Dearth, snow and fire from week that was
Some random observations of the week that was:
• Scholastic wrestling is not the popular sport it was a generation or two ago, when thousands would pack gyms to witness dual meets. Competition in weight classes was stiff, and a forfeit in a bout because of a lack of a wrestler was rare.
Not so today. A recent article by sports writer Joe Tuscano described the problems smaller schools have in fielding teams and cited a recent dual meet between Avella and Avonworth as an example. The lack of wrestlers resulted in no contest in all bouts but one, and that one ended quickly by a fall in the second period.
We have to wonder if the spectators at this event were charged admission to see the three minutes or so of action, and if they were, how many demanded their money back.
• Poor Donora. Can any town in Western Pennsylvania claim to have lost more? Its Donora-Webster Bridge is gone now, and so are its banks and shops and most of its churches. It no longer has a grocery store or a school. And now a fire early Tuesday has shut down its youth center and food pantry.
A fire of suspicious origin that destroyed a small frame house blew out six windows and caused extensive smoke damage to the former synagogue used by the Mon Valley Youth & Teen Association.
Its director, Mary Ann Bandalo, is looking for another building to move the activities but doubts there is anywhere suitable in the borough.
We have to wonder if Donora will ever catch a break.
• Washington’s Christmas parade was held on a Friday night in early December, but the mess on the street it left was not cleaned up until Monday. City officials said it wasn’t possible to address the litter sooner because it would have meant paying overtime to its street department employees for working on the weekend.
Apparently, the snowstorm that began last Friday and ended shortly after noon on Saturday had the same effect as the parade. A city truck was observed beginning to plow the city lot on East Wheeling Street at about 9:40 a.m. Monday. The plowing was made more difficult by the fact that some employees of Citizens Library had managed to get their cars through the deep snow and into parking spaces in order to be at work when the library opened at 10 a.m.
Let us hope that the next snowstorm has the decency to hit at the beginning or middle of the week, in that the city is presumably unable to clear its lots at nights or on weekends.
• The snowstorm might have caused problems here, but they were nothing like those experienced by some motorists on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, some of them stranded for as long as 30 hours. That the situation did not turn tragic was a bit of a miracle.
Some motorists in Russia were not so lucky earlier this month, when a blizzard stranded 80 people on the highway between Orenburg and Omsk. Temperatures were well below zero, and help did not arrive for 16 hours. By the time rescuers showed up, one man had frozen to death, an elderly woman had suffered a heart attack and 12 people had severe frostbite. One by one, the vehicles had run out of fuel, and people crammed into the few with motors still running. Then they burned clothes and money in order to stay warm.
It is not as if the latest storm here came without warning. Why were so many vehicles on the turnpike during the storm, and why hadn’t traffic been restricted? These are questions our turnpike officials, state police and travelers ought to keep in mind the next time a snowstorm comes barrelling up from the southeast.