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Posts Tagged ‘BREAKING’

Gulf Road bridge fixes expected to be done at month’s end

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011

Drivers frustrated by a detour on Gulf Road will have to wait a bit longer.

The Gulf Road bridge over Interstate 90 awaits concrete Tuesday. ODOT officials say wet weather has delayed the reconstruction of the bridge. (CT photo by Chuck Humel.)

The Gulf Road bridge over Interstate 90 awaits concrete Tuesday. ODOT officials say wet weather has delayed the reconstruction of the bridge. (CT photo by Chuck Humel.)

The Ohio Department of Transportation said Tuesday it plans to reopen the rebuilt Gulf Road bridge over Interstate 90 by late November.

“We’ve had questions of late over how weather has delayed us,” said Christine Myers, spokeswoman for the ODOT District 3 offices in Ashland, which oversees all work on state roads and bridges in an eight-county area of Northeast Ohio that includes Lorain County. “Weather has been huge for us. We’ve obviously had significant delays of three to four weeks due to rain.”

Crews had hoped to pour the bridge’s new concrete deck last week, but that work was delayed by rain as well, Myers said.

“With the rain we had last week, that work was not likely completed,” she said.

No specific date has been set for the bridge being reopened, but Myers indicated it would most likely occur the week after Thanksgiving.

Work on the $2 million state-funded project began in April and was originally slated to be completed by Oct. 31.

The project calls for replacement of the 308-foot-long bridge built in 1970. When completed, the new span will include a composite reinforced concrete deck and three new vertical piers at both ends of the span, as well as a fourth new pier in the middle of the bridge.

The bridge reconstruction is being done by Mosser Construction, a Fremont firm whose credits include the Ohio Turnpike bridge over the Maumee River and the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College.

Heavy rainfall in September and October led to construction work being halted on a number of days, and limited to a few hours on others, according to Myers, who explained that bad weather was factored into the project’s timetable.

“We had about three to four weeks of rain delays built in, due to the weather we’ve been having,” she said.

The exceedingly soggy weather was also blamed for delaying welding work on the bridge’s steel frame.

Any work that remains to be done — principally painting of the bridge — may wait until next spring, Myers said.

The state also repaved a portion of Abbe Road at the same time work began on the new bridge. The repaved road, which was completed some weeks ago, runs from the state Route 57 bypass north to Loyola Street near Lorain County Community College.

Northbound Gulf Road traffic will continue to be detoured to Burns Road, east on Burns Road to state Route 301 (Abbe Road) north on Route 301 to state Route 254, west on Route 254 to Gulf Road. The reverse route applies for southbound motorists.

Contact Steve Fogarty at 329-7146 or sfogarty@chroniclet.com.

Rodeo rider in stable condition

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

A cowboy hurt last night in the rodeo at the Lorain County Fair is in stable condition, according to a spokeswoman at MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland.

Nelson Miller of Coshocton was bucked from his horse and apparently kicked in the head during the bareback bronc riding portion of the rodeo.

He was LifeFlighted from the fair to MetroHealth Medical Center in Cleveland.

He suffered a concussion and a collapsed lung but is out of the hospital’s intensive care unit, according to Jim Bainbridge, senior public relations coordinator at the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association.

An announcer at the rodeo and several rodeo officials with the rodeo identified the rider Wednesday night as Logan Kohler. Bainbridge said no one named Logan Kohler was a member of his association or was registered in Wednesday night’s event.

Miller is not a member of the PRCA either and was a last-minute local add to the rodeo, Bainbridge said.

Contact Rona Proudfoot at rproudfoot@chroniclet.com, (440) 371-0792 or stop by to see her at the fair. She’s based at the WEOL booth and will be wandering the fairgrounds in a bright gold Chroniclet.com T-shirt.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver, JFK’s sister, Special Olympics founder, dies at 88

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

BOSTON — President John F. Kennedy’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who carried on the family’s public service tradition by founding the Special Olympics and championing the rights of the mentally disabled, died early Tuesday surrounded by relatives at a Hyannis hospital. She was 88.

Shriver

Shriver

Shriver had suffered a series of strokes in recent years and died at Cape Cod Hospital, her family said in a statement. Her husband, her five children and all 19 of her grandchildren were by her side, the statement said.

“She was the light of our lives, a mother, wife, grandmother, sister and aunt who taught us by example and with passion what it means to live a faith-driven life of love and service to others,” the family said.

The hospital is near the Kennedy family compound, where her sole surviving brother, Sen. Edward Kennedy, has been battling a brain tumor.

Sen. Kennedy said his earliest memory of his sister was as a young girl “with great humor, sharp wit, and a boundless passion to make a difference.”

In this photo from 1964, Eunice Kennedy Shriver is shown swimming with youngsters in a pool at the day camp for mentally challenged children in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. (AP file photo.)

In this photo from 1964, Eunice Kennedy Shriver is shown swimming with youngsters in a pool at the day camp for mentally challenged children in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. (AP file photo.)

“She understood deeply the lesson our mother and father taught us — much is expected of those to whom much has been given,” he said in a statement. “Throughout her extraordinary life, she touched the lives of millions, and for Eunice that was never enough.”

