Sunday, April 24, 2011
EKB Capsule News...West Virginia...4-25-'11
- Police say Stacey Nicole Wilson, 27, from Victor in Fayette County, was reported missing on Friday night after her car had gotten stuck in a muddy area and she left on foot. Her vehicle was found Friday night. On Saturday, tracking dogs and an aviation team located Wilson's body in the Gauley River under some steep rock cliffs near Jodie. An autopsy is scheduled for Monday.
Saturday, strong storms moved through several counties in West Virginia. Several storage units in the Lowe's parking lot on Corridor G in Charleston were picked up by wind and thrown several feet in a restaurant parking lot where about a dozen vehicles sustained damage. A high voltage power line stopped traffic on Interstate 77 in Jackson County Saturday evening when the line fell across all four lanes heading north and south. At 10:30 P.M., Appalachian Power Company was reporting more 12,000 customers without service in West Virginia, more than 8,000 in Kanawha County. Allegheny Power Company was reporting several hundred outages Saturday night in central and northern counties.
- David Sparks, a work release inmate who escaped from the Greenup County Detention Center Thursday was caught Sunday after Cabell County Sheriff’s Deputies received a tip that Sparks was staying at the Red Roof Inn next door to the Days Inn on Rt. 60 in Huntington. By the time Deputies searched the Red Roof Inn, Sparks had checked in at the Days Inn. Three women, Debbie Johnson, Holly Ployer and Stefani Tucker, were arrested along with Sparks. Johnson was charged with aiding Sparks' escape in Greenup County. Ployer and Tucker were charged with misdemeanors of being accessories after the fact.
- John King, the longtime director of operations for the West Virginia Regional Jail and Correctional Facility Authority, was arrested around 3:30 A.M. Sunday morning on aggravated DUI charges. According to the criminal complaint, police got a tip that a man was intoxicated at the McDonald's on Jefferson Road. When officers responded, they found King in a car with his foot on the break and the car turned on. The complaint states that King had a strong odor of alcohol on him, and he failed three sobriety tests. Charleston police say King rendered a .239 BAC during a sobriety test. King is a state official tasked with overseeing operations at West Virginia's 10 regional jails. He has been released on bond.
The Sierra Club of West Virginia is criticizing a West Virginia University program aimed at teaching communities about Marcellus shale drilling because it receives funding from the natural gas industry. The program received $50,000 each from Chesapeake and Dominion and $25,000 from EQT. The Sierra Club of West Virginia says the program does not give participants enough information about the environmental damage caused by drilling. The West Virginia Oil and Natural Gas Association organized funding for the program and helped train some of the people involved in the information sessions, but Sierra Club Outreach Coordinator Chuck Wyrostok says the presentations are not inaccurate, but that they leave out certain aspects of Marcellus drilling. Wyrostok says there's a lot of error by omission, and it doesn't deal with the problems of Marcellus drilling at all.
# posted by Homer Owens @ 9:48 PM 
