Feral Gifter

Wiltshire’s Underground City

Found on BBC

Burlington: The 35 acre, secret subterranean Cold War City that lies 100 feet beneath Corsham.

The BBC has a bunch of 360 Gallerys.

How to catch someone pranking a 911 call center? With a better prank, of course!

Found on Dvorak Uncensored from Associated Press

Knoxville Fire Department investigators used a ruse of their own to nab a man suspected of making a series of bogus emergency  calls on his cell phone.

After receiving a false report of a gas leak on Dec. 14,  firefighters compared notes.

They confirmed 15 fake 911 calls over a two-month period, including four house fires, six car crashes and various other  medical emergencies. All came from the same cell phone.

So they called the number and left a message saying the phone’s owner had won a gift card from a major retailer, Fire Capt. Brent Seymour said.

Within an hour, Seymour received a call back from a man identifying himself as the phone’s owner. “He willingly gave his name and address,” Seymour said. “I told him I would be sending that gift card.”

But that wasn’t quick enough to suit the man. He wanted the gift card in time for Christmas. So the investigators set up a meeting for that evening.

Seymour said he waited only a few minutes in a business parking lot before suspect Jason Mark Harms arrived on foot, identified himself as the gift card recipient and was arrested.

Seymour said Harms’ first words were, “You can’t prove it.”

But General Sessions Judge Charles Cerny found the evidence strong enough Wednesday to send 15 felony counts of making false reports against Harms to a Knox County grand jury.

Harms, 29, told authorities he thought he was doing taxpayers a favor by drawing otherwise lazy firefighters out of their cozy fire halls, according to court papers.

Carbon Monoxide Law

Found on KHQA Online

By Chad Douglas
Around 500 people die every year from Carbon Monoxide poisoning in the U-S.

But having a detector in your home could save your life…and after the first of the year, it’s state law in Illinois.

The Quincy Fire Department says the only exception is if you have an all electric house with a *de* tached garage.

The symptoms are flu like and will affect everyone in your home because C-O robs your body of oxygen.

The fire department recommends getting a detector with a digital readout.

 Assistant Chief Keith Frank says a normal home will have a reading of two or three parts per million.

Anything over that should be cause for concern.

FireWatch: Avoid fire when ‘making spirits bright’

Found on Daily Nonpareil

“‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”
- Clement Clarke Moore

Those famous words, permanently ingrained into almost everyone’s memory banks, should help to serve as a reminder about holiday fire safety. What a glorious Christmas season this would be if we could all manage to stay safe and healthy through the season!

But another quote, perhaps not so famous or well-known, could be adapted as a guide for the season: “A Christmas candle is a lovely thing; It makes no noise at all, But softly gives itself away; While quite unselfish, it grows small.”

I am sure Eva K. Logue, who wrote the above, had no intention for her quote to serve as a guide for holiday fire safety, but it seems as though it might just work. Contrary to her observation that the flame grows small, an unattended candle can do just the opposite and grow quite large and out of control. Statistically, the incidence of fires caused by unattended candles grows almost exponentially during this oh-so-busy time of the year.

Last week, we had at least one fire caused by an unattended candle and Omaha had several.

With all of this in mind, I am simply asking everyone to be a little more careful with their candles this holiday season.

Bargain-hunters unafraid of smoke

Found on United Press International

MENTOR, Ohio, Dec. 8 (UPI) — Firefighters responding to a blaze at an Ohio department store had more trouble getting bargain-hunters out than they did extinguishing the fire.

The fire at the Dillards South store in the Great Lakes Mall in Mentor was under control within 8 minutes of the firefighters’ arrival. But the smoke was another matter.

“It was amazing,” Battalion Chief Joe Busher of the Mentor Fire Department told the Willoughby News Herald. “Even though there was heavy smoke in there, they all wanted to stay and shop. We even had to put people at the door to keep people from coming in.”

Georgia erases 519 places off the map

Found on Pioneer Times Journal

CHATTOOGAVILLE, Ga. - Poetry Tulip has vanished. So have Between and Climax. Cloudland and Roosterville are gone, too.

Georgia‘s Department of Transportation, which drew the new map, said that the goal was to make it clearer and less cluttered and that many of the dropped communities were mere "placeholders," generally with fewer than 2,500 people. Some are unincorporated and so small they are not even recognized by the Census Bureau .

Gone are such places as Ty Ty, Centralhatchee, Deepstep, Gay, Good Hope, Gum Branch, Talking Rock, Young Harris and Chattoogaville, a spot in far northwestern Georgia that consists of little more than a two-truck volunteer fire department, a few farmhouses and a country store where locals fill up their gas tanks.

That doesn‘t ease the snub to the people who live in those places.

VHS, 30, dies of loneliness

Found on Variety.com.

After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old.

No services are planned.

The format had been expected to survive until January, but high-def formats and next-generation vidgame consoles hastened its final decline.

“It’s pretty much over,” concurred Buena Vista Home Entertainment general manager North America Lori MacPherson on Tuesday.

VHS is survived by a child, DVD, and by Tivo, VOD and DirecTV. It was preceded in death by Betamax, Divx, mini-discs and laserdiscs.

Kiss a Mule Day

Read the rest on DunnDailyRecord.com.

The
festival, which was founded to honor the tradition and history of the
mule, was a success this weekend with thousands of people filling
Benson. According to Loretta Byrd, Benson’s chamber director, the event
was one for the record books.

Little
Miss Benson Sydney Wheeless plants a kiss on the nose of Mable, the
grand champion mule, during the 57th Annual Mule Days this weekend.
During the kiss, which is a festival tradition, Mable nuzzled toward
the beauty queen.

Greedy sheep rescued from tree

Firemen may be well-practised in rescuing cats from trees, but the challenge facing the emergency services in Lund on Wednesday morning was an altogether different beast: a sheep stuck in a tree, seven metres from the ground.

When the fire engine arrived at St Lars park in the south of the city, officers found that a tree had partly fallen over and the sheep had worked its way up through the branches, lured by the tasty green leaves.

A group of children followed the episode with much amusement and afterwards named the sheep Tarzan.

Cherished antique needs home

The truck is cool, but the mass inoculations aren’t.

Concord Monitor Online Article

In 1928, the Concord Fire Department answered fewer than 500 calls and spent less than $72,500. It had a full-time force of approximately five firefighters, plus volunteers. And, it bought a brand new fire truck - built by the Abbot-Downing Truck & Body Co., an offshoot of the company that built the Concord stagecoaches in the 1800s.

The truck will be displaced from its current location when the fire
station gets a trailer from the state to be used for mass inoculations
in case of a pandemic. Clark hopes that one day the union will be able
to buy a building and create a firefighting museum, which would hold
the truck. But for now, the “Old Engine 7″ is about to be displaced…..