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Insurance company sues over Urbandale fire

July 19, 2010 By

An insurance company is suing a central Iowa developer and his wife – claiming the couple is responsible for a fire that destroyed their one-million dollar home last year. The fire on February 9, 2009 in Urbandale remains under investigation, but American Family Mutual Insurance Company alleges John Kline and his wife, Michelle, concealed information about the circumstances of the fire that left their 13,000 square foot home in a pile of burnt rubble.

No one was injured in the fire. The federal lawsuit claims the Kline’s attempted to fraudulently collect damages for the loss of the house and a vintage Corvette. John Kline is a longtime central Iowa developer. The fire happened less than a week after Kline was found guilty in a multi-million dollar fraud case.

Filed Under: Crime & Courts, Fires/Accidents/Disasters

Iowa based installer says not all stadium poles a problem

July 19, 2010 By

An Iowa-based installer of stadium light poles says the poles that have been recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission are a specific type and not all the poles from the company are a problem. The concern is that the Whitco Company L-P poles would crack and fall over. Steven Everly of Ardent Lighting in Knoxville says the problem poles have a modification that causes the problem.

He says the poles with a problem have what’s called an anchor-based pole design, which includes a flange at the bottom where they are bolted to a base. Everly says the poles where manufactured, then re-cut and remanufactured to put the flange on the bottom of the pole. Everly says the remanufacturing has led to the problems. Everyly says along with Iowa, his company installs poles in Minnesota, Nebraska and the Dakotas. They’ve installed some 200 to 300 poles in Iowa over the last 20 years.

He says they have installed mostly direct-imbedded poles, which he says is much more structurally sound. Everly says instead of having the weight of the pole focused on the welded flange, the imbedded poles spread the weight over the entire length of the pole. Everly says they heard about potential problems with the Whitco poles and let their customers know. He says West Des Moines Valley stadium is one place where they installed the poles.

Everly says as soon as they became aware of the potential problem, they inspected the poles and then helped the school find a structural engineer to inspect the poles, which he says cleared the poles of any default. Everly says his company is proud of its record for installing safe poles.

“The only poles we’ve ever failed…we lost a field in Parkersburg at the F-5 tornado, that’s a little bit extreme,” Everly says. Everly says he wants to counter “misinformation” that all the Whitco poles installed had problems. He says that is not the case for the poles his company has installed in Iowa.

Filed Under: Fires/Accidents/Disasters

Bellevue police report: unknown why horses bolted in fatal July 4th parade

July 19, 2010 By

Police officers in the eastern Iowa town of Bellevue have concluded their investigation into the July 4th parade that turned deadly.

Bellevue police say it’s still unknown why two horses pulling a buggy bolted and trampled the crowd after the bridle came off one of the horses.

Sixty-year-old Janet Seines, a passenger in the buggy, was thrown off the buggy after it hit a tree and died from her injuries. The initial report said 24 other people were injured as the horses bolted through the crowd, but police have since identified five more victims to bring the total number injured to 30.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Fires/Accidents/Disasters

Great grandmother’s journal sparks Iowa native’s novel

July 19, 2010 By

An Iowa native used a 15-page journal written by her great-grandmother as inspiration for a novel about feuding farm families nearly a century ago. Michelle Hoover grew up in Ames, descended from four generations of Iowa farmers.

Hoover’s debut novel, “The Quickening,” follows two fictional Iowa farm women, isolated and very different neighbors who face a series of hardships together. She says her great-grandmother’s journal, which included family photos, sparked the idea. Hoover says, “My mother gave it to me, ‘Oh, you might be interested in this,’ she said. Of course, I was. From the very first sentence, it’s really heartbreaking. She says, “I don’t know if anyone else will care about our life, but here it is.”

Reading about the challenges of her real-life ancestors gave Hoover the premise for her book. “It’s about two Iowa farm women trying to survive the Great Depression,” Hoover says. “They’re each other’s closest neighbors and have to depend on each other to get through their hardships but they’re also about as different as possible and that causes them problems.” The story is told in alternating chapters by the two women and encompasses several decades.

