Exercise 4: Working with Your State’s Campaign Finance Data

Step 1: I searched “pa campaign data” and found the pa government site. http://www.dos.pa.gov/Pages/default.aspx#.VwAkNXrH7p8

Step 2: I searched for three days for some campaign information and then asked my teacher for help.

Step 3: I decided that I could look into a couple different presidential electives, the PA government site has a list of names to pick from.

Step 4: I clicked a couple different names for those in the election right now and pulled up very detailed profile information

Bernie Sanders: https://www.pavoterservices.state.pa.us/ElectionInfo/CandidateInfo.aspx?ID=13717

Hilary Clinton

https://www.pavoterservices.state.pa.us/ElectionInfo/CandidateInfo.aspx?ID=13251

Step 5: Here’s where I got stuck. Inside each candidates profiles are links for reports and other information. There are petitions listed under their names but they download a tifs and even downloading their tif reader, I only ever got 1 image out of however many.

There was also a section called CF reports which I thought might be what I needed but when I clicked on it, it was blank. It just said “Name:” and nothing else. https://www.campaignfinanceonline.state.pa.us/Pages/CFAnnualTotals.aspx?Filer=2016C0949

When I searched some more, all I got was documents to send out, I didn’t get any reports I could use to make a spreadsheet. I searched for the past two days and couldn’t find anything to help myself so I couldn’t get past it. I don’t know where else to check that’ll give me the proper information.

 

EDU Board of Governors discuss new website

Summary: Members of the East Dakota University System’s Board of Governors held their monthly meeting in Wilmington this week. At the meeting they got a sneak peak at a website that will function like a Facebook for researchers. The website, dubbed REACH-EDU, is still in beta and only includes data from two public universities. It’ll show off connections between researchers, their work, grants they’ve earned and people they’ve worked with. The Board also met with EDU Chancellor Holden Caulfield and Athletic Director Brad Richardson to discuss an ongoing NCAA investigation of the football team there. Finally, tuition plans were discussed.

 

By Sally Stringer

Updated: 2:20 PM

WILMINGTON — Members of the East Dakota University System’s Board of Governors held their monthly meeting in Wilmington this week. At the meeting they got a sneak peak at a website that will function like a Facebook for researchers. The website, dubbed REACH-EDU, is still in beta and only includes data from two public universities. It’ll show off connections between researchers, their work, grants they’ve earned and people they’ve worked with. The Board also met with EDU Chancellor Holden Caulfield and Athletic Director Brad Richardson to discuss an ongoing NCAA investigation of the football team there. Finally, tuition plans were discussed.

REACH-EDU takes existing data and makes it easier to see the relationships between the system’s 15,000 faculty members, 1,000 baccalaureate programs and $1.4 billion in annual research funding.

Look up “asthma” and it’ll show every faculty member with an expertise on the disease, the research they’ve produced, the classes they’ve taught on the subject and the grants they’ve received.

Search among EDU’s chemistry department, and the most prolific researchers show up along with who they work with and the patents they hold. A department head could look for junior faculty that would benefit from mentorships with more experienced faculty. The site should make it easier to see potential candidates for grants. Research Director Courtney Thorton said her office frequently gets calls asking who in the system is doing research on a particular topic, and the website will make it easier to answer that question. Because it can drill down into such specifics, others could use it to poach faculty from within the University system, a concern raised by several board members. But all the information on the site is already public, Leath said. Someone intent on poaching from EDU would already know the major players and have access to the information elsewhere. Right now the site draws data from East Dakota University and the State College of East Dakota. All University-system schools will be included by summer 2011, and partnerships with private universities are being explored. Dakota Digits International, a nonprofit research organization based in Greenville, has also expressed interest in being involved. Few other schools have such a way to organize their data. There are similar sites in Michigan and Georgia, but they don’t include information outside the biomedical fields and don’t include data from as many sources as EDU’s site will.

