A new 200-thousand dollar engineering laboratory for testing structural materials will be dedicated this (Friday) afternoon at Iowa State University. Lab manager Doug Wood says the facility will become the new home for civil engineering researchers to put all types of building materials through their paces. In the past it was typical construction materials like steel and concrete, but with fiber-reinforced plastics and concrete embedded with steel shavings, Wood says industry needs more thorough testing before products are put on the market. Wood says the high-tech gadgetry in this lab will be used to trash, tear up and torture the material that’ll be used to build the roads, bridges, buildings and dams of the future. Wood says “One machine tests items in tension and compression — it will pull things apart or squish things until they break. Another machine will also fatigue items…going between tension and compression cycling 24 hours a day on a material until we get the data on it…or it breaks.” Dedication is slated for two P.M.
Elderly scam leads to ban
A scam operator’s been banned from the state and fined after the operator of a mailbox store in the western Des Moines suburb of Clive helped officials uncover his plan. Bob Brammer, spokesman in the Iowa Attorney General’s office, says it began with a phony mailing that promised improbable winnings to elderly target victims.Things like “You’ve got a 99-percent chance of winning a million dollars, just send a 20-dollar processing fee,” the kind of offer most would throw out but anyone who sent the money identified themselves to this “con artist” as a good prospect to be on a “hot list.” That list of easy targets then would be sold to perpetrators of other scams, the consumer-protection office alleges. Last December investigators seized 12-thousand pieces of mail coming through the rented mailbox in Clive. Identified as Richard Panas, he runs a huge “list broker” operation. Brammer explains the main product he sells is the names of people who’ve shown they’re likely to cooperate with promoters of scams. The mailbox was raided and the money sent in by thousands of scam victims was returned to them. The judge ordered him to stop any business in Iowa, and possibly most important, to remove the name Iowa from any material he uses or lists he sells. The man’s also been ordered to pay the state 75-thousand dollars.
Britt teen arrested in fatal hit and run
A northern Iowa teenager is now jailed in a fatal Valentine’s Day hit-and-run accident.Hancock County deputies arrested 18-year-old Steven Gaiken of Britt. 48-year-old Bernard Anderson of LuVerne was walking toward Corwith on February 14th after his car got stuck in the snow. As he was walking, he was hit by a passing vehicle and killed. Gaiken is charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident and failure to report an accident. He’s held on 68-hundred-25 dollars bond.
U-P has mixed report on finances
Union Pacific has announced good news and bad news on its financial front. U-P C-E-O Richard Davidson says net income was down for the first quarter of its fiscal 2004, but the price of the railroad’s stock went up. Earnings on U-P’s stock were five-cents-per-share better in the first quarter. In addition, Davidson says there was “exceptionally strong” demand for the rail-line’s services. But Davidson conceded a big financial setback came when the Arkansas Supreme Court upheld a 30-million-dollar judgment against the railroad. With accumulated interest, Davidson says the railroad will owe nearly 36-Million dollars. While U-P is appealing the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, it recorded the 36-million judgment on its books as a loss for the first quarter. An Arkansas man riding in a garbage truck that was struck by a train sued Union Pacific, charging that the railroad didn’t clear overgrown brush that blocked the view at the railroad crossing where trains crossed at speeds as high as 60 miles an hour. The Arkansas Court has upheld the 30-million dollar judgment that man won. A hiring frenzy was another factor in U-P earnings during the first quarter of 2004. Davidson says with the country facing war early in 2003 the U-P stopped hiring, anticipating a third year of a flat economy. In 20-20 hindsight, he says the railroad didn’t hire enough people fast enough to meet demand once the economy started recovering, and though traffic volume was flat for three-quarters of the last year, he says it rose faster in this recent quarter than customers or the U-P had expected. The railroad’s started hiring in recent weeks, but Davidson says U-P couldn’t add staff quickly enough to satisfy the surging demand for railroad shipping services. Davidson says there’s a long “lead time” between the hiring of new crew and engineers and when they’re finally trained and ready to work on the railroad. The Union Pacific’s even borrowed staff from other railroads to keep up with the demand. He says a harsh winter slowed the trains and put extra demand on crews, cars, terminals and the railroad lines. Davidson says shipping volume rose nine-percent just in the month of March, especially for commodities being shipped to and from the West Coast…where the crew shortage is greatest. He says hiring and training continue at “a significant rate” but while U-P added almost 1000 people to the payroll, the railroad could hardly keep up. Despite all the headaches, U-P saw record revenues of two-point-nine Billion dollars and Davidson says the company saved almost 40-million in taxes by moving many of its personnel from Missouri into Nebraska and Texas.
