Home Builder Developer - Interior Renovation and Design

Saturday morning
Tree removal equipment.

By: Stanley tree service inc

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Saturday morning - Video

SAFETY HARBOR| With a new moratorium on tree removal in place, the city is now focused on fine-tuning an ordinance that strengthens existing tree protection rules.

All city commissioners but Richard Blake this month voted to ban tree cuts through April 1 unless the updated ordinance is passed sooner. The proposed law would expand Safety Harbors authority beyond grand trees of a certain size to all trees within city limits.

Commissioners will discuss ordinance language during a City Hall workshop 6 to 8 p.m. Monday, with their regular meeting following.

Items on the regular meeting agenda include a proposed budget amendment that would restore $27,000 gleaned through a deferred hire, reduced health insurance costs and other savings to the Chamber of Commerce, Neighborly Care Network and Mattie Williams Neighborhood Family Center.

Controversy over reducing the funding during summer budget talks generated outcry from multiple residents and prompted two commissioners to vote against the 2015 budget.

Last month, local businessman Jim Barge presented a $1,000 check to the Mattie Williams center during a city meeting and publicly challenged residents to participate in a crowd-funding campaign in which he would match dollar-for-dollar all money raised up to $2,000. As of Tuesday, three weeks into the campaign, 28 contributors had donated $4,115. Barge, who researched the center's work after hearing residents' pleas during budget season and subsequently vowed to help raise awareness, said he plans to keep the challenge going through its Thanksgiving deadline.

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Safety Harbor to consider tree rules, outside agency funding

Paul Claas is an ordinary man with a not-so-ordinary dream -- to straighten wonky, wobbly Christmas trees.

Some people stay up at night worrying about whether they turned in their work on time or paid their mortgage before the deadline. For Claas, visions of unstable conifers have been dancing in his head for over 20 years.

That's when the 65-year-old DeForest resident and inventor of the Premier Christmas Tree Stand said "enough is enough" and designed his first prototype for his personal use.

"It was a very simple concept where you'd drill a hole up the trunk of the tree and set it on a peg," says Claas.

Two decades and several versions later, Claas is semi-retired from running a truck salvage business (tinkering and fixing are clearly in his DNA) and he is continuing to produce and sell his novel tree stands.

The current version, made out of sturdy metal (in red and green, of course) features metal "jaws" that hold the tree trunk in place. A couple of knobs can be turned for adjustments. The result is a much more secure tree, less likely to tilt or topple. It's easier to make adjustments, too, after the tree is in the stand, unlike with conventional models. A large container for water is detachable, which makes removal easier (and means fewer trips to re-hydrate the tree).

"Each Christmas tree stand is my baby," he says. "This is my passion."

The entrepreneur, despite his zeal for his Christmas creation, has sold only hundreds, not thousands, of the latest version of his tree stand. In fact, in 2000, he sold off his inventory and decided to close up shop until a reporter wrote about his product, and Premier Christmas Tree Stands was once more.

Although sales have been fairly low, Claas still believes wholeheartedly in his product. And his converted customers agree, according to reviews shared on his website.

"I'll never have to buy another stand, nor will I ever have to fight with putting up another Christmas tree!"

Link:
A DeForest man believes in his improved Christmas tree stand

Last week, the U.S. Forest Service released a report evaluating the effectiveness of fuel treatments during the Mountain Fire in July 2013.

The primary goal of the report was to assess the effect of the treatments on the fires behavior and intensity and their ability to improve fire suppression efforts near communities.

Our trends suggest that fuel treatments can facilitate suppression activities and potentially reduce fire behavior and fire effects, depending on the fire weather or conditions, the reports authors concluded. The more recent the treatment, the more likely it reduced fire severity or aided fire suppression.

The Forest Service studied areas that had received fuels treatments such as tree removal, mechanical thinning, pile burns and prescribed area burns. The period covered started in the mid-1990s, but most of the work was accomplished in the past decade. The study also examined the effect of two previous fires in or near the Mountain Fire area.

