Pine Tree Watchdog (https://pinetreewatchdog.org/category/public-safety/)
Robert Williams had seen enough. The chief of the state police and a 30-year veteran had seen enough mangled bodies in car wrecks. Enough distraught and hysterical mothers and fathers. Enough lives that could have been easily saved with the click of seatbelt. Continue Reading →
The Investigative Fund, a project of the Nation Institute, has included the Center’s story on gun subsidies, “States have subsidized makers of assault rifles to tune of $19 million,” on their list of six stories that constitute the “Best Investigative Reporting on US Guns You Might Have Missed.” We’re proud to join our investigative reporting colleagues at Mother Jones, The Tampa Bay Times, The Chicago Reporter and City Limits on the Nation Institute’s list. You can see the entire list here. Continue Reading →
Taxpayers across the country are subsidizing the manufacturers of assault rifles used in multiple mass killings, including the massacre of 20 children and six adults at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. last month. Continue Reading →
The moment Mark Spiro walked into G&K Services, an industrial laundry in Waterbury, Conn., the steamy air stung his eyes and made his head ache. The place reeked of chemical solvents: methyl ethyl ketone, xylene, toluene – the sickly sweet scents of spray paint, permanent markers and model glue. Continue Reading →
Sometimes it takes a death. Sometimes it takes four deaths: a mother, her two children and the man who killed them and then killed himself. The deaths of Amy, Monica and Coty Lake at the hands of their husband and father, Steven Lake, may be the tragedy that brings major reform to how the criminal justice system handles dangerous domestic violence cases. The June 13 triple murder-suicide is becoming a rallying point
for changes in the system from an unofficial coalition of domestic violence groups, leading Republicans and Democrats and the state’s top judge and top cop. “Change will occur,” said Brian Gagan. Continue Reading →
“These four people died needlessly …”
– From a psychological autopsy of the triple murder and suicide in Dexter, June 13, 2011
The study rests on a shelf deep in the documents room at the state library. It has been sitting there since September 2006, most of its recommendations going the way of the hundreds of government blue ribbon studies that fill the other shelves – waiting for action. Among the report’s findings: a strong critique of Maine‘s archaic bail system, a system that entrusts to minimally trained bail commissioners the decision of whether potentially dangerous men and women can be free on bail. The people who asked for the study – with the bland title, “Pretrial Case Processing in Maine” – are the same people who could implement the recommendations: the state legislators. If they had taken the findings to heart, turned them into legislation and funded them, they might have saved lives. Continue Reading →
In the last three months, three storms have blacked out tens of thousands of electric customers in New England. Mayors can lose elections because of poor snow plowing, but can utility executives lose their jobs because of power outages? The president of Connecticut Light & Power, the largest electric company in the Nutmeg State, found out. He was forced to resign after his company was slow to return homes to service and gave misleading information about when the lights would come on again following the Halloween storm. His fate illustrates just how serious the problem of frequent storm-related outages has become. Power lines are vulnerable. Usually breaking or grounding a single strand of relatively thin, bare wire is all it takes to cause an outage. Telephone lines are insulated, so they are far less vulnerable to breaking and can even support more weight than most local power lines. Continue Reading →
Around 3:50 on the afternoon of Wednesday, Oct 12, a state-owned silver GMC Sierra pickup pulled into the parking lot at the Colby College rugby field. A man in a blue windbreaker got out of the truck, took a cardboard box of equipment from the cab and headed down to the field, where members of the college’s men’s and women’s teams
had gathered for their regular late afternoon practice. The man was their coach. But he is also the state dam inspector who has fallen years behind the legal schedule for safety inspections of the nearly 100 dams across the state categorized as potentially dangerous. His name is Tony Fletcher, and he has held the paid rugby coach job at the private Waterville college since 2001, except for one semester, according to the college. Continue Reading →
AUGUSTA — The head of the state agency responsible for the safety of about 100 potentially hazardous dams admitted to a legislative committee Monday that the dams are not being inspected when the law says they should be. But he also said he was confident in the assurance he got from the chief dam inspector that none of the dams pose a danger. Robert McAleer, director of the Maine Emergency Management Agency, told the committee that completing safety inspections of the dams “at the rate specified in the law is virtually impossible.”
He was responding to a news story by the Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting in August that revealed the state had records of on-time inspections of only 10 percent of the 93 dams in the state classified as high or significant hazard. High hazard dams could take lives if they fail; significant hazard dams would destroy property. State law requires them to be inspected by a MEMA civil engineer every two or four years, respectively. Continue Reading →
This spring, as part of the Center’s goal of training future journalists, John Christie and Naomi Schalit taught an investigative reporting class at Bates College in Lewiston. The ten students in that class conducted important research for the Center’s recently published story about weaknesses in Maine’s dam safety program. You can read all about the course in this dispatch from Bates Magazine. Continue Reading →