Tragedy in the homestead: Woman killed by mysterious fire.
Residents afraid ‘safe rooms’ in homes not as secure as claimed.
Every cent at the gas pump adds up. Rising fuel prices are costing the city of Lawrence an additional $100,000 this fiscal year.
While fuel consumption through the first five months of the year — 175,000 gallons — is similar to 2010 — 172,000 — the 65-cent-per-gallon fuel increase is taking a bigger bite out of the city budget.
To power its fleet of 573 vehicles, the city purchases fuel in bulk — about 7,000 gallons at a time. With the most recent fuel purchase of $26,000, the city has spent nearly $620,000 of the $1.8 million allotted in the 2011 budget for fuel — an increase from the $1.35 million budgeted in 2010.
“We’re watching fuel prices, of course, on a regular basis,” city fleet manager Steve Stewart said. “We try to watch the market closer and see if we can try to determine the best possible time to buy it.”
The city fleet includes a range of cars and trucks, which includes three gas-efficient Toyota Prius hybrids for environmental code enforcement and parking that get about 30 miles per gallon, to guzzlers like a rear-loading garbage truck that averages 3.2 miles per gallon.
The city’s ongoing effort to limit fuel use began in 2009 with the adoption of an official idle policy and continued with the addition of solar panels to some emergency vehicles last year.(Continued on A2)
Fire woke Main Street this morning when a local school teacher's house went up in a blaze. It took fire fighters three hours to put out the fire, citing the worst fire the city has seen in almost a decade. When all was said and done, there was nothing left to the house, and one person was killed.
"It's a tragedy," Lois Grace, a neighbor of the Whitecrest family, told reporters. "They're such a nice family. They just had a baby a few months ago. It's just awful."
Investigators are stumped by what could have started the horrific blaze that claimed the life of Mary Whitecrest. So far there are no leads.
"It's a real shame," said Jim Marks. "And it's completely knocked a screw loose in Mike [Whitecrest]'s brain. He's rambling on about her being stuck to the ceiling or something. He's taking it real hard."
Mary is survived by her husband Mike, and her six-month-old son. Services will be held on Saturday.
Jeff Waltho says he wasn’t just buying a home when he recently bought one unit of a fourplex off Lake Pointe Drive in west Lawrence.
He also was buying peace of mind. The advertisement for the home even said so.
Waltho had never lived in a Kansas house without a basement. The threat of a tornado always had made that seem like a bad idea. So the fact that his new slab home at 2250 Lake Pointe Drive had a “storm shelter/safe room” in its garage was an important selling point.
At least it was until he started watching a television program on The Weather Channel.
“They were talking about safe rooms and how they needed to be rated for certain wind speeds and what they needed to have to really be safe, and then I started having a lot of questions about mine,” Waltho said.
He had enough questions that he started asking his builder, and it got to the point that the builder’s attorney got involved. What he had to say really didn’t please Waltho.
“In other words,” the letter read, “the storm room is a concrete box with a steel door on it, which is all that was ever promised to you.”
That doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as the language that was on a real estate flier promoting the fourplex: “Oversized two car garage with concrete Storm Shelter/Safe Room for your peace of mind.” (Continued on A3)