After a flurry of emergency preparations that went on through the week, Hurricane Earl was downgraded to a tropical storm by the time it arrived on the Island late Friday night, sparing the Island any damage save from drenching rains that flooded some cellars and washed out driveways.
The Vineyard was in a state of emergency and high alert at nightfall yesterday as Hurricane Earl crawled up the Eastern Seaboard, a category three storm packing winds up to 111 miles per hour with drenching rains, its huge eye pointed straight at eastern Cape Cod, the Vineyard and Nantucket.
The Massachusetts Land Court has upheld the town of Aquinnah in a pivotal case that will ultimately decide whether a large swath of rare, salt-blasted coastal heathland along Moshup Trail remains forever wild or is opened up for development.
The Chappaquiddick superintendent for The Trustees of Reservations has resigned and Trustees are taking full responsibility for an incident late last month where an unfledged nest of least tern chicks was nearly run over by a Trustees-owned four-wheel-drive truck that was on the barrier beach conducting a natural history tour.
He is a pilot who became the owner of an airline that became one of the best small business success stories in the country. And now Dan Wolf, the owner of Cape Air, has decided to add politics to his CV. Mr. Wolf has announced he will run for the Cape and Islands seat in the Massachusetts senate that Rob O’Leary will vacate this year, when he makes his own bid for the seat in U.S. Congress that will be vacated by Rep. William Delahunt, who is stepping down.
A spokesman for the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital confirmed yesterday that Dr. Timothy Tsai is no longer director of the hospital emergency room, although the hospital could not provide further details about the circumstances that led to his abrupt departure this week.
“Dr. Tsai is on leave from his position as director of emergency medical services,” said hospital spokesman Rachel Vanderhoop. “That is the only statement we are making right now,” she added.
Vandals have been targeting the boat house at the Sailing Camp Park in Oak Bluffs, leaving a trail of smashed-in doors, broken windows, floats set adrift in the Lagoon Pond — and, in a dangerous turn, the latest offense this week saw gasoline poured around the grounds.
At the receiving end of all this vandalism is Sail Martha’s Vineyard, the community-supported nonprofit program that leases the boathouse on the Lagoon from the town to teach sailing to Island children.
A one-year moratorium on wind turbine applications and an array of housing initiatives, including a bylaw that addresses the thorny issue of inheritance for the children of affordable housing recipients, top the list of business for a double-header special and annual town meeting in Chilmark next week.
The meeting is Monday night in the Chilmark Community Center; longtime moderator Everett H. Poole will preside. The special town meeting begins at 7:30 p.m., immediately followed by the annual town meeting at 8 p.m. There are a total 31 articles on the two warrants.
State police and federal drug enforcement authorities made their annual helicopter sweep over the Vineyard early this week looking for marijuana plants under cultivation.
Sgt. Jeffrey Stone who works out of the Massachusetts state police barracks in Oak Bluffs, said yesterday that 62 plants were found and removed at six sites in Oak Bluffs, West Tisbury and Edgartown.
Compromise and congeniality were the hallmarks of the West Tisbury annual town meeting this year, as 210 voters marched through a 48-article warrant in three hours flat, first pausing at the outset to hear the annual reading from the town poet laureate and shower the retiring police chief with accolades and long-stemmed red roses.
“Isn’t this a great town?” beamed moderator F. Patrick Gregory following the reading by Fan Ogilvie.