The site should go live either late this year or early next year. Anyone will have access to it, although the system is still trying to work out the extent to which some information will be displayed.

“We want to get it right and then we’ll promote it,” University President Andrew Card said.

Caulfield said the NCAA investigation into academic misconduct by individual players is “very near the end.” The University is still looking into academic sports services and how to ensure this doesn’t happen again. Richardson said the investigation could go back further than the last academic year but wouldn’t comment further. Neither man would elaborate on how far back the academic misconduct goes. When asked if he anticipated it extending back multiple seasons, Baddour said yes.”We will go where the information takes us,” he said to the board.

Caulfield and Richardson are leading the school’s internal investigation of academic misconduct alongside the NCAA’s look into whether players had improper contact with agents.

Card said that the investigation was being handled well. “I think you can be very, very proud of the way they are handling this,” he said as he put his arms around Caulfield and Richardson.

Board members asked questions about the timeline of the investigation and the extent of the violations but repeatedly expressed their confidence in EDU’s leadership.

“The board was completely satisfied,” Chairwoman Hannah Gage said afterwards. “Everyone is completely confident. “People just have to be patient.”

Gage restated her belief that the investigation was a “campus responsibility” and said she had no reason to think the board would need to get involved beyond lending support.

Now the school is looking to determine each player’s eligibility on a case-by-case basis. “I feel like we have most of the facts,” Caulfield said after the meeting.

Also at the meeting, Board of Governors member Bill Daughtridge voiced exploring the option of raising international student tuition relative to out-of-state residents. Stephen Farmer, director of undergraduate admissions at EDU, said he thinks that the demand of international students is highly elastic. Basically, higher tuition at EDU means international students are more likely to attend another, more affordable university. Daughtridge said that the impact these students have as well as the effect any increase in tuition would have on the applicant pool is being looked into. A report by the NAFSA Association of International Educators states that foreign students contributed nearly $280 million on net to the state economy in the 2008-2009 fiscal year. This revenue will likely go up, Farmer said, because EDU has seen an increase in the number of foreign students attending in the last few years

Orange County still trying to take out the trash

 

Summary: More than two years and $490,000 later, no one is quite sure how Orange County should take out the trash. Local governments are currently trying to sort out the ramifications of the county’s latest decision: come 2012, when the local landfill reaches capacity, county trash will be trucked directly to a transfer station in Franklin. Members of the county Board of Commissioners say the December decision, which brought an end to a contentious search process, is a temporary fix. But it also has its consequences, from higher greenhouse gas emissions to the potential of millions of dollars in higher costs. And the longer the county spends deciding what to do with its garbage, the longer it will have to absorb the costs of its choice. In the end, it might have to restart the search for a transfer station site.

 

By Rose Thornburg

Updated: 9:32 AM

More than two years and $490,000 later, no one is quite sure how Orange County should take out the trash. Local governments are currently trying to sort out the ramifications of the county’s latest decision: come 2012, when the local landfill reaches capacity, county trash will be trucked directly to a transfer station in Franklin. Members of the county Board of Commissioners say the December decision, which brought an end to a contentious search process, is a temporary fix. But it also has its consequences, from higher greenhouse gas emissions to the potential of millions of dollars in higher costs. And the longer the county spends deciding what to do with its garbage, the longer it will have to absorb the costs of its choice. In the end, it might have to restart the search for a transfer station site.

“It’s like punting,” said Commissioner Barry Jacobs, who is also a local sports writer. “Sometimes you can get better field position.”

The county has a few options it is considering. It could build a transfer station, a new landfill or convert waste into energy.

Commissioners have put the transfer station option on the back burner for now. Many residents took issue with the county’s two-year search process, particularly the Rogers Road community, which has been affected by the landfill for decades. But waste management experts say a local transfer station will be necessary no matter what the county chooses. A waste transfer station serves as a central collection point for trash before it is shipped somewhere else. Smaller garbage trucks, which typically serve homes and businesses, bring their waste to the facility each day. That trash is then sorted, consolidated and loaded onto bigger trucks headed for a landfill or other disposal facility.

