Friday, April 28, 1978
University Dally Kansan
Benefits bill approved as 1978 legislature ends
TOPEKA (AP)—A bill to increase benefits for 15,392 retired state employees, which passed the Kansas Legislature by only one vote, proved to be the major sag in the final moments of the 1978 session.
U able to agree on how to finance the measure. House and Senate members of a conference committee kept the other 163 senators here yesterday as a need for a compromise.
The legislative session was to end officially on Wednesday.
officially on Wednesday.
The final agreement will take $16.90
million from the state treasury over the next four fiscal years.
An immediate expenditure of $2 million will be needed to cover the additional benefits for next fiscal year, which begins July 1.
The state must then pay $4.938 million into a fund each year for three years beginning July 1, 1979.
THE KBI AGENT who allegedly exaggerated the testimony against the men recently resigned from the agency, Jack West, agent in charge of special services for KBI in the district.
Drug cases dropped
As it stands, the governor's legislative staff fears the state has promised too much money in the compromise, especially considering other appropriations approved during final hours of the session.
Drug charges against two University of Kansas students and two Lawrence men were dropped yesterday by Mike Malone, Douglas county attorney, who said a Kansas Bureau of Investigation agent had "embellished or exaggerated" his planned court
Charges have been dropped against David Tucker, Wichita senator; Anthony Backus, Lawrence sophomore; and Carl Lutz, 1900 W. 31st St. The fourth man had not yet been arrested by police, and Malone refused to release his name.
Tucker and Lutz were each charged with sale of cocaine. Backus was charged with possession of firearms.
soneon would not identify the agent, but court records from Lutz's preliminary hearing indicated that he was John J. Washington of Toneka.
Malone said yesterday in a prepared statement. "All of these cases involved an individual."
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"I feel that anytime the State knows that testimony is embellished or exaggerated it has an ethical duty to terminalize its prosecution under a order, a mackery of our criminal justice system.
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"I have discovered serious conflicts in the proposed testimony of this narcotics agent that have substantially affected his credibility as a witness.
MALONE SAID that part of the agent's testimony involved false statements.
51 die in fall from tower platform
BELMONT, W.Va.—Death came to this little Ohio River community like an unexe-
From the Kansan's Wire Services
Fifty-one men were dead.
State police said the wood and steel scaffolding, hanging 5 feet from the top of the partially completed cooling tower, came loose with a roar, sending the workers of the power plant to the ground in a mass of twisted metal and spintered boards.
tones and the anguished crises of the relatives being led from the morgue.
"The best description I can give you is that it continued to break loose in a circle more or less like you would peel an apple and fell the fruit," M.J. W. Dombok of the magazine said.
West Virginia State Police troopers, tight-lipped, called out names of the victims and asked their relatives to follow from the church to the morgue.
THE PEOPLE of Belmont were numb.
Relatives of the victims of the cooling tower tragedy crowded in small groups into the community room of the little United Methodist Church, across the street from the Belmont Volunteer Fire Department, where a temporary morgue was set up.
At the church the grisly task of identification began.
THEY WALKED IN SILENCE, these men and women of Schultz and Willow Island and other little towns up and down the Ohio River, then reality of a small cinderblock building.
There were no loud voices, only hushed
Along with the pall hanging over Belmont was anger and frustration. Dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen came here, and many people appeared in front.
"I FEEL LIKE a vulture," one cameraman for a national television network said. "You can feel the anger around the church."
And on and, on their eyes rimmed with red, the relatives spoke of the past.
Out through the door walked a man in his 50s, his bald head circled with white hair. His eyes were red and a state trooper clutched his left arm.
The man was carrying the badge of the relative and an 11-by-14-inch manila envelope carrying the personal effects of a man who in his youth had attended children, kissed his wife goodbye and gone to work just like hundreds of other Pleasant County men.
Tonight he is dead.
"YES, YOU CAN reach his wife at home," the man told the trooper, his voice barely audible above the wind, "He has little children, a boy and a girl. I think."
The tears flowed freely down the man's cheeks, glistening in the sun, but his face was bare.
There is nothing more to be done.
"We feel useless," a uniformed nurse said near the morgue. "I don't guess there is
anything more to be done, but you just feel more useless."
At that point an old man, his back bowed and his face white, was led out the door by a trooper. The elderly man's face was lined and he shook his head over and over.
"I WASO TWO CLOSE, closer than I wanted to be when it happened," O.B. Patterson, a carpenter's steward at the Monongahela Power Co.'s Pleasant Power Station in Belfast, said of the warm weather that 94 yards away when I heard this noise roaring and people yelling.
AT THE BASE of the tower, huge concrete angles angled in pairs, 500 feet in diameter. And all along the interior, piles of bricks were laid and chunks of concrete littered the area.
"But by the time I got out, it had all fallen and there wasn't any noise." Patterson told his hands shaking. "There was just all this dust and the whole place
The reminders that something had gone wrong, something had failed to work, were few-bits of torn clothing, blood-stained medical supplies blowing in the crip wind.
in the center of the tower's base sat an orange cement truck on a massive trailer. Stories circulated about the driver, standing outside the cab, who caught beneath when he was falling around him. He was later hospitalized for shock in Parkersburg.
COMPANY OFFICIALS from the general contractor and the subcontractor responsible for the scaffold said little as they led "media tours" at the cooler tower site.
The noise, the screams of men trapped beneath the concrete, pipe and lumber that echoes.
Hours after the tragedy, the spring wind whipped through the massive tower but the windows were still open. It was storming.
The tower, measuring about 360 feet in diameter at the base, was one of two being constructed by Research-Cottrell Inc. of Bound Brook, N.J., a company that owns 729 million Willow Island Power Plant, which was scheduled to begin operation next year.
"When we got there, the workman had already started removing the debris," he said. "We're not going to get out."
RANDY SPENCER, a paramedic, said emergency equipment to arrive on the scene.
"I saw guys lift pieces of steel they normally could not pick up," he said.
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METHODOLOGY
Mountaineering, as all but the chronically misinformed know, is the skill, the
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II However, between those two points lies a vast area of personal peccadilloes sometimes called technique and sometimes called methodology (depending on your major). Hence, this ad. II Sipping vs. chugging. Both have their merits, of course. But generally speaking, except for cases of extreme thirst or a leaking glass, sipping is the more prudent practice for serious, sustained mountaineering. III Next. the proper position. Some swear by siting; others by
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If Finally, there's the issue of containers. Good taste dictates a glass be used. But bad planning sometimes prevents that. If you find yourself forced to drink from the can, you should minimize this breach of etiquette. Be formal. Simply let your little finger stick out stiffly (see Fig. 4). Happy Mountaineering!
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