300-year-old oak falls, twice

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (April 21, 2005): After weathering this winter's snow and wind storms, a 300-year-old oak tree just waking up for the spring fell across Holmes Road unexpectedly Tuesday morning, damaging a van and closing the road two separate times during the day.

The incident has prompted town officials to inspect and identify other old oaks that may need to be taken down.

At about 7:45 a.m., one large limb fell across the road, smashing the rear window of a passing van. “I just felt an impact,” said Scott Mincher, the van’s driver. “I looked in the mirror and my (rear) windshield was shattered.”

Mincher, who was unhurt, drove away and returned with a chainsaw to help clear the road. Onlookers and those who heard the story told him he should buy a lottery ticket.

While he was gone, a neighbor, Dan McMahan, had grabbed his own chainsaw and started work.

The drivers of other cars, who had to stop because the road was blocked, got out of their vehicles and helped, McMahan said. One person was driving a pickup truck. He swung around, attached a chain to his tow hitch and pulled one large section of the limb to the side of the road, where McMahan cut it up and with help was able to roll it into the ditch, clearing the roadway.

Hours later, a second, larger section came down, tearing off the side of the tree trunk and sending more branches flying across the road.

“It’s too bad it didn’t hit my truck,” said neighbor Arthur Gallant. His white Chevy pickup, on a rebuilt motor and transmission, was just a foot beyond the farthest branches.

“I wouldn’t have cried over that truck,” he said.

Gallant said he was surprised the tree picked a warm, windless day to fall apart, since it had already survived the heavy snows and high winds of this past winter. All the same, he knew it was an old tree, and “I’ve been eyeing it because I was afraid it would take the wires down.”

But when it fell, the limbs just rattled the wires and left them standing.

The tree was taken down later in the afternoon by Bartlett Tree Experts of Scarborough.

Tim Lindsay, a consulting arborist with the company, said the tree "failed" because of "a decay organism that was working very quickly within the tree."

He said fungi were rotting the tree from the inside out, which caused some limbs to appear normal from the outside, despite being discolored on the inside and far lighter than they should be, almost "like balsa wood."

The only way to discover the damage before a limb falls is to drill into the tree and inspect the wood that is removed.

The fungi "work very fast in degrading the wood in the fall of the year and the spring," Lindsay said.

That seasonal spurt, plus the tree's emergence from winter dormancy, led to the collapse. "The buds were swollen and they were ready to pop," Lindsay said. The weight of water now flowing up from the roots into the limbs of the tree overloaded the degraded wood, tearing the tree apart.

Lindsay said he and Public Works Director Mike Shaw will be on the lookout around town for other large oak trees that may be in similar straits and need to be tested.

Faye Holmes, who owns the house lot on which the tree sits, said she hoped other oaks on her property would be allowed to stand. The tree that fell Tuesday has “been in my father’s family for over 100 years,” she said, as part of what used to be Emerson Farm.

She was sad the broken tree had to come down. “The place won’t be the same without it.”

Parents, schools have role in keeping kids healthy

Published in the Current

SCARBOROUGH (April 14, 2005): Today’s children are so unhealthy, they may not live as long as their grandparents have.

Dr. Steven Kirsch, a family-practice doctor in Scarborough, gave that message to a group of parents at a presentation on youth obesity and wellness sponsored by the Wentworth PTA last week.

Kirsch and Dr. Lisa Letourneau, another Scarborough doctor involved in the Maine Youth Overweight Collaborative and a founder of the Scarborough Wellness Initiative, told parents how the culture has changed to encourage obesity in children and adults, and gave some ideas on how to change personal habits to stay healthy.

“It’s not only for our youth but for us and older adults as well,” Kirsch said. He showed data of adult obesity by state, and a picture of a Time Magazine cover from 1995, with the headline “The Girth of a Nation,” saying Americans have been growing more and more overweight every year.

“It’s not easy modifying your diet,” he said, urging people to eat based on their level of activity. “Your energy in, if it exceeds your energy out, you’ll end up gaining weight,” he said.

On the “energy in” subject, he talked about what he called “portion distortion,” a phenomenon over the past 20 years in which foods have increased in size and calories. For example, a “regular” size bagel has doubled in size and calories in the past 20 years, and a “small” portion of French fries has nearly tripled in size and calories, Kirsch said.

He said many people know they should be having so many servings of different types of foods, but few know what a serving really is.

“The serving size of a piece of meat should be about the size of a deck of cards,” he said. A serving of vegetables or fruit is about the size of a baseball, and “if you want a serving of sweets,” that should be the size of a domino.

Kirsch noted that kids today have less “energy out,” playing video games or watching TV more than young people did in the past.

“As a kid, all we used to do is play baseball as a group in the neighborhood, and we were riding our bikes everywhere,” Kirsch said.

Letourneau said all is not lost, and encouraged the parents in the room to work to improve their health and their children’s.