Commissioners have ruled out building another landfill in Orange County, but the possibility of a sharing one with neighboring counties remains. Building a landfill, however, faces stringent regulatory hurdles and vehement community backlash. The Orange County Landfill, located in the historically black Rogers Road community, is expected to reach capacity in early 2012. The landfill opened in 1972, and community members have accused local governments of environmental racism. Commissioners explored the transfer station option for two years but failed to settle on a site as divisions emerged between groups of residents, waste management staff and consultants managing the process.

Commissioners might look at technologies that convert trash into energy, usually by burning it. Most are still in development phases and have yet to be used on a wide scale. Orange County does not produce enough waste to operate its own facility, making regional partnerships a must. A waste-to-energy facility is also sure to face its own siting, regulatory and financial challenges and possible opposition from environmentalists concerned about emissions.

One impact of the latest decision is clear: the move will mean more pollution. Shipping the trash to Franklin means garbage trucks will spend more time on the road, often on highways, increasing the county’s carbon footprint. That jump in emissions could make it hard for towns to meet long-term sustainability goals. Towns and institutions are analyzing the Franklin decision and other options’ potential effect on these goals. Springfield, for example, has made plans to reduce its emissions 60 percent by 2050.

“If we’re adding miles, then naturally we add more CO2,” said John Richardson, Springfield’s sustainability officer. “From that perspective, we would need to figure out ways to try and counter balance that.”

The latest estimate by Olver Inc., a solid waste management consultant on retainer with the county, stands at more than 46 million additional pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The estimate, which was approved by towns and county government, is about 1 percent of the 5.6 billion pounds of CO2 the county produced in 2005, the last time emissions were comprehensively measured. Springfield, along with Clinton, will shoulder the lion’s share of the increase, since the towns are farther from the Franklin transfer station. By shipping trash to Franklin, the county also loses some control over what will get landfilled, said Gayle Wilson, Orange County’s solid waste manager. Orange County has posted the third-best waste reduction numbers in the state, decreasing its trash output by 54 percent since 1991. Franklin, however, has gone backwards, producing 1 percent more. That could mean more greenhouse gas producing materials, like most organic waste, will not be properly disposed.

“There’s the as yet unknown impact of not being able to apply our regulations,” he said. “We’re worried about a little waste reduction slippage.”

The county’s decision could also affect East Dakota University, which aims to be carbon neutral by 2050. The University wants to find a place in-county to send its trash. But in an effort to free up space in the county landfill, the University has been shipping its waste to a private transfer station also in Franklin for about a year. That means an increase in hauling distance and a spike in emissions that could complicate sustainability goals, said BJ Tipton, EDU’s solid waste program manager.

“It’s one that we haven’t analyzed directly, but it’s a possibility,” she said. “The change has added some hauls.”

The exact financial costs of the decision have yet to be worked out. Officials and consultants in waste management say trucking trash to Franklin will cost the county more than building a local transfer station would have, especially in the long-run. Olver estimates that a local transfer station would have saved the county up to $15 million. The decision will also expose the county to more risk as variables like gas prices fluctuate, Jan Sassaman, chairman of the solid waste advisory board, and Wilson agreed.

“Logic tells me that there are other ways of doing things that are cheaper,” Sassaman said.

Springfield and Carrboro, which have a longer trip to the Franklin transfer station, face an annual increase of about $223,000 and $109,000, respectively, in hauling costs over shipping to an in-county transfer station, according to Olver. Hillsborough, which is closer to the Franklin station, will actually save about $3,000 annually by shipping to Franklin. But commissioners seem reluctant to rely on that data.

“There are fiscal and environmental costs no matter where we go,” Jacobs said. “We need to decide what the actual costs are in a process that is not consultant-driven.”

