THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
7A
FRIDAY, APRIL 4, 2008
LAWRENCE
Station receives new fire truck
BY WENDY MCCART editor@kansan.com
Lt. Dave Sherman described Station I's new fire truck as if it were the best present he ever unwrapped on his birthday.
Station 1 was the first and only fire station in Lawrence to receive a new fire truck last year, a Quint model, because of the City of Lawrence's new fire apparatus replacement program. The program intends to replace all of Lawrence's aging fire trucks with newer, safer models.
Fire trucks serve an important purpose in Lawrence.
Sherman said it was important to replace the trucks and take advantage of the new safety additions they offered.
Administrative Chief Bill Stark is heading up the fire apparatus replacement program for the fire department.
Stark said Lawrence's fire trucks were becoming outdated and the city needed to replace them within the next few years. All of Lawrence's fire trucks were put through a ratings test to see if they qualified for replacement, and all of them did.
The money for the new trucks will come from the City of Lawrence. A new fire truck, depending on the type, can cost between $600,000 and $1 million, Stark said.
Assistant City Manager Cynthia Boecker said the city saw the need to replace the trucks, but the program would not replace all of them immediately.
The fire apparatus replacement program most likely will not cause an increase in taxes for citizens of Lawrence or effect other departments funding this year, Boecker said. Buying new trucks may be a better way to spend the city's money.
"We have to look into various funds to find the money to replace the trucks," Boecker said. "We are looking to replace two fire trucks for the department this year, and we are looking into the equipment reserve fund or possibly Lawrence's general fund for the money."
The old trucks are in need of repair and the cost of maintenance may actually be causing the city to spend more.
"They break down and then when you need parts, they are expensive and hard to get," Stark said. "It isn't like taking your Ford into the shop. These trucks have special parts and a lot of times we have to have them special ordered and made somewhere else."
Newer fire trucks come with safety equipment for both the firefighters and citizens of Lawrence.
Sherman said that, like cars, fire trucks had safety upgrade requirements and additions made to new models.
Lawrence's old fire trucks do not have the newer safety systems. Station 1's new truck has safety additions. Sherman said the new equipment was necessary and appreciated.
"Our new truck has a foam system built into it so we can deliver fire fighting-foam, spraying it directly from the truck without having to mix it separately," Sherman said. "It also has side-curtain airbags for the passengers and better restraint systems for our air packs."
The new truck also protects the public, Sherman said. Whereas old trucks had equipment that sat directly on the apparatus without being tied down, the new trucks had straps that held the equipment so that nothing flew off while the firefighters were driving to an emergency. Lawrence Fire Chief Mark Bradford confirmed that the fire apparatus replacement program was an important issue for the Lawrence Fire Department.
Both the City of Lawrence and the fire department are looking into the issue of replacing aging fire trucks as the budget allows. However, the city cannot specifically set a date as to when all of the trucks will be replaced.
» ARCHAEOLOGY
Oldest American DNA found in feces
Edited by Daniel Reyes
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Newly discovered human fossil feces, found in a cave deposit in Oregon, are the oldest evidence of humans in North America. New evidence shows humans lived in North America more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than had previously been known. Fossil feces yielded DNA indicating these early residents were related to people living in Siberia and East Asia, according to a report in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.
WASHINGTON — New evidence shows humans lived in North America more than 14,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than had previously been known.
Discovered in a cave in Oregon, fossil feces yielded DNA indicating these early residents were related to people living in Siberia and East Asia, according to a report in Thursday's online edition of the journal Science.
"This is the first time we have been able to get dates that are undeniably human, and they are 1,000 years before Clovis," said Dennis L. Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist, referring to the Clovis culture, well known for its unique spear-points that have been studied previously.
Humans are widely believed to have arrived in North America from Asia over a land-bridge between Alaska and Siberia during a warmer period. A variety of dates has been proposed and some are in dispute.
Few artifacts were found in the cave, leading Jenkins to speculate that these people stayed there only a few days at a time before moving on, perhaps following game animals or looking for other food.
The petrified poop - coprolites to scientists - is yielding a look at the diet of these ancient Americans, Jenkins said.
While the analysis is not yet complete, he said there are bones of squirrels, bison hair, fish scales, protein from birds and dogs and the remains of plants such as grass and sunflowers.