President Barack Obama said Shriver will be remembered as “as a champion for people with intellectual disabilities, and as an extraordinary woman who, as much as anyone, taught our nation — and our world — that no physical or mental barrier can restrain the power of the human spirit.”

As celebrity, social worker and activist, Shriver was credited with transforming America’s view of the mentally disabled from institutionalized patients to friends, neighbors and athletes. Her efforts were inspired in part by the struggles of her mentally disabled sister, Rosemary.

“We have always been honored to share our mother with people of good will the world over who believe, as she did, that there is no limit to the human spirit,” her family said in the statement.

Shriver was also the sister of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the wife of 1972 vice presidential candidate and former Peace Corps director R. Sargent Shriver, and the mother of former NBC newswoman Maria Shriver, who is married to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. With Eunice Shriver’s death, Jean Kennedy Smith becomes the last surviving Kennedy daughter.

Schwarzenegger said his mother-in-law “changed my life by raising such a fantastic daughter, and by putting me on the path to service, starting with drafting me as a coach for the Special Olympics.”

A 1960 Chicago Tribune profile of the women in then-candidate JFK’s family said Shriver was “generally credited with being the most intellectual and politically minded of all the Kennedy women.”

When her brother was in the White House, she pressed for efforts to help troubled young people and the mentally disabled. And in 1968, she started what would become the world’s largest athletic competition for mentally disabled children and adults. Now, more than 1 million athletes in more than 160 countries participate in Special Olympics meets each year.

“When the full judgment on the Kennedy legacy is made — including JFK’s Peace Corps and Alliance for Progress, Robert Kennedy’s passion for civil rights and Ted Kennedy’s efforts on health care, work place reform and refugees — the changes wrought by Eunice Shriver may well be seen as the most consequential,” Harrison Rainie, author of “Growing Up Kennedy,” wrote in U.S. News & World Report in 1993.

It was Shriver who revealed the condition of her sister Rosemary to the nation during her brother’s presidency.

“Early in life Rosemary was different,” she wrote in a 1962 article for the Saturday Evening Post. “She was slower to crawl, slower to walk and speak. … Rosemary was mentally retarded.” Rosemary Kennedy underwent a lobotomy when she was 23, though that wasn’t mentioned in the article. She lived most of her life in an institution in Wisconsin and died in 2005 at age 86.

The roots of the Special Olympics go back to a summer camp Shriver ran in Maryland in 1963. Shriver would “get right in the pool with the kids; she’d toss the ball,” said a niece, former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who volunteered at the camp as a teen. “It’s that hands-on, gritty approach that awakened her to the kids’ needs.”

Realizing the children were far more capable of sports than experts said, Shriver organized the first Special Olympics in 1968 in Chicago. The two-day event drew more than 1,000 participants from 26 states and Canada.

“She believed that people with intellectual disabilities could — individually and collectively — achieve more than anyone thought possible. This much she knew with unbridled faith and certainty,” her son Timothy, chairman of Special Olympics said in a statement.

By 2003, the Special Olympics World Summer Games, held that year in Dublin, Ireland, involved more than 6,500 athletes from 150 countries. The games are held every four years.

Well into her 70s, Shriver remained a daily presence at the Special Olympics headquarters in Washington.

“Today we celebrate the life of a woman who had the vision to create our movement,” said Special Olympics President and COO Brady Lum.

Juvenile delinquency was another issue that interested Shriver and spurred her to action. In his 1991 book “The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America,” author Nicholas Lemann said the Kennedy administration’s juvenile delinquency commission, “a pet project that had been created to placate Eunice,” became the precursor of the vast federal effort to improve the lot of urban blacks.

After he took office, President Lyndon B. Johnson tapped R. Sargent Shriver to lead his War on Poverty.

Eunice Shriver was the recipient of numerous honors, including the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which she received in 1984. In May, the National Portrait Gallery installed a painting of her — the first portrait commissioned by the museum of someone who had not been a president or first lady.

Shriver was born in Brookline, Mass., the fifth of nine children to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. She earned a sociology degree from Stanford University in 1943 after graduating from a British boarding school while her father served as ambassador to England.

She was a social worker at a women’s prison in Alderson, W.Va., and worked with the juvenile court in Chicago in the 1950s before taking over the Joseph P. Kennedy Foundation with the goal of improving the treatment of the mentally disabled. The foundation was named for her oldest brother, Joseph Jr., who was killed in World War II.

In 1953, she married Shriver. He became JFK’s first director of the Peace Corps, was George McGovern’s vice-presidential running mate in 1972, and ran for president himself briefly in 1976.

Survivors include her husband, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2003, and the couple’s five children: Maria Shriver, who is married to Schwarzenegger; Robert, a city councilman in Santa Monica, Calif.; Timothy, chairman of Special Olympics; Mark, an executive at the charity Save the Children; and Anthony, founder and chairman of Best Buddies International, a volunteer organization for the mentally disabled.

In remembrance of Shriver, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston will make condolence books available for the public to sign during normal hours.