Orange County Voice, which played a prominent role in defeating attempts to site a transfer station in the county, has endorsed the Franklin option as the most fiscally sound. “Olver misinformed the public and the county on costs,” said Bonnie Hauser, a spokeswoman for Orange County Voice.

Bob Sallach, Olver president, said the numbers were as accurate as possible and approved by town and county staff.

How long local trash will be headed out of the county ultimately depends on one factor: how long it takes the county to develop an alternative solution. The commissioners plan to start the process this month in a meeting with local governments. But given the many options available, from relatively unproven waste-to-energy technologies to regional partnerships, it could be years from conception to ribbon cutting. “Unless there’s some violent upheaval in the current direction that we’re going, I doubt that it would be in 10 years,” Sassaman said.

Developing a partnership with nearby towns, counties and possibly EDU, meanwhile, could be logistically challenging, especially since the county’s neighbors are not facing the same time crunch. While the Orange County landfill is scheduled to close in early 2012, Madison County has 20 years more of life left in its landfill, while Marion County has up to 60, Wilson said. EDU is also not on the clock, since it began shipping its waste to a different private transfer station in Franklin about a year ago.

“We have a great working relationship with the county,” Tipton said. “But I think when it comes to actual infrastructure, they’re a little bit more challenging.”

Past collaborative projects, like one to capture methane at the current landfill, have consumed large amounts of resources and time. Tipton said whether Orange County has a waste management solution in 20 years is a “flip of a coin.” No matter what Orange County decides to do down the road, waste management experts say a local waste transfer station will remain a necessity.

“If we get an alternative technology, that you’re still going to have to get the waste to that facility,” Wilson said. “The issue of a transfer station will continue to reoccur in the meantime.”

Not all parties are convinced, however. Jacobs said there could be other viable alternatives. Ultimately, the county might find that its waste management problems just don’t have a clean solution.

“At some point we’re going to have to decide what is the best option, as opposed to the option that we feel cornered into taking,” Jacobs said. “If those two happen to coincide, then so be it.”

http://townofchapelhill.org/index.aspx?page=235

EDU vice chancellor to step down

Summary: Bernice Littlejohn announced her decision to step down as EDU’s executive vice chancellor and provost in May 2009 to become chancellor at the University of Kansas. When it came time to hire a new provost, East Dakota University did everything by the book. But when another search begins, administrators might need to find a new approach to solve the hiring equation. For this year’s search, EDU followed a well-worn path. They formed a search committee, settled on a job description and followed most national higher education trends by hiring R. William Funk and Associates, one of the best-known search consulting firms in the field. But at the end of the search, the University did not come up with a new provost. The executive vice chancellor and provost is the chief academic officer and No. 2 administrator at the University who oversees all academic departments, research and student affairs.

 

By Louie Louie

Updated: 9:32 AM

Bernice Littlejohn anounced her decision to step down as EDU’s executive vice chancellor and provost in May 2009 to become chancellor at the University of Kansas. When it came time to hire a new provost, East Dakota University did everything by the book. But when another search begins, administrators might need to find a new approach to solve the hiring equation. For this year’s search, EDU followed a well-worn path. They formed a search committee, settled on a job description and followed most national higher education trends by hiring R. William Funk and Associates, one of the best-known search consulting firms in the field.

But at the end of the search, the University did not come up with a new provost. The executive vice chancellor and provost is the chief academic officer and No. 2 administrator at the University who oversees all academic departments, research and student affairs.

As the experience showed, search firms are drawing from a narrow pool of people, limiting the diversity and range of candidates available to universities for consideration, and the last three expensive search processes all ended with EDU hiring from within its ranks. At the moment, EDU has no searches on the horizon — due in part to Chancellor Holden Caulfield’s decision to keep interim Carey Bruce in the job permanently after none of the finalists worked out. Until then, Caulfield says he will be looking for a new solution.

“I think the question is not whether any individual group — be it the committee or Bill Funk or anyone else — failed in this,” Caulfield said. “The question is, ‘Are we going about this in the right way?’”