Death of men in domestice violence not common
A professional working in domestic violence has updated a long list of people killed by their domestic partners. Marti Andersen heads the Crime Victim Assistance Division in the Iowa Attorney General’s office, and began tracking the number of people killed by a partner back in 1995. Anderson has been tracking cases in which someone’s been killed by their boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife, someone they have a child with, or someone they’ve dated within the last couple of years. Andersen relies on the reports of law-enforcement, domestic-abuse programs and prosecutors to assemble facts on the list, which names each person killed in a domestic situation and gives a brief summary. She’s added people later, sometimes waiting a year or two until evidence comes up to confirm that someone was murdered by a partner. She’s recently added Scott Shanahan to the list, though his body was hidden for more than a year before the investigation that led to his wife’s guilty verdict today in Shelby County district court. There were no men killed by their partners in Iowa in the year 2003 and none so far in 2004, so Scott Shanahan is still the last on the list of men’s names. Since August 2002 when Scott Shanahan was killed, there have been 14 women killed by their partners in Iowa. But the partners in a bad relationship aren’t the only ones killed when it turns violent. Andersen says since she began keeping the list in 1995, 28 so-called bystanders” have been killed in domestic-abuse murders.That might includes someone who came to help a victim, a parent of the threatened partner, someone they’d started to date, and 9 children killed by their father, 1 by a step-father, and 5 by a man who lived with them and their mother. When Andersen began keeping her list, she wanted to know where the people were from, and says many people assume that fatal domestic violence was most likely to happen in a big city.Just in 2004 there’s been a woman killed in Des Moines but others in Jefferson, Sioux City, and Jesup — and Anderson says in 2003 there were no women killed by a partner in Des Moines but women were killed in New Hampton, Ankeny, Davenport, Denison, Stockton, Hiawatha and Spencer. Andersen says many people feel safe in Iowa’s small hometowns but often in a rural community “the least safe place for a woman is in her home.” And she says though Dixie Shanahan killed her husband in a well-publicized case that ended this week, it was a typical situation in many ways with the likelihood that the woman would have been killed by her partner if she hadn’t shot him.
Dixie Shanahan faces prison time
The jury in the Dixie Shanahan murder trial returned its verdict this morning. At about 10:25 A.M., Judge Charles Smith read the verdict at the Shelby County Courthouse in Harlan. Second-degree murder carries with it a sentence of up to 50 years in prison, and a person must serve at least 35 years before they can be paroled. Shanahan’s attorney, Greg Steensland, says the verdict sends a “chilling message” to women living with domestic abuse. Steensland says the verdict sends a bad message to battered women everywhere who find themselves in an “inescapable situation.” Steensland made it clear, he did not think the jury erred. He says the jury simply used current state law in making the ruling. Steensland says jurors had to deal with the law, and he doesn’t “blame them” for the verdict they returned. Judge Smith ordered Shanahan taken into custody immediate and her bond was revoked. Sentencing has been scheduled tentatively for May 10th. Shanahan was convicted in the shotgun killing of her husband, Scott. She kept the body sealed in a bedroom for more than a year.
Missing fisherman’s body found
Searchers last night found the body of a missing angler in northwest Iowa. Harrison County authorities recovered the body of an Onawa man who drowned earlier this week in a boating accident at the De Soto Bend Wildlife Area. Refuge staff members say Ronald Uhl was fishing with his brother Tuesday afternoon in a small boat when he fell into the lake. Uhl was not wearing a life jacket at the time and family members say he couldn’t swim.
