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Gayla and Guy Norelli of Glassport, Vince Klinkner of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Jim Harrold of Seven Springs at an award ceremony celebrating Harrold’s rescue. (Submitted photo courtesy Guy Norelli)
“I just assumed I was going to drown.”
Jim Harrold of Seven Springs was fishing in the Youghiogheny River in Confluence, Somerset County, when the current pulled him under.
“As I was going down towards the bottom of the pool, which was about 20 feet, there was a light,” Harrold said recently. That's just about where Glassport resident Guy Norelli pulled Harrold out of the Youghiogheny River Lake outflow on Sept. 2, 2022.
Last month, Guy Norelli and his wife Gayla, who spotted the drowning man, were honored with a Public Service Commendation Medal by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Allegheny County elections officials have issued this video explaining how absentee and mail-in ballots are counted. (Courtesy Allegheny County via YouTube)
Ahead of Tuesday’s election, Pennsylvania has become ground-zero for election conspiracy theories, experts warned this week, and they are cautioning the public not to be fooled.
Officials with the Allegheny County Elections Bureau have already attempted to debunk social media rumors after a video circulated of an absentee ballot drop-off location in South Park.
County officials said no illegal activity occured at the South Park drop-off facility, located at the county-owned ice rink on Corrigan Drive. The county elections bureau has opened temporary satellite offices at nine locations, including in Duquesne, Squirrel Hill and six other neighborhoods, where voters may deliver their own absentee ballots to elections workers.
More than four out of 10 Pennsylvanians told pollsters they’d support an outright ban on fracking.
Sean O'Leary, senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, said the poll was conducted to assess voters’ attitudes toward the fracking industry. Multiple questions were asked about what could be done to minimize or reduce some of the impacts of fracking.
“And what we found was that, across the board, across a variety of different measures,” said O'Leary, “more than 90 percent of all Pennsylvanians supported increased efforts in those regards.”
Elementary school pupils learn to use tablets in class. (Lexie Flickinger photo from www.schooltechnology.org, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 2.0)
A new report finds Pennsylvania schools are falling behind in teachers’ pay and have not kept up with inflation since the 1990s.
The report from the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, highlights data on the state’s public schools, educator compensation, school district staffing and funding, and student performance.
Chris Lilienthal, assistant director of communications for the PSEA, said the report aims to educate Pennsylvanians on the challenges and opportunities facing public schools, and educators’ salaries are a big one.
A state vehicle accesses a public charging station. Electric vehicle registrations increased 82 percent between 2021 and 2023. (Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection photo)
Pittsburgh is emerging as a leader in innovative solutions like electric vehicles and clean energy to combat the climate crisis, says the group Elected Officials to Protect America.
The bipartisan nonprofit, based in Rockland, Maine, is a network of elected officials who are concerned about the effects of climate change on the environment. It recently hosted a press conference in Pittsburgh to applaud the region for efforts to encourage motorists to switch to electric cars, and for projects such as Energize Pittsburgh, a pilot program designed to help low-to-moderate income homeowners to reduce their energy costs.
Statewide, in 2022, electric vehicle registrations increased by about 82 percent from the previous year, the group said. At the start of this year, more than 47,000 electric vehicles were registered in the state.
State Rep. Emily Kinkead, Democrat from Bellevue, envisions Pittsburgh as a future leader in the green economy, bolstered by strong labor unions and academic institutions.
(Source: Pennsylvania Workforce Development Association; Keystone Research Center; Economic Policy Institute)
Pennsylvania's wage growth has rebounded from pre-pandemic lows and now exceeds the national average, according to the latest Pennsylvania Workforce Trends report from the Pennsylvania Workforce Development Association.
The data show average hourly earnings for nonsupervisory workers grew almost 4 percent between 2019 and this year. Pay grew even faster among low-wage workers, at 9.2 percent in Pennsylvania, but not as much as the U.S. average of more than 13 percent.
Carrie Amann, executive director of the Pennsylvania Workforce Development Association, said despite the wage increases, Pennsylvanians are well aware the cost of living has also been on the uptick.
“Employers are, in fact, paying their workers more in certain occupations and certain percentiles of workers,” Amann said. ‘We’ve seen significant increases — I think, almost 10 percent wage increases — in what we would typically call low-wage workers.”
A bill to increase Pennsylvania public school funding by billions of dollars passed the state General Assembly and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate.
House Bill 2370 proposes more than $5 billion extra in funding for the next seven years. It has been referred to the state Senate’s education committee and has not been scheduled for a vote.
Editor’s Note: This story was written by Danielle Smith of Keystone State News Service with additional reporting from Tube City Almanac.
The state Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation received a national award for its cleanup work regarding approximately 27 acres of coal refuse piles in Cambria County, which posed multiple environmental threats to the area. (Photo courtesy state Department of Environmental Protection)
Pennsylvania will receive $244 million this year to clean up the pollution left over from decades of coal mining.
The money is part of $725 million in abandoned mine cleanup funding the Biden administration is providing to more than two dozen states. Pennsylvania has more abandoned coal mines than any other state in the country, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection. About 1.4 million Pennsylvanians live within one mile of an abandoned mine.
The most recent funding is the third installment of more than $11 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law for cleaning up environmental hazards and pollution by past coal mining operations, aligning with President Joe Biden’s environmental justice initiatives.
“Remediation of abandoned mine lands is critical for the health, safety, and well-being of communities across Pennsylvania,” said Jessica Shirley, acting state secretary of environmental protection. “With this federal funding, we will be able to continue this vital work that protects public health and safety, and put reclaimed land to good use with eligible economic development initiatives.”
According to the state Department of Environmental Protection, more than 5,000 miles of streams in Pennsylvania are impacted by acid mine drainage from abandoned mining sites. Toxic chemicals from mines can harm water sources and result in issues like erosion, DEP said.
Although polls show that Pennsylvanians are concerned about the economy, research indicates that the unemployment rate statewide is at a record-low number, and better even than the rate nationally.
In April, the state’s jobless rate stayed at 3.4 percent, an all-time low in Pennsylvania, better than the national rate of 3.9 percent.
Maisum Murtaza, research associate at the Keystone Research Center, said the positive trend has been ongoing for months, with the rate hovering between 3.2 and 3.4 percent over the past year.
He saod the job market is recovering from the COVID pandemic and workers are starting to gain a bit more power in the labor market.
Editor’s note: The writer of this story has a conflict of interest. He is a U.S. Steel shareholder.
A local clean-air advocate argued Wednesday there is only one likely source of a rotten-egg smell that has plagued the Mon-Yough area for weeks — and it’s U.S. Steel’s Clairton Plant.
Patrick Campbell, executive director of the Group Against Smog & Pollution, said that a 2023 study by the Allegheny County Health Department concluded that nearly all hydrogen sulfide, or H2S, pollution in the region is the result of operations at Clairton Plant, which makes coke, a blast-furnace fuel, by super-heating coal to remove impurities.
“We know the source of the stench,” he said in a phone interview. “Something is going on at Clairton Coke Works that’s resulting in these emissions.”
Last week, Allegheny County Councilman Bob Macey convened a meeting of 40 first-responders, representatives from corporations, and local, county and state officials to discuss the ongoing odor. The smell — which seems to come and go — has resulted in countless calls to local fire departments by residents concerned that they have a natural gas leak.
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