http://www.wyff4.com/article/wyff-news-4-anchor-photojournalist-tragically-killed-when-tree-falls-on-suv/20945002

POLK COUNTY, N.C. —
WYFF News 4 anchor Mike McCormick and WYFF News 4 photojournalist Aaron Smeltzer died Monday when a tree fell on their SUV.

The accident happened on Highway 176 in Polk County while they were covering the impact of heavy rain in that area.

Video: Polk County authorities give update on accident
Tryon Fire Chief Geoffrey Tennant said the engine of the SUV was running and the transmission was in drive when authorities arrived at the scene about 2:30 p.m.

He said the tree that fell on the SUV was about 3 feet in diameter and had stood back off the road.

Tennant said the ground was saturated and the tree's root system failed.

"I have never seen an event like this one," Tennant, who has been in fire service in Polk County for 44 years, said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Bridge#History



History

Construction

The bridge was conceived by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling in 1852, who spent part of the next 15 years working to sell the idea. He had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Covington, Kentucky. While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes, he developed a tetanus infection that left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death in 1869, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son, Washington Roebling, in charge of the project.

In February 1867, the New York State Senate passed a bill that allowed the construction of a suspension bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan. Two months later, the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Company was incorporated. The company was tasked with constructing what was then known as the New York and Brooklyn Bridge.

Construction of the Brooklyn Bridge began in 1869. The bridge's two towers were built by floating two caissons, giant upside-down boxes made of southern yellow pine, in the span of the East River, and then beginning to build the stone towers on top of them until they sank to the bottom of the river. Compressed air was pumped into the caissons, and workers entered the space to dig the sediment, until the caissons sank to the bedrock. The whole weight of the bridge still sits upon 15-foot-thick southern yellow-pine wood under the sediment.

Many workers became sick with the bends during this work. This condition was unknown at the time and was first called "caisson disease" by the project physician, Andrew Smith. Washington Roebling suffered a paralyzing injury as a result of "caisson disease" shortly after ground was broken for the Brooklyn tower foundation on January 3, 1870. Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand.

As chief engineer, Roebling supervised the entire project from his apartment with a view of the work, designing and redesigning caissons and other equipment. He was aided by his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, who provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Warren Roebling studied higher mathematics, calculations of catenary curves, strengths of materials, bridge specifications, and intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next 11 years helping to supervise the bridge's construction.

When iron probes underneath the caisson for the Manhattan tower found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the sandy subsoil overlying the bedrock 30 feet (9.1 m) below it to be firm enough to support the tower base, and construction continued.

The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in The Great Bridge (1972), the book by David McCullough, and in Brooklyn Bridge (1981), the first PBS documentary film by Ken Burns. Burns drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is also described in Seven Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC docudrama series with an accompanying book.

Opening
The New York and Brooklyn Bridge was opened for use on May 24, 1883. Thousands of people attended the opening ceremony, and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President Chester A. Arthur and Mayor Franklin Edson crossed the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor Seth Low when they reached the Brooklyn-side tower.Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a celebratory banquet at his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the performance of a band, gunfire from ships, and a fireworks display. Since the New York and Brooklyn Bridge was the only one across the East River at that time, it was also called East River Bridge.

On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet 6 inches (486.3 m). The bridge cost US$15.5 million in 1883 dollars (about US$393,964,000 in today's dollars) to build, and an estimated 27 men died during its construction.

On May 30, 1883, six days after the opening, a woman falling down the stairway caused a stampede, which was responsible for at least twelve people being crushed and killed.[37] On May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability—while publicizing his famous circus—when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge.

At the time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world—50% longer than any previously built—and it has become a treasured landmark. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to highlight its architectural features. The architectural style is neo-Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers. The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins Red".

At the time the bridge was built, engineers had not discovered the aerodynamics of bridge construction. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s, well after the collapse of the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, known as Galloping Gertie, in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished or been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh—by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/21/obituaries/dovey-johnson-roundtree-dead.html

?quality=90&auto=webp

The jurors were looking at her when they filed into court. That, Dovey Johnson Roundtree knew, could have immense significance for her client, a feebleminded day laborer accused of one of the most sensational murders of the mid-20th century.

Little had augured well for that client, Raymond Crump Jr., during his eight-day trial in United States District Court in Washington: Mr. Crump, who had been found near the crime scene, was black and poor. The victim was white, glamorous and supremely well connected. The country, in the summer of 1965, seethed with racial tension amid the surging civil rights movement.