The oldest of several coprolites studied is 14,340 calendar years old, said co-author Eske Willerslev, director of the Centre for Ancient Genetics at Denmark's University of Copenhagen.
said. "Other pre-Clovis sites have been claimed, but no human DNA has been obtained."
"The Paisley Cave material represents, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest human DNA obtained from the Americas," he
The date for the new coprolites is similar to that of Monte Verde in southern Chile, where human artifacts have been discovered, added Willerslev.
Jenkins said it isn't clear exactly who these people living in the Oregon caves were, since there were few artifacts found. He said there was one stone tool, a hand tool used perhaps to polish or grind or mash bones or fat.
"We are not saying that these people were of a particular ethnic group. At this point, we know they most likely came from Siberia or Eastern Asia, and we know something about what they were eating, which is something we can learn from coprolites. We're talking
about human signature," he said.
"If you are looking for the first people in North America, you are going to have to step back more than 1,000 years beyond Clovis to find them," Jenkins said.
The Clovis culture has been dated to between 13,200 and 12,900 calendar years ago and is best known by the tools left behind.
Michael Waters, director of the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M University, said the find, along with indications of human presence at other locations, adds to the evidence for a pre-Clovis human presence in North America.
To make sure the Oregon cave material hadn't been contaminated with modern DNA, the researchers tested more than 50 people
who worked at the site. The DNA testing indicated that the feces belonged to Native Americans in two groups that can be traced to Siberia and East Asia.
In their paper the researchers dated the coprolites at 12,300 "carbon years" before the present. Prior to 3,000 years ago, carbon years differed from calendar years, resulting in the date of approximately 14,300 calendar years for the coprolites.
The research was funded by the Museum of Natural and Cultural History, University of Oregon; Association of Oregon Archaeologists and the Marie Curie Actions program.
NATION
Census scraps plans for high-tech count
BY STEPHEN OHLEMACHER ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Stumbling over its multibillion-dollar plans for a high-tech census, the government says it will go back to counting the nation's 300 million people the old-fashioned way — with paper and pencil.
Help wanted: 600,000 temporary workers to do the job.
Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez told Congress Thursday his department will scrap plans to use handheld computers to collect information from the millions of Americans who don't return the census forms that come in the mail.
This was to be the first truly high-tech count in the nation's history. The Census Bureau had awarded a contract to purchase 500,000 of the computers, at a cost of more than $600 million. The contract is now projected to balloon to $1.3 billion, even though bureau will scale back its purchase to only 151,000 computers.
The devices, which look like fancy cell phones, will still be used to verify every residential street address in the country, using global positioning system software.
That's one of a number of changes that will add as much as $3 billion to the constitutionally mandated 2010 count, pushing the overall cost to more than $14 billion.
But workers going door-to-door will not be able to use them to collect information from the residents who didn't return their census forms. About a third of U.S. residents are expected not to return the forms. The Census Bureau plans to hire and train nearly 600,000 temporary workers to do the canvassing.
Gutierrez blamed many of the
problems on "a lack of effective communication with one of our key contractors" Florida-based Harris Corp.
The 2010 census was already on pace to be the most expensive ever. Officials now are scrambling to add money while trying to ensure the count produces reliable population numbers — figures that will be used to apportion seats in Congress and divvy up more than $300 billion a year in federal and state funding.
"The increased funding is required to cover additional sites, equipment, software and functions added by the bureau to the program in January of this year," said Harris spokesman Marc Raimondi said in an e-mail. "The handheld devices make up only a portion of the overall automation program."
Rep. Alan Mollohan, chairman of the appropriations subcommittee, said both the Census Bureau and Harris Corp. "contributed to today's crisis." However, the Census Bureau's failure to address problems with the computers early on has "turned the crisis into the emergency that we now face," the West Virginia Democrat said.
The success or failure of the census could have widespread repercussions. The Constitution has required a census every 10 years since the first one in 1790. It is used to apportion the 435 seats in the House of Representatives among the states. And states and many cities use census data to draw legislative districts.
Population numbers are used to calculate billions in state and federal grants for transportation, education and other programs. Private businesses use census data to identify labor and consumer markets.