Becky Kramer

The Northwest gets about 2.4 percent of its energy from biomass. Mills often burn wood waste for steam to run equipment and generate electricity. Wood also heats rural schools and hospitals. Here are a few of the projects. The University of Idaho saves about $2 million per year by using wood for heat.

Spot fires flared in the streets as families fled Wallace. For days, the city’s residents thought they might escape the forest fires blazing in the mountains around them. But by the evening of Aug. 20, 1910, gale-force winds were pelting the town with glowing embers.

Avery Bright remembers when the Cloverleaf Grange was the hub of a close-knit community focused on farming and family values. Couples waltzed across the wooden floor on Friday nights, or gathered during election season to listen to candidates debate the issues. Over the past century, the grange hall on McGuire Road in Post Falls also hosted 4-H meetings, rummage sales, wedding receptions, potlucks and cowboy-themed church services.

Allison Stacey Cowles, a longtime Spokane civic leader, education activist and matriarch of the family that owns The Spokesman-Review, died Sunday morning at the age of 75. Born Allison Florence Stacey on July 12, 1934, in New Jersey, she died in Spokane of pancreatic cancer.

Stricter smog limits could put Spokane and Kootenai counties in violation of federal ozone standards. By early summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency expects to announce new limits for ozone – a pollutant triggered by sunlight mixing with motor vehicle exhaust and vapors from paints and solvents. Other Northwest metro areas could be in violation as well, said Dennis McLerran, the EPA’s regional administrator in Seattle.

PLUMMER, Idaho – The crowd chuckled appreciatively when Ernie Stensgar began singing “One little, two little, three little Indians” during a U.S. census rally Wednesday on the Coeur d’Alene Indian Reservation. That’s how some tribal members might feel when Census Bureau workers come knocking at their doors, acknowledged Stensgar, the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s vice chairman. The suspicion is natural. Broken treaties and a history of past conflicts color how American Indians view the federal government.

The state of Idaho will pay $275,000 to settle a dispute over the seizure of 25 boat slips and docks at the Sandpoint Marina during a U.S. Highway 95 construction project. The agreement ends an 18-month skirmish between Ralph Sletager, the marina’s owner, and the Idaho Transportation Department. The parties agreed to drop lawsuits against each other and pay their own attorneys fees. Sletager can reinstall the docks when the $98 million Sand Creek Byway project is finished, the settlement says.

A plan to reduce the amount of phosphorus flowing into the Spokane River would strangle growth in Kootenai County, Idaho municipalities said Monday. During a five-hour dispute resolution hearing, the cities said the plan favored Spokane dischargers at their expense. Sewage treatment plants in Spokane and Spokane County would be allowed to discharge phosphorus at levels of 42 parts per billion into the river from March through October, when most water quality problems occur, while Idaho dischargers would have to meet a standard of 36 parts per billion.