Man dies when sink hole opens in California home
Published 9:00 pm Sunday, April 23, 2006
ALTA, Calif. – A large sink hole opened in the middle of a house, killing a 27-year-old man who plummeted 10 feet and was covered by the rubble, officials said Sunday.
The two-story home, built in the 1980s, might have been sitting atop a decades-old underground mine, authorities said. Recent rains possibly softened the ground under the home, in an isolated area near Lake Alta, northeast of Sacramento.
“It’s unbelievable,” Placer County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Dena Erwin said. “From the front of the house, it’s absolutely normal. Then, in the middle of the house, is this enormous hole.”
Rescuers had trouble reaching the man because the ground began to shift, creating an unsafe situation for work crews. They still were trying to remove the body Sunday afternoon, said Erwin, adding that the home has been condemned.
Texas: College bans MySpace.com
Students of Del Mar College in Corpus Christi now have to use computers outside the school’s system if they want to visit the popular social-networking Web site MySpace.com. The community college has blocked the site in response to complaints about sluggish Internet speed on campus computers. Forty percent of daily Internet traffic at the college involved the site, the college said.
FEMA wants $1.26 million back
The federal government is asking 625 people in Texas to pay back a total of $1.26 million in recovery aid they shouldn’t have received after Hurricane Rita. Texas families received more than $592 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the September storm. Most of the money FEMA wants was incorrectly paid for damage to homes that were not the owners’ primary residences, the agency said.
Louisiana: Runoff campaign begins
Incumbent Ray Nagin and rival Lt. Gov Mitch Landrieu kicked off their New Orleans mayoral runoff campaigns by urging voters and the media to leave race out of the historic mayoral election, calling in campaign stops for unity in the face of daunting rebuilding tasks after Hurricane Katrina. In a field of 22 candidates, Nagin, who is black, won 38 percent (41,489 votes), and Landrieu, who is white, 29 percent (31,499). The runoff is scheduled for May 20.
Kansas: BTK gets prison privileges
Good behavior has earned the BTK serial killer the privilege to watch television, listen to the radio, read and draw in his Wichita prison cell. Even with the new privileges, Dennis Rader remains in the prison’s most restrictive environment. He is let out of his 8-foot-by-10-foot cell only one hour a day, five days a week, to shower and exercise. Rader, who called himself BTK for his method to “bind, torture and kill,” would have to serve a minimum of 175 years to be eligible for parole. Kansas had no death penalty at the time of the 10 murders.
