BLOOMSBURG – Thunderstorms bringing high winds and heavy rain downed trees across Columbia and Montour counties Thursday, leading to road closures, causing power outages, and knocking the 911 phone system out of service.
Jeremy Brown, Director at East Central Emergency Network, said a fiber optic line was cut somewhere compromising service for Verizon customers in several counties.
BERWICK — A kitchen fire, started by accident Saturday morning when cardboard boxes were left on an electric stove, forced about a dozen people to evacuate a large multi-unit apartment building.
Fire alarms went off shortly before 8 a.m. in the four-story building that once housed the old Berwick Hospital at 1599 N. Mulberry St.
MIFFLIN TWP. — A helicopter crop dusting a cornfield crashed Saturday morning, killing the pilot.
Theodore “Ted” Farwell, 39, was working for his family company Triple F Flying when his small helicopter apparently clipped an electric wire, said his brother, Joe Farwell.
UPDATE 7 p.m.
BLOOMSBURG — A suspicious package created a brouhaha at both the Columbia County Courthouse and Bloomsburg Post Office on Wednesday, after officials couldn’t determine what was inside it and summoned a bomb squad.
BLOOMSBURG —A judge has ordered the Bloomsburg Fair Raceway to shut down days after a hearing was held in county court.
Visiting Judge William Amesbury granted the town’s request for an injunction in an order filed Monday morning.
BEAR GAP — An overnight blaze here Sunday quickly engulfed a large two-story garage and adjacent storage shed at a secluded woodland residence just south of Knoebels Amusement Resort in Ralpho Township.
LIME RIDGE — A 2-year-old girl was thrown from an SUV and critically injured when it slammed into a concrete highway barrier after being stuck by eastbound traffic on I-80 here Friday morning.
The child, 2-year-old Dana Isabella Serrano, of Ohio, had to be rescued from beneath the right rear of a 2011 Acura that was sideswiped in heavy eastbound truck traffic near the Berwick exit about 8:30 a.m.
BERWICK — Fire ripped through a mobile home early Monday morning, leaving a couple homeless, but alive.
Wilberto and Kathy Rosario were asleep when the blaze broke out at 1348 Seventh Ave. shortly before 3:45 a.m. Their son Hector, who was visiting from Florida, was staying in a camper nearby, woke up to see flames coming from the north side of the trailer.
“I banged on the door and woke my father and mother,” Hector Rosario said. “They went out the back door.”
He tried to put the fire out with a garden hose, “but the hose didn’t do nothing,” he said.
BLOOMSBURG – The man who drove a car through a crowd at a fundraiser last summer was given two life sentences and up to 380 years in prison Tuesday for killing one person and injuring 19 others, before driving home and beating his mother to death.
Adrian Oswaldo Sura Reyes, 25, of Nescopeck, said nothing during the proceedings that included victim statements and stern words from President Judge Gary Norton.
BENTON — A woman shot a man in the small of his back with a small handgun during a domestic dispute at a Main Street apartment on Tuesday morning, police said.
The shooting shortly before 8 a.m. happened in a second-floor apartment at 300 Main St., Benton, near the corner of Main and Church streets. Two children were home when the shooting occurred, officers said.
The report of the shooting drew local police from across the county, and more than a dozen State Police cruisers.
Officers said the man is expected to survive and they have the woman in custody.