“It’s everything. It’s not just one thing,” she said. “Until we make it easier to make good choices (rather) than bad choices … we’re going to be fighting an uphill battle” to get people to change their personal behavior about eating and exercise.

She asked parents to think about what they do that might unconsciously encourage their kids to eat unhealthy foods. For example, she said, many parents bring sweets for kids to eat after sports competitions.

“If we’re at a sporting event, why bring it?” she asked, noting that many athletic areas have advertising for sodas, candies or other foods, including on scoreboards.

She said the snack bar by the main high school fields often has unhealthy foods, and suggested it stock apples and other better snacks.

“I guarantee it. If that’s all the kids have to choose from, they will buy it,” she said.

Letourneau also lamented the economics of many school lunch programs, including Scarborough’s, which must be financially self-supporting. That effectively forces them to sell sodas and sugary foods to make a profit to support sales of healthier foods.

Letourneau said there are bright spots. She has heard of students complaining about long lines at the salad bar at Scarborough Middle School, forced them to wait or to choose other foods to get to class on time.

And several fifth-grade classrooms are tracking their exercise through a program called “Maine in Motion,” in which each student uses a pedometer to measure how many steps they walk each day.

“Kids who are more active in school actually learn more,” Letourneau said. Many young children play sports in town, but once they get to the middle school and have to try out for teams, very few continue athletics, she said.

Letourneau said the solutions to weight problems start at home. “When an issue is identified with a child, it’s not about the child; it’s about the family,” she said. “The whole family has to be involved in choosing a healthy lifestyle.”

Parents can encourage their kids to follow what Letourneau called a 5-2-1-0 program, in which kids eat five fruits or vegetables a day, watch no more than two hours of TV or video games, do one hour of physical activity and drink zero sodas. “Juices can be just as bad…Water water water is good,” she said.

To change the “culture of overeating,” she urged parents to take the lead. “We are absolutely role models for our kids.”

Interest in neighborhood watch grows

Published in the Current

The organization of a Mitchell Road neighborhood watch group has already improved communication between residents and Cape Elizabeth police.

On Monday, for example, a Manter Road resident called police to ask about an unknown car parked in front of her home for several hours.

The woman also called Mary Chris Bulger, a Lydon Lane resident helping to organize the neighborhood watch, to let her know, and told Bulger she wouldn’t have called police if she hadn’t attended a neighborhood watch meeting last month.

“People are much more aware and certainly calling the police themselves” as well as calling or e-mailing their neighbors, Bulger said. “I think that’s how it will go.”

The effort has also sparked interest in similar groups from residents elsewhere in Cape Elizabeth.

Community Liaison Officer Mark Dorval welcomes the prospect of other such groups starting around town. “The more eyes and ears out there the merrier,” he said.

Also welcoming the wider interest is Mary Chris Bulger, a Lydon Lane resident who, with Pam Salerno of Manter Street, is coordinating the Mitchell Road group, which will meet on Wednesday, April 27, at 6:30 p.m. at the town center fire station in Cape Elizabeth to discuss how the effort will work.

Bulger said her group will continue to focus on the Mitchell Road area, and encouraged people elsewhere in town to meet with their own neighbors to set up their own programs.

At the April 27 meeting, Dorval will give a presentation on “being a good eyewitness” to help people know what details of a person or scene are most helpful to police.

Dorval said he hopes the effort improves the sense of community in the area. “In today’s day and age, a lot of people don’t know who their neighbors are,” he said.

The group will also plan presentations for future meetings, which are expected to occur at regular intervals, either monthly or every other month.

“In order for a neighborhood watch to be effective, you need to keep people’s interest,” Dorval said.

Bulger has her own plan to keep the group in people’s minds.

She has an e-mail list of about 22 households who will get regular updates about the group’s activities and programs.

“What I would be happy with is for people to be observant” and call police with questions or concerns, Bulger said.

She said people who live near each other are meeting each other for the first time as a result of the group. “I met several of my neighbors I didn’t know,” she said.

The group has sprung up after concerns arose that an intruder was repeatedly entering homes in the neighborhood and watching people while they slept. No one was harmed, nothing was taken, and the intruder fled as soon as the residents awoke, according to police.

“Hopefully they’ll catch this guy,” Bulger said.

Capt. Brent Sinclair said the department has “got a lot of calls,” including about 10 people suggesting specific names of people they want police to check out.

Of the 10 calls, two named the same person, Sinclair said, while the others all suggested different names.

“Everybody seems to think it looks like somebody they know or have seen,” he said. Police are following up on those leads now.

Editorial: Barring the press

Published in the Current

The state Department of Education should reverse its practice of preventing the media from accompanying public officials on tours of public school buildings being built with public money.

That practice was invoked Wednesday to bar reporters from a tour of Scarborough High School’s renovation and construction site, though the quality of the work done on the project has been under public scrutiny in recent weeks, and was the subject of the tour.