Fuelbreaks in or near the burned area were generally beneficial. However, the authors noted that in areas where the fuelbreaks near private land were connected to treatments on agency land, they were more likely to reduce the fires effects. Where this was not the case (e.g., around much of the Bonita Vista fuelbreak), the fire burned through untreated fuels on private land.

Forest Service investigators also observed a treatment shadow where the value of fuel treatments extended beyond their boundaries. These treatment shadow benefits included diminished fire behavior when it moved to untreated areas; reduced production of embers; and eased fire containment activities.

The fire severity data indicated that areas with taller pre-fire shrub cover tended to have the potential for higher substrate (soil) and vegetation (shrubs) burn severity.

Another conclusion important to efforts on the Hill was the recognition that coordinated efforts of private landowners and the Mountain Area Safety Task Force in completing fuels reduction projects helped save homes in the communities.

Everyone on the Hill should know that this analysis supports the basic principle that both we and the fire agencies have been acting on for years: reducing fuel around homes and the community increases the safety of both, said Mountain Communities Fire Safe Council President Mike Esnard. The report has other useful lessons for land managers in the design of fuel treatments, but overall it argues for the value of consistent fuel reduction in and around the mountain communities.

The area burned during the Apache Fire in 2008 was also less receptive to the devastation of the Mountain Fire. This reinforced the principal of fire as a natural fuel treatment process.

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Local fuel treatments help during big fires: Organizations performed work prior to Mountain Fire

30 minutes 54 seconds ago by Q2 News

BILLINGS - The owner of IHOP on the Billings West End is reviewing surveillance video after a person entered the restaurant and apparently tried to start a fire in the men's restroom.

Fire crews responded to the restaurant just before 7 a.m. Wednesday.

Owner Bob Llana said the restaurant was shut down momentarily while water around the restroom was cleaned up.

The restaurant reopened shortly after the cleanup.

Llana is not sure who caused the sprinkler system in the bathroom to go off, but he plans to review surveillance video and hand it over to the Billings Police Department.

He said nothing like this has happened at the restaurant before, and it appeared to be a random act.

"We handled it pretty quickly and took all the necessary steps," he said.

In the midst of the commotion, Llana said, the restaurant is celebrating the chain's highest operational assessment award for 2014.

He said they were reviewed and monitored on categories like food handling, preparation and cleanliness and scored perfect in all of the categories.

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Sprinkler system set off at IHOP

RICHLAND, WA- It is close to freezing outside and that can lead to some pretty big problems. This early cold snap has some companies in our area extremely busy. Now if you have not already, it is probably a good idea to take care of your sprinkler system.

Pat Mosley with Senske Systems said people should, "Definitely need to get their sprinklers blown out, absolutely. I mean this is such a critical time especially with this weather reaching below freezing now. If there is any water in their pipes it will crack, it will burst and the damages next year could be just tremendous."

Senkse Systems, one of the companies providing this service, said it is almost past their service season. They are still taking calls but have been working like crazy.

Jake Anderson called into Senkse and had his sprinkler system blown out. Anderson said he does it partly for, "The dog, she likes to enjoy the yard and she really likes it when its not all torn up. If we don't get the sprinklers blown out then the ice freezes in the pipes and we gotta fix them in the spring. It chews up all the grass."

Although Anderson told NBC Right Now he did not make his call too far in advance, Senske has been working on around 600 calls within the past few weeks. They have three crews at almost 20 sites a day.

Mosley said, "We're pretty busy because with this sudden cold weather, people are calling now because they don't want their pipes to freeze. We were thinking we would have kind of a milder winter, November month."

Now if you have not had your sprinklers blown out yet, Senske says the are taking a few more calls. Here are more options to check in with from area: -Craigslist search under "farm and garden services"

-Templeton Sprinkler Blowouts

-Tri-Cities Irrigation Landscape

-Quality Valve and Sprinkler

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Blow Out Your Sprinklers for Winter

Albany

Remington Arms Co. laid off 126 people at its Ilion factory in Herkimer County on Tuesday.

