless and brutal war,” she said.
Bush left Dobbins just before noon enroute to to Coastal Georgia to stump for Republican congressional candidate Max Burns, and arrived there about 12:45 p.m.
Burns, a former Screven County commissioner, was first elected to Congress in 2002 and is trying to regain his congressional seat lost to John Barrow, a Democrat, in the 2004 election. A crowd of about 500 gathered for the fundraiser at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Pooler, paying either $250, $500 or $4,200 a ticket.
Bush made remarks for about a half hour. His remarks ranged from flying on Air Force One with Perdue, “He’s the kind of guy, frankly, Texas voters would be comfortable with,” to No Child Left Behind, to the economy, to the war.
Bush said he understands that Americans are “troubled by the death and destruction they see on their television screen,” and that such compassion speaks well of the nation’s character. But if the country pulls out of Iraq now, Bush said, “we will have failed when history looks back. We will have said to our enemies, we will give you a victory. We will have said to our friends, you can’t count on us.”
The president recalled his recent trip to Graceland with Japan’s prime minister, noting such an event would have been unthinkable in the days after World War II.
“Liberty has the capacity to convert enemies into allies,” he said.
Staff writers Tom Baxter, Jennifer Brett and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Suspected shoplifter fires gun at Mall of Georgia
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Gunfire erupted in the parking lot of the Mall of Georgia Wednesday afternoon when five suspected shoplifters fled a department store.
No one was hurt in the melee, which took place outside Macy’s. Three suspects got away in a stolen SUV and were at large late Wednesday. Gwinnett police collared the other two at a nearby fast-food restaurant.
The five first went inside Dillard’s, where store employees recognized them as suspected shoplifters, said Det. Robert Rude, speaking for Gwinnett police. When the five headed toward Macy’s, Dillard’s employees called their counterparts at Macy’s, Rude said.
The five were inside Macy’s about 2:30 p.m. when store security workers “made their presence known,” Rude said. The five ran into the parking lot, chased by employees. One reached into a vehicle and pulled out a gun, police said.
He fired at least one shot, which hit the mall building, police said. The three jumped into a white, 2002 Mercury Mountaineer and squealed out of the parking lot. The Mountaineer, reported carjacked in Fulton County Friday, was last seen heading south toward Interstate 285, Rude said. Its Georgia license number, according to police: AII-1075.
Police found the other suspects hiding at McDonald’s. They told officers they are 16-years-old. Officers did not name them because of their age.
Police, meanwhile, continued searching for the SUV. The suspects are considered armed and dangerous.
AJC staff writer Mark Davis contributed to this story.