Hoover says she intentionally kept the book’s setting anonymous, but in her mind, it was central Iowa. “It’s based in part on my great-grandmother’s journal and her farm was actually in south-central Iowa but I wanted to keep it open,” Hoover says. “I have a reader in North Dakota that said when she read the book, it was just like home for her, that landscape, which is exactly what I wanted. It’s the landscape that’s more important to me than the actual place name.”

The 37-year-old Hoover, who teaches writing at Boston University, will be back in Iowa for a book tour next week, with readings scheduled in Ames, Iowa City, Oskaloosa and Des Moines.

Learn more at :www.MichelleHoover.net.

Listen to Matt Kelley’s complete interview with Hoover: Hoover interview 4:34 MP3

Filed Under: Agriculture, Human Interest, Recreation & Entertainment

DNR increases bobcat limit for the fall season

July 19, 2010 By

Iowa hunters and trappers will be allowed to take more bobcats this year. Willie Suchy, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ Wildlife Bureau Research Supervisor, told lawmakers there are now enough cats to raise the limit from 200 to 250.

“We rely on a couple of different indices, you know the number of animals that get hit by cars and we have a survey where our bow hunters actually report the number…and it’s been increasing gradually over the last few years and our philosophy is not to expand the season so the bobcats go away but to keep them at a certain level,” Suchy said.

A legislative review committee signed off on a proposal to raise the quota to 250 last week. At one time on the state’s endangered list, the D.N.R. now estimates there are as many as 4,000 bobcats in Iowa. Suchy says the goal is to preserve enough of the animals to allow the population to expand in Iowa’s northern counties.

“The indices are very strong in the southwest and the southeast and as you go northwards they tend to decline,” Suchy explained. “Over the last seven or eight years, we’ve seen that move north more and as we’ve seen that – we add a row of counties to the open season.”

Under the expanded quota, hunters and trappers will now be allowed to take bobcats in 35 of Iowa’s 99 counties. The season begins November 6.

Filed Under: Environment & Conservation Tagged With: ,

Iowa Health Systems spending $18 million to expand fiber optic network

July 19, 2010 By

Iowa’s largest hospital group is investing nearly $18-million in federal economic stimulus money to expand its statewide wireless and fiber-optic health-care network. Bill Leaver,  president and C.E.O. of the Des Moines-based Iowa Health System, says the improvements will help bring telemedicine devices into the homes of patients in rural areas so their doctors can watch over them more closely.

Leaver says, “The primary-care physician and their staff taking broader responsibility and longer range responsibility, for example, chronic disease patients and ensuring that the patient is complying with their treatment regimen for that chronic disease.” The money will help move the group of hospitals and doctors toward what’s known as the “medical home model” of health care. Leaver says the result will put homebound and chronically-ill patients — even in rural areas of Iowa — in direct telecommunication with their health-care providers, without their having to leave the house.

Leaver says, “Connected via this wireless tower to a physician office or to a home health agency that will be monitoring that patient, communicating with that patient, seeing various vital signs and actually have visual connection to that patient.”

Iowa Health is also using almost ten million of its own money to complete the project. Leaver says the enhanced network will make possible the transmission of X-rays and CT-scans to any hospital and medical center in Iowa. Leaver expects to have the enhanced network up-and-running by mid-2012. The Iowa Health System has affiliated hospitals in the Des Moines area, the Quad Cities, Anamosa, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Sioux City, Muscatine, Fort Dodge and Dubuque.

Filed Under: Health & Medicine, Technology

Work continues to restore power after weekend storm

July 19, 2010 By
Hundreds of trees and tree limbs were blown down by the weekend storm.

Hundreds of trees and tree limbs were blown down by the weekend storm.

Power crews are continuing work today to get electricity restored after an early morning storm that roared through Iowa Sunday.

 MidAmerican spokesperson Ann Thelen says at the peak of the storm there were about 38,000 customers without power and they implemented their emergency system to bring in crews from around the state to help restore the power.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Fires/Accidents/Disasters Tagged With:
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