In August, 105 workers lost their jobs.

A Remington spokesman did not immediately return phone and email requests for comment. Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney, whose district includes Ilion, said she was told that the layoffs are the result of a downturn in the market and the completion of a recall of a line of rifles.

"I feel really sad for the employees and the 126 families (who) have a huge impact on our economy," Tenney said. "My heart goes out to them. It's been a very, very rough ride this year for Remington."

In May, the company said it would consolidate some operations at its Alabama factory. Among the manufacturing lines moved were the Bushmaster and R1 lines. The Ilion jobs would not have gone to Alabama, Tenney said.

The company employed about 1,200 workers in Ilion at the time. Tenney said the company has about 1,000 employees left.

The fate of Remington's operations in New York has been questioned since the passage of the SAFE Act in early 2013. SAFE Act opponents have said the laws are the reason Remington and others gun makers have considered moving operations elsewhere. In August 2013, Kahr Firearms Group moved its corporate offices from Rockland County to Pennsylvania, citing, in part, the SAFE Act. In the fall of 2013, American Tactical Imports, a firearm and ammunition manufacturing and import company based in Rochester, left for South Carolina. In December 2013, AR15.com left the Finger Lakes for Texas, citing the SAFE Act.

"When you're manufacturing guns in a state that the most powerful person in the state has indicated that they don't like what you manufacture (it doesn't help)," Tenney said Tuesday about the Bushmaster line of rifles, some of which are illegal under the SAFE Act because they have features that classify them as assault weapons. "It doesn't help that there's an unfriendly attitude by elected officials not us up here about the products they produce."

mhamilton@timesunion.com 518-454-5449 @matt_hamilton10

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Gun plant sheds 126

Private Ernest Cable was buried in a cemetery in Wimereux, France. He died from dysentery in a hotel turned hospital in the northern French town. Courtesy of Genome Research Ltd hide caption

Private Ernest Cable was buried in a cemetery in Wimereux, France. He died from dysentery in a hotel turned hospital in the northern French town.

In the early months of World War I, British Pvt. Ernest Cable was a member of the 2nd Battalion of the East Surrey Regiment. Records show that in early 1915, his regiment was fighting in the trenches of Flanders, Belgium.

But by March of that year, Cable, 28, was in a hospital in the northern French coastal town of Wimereux. On the 13th he died from dysentery, a diarrheal disease caused by the bacterium Shigella flexneri. Spread by poor hygiene and lack of sanitation, dysentery stalked the water-logged trenches of WWI, killing hundreds of thousands on both sides.

Now a sample of the very bug that felled Pvt. Cable 99 years ago may provide a boost to efforts to find a vaccine to prevent the disease, which is highly contagious and kills hundreds of thousands of children a year, mainly in developing countries. It's also wholly resistant to antibiotics.

When Cable died, a bacteriologist collected a sample of the microbe, which was sent to London and preserved at Public Health England's National Collection of Type Cultures, essentially a repository of bacteria.

Cable was certainly not the first British soldier to die from dysentery, but his sample was among the first collected and preserved. "It is the oldest living available strain," says Alison Mather, a researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a genome research lab near Cambridge. She did the detective work that determined that the strain almost certainly came from Cable.

Earlier this year, Mather's colleagues at Sanger and researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine began using new, sophisticated gene-sequencing technology to reconstruct Cable's S. flexneri genome and compare it to its modern samples. Their studies were reported in a special First World War edition of The Lancet, published Nov. 8.

The sample's genome had been reconstructed before, but a new technology allows whole strands of DNA to be sequenced without having to shred it into hundreds of pieces and put it back together like a jigsaw puzzle, says Kate Baker, one of the Sanger researchers. That's allowed investigators to see more precisely how the bug evolved and determine parts that remained unchanged useful knowledge for development of a vaccine.