The University’s Budget Committee allocates funds for administrative searches. A majority of the funds designated for searches are paid to search firms, but they also cover expenses related to travel and bringing candidates to campus. The money is not from state appropriations, but rather from investment income. It also comes from facilities and administrative funds — “overhead” from research contracts and grants that reimburse the campus beyond the direct costs of the research project. To replace Littlejohn, EDU formed a 13-member search committee and hired Funk’s company to facilitate the search, paying them $72,800 in non-state funds, plus expenses. The University’s budget committee allocated a total of $144,700 for the search.

In recent years, EDU has spent nearly a half-million dollars on national searches for candidates, only to eventually hire from within its own ranks. In 2007-2008, the search for a new chancellor cost $213,581, much of which went to search firm R. William Funk and Associates. The final candidates included at least six finalists including Caulfield, two black males and two white females. In 2008-2009, the search for a new dean of the college of arts and sciences cost $131,791, much of which went to search firm Witt/Kiefer Executive Search Firm. The final candidates included Joel Martin of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Karen Gil of EDU, Paul Armstrong of Brown University and Katherine Newman of Princeton University. The University hired Gil. In 2009-2010, the search for a new executive vice chancellor and provost cost $144,700, much of which went to search firm R. Willia Funk and Associates. The final candidates included Philip Hanlon of the University of Michigan, Anthony Monaco of the University of Oxford, Jeffrey Vitter of Texas A&M University and Scott Zeger of Johns Hopkins University. Bruce eventually filled the position.

Across the nation, the decision to hire a search firm is becoming an expected part of the hiring process. Universities pay large sums to these companies to identify, vet and interview potential candidates. Officials have cited the firms’ abilities to conduct background checks and recruit candidates as the tangible services worth paying for. But whether that increasingly common process results in the most effective hires is still in question, both in terms of the types of candidates who are pulled from the Rolodex files and the degree to which they can be matched with an institution. EDU administrators have said the process does not always achieve positive results even under the best of circumstances. Caulfield said he thinks traditional search firms like Funk’s look at too narrow a pool of applicants and need to broaden their scope to find a more unconventional range of candidates.

“I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t know they want to do these jobs,” he said. “They don’t know they would be good at these jobs. Higher education does need to rethink the way we do this. We definitely don’t look in enough places. I think higher education can do a much better job of looking more broadly for talent.””

Jean Dowdall, senior vice president at Witt/Kieffer, a search firm that has worked for EDU before, said the nature of a search for a provost, in addition to the position itself, inherently limits the number of qualified applicants. She also said most candidates for provost are deans or mid-level administrators who view the provost position as a transitory one in their ultimate quest to become president or chancellor of a university.

“You want to hire someone from a peer institution, not from a smaller, less well-regarded institution. And then they just have to have incredibly impressive academic credentials,” Dowdall said. “So you look at how many deans are out there, and how many are at the right kind of institution, and then how many are women and people of color, and you’ve reduced the number of people by a lot.”

Caulfield and other administrators were criticized for a lack of diversity among the candidates — the four finalists for the provost position were all white males with science backgrounds, much like Caulfield, Bruce and Shelton Earp, chairman of the search committee. Administrators are quick to point to the women and minorities who have served in top positions in recent years, including former vice chancellor for student affairs Margaret Jablonski. Littlejohn and former Senior Associate Provost for Finance and Academic Personnel Elmira Mangum are black women. But those administrators have all left in the past year, and the majority of the current top administrators could retain their jobs for a significant period of time before another search occurs. Dowdall agreed that it can be difficult to find minority candidates who come from diverse backgrounds.

“It may be that the smaller number of women and people of color have the background experiences to make them ready for that, and that there just aren’t that many in the pipeline yet,” she said.

