NIC satellite closer for Bonners Ferry
The NIC satellite in Bonners Ferry is one step closer to realization.
The Panhandle Area Council bought a 4,500-square-foot building on Main Street, formerly the Selkirk Outdoors store, and will lease it to Boundary County, which in turn will sublease it to North Idaho College.
The satellite, due to be open by next fall, will be modeled after the satellites in Sandpoint and the Silver Valley.
“As other communities in North Idaho have discovered, having North Idaho College programs and services available is a powerful economic development tool,” said NIC President Michael Burke in a statement. “We are looking forward to directly serving the needs of this part of our service area.”
Donation account opened for family
A donation account has been opened for a Westmond, Idaho, family who lost their home and all of their belongings in a fire Monday afternoon.
Jodi Grevé and her husband, Cody Likkel, and three children lived in the single-wide trailer south of Sandpoint that caught fire Monday. The family had no insurance on the home, according to Grevé’s boss, Mike Wolcott.
“It was pretty much a total loss,” said Wolcott, vice president of Inland Forest Management Inc. in Sandpoint. “They’re basically starting over.”
Nobody was home at the time of the fire. Two of the family’s dogs were inside at the time, but were rescued.
Donations are being accepted in Grevé’s name at any branch of Panhandle State Bank. Her mother, Kay Short, is coordinating donations of material items. Short can be reached at (208) 610-3993.
Deputy overturns car trying to avoid deer
A Spokane County sheriff’s deputy rolled his patrol car while trying to avoid a deer Monday but was uninjured.
Deputy Tom Litts was eastbound on Highway 902 from Medical Lake, responding to an accident report about 4 a.m. when the deer ran in front of his patrol car. The deputy swerved to avoid the animal and slid off the shoulder, Cpl. Dave Reagan said in a news release.
Litts, who crawled out of the overturned patrol car, was taken to a hospital as a precaution and was later released. The car was destroyed. The deer reportedly escaped without injury.
As The Spokesman-Review reported Tuesday, biologists and highway safety experts say deer-car collisions are more common in mid-November, which is the peak of breeding season for whitetail deer. Bucks, in particular, can react unpredictably at such times.
In the past three years, 11 people in Washington have been killed in collisions with deer, according to the Washington State Department of Transportation.
Interstate narrowed while lanes striped
It’s not over until the lines are painted.
Eastbound Interstate 90 will be reduced to two lanes today between Broadway and Argonne while crews stripe the lanes.
The work is one of the last parts of a project to widen I-90 to three lanes between Argonne and Sullivan. The area in question was temporarily restriped to indicate lanes leading into the expansion area.
Work will be under way from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Faulty equipment blamed for outage
Faulty equipment is being blamed by the Bonneville Power Administration for a Monday power failure that darkened 15,500 homes and businesses in Mead and Spokane Valley.
The outage, which lasted three hours, was sparked by a line that fell across three major BPA power cables servicing Vera Water and Power, Inland Power and Kaiser Aluminum’s rolling mill in Trentwood. At the time, the cables were being moved to make way for construction of a north-south freeway connecting north Spokane to Interstate 90.
“What happened was a fitting that was holding the static line failed and the line fell,” said Ed Mosey, a BPA spokesman. “We have a lab at the Vancouver-Ross Complex that is testing the fitting.”
Henkels & McCoy Inc., the contractor moving the lines for BPA was not at fault, Mosey said.