Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
Keeping your community covered. We're committed to producing high-quality, fact-based news and information that gives you the facts in this community we call home. If our work has helped you stay informed, take action, or feel more connected to Windham County – please give now to help us reach our goal of raising $150,000 by December 31st.
About a year and a half ago, Jessica Greene was running a maternal support group when a mother approached her with a problem: She couldn't find proper childcare while undergoing addiction treatment.
“It just seemed like it was a need that nobody had been aware of,” recalled Greene, who works for Health Care & Rehabilitation Services in Brattleboro.
Is a bucolic, 177-acre hillside campus a good place for a wintertime homeless shelter? That was a recurring question at an Aug. 16 community meeting, as some residents balked at plans to move Brattleboro's seasonal overflow shelter from its longtime downtown home to the Winston Prouty campus a few...
Despite a late start, administrators say Vermont Yankee's $143 million fuel storage project is on schedule to finish by the fall of 2018. That's not to imply, however, that anything related to the movement of radioactive spent fuel is happening quickly at the idled Vernon nuclear plant. In fact,
The Turner family had a name for their hardscrabble Grafton homestead, and that name reflected a long journey from slavery to freedom. “The home place was named 'Journey's End,' 'cause father never wanted to go no further after he got up there on that hilltop,” recalled Daisy Turner, whose parents founded the farm in the early 1870s. The Turner family's tale survives because of Daisy's prodigious and well-documented gifts as a storyteller. But their mountaintop home has been mostly reclaimed...
In many ways, the town's seasonal overflow shelter has been operating on borrowed time. So administrators have decided to try something entirely new when cold weather arrives this fall. The overnight shelter will move out of downtown and relocate to the new Winston Prouty campus for the 2017-18 season, officials announced on Aug. 14. The program also is gaining a full-time staff and adding professional medical, substance-abuse, and mental-health services. The move presents logistical challenges, some of which likely will...
Federal regulators say the owner of three Connecticut River hydroelectric dams needs to take another look at erosion issues. Great River Hydro is seeking renewed Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) licenses to operate the Wilder, Bellows Falls, and Vernon hydro dams. As part of that process, the Massachusetts-based company had submitted two years of erosion-monitoring data. But in a recent decision, federal officials said the company's analysis was “incomplete and inconsistent with what was required in the approved study plan.”
It will take a while for state and federal regulators to decide whether NorthStar Group Services can buy Vermont Yankee. But in the meantime, the New York company isn't just waiting around. New documents show NorthStar already has begun performing engineering and design work at Vermont Yankee under a separate, “pre-closing” contract with plant owner Entergy. NorthStar contractor Areva also has started similar work. Entergy says these preliminary projects will prove valuable no matter who ends up decommissioning Vermont Yankee.
A Vermont Yankee employee's deliberate failure to check radiation exposure monitors was a “personal accountability issue,” and no other staffers engaged in such behavior, the company says. In a new filing with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Entergy says it conducted an extensive review after federal inspectors discovered that a staffer hadn't checked the functionality of personnel contamination monitors for eight months in 2016. The technician in question was fired, Entergy says. The company found no evidence of similar problems after...