Bruce’s hiring represents at least the sixth time in recent years that EDU has hired an internal candidate for a top administrative job. While the four finalists in the search were all external, and Caulfield said he was open to outside candidates, administrators have also said they appreciate candidates who have a familiarity with how EDU operates — an attitude that experts said fits with national trends in hiring. Dowdall said she has seen an increase in schools hiring internal candidates as a result of budget shortfalls, both as a result of candidates being less willing to move across the country and of universities looking for individuals who already understand the politics behind the allocation of funds. She acknowledged that there are downsides to hiring from within the school.

“There really does seem to be a pattern right now of continuity in a time of turmoil,” she said. “The biggest theme you would be missing here is new blood, new ideas, more creative and different ways of doing things,” she said.

Caulfield said he thinks changes need to be made to the types of people the search firms target, but isn’t sure how to go about making that happen. But the need to look outside the established pool of people will certainly stay on Caulfield’s mind, despite the lack of searches at the moment. Caulfield pointed out that Bruce, who is 63 years old, will eventually step down from the job, at which point he hopes he will have found a better way to conduct searches.

“One day, Carey (Bruce) will come in here and say ‘I’m tired of doing this.’ And we’ll gear up for a new way to find a replacement,” he said. “And hopefully I will have found people to give me good new ideas by then.”

Exercise 6: Analyze What You Find

The book that is currently number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list for fiction is “Me Before You” by Jojo Moyes. It has been in that position for 63 weeks so since December 18th of 2014. During that time the author’s wiki page has been updated several times and by several different people.

Some of the users who have updated it are Bearcat, Kasperbot, Danielamihailuta, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, All Hallow’s Wraith, Philip Cross, Gareth E. Kegg and various IP addresses. The recurring ones are Danielamihailuta, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, and Philip Cross.

Some of the things that have been changed were a lot of minor things and things in various categories. Things like biography, removal of categories for new ones such as “British Women Journalists” and “English Women Novelists,” the fixing of punctuation marks such as dashes with scripts, the adding of the tags “Mobile edit and mobile web edit,” the correction of a missing article, and information on categories for print media such as “The Independent People,” and “Daily Telegraph Journalists.”

The motivation behind these edits might be people finding out more information as the author participates in various things and new articles are published about her. Other motivations might be corrections on things that were wrong before that the editors before didn’t catch. Wikipedia is an open source site which means it’s constantly being updated by various people, sometimes for the better and sometimes for worse.

Exercise 4: Dig Deep for Data

I got stuck very early in because I couldn’t seem to search the right keywords or the right phrases. I tried “lock haven school board houses,” “kelly hastings lock haven house,” and quite a few other searches in Google and couldn’t find anything. I searched for almost an hour before deciding I was stuck. I’m not sure where to go for information like that and I’m not sure if a researcher can access something like that. However, even if I did find information like that, I’m not sure it would be a very newsworthy story. I don’t think it has really any immediate public interest other than, if the houses are nice, where is the money coming from?

Exercise 5: SEO strategy memo

SEO strategy is important for a website to succeed, especially a paper as famous as the New York Times. With such a large circulation, it’s important that their site is readable and easy to navigate. Plus, when searching on Google, it should be one of the first few papers to show up in a list of hundreds.

One thing the Times is doing right as far as search engines go is their ranking on Google. Depending on your search it’s usually on the second page or recommended at the bottom. Also, certain searches will put their articles as the third option to look into. If the Times was worried about it, they could try and get Google to put their actual site higher in their search engine but they’re doing a pretty decent job already.

Something interesting that is sometimes, or sometime not, carefully hidden is the viewpoint of a newspaper. Are they conservative, liberals or something in between. When studying the Times closer some of the topics they cover seems to lean more towards them being a liberal paper. This much is first clearly seen in their headline wording and second inside the actual body of each article.

When studying the homepage, at first glance it looks very cluttered and like things are everywhere but after studying it more, the viewer can scroll to the bottom and see all the sections labeled off with a list of three stories to click on. The top part seems to be just a small spattering of article options, probably some readers might be most interested in or are most popular or recent at the current moment. This is a very strong layout since it includes interesting articles to check out as well as articles separated by section. However, sometimes it looks a little messy so it might be better to include the sections in a list format as viewers scroll down and include a section labeled “Top Stories,” “Interesting Stories” or “Most Recent” at the very top of the page.

