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closeKatawba Valley Land Trust names director
The Katawba Valley Land Trust has hired its first full-time employee, Austin Jenkins, as executive director.
He replaces Lindsay Pettus, who founded the Land Trust in 1992, and had served as its unpaid director. The Trust focuses on protecting land through conservation easements, the acquisition of land, and transfer of some properties to other public or private land management agencies. To date, the Trust has completed 53 land transactions and protected 6,862 acres in five S.C. counties, primarily along the Catawba River and its tributaries.
Jenkins has been working as a naturalist and natural resource manager at the Sandhill Research and Education Center of Clemson University. He will start work in early September.
-- The Charlotte Observer
Gun taken from inexperienced officer in hospital
COLUMBIA -- The corrections officer whose gun was taken and used by a woman to commit suicide in Palmetto Health Richland's emergency room Tuesday had been on the job for two months.
But the female officer, whom the department declined to identify, had completed all the necessary training requirements, according to department spokesman Josh Gelinas.
Two officers were transporting a high-risk inmate to the hospital Tuesday night when 29-year-old Lorelei Gibbons of Elgin -- who was a hospital patient and not an inmate -- took the gun from one of the officers and shot herself in the head. Gibbons died Thursday.
Neither officer has a history of disciplinary actions, Gelinas said.
The officer carrying the gun had been on the job since June. The other officer, who was unarmed per department policy, had been with the department since 2003.
Both officers had completed a five-week training course that includes one week of firearms training all that is required of corrections officers, Gelinas said.
-- The (Columbia) State
Aerosol chemicals cause Anderson auto explosion
ANDERSON -- Two men are being treated for first- and second-degree burns after Anderson police say a lit cigarette caused the car where they were huffing aerosol chemicals to explode.
The Greenville News reports that Anderson police say a 34-year-old Georgia man and a 19-year-old Conastee man were in a car huffing computer keyboard cleaner near the Anderson Sports and Entertainment Complex about 8:35 p.m. Thursday.
Police say the older man tried to light a cigarette when the chemicals in the air exploded and blew out windows of the car.
A public safety officer who may have inhaled fumes from the explosion was also taken to a hospital as a precaution.
Earlier, police had said a mobile methamphetamine lab could be to blame for the explosion.
No more money to repair beach at Hunting Island
BEAUFORT -- Tropical Storm Fay eroded a road and damaged three buildings at Hunting Island State Park near Beaufort, but a state official says there is no extra money to put sand on the beach to prevent further erosion.
The South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism spent more than $8 million last year to pour sand on sections of the beach and install walls perpendicular to the beach intended to catch sand.
PRT spokesman Marion Edmonds told The Beaufort Gazette that areas included in the project did well in last week's storm. But other areas were damaged by Fay.
Edmonds says the road will be repaired, but there is no additional funding to put sand on the beach to ease future erosion at that spot.
S.C. parks service creates junior ranger program
COLUMBIA -- The South Carolina State Park Service has created a program to get the state's children excited about the natural world around them.
Department officials unveiled a program Thursday that teaches kids how to find and identify plants and animals. It also encourages them to recycle, interview park rangers and learn about safety in the woods, at the lake and on the beach
The free program is for children ages 6 to 9. The program is offered at 16 of the Park Service's 47 state parks.
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