Federal prosecutors had amassed a welter of circumstantial evidence — including 27 witnesses and more than 50 exhibits — to argue that on Oct. 12, 1964, Mr. Crump had carried out the execution-style shooting of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a Washington socialite said to have been a former lover of President John F. Kennedy.

By contrast, Ms. Roundtree, who died on Monday at 104, had chosen to present just three witnesses and a single exhibit to the jury, which comprised men and women, blacks and whites. Her closing argument was only 20 minutes long.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dovey_Johnson_Roundtree

Dovey Johnson Roundtree (April 17, 1914 – May 21, 2018) was an African-American civil rights activist, ordained minister, and attorney. Her 1955 victory before the Interstate Commerce Commission in the first bus desegregation case to be brought before the ICC resulted in the only explicit repudiation of the "separate but equal" doctrine in the field of interstate bus transportation by a court or federal administrative body. That case, Sarah Keys v. Carolina Coach Company (64 MCC 769 (1955)), which Dovey Roundtree argued with her law partner and mentor Julius Winfield Robertson, was invoked by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy during the 1961 Freedom Riders' campaign in his successful battle to compel the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce its rulings and end Jim Crow in public transportation.

Roundtree was saluted by First Lady Michelle Obama on the occasion of the release of her 2009 autobiography, Justice Older than the Law, which Roundtree co-authored with Washington journalist Katie McCabe and which won the 2009 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians. In a letter made public at a July 23, 2009 tribute to Roundtree at the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, the First Lady cited Roundtree's historic contributions to the law, the military and the ministry, and stated: "It is on the shoulders of people like Dovey Johnson Roundtree that we stand today, and it is with her commitment to our core ideals that we will continue moving toward a better tomorrow."

A protégé of black activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune, Roundtree was selected by Bethune for the first class of African-American women to be trained as officers in the newly created Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (later the Women's Army Corps)[4] during World War II. In 1961 she became one of the first women to receive full ministerial status in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which had just begun ordaining women at a level beyond mere preachers in 1960. With her controversial admission to the all-white Women's Bar of the District of Columbia in 1962, she broke the color bar for minority women in the Washington legal community. In one of Washington's most sensational and widely covered murder cases, United States v. Ray Crump, tried in the summer of 1965 on the eve of the Watts riots, Roundtree won acquittal for the black laborer accused of the murder of Georgetown socialite (and former wife of a CIA officer) Mary Pinchot Meyer, a woman with romantic ties to President John F. Kennedy.

The founding partner of the Washington, D.C. law firm of Roundtree, Knox, Hunter and Parker in 1970 following the death of her first law partner Julius Robertson in 1961, Roundtree was special consultant for legal affairs to the AME Church, and General Counsel to the National Council of Negro Women.

She was the inspiration for actress Cicely Tyson's depiction of a maverick civil rights lawyer in the television series "Sweet Justice", and the recipient, along with retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, of the American Bar Association's 2000 Margaret Brent Women Lawyers of Achievement Award. In 2011 a scholarship fund was created in her name by the Charlotte Chapter of the National Alumnae Association of Spelman College. Roundtree also received the 2011 Torchbearer Award from the Women's Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the organization which she integrated in 1962. In March 2013 an affordable senior living facility in the Southeast Washington DC community where she ministered was named "The Roundtree Residences" in her honor. She turned 100 in April 2014.

https://nypost.com/2018/05/18/playboy-playmate-took-young-son-on-fatal-leap-from-nyc-building/



A former Playboy Playmate jumped with her 7-year-old son to their deaths from a Midtown hotel Friday — amid a nasty custody battle with her chiropractic ex, sources told The Post.

Stephanie Adams, 47, leaped with young Vincent from the top floor of the Gotham Hotel around 8:15 a.m., sources said.

The pair checked into the hotel around 6 p.m. Thursday and were staying in a 25th-floor penthouse suite, NYPD Chief of Manhattan Detectives William Aubrey said at a press conference.

Their bodies were found on a second-floor landing in the hotel’s rear courtyard.