The layout and design of article elements is pretty decent for the Times. Each article is filled with pictures and graphs which all help to enhance the story of each article. Section headlines really depend on the story, some have quite a few strewn throughout some don’t. When the articles do use section headlines though, they’re nice and big which makes them clear to see. It really helps to break up the text as the viewer reads.

The leads for Times articles are also fairly well-written. Sometimes the leads can be lengthy but usually the journalist will keep their readers interested as they go. Some of the leads published in the Times can be twenty-five to thirty words, which is bad because a shorter lead has more of a chance of keeping a reader interested. In recent times, the Times has gotten better with this but it seems they’re still working on it.

The New York Times has a very good website, one of the best and they seem to be doing a good job at keeping up with it. I feel like some minor fixes could make it even better.

Tragedy on the tracks

City Transit officials investigating tragic train accident

SUMMARY: Information from the CTA (City Transit Authority) confirms there was a two-train accident on the Red Line. The accident occurred between the Fort Teeter and Seatac stations. 1 person is confirmed dead and others have been injured and transported to city memorial hospital

Devastating two-train crash ten-minutes ago leaves 1 dead and others injured.Further train activity has been halted until 8:15 a.m.

The accident occurred at 7:43 a.m between the Fort Teeter and Seatac stations. The one person reported dead thus far was Jeanice McMillan, the operator of Red Line train 112. McMillan died  as a result of the collision and any other persons involved have been rushed to City Memorial Hospital.

Actions currently being taken by the CTA:

• Currently rescue crews are evacuating passengers
• Fort Teeter and Seatac stations are closed for the rest of the day.
• City Transit Authority (CTA) safety and operations officials are working hand-in-hand with the National Transportation Safety Board to investigate the cause of the accident.

CTA General Manager, Roscoe Coltrane, feels most sorry for the families who are suffering as a result of this tragedy. “This is an incredible tragedy and our hearts go out to the families of those who suffered fatalities and to those whose loved ones are injured. We are committed to investigating this accident until we determine why this happened and what must be done to ensure it never happens again,” he said.

Family Support:

People who believe their relatives may have been on board the trains involved in the accident can call 311 if they live in the area. A family reunification center has been established at 501 Riggs Road.

More details to come later.

Facts C

City Transit officials investigating tragic accident of train 112

SUMMARY: Information from the CTA (City Transit Authority) confirms there was a Two-Train Accident on the red Line. The accident occurred between the fort teeter and seatac stations. 1 person is confirmed dead and others have been injured and transported to city memorial hospital

You have just received this information from the CTA – the City Transit Authority, which is responsible for running the commuter trains and subway in your metropolitan area:

Ten minutes ago, at 7:43 a.m., there was a two-train accident on the Red Line. The accident occurred between the Fort Teeter and Seatac stations.

All trains are stopped and will resume operating at 8:15 a.m.

Train operator Jeanice McMillan, who was operating train 112, died as result of the collision. Other injured people have been transported to City Memorial Hospital.

Rescue crews are evacuating passengers. The Fort Teeter and Seatac stations are closed. They will be closed least the rest of the day.

CTA safety and operations officials are working hand-in-hand with the National Transportation Safety Board investigating the cause of the accident.

People who believe their relatives may have been on board the trains involved in the accident can call 311 if they live in the

A family reunification center has been established at 501 Riggs Road.

CTA General Manager Roscoe Coltrane: “This is an incredible tragedy and our hearts go out to the families of those who suffered fatalities and to those whose loved ones are injured. We are committed to investigating this accident until we determine why this happened and what must be done to ensure it never happens again.”

The Story of Malala Yousafzai

A young Pakistani girl’s struggle to overcome the Taliban