It turns out that only two percent of the genome differs from its modern equivalent. "That is a conservative amount of change," Baker says. "But the two percent that did change was the important elements that make it resistant to antibiotics. It was the right two percent."

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A Dysentery Sample From A WWI Soldier Sheds Light On Drug Resistance

CLEVELAND Its taken 45 years, but the jokes about the river burning in Cleveland have faded.

Now they cant be replaced by jokes about Lake Erie being the only great lake where you cant drink the water.

We dont want to be the butt of late night comedians again, says Rep. Dave Hall, the Republican chairman of the Ohio House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee.

Hall, whose district stretches from Millersburg north to Brunswick, says the first concern is public safety, and the second is an image problem that can impede economic development in a region that appears poised on the brink of a comeback.

Halls committee will hold hearings to look at what to do to prevent a repeat of what happened last summer in Toledo.

For an entire weekend, close to half a million people living in and near Toledo couldnt drink their water for fear that an algae bloom on Lake Erie had rendered it toxic.

The concern was over a bloom that produced microcystin a toxin that in too high of amounts can lead to liver and stomach problems.

Julius Ciaccia, Executive Director of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, warns that without change, the region is doing worse than playing with fire its playing with its source of drinking water.

(The blooms) will come again, just like the river burned, he says.

There are three main sources of the pollution that leads to the blooms: storm water overflows, faulty septic systems, and farm fertilizer runoff.

Link:
I-Team investigation: Lake Erie algae blooms and the ghost of the river burning

INTEREL

INTEREL

Dubai, 12 November 2014: INTEREL, the world's fastest growing manufacturer of integrated room technologies in the luxury hospitality industry, has announced the release of a series of new global products as well as the establishment of a local presence in Asia and the Americas.

The company's online room management system offers highly innovative and intelligent solutions for the modern hotelier. Through a combination of cutting-edge technology and uniquely simplified design, the system allows hotel operators to optimize their energy monitoring and consumption and to deliver a greater guest experience.

The hospitality industry's most advanced portfolio of Room Control Units (RCU) becomes even more powerful with the release of a series of new RCUs, which deliver expanded and flexible configuration options efficiently enabling a wider array of guest room environment features, interactions and experiences. One of these new features is a smart lamp option that provides guests with full bedside lamp functionality even when the master light switch is off.

INTEREL has also introduced a brand new series of customizable wall and tabletop room control panels, which now incorporate a range of leading 3rd party power and connectivity options. In addition, INTEREL has released an expanded creative palette for hotel designers with new bold and elegant options for panel finishes, colors and icon layout designs.

INTEREL has seen exceptional growth over the past six months as a result of strong demand for its products and services. In February this year INTEREL appointed Silvio Reale as CEO Asia Pacific, which saw the company enter a number of business hubs in the region including Hong Kong, Jakarta, Macau and Manila. In September INTEREL appointed Michael Cohen as SVP Key Accounts, who will be leading the company's market entry into the Americas.

"With the Middle East being our biggest and fastest growing market in the world, we decided to move the headquarters to Dubai at the end of 2012, with design and manufacturing still based exclusively in Italy. " Said Florian Gallini, Group CEO of INTEREL. He added: "The extension of our geographical reach with a local presence in Asia and the Americas will enable us to assist our clients directly on the ground and is testament to the growing demand for our solutions worldwide."

"Providing innovative technology and design leadership in integrated room solutions."

Headquartered in Dubai, INTEREL is the fastest growing manufacturer of integrated room technologies and energy conservation systems in the luxury hospitality industry with a footprint across the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. Established in 1984, the Italian manufacturer has nearly two decades of experience in the hospitality industry and is an approved supplier with more than 17 of the world"s leading hospitality and leisure organizations.

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INTEREL Announces New Product Releases And Expands Its Global Footprint