The closing of the tour means the public has one more reason to fear that there are real problems with the construction quality at the high school, and that the schools are trying to cover them up.

Dale Douglas of the department told us Wednesday that the practice is meant to allow state employees – public servants – to speak freely to each other, and said the department is concerned that its employees’ comments might be misconstrued by the media.

But thousands of other public officials in our towns and elsewhere, from town councils to state legislators, conduct their business in front of the media on a regular basis, without complaint or concern. They make their comments openly and conduct frank discussions, including asking hard questions, and their comments are fairly and accurately reported in our paper and hundreds of other media outlets.

The Department of Education doesn’t want to play by the same rules. And Superintendent William Michaud took their side, likening the event to an executive session or an internal investigation.

Michaud forgets that an executive session can only happen when a majority of officials in an elective body vote – in public – to close the door, and only after saying why state law allows them to do so. And the timing of this “internal investigation” – if that is what it is – is unusual, coming as it does after a full public airing of concerns about the construction project, and after the public release of the schools’ extensive rebuttal to the concerns.

It would have been a big help to everyone involved if the public – in the form of the press, the public’s representative – had been allowed on the tour. If there are real problems, we would have seen them and reported on them. If there are not problems, we would have told you that. And if there is not a way to tell without deeper investigation, we would have explained that.

Now, the school board and school officials must consider whether they think the town should spend $20,000 on an outside engineer.

But they have barred one of the few ways to keep the council from conducting what some of them have said is an unneeded outside review.

It’s true that the state officials will issue a report in a week’s time, and that report will be made public. But given the scrutiny and skepticism the report is certain to face, it would have helped all involved – and most of all you, the public – if you had been able to see the process of researching the report. How complete was the state’s review of the construction work? We may never know, and we should.

Michaud should have argued with the state officials that, in light of the public nature of this situation, having the press on the tour would help the schools make their case that everything is “fine,” to use the word of Board of Education Chairman David Beneman.

Unless, of course, there are real problems with the school, or unless there’s no way to tell without being a professional engineer.

In those cases, having the press along would not help the schools. But in those cases, it’s time to spend the money on an outside expert.

Students learn about choice of new pope

Published in the Current

SOUTH PORTLAND (April 7, 2005): Holy Cross School Principal Deacon Steve Harnois took a group of students into the school's chapel Monday, with its frescos and murals on the walls, as millions around the world mourned the death of the pope.

Harnois has been using the death of Pope John Paul II to teach students about the traditions surrounding the death of the pope and the process of choosing a new one.

Taking students into the school's chapel, "like the Sistine Chapel," is helping Harnois recreate for the students the experience of the cardinals, as they vote to choose the new leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

“We learned basically what’s going to be happening as the cardinals arrive in Rome,” Harnois said of the events at the pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade school on the corner of Broadway and Cottage Road.

Pope John Paul II, born Karol Wojtyla in Poland in 1920, died Saturday at age 84, after more than 26 years as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church.

The school is beginning each morning this week by praying the “‘Our Father,’ ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘Glory Be’ for the repose of his soul,” Harnois said.

Harnois gave teachers information on Pope John Paul II, and on the process of choosing a new pope, and are discussing the events with their students.

Harnois, who worked 29 years in public education before moving to the Catholic schools seven years ago, said death is not a problem topic at Holy Cross.

“It’s much easier to handle death here than in the public schools … because you can go into Christian beliefs,” he said.

In religion classes, students have talked about John Paul II and what he did during his papacy, as well as the traditions surrounding the death of a pope and the election of a new one.

Some of the students asked about the practices of hitting the pope on the head with a silver mallet and calling out the pope's original name, Harnois said. He told them those measures were to ensure the pope was not stricken with the “sleeping sickness” in the 16th and 17th centuries, which made people appear dead when they were really still alive.

“We talked about all the different traditions that have evolved over the years,” Harnois said, including the prayers before each balloting, why the cardinals’ ballots are threaded by a needle onto a thread and why the ballots are burned after each vote.

Those practices were developed to prevent cardinals from casting more than one vote, which led to questions from students who wondered why holy men would try to cheat. Harnois has discussed with the students how some people throughout history have been more interested in the “power of the papacy rather than the goodness of it.”

And to explain why a newly chosen pope has to pick a new name, Harnois looks to the Bible. “It comes from Jesus changing Simon’s name to Peter,” he said, referring to an event in which Jesus renamed one of his disciples to reflect a new, reborn set of beliefs.

Harnois, who was in his late 20s when John Paul II became pope, is now 65. He has also addressed some of the larger issues the cardinals face when they meet to choose a pope.

“The needs of the church, the needs of the kingdom of God, should be discussed,” Harnois said. If there are specific people who meet those needs, their skills might be mentioned, but there is nothing like what Americans might call campaigning. Cardinals do not urge each other to vote for one or another person in particular, he said.