“Early this morning investigators located an individual whose attention was drawn to that same second-floor area when he heard two loud noises,” Aubrey said. “His attention was drawn to that and he discovered these two deceased individuals.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#Operational_history

Completion and launch


Launch of the modified Saturn V rocket carrying the Skylab space station

On August 8, 1969, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation received a contract for the conversion of two existing S-IVB stages to the Orbital Workshop configuration. One of the S-IV test stages was shipped to McDonnell Douglas for the construction of a mock-up in January 1970. The Orbital Workshop was renamed "Skylab" in February 1970 as a result of a NASA contest. The actual stage that flew was the upper stage of the AS-212 rocket (the S-IVB stage, S-IVB 212). The mission computer used aboard Skylab was the IBM System/4Pi TC-1, a relative of the AP-101 Space Shuttle computers. A Saturn V originally produced for the Apollo program—before the cancellation of Apollo 18, 19, and 20—was repurposed and redesigned to launch Skylab. The Saturn V's upper stage was removed, but with the controlling Instrument Unit remaining in its standard position.

Skylab was launched on May 14, 1973 by the modified Saturn V. The launch is sometimes referred to as Skylab 1, or SL-1. Severe damage was sustained during launch and deployment, including the loss of the station's micrometeoroid shield/sun shade and one of its main solar panels. Debris from the lost micrometeoroid shield further complicated matters by pinning the remaining solar panel to the side of the station, preventing its deployment and thus leaving the station with a huge power deficit.

Immediately following Skylab's launch, Pad A at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39 was deactivated, and construction proceeded to modify it for the Space Shuttle program, originally targeting a maiden launch in March 1979. The manned missions to Skylab would occur using a Saturn IB rocket from Launch Pad 39B.

SL-1 would be the final unmanned launch from LC-39 until February 19, 2017, when SpaceX CRS-10 was launched.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinko_Bogataj

Vinko Bogataj (Slovenian: /ˈʋiːŋko bɔɡaˈtaj/; born 1948) is a Slovenian former ski jumper. Footage of him crashing featured on ABC's Wide World of Sports representing the Agony of Defeat.

Agony of Defeat jump
Bogataj competed as a Yugoslav entrant at the ski flying event in Oberstdorf, West Germany (now Germany) on 7 March 1970. A light snow had begun falling at the start of the competition, and by the time Bogataj was ready for his third jump on the Heini Klopfer hill, the snow had become quite heavy. Midway down the inrun for his jump, Bogataj realised that the conditions had made the ramp too fast. He attempted to lower his center of gravity and stop his jump, but instead lost his balance completely and rocketed out of control off the end of the inrun, tumbling and flipping wildly, and crashing through a light retaining fence near a crowd of spectators before coming to a halt. Bogataj suffered a mild concussion and a broken ankle.

A film crew from Wide World of Sports was recording the event in which Bogataj crashed. The show featured an opening narration by host Jim McKay over a montage of sports clips, and co-ordinating producer Dennis Lewin inserted the footage of the crash to coincide with the words "...and the agony of defeat." Throughout the show's long history, various images were used for the other parts of the narration, including for "the thrill of victory...", which directly preceded the above phrase and was often accompanied by images of the celebrating team at the most recent Super Bowl or World Cup, but after that point, the "agony of defeat" was always illustrated by Bogataj's failed jump. Later on, other clips were added to the "agony of defeat", but Bogataj's crash was always featured and always the first played.

The melodrama of the narration—which became a catchphrase in the US—transformed the uncredited ski jumper into an American icon of bad luck and misfortune. Meanwhile, having retired to his quiet, private life in Slovenia, Bogataj was unaware of his celebrity, and so was surprised to be asked to attend the 20th anniversary celebration for Wide World of Sports in 1981. He received the loudest ovation of any athlete introduced at the gala, and attendees such as Muhammad Ali asked him for his autograph.

Later life
Bogataj returned to ski jumping in 1971 but never duplicated the success he had before the crash and retired from the sport competitively, save for occasional senior competitions thereafter. During his career, his best career finish was 57th in the individual normal hill competition in Bischofshofen in 1969 during that year's Four Hills Tournament.

Bogataj became a ski instructor, coaching the 1991 World Champion Slovenian ski jumper Franci Petek. He supplements his income by painting and has also worked as a forklift operator at a factory, Veriga Lesce. His paintings have won awards and been exhibited in both Europe and the U.S. He also enjoys wood carving.

Bogataj resides in his hometown of Lesce, Slovenia. He is married and has two daughters.