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Brûlée serves up a menu of musical blends. B1
Gazette-Star SERVING SOUTHERN AND CENTRAL PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY COMMUNITIES
DAILY UPDATES ONLINE www.gazette.net
Thursday, August 15, 2013
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Chief: County fire stations understaffed
Lining up to dance in Glenarden
Bowie man’s 30-minute wait for ambulance highlights need for more personnel, officials say n
BY SOPHIE PETIT STAFF WRITER
When Vail Clemence returned home from a July softball game complaining of chest pains, his wife, Barbara Clemence, said it took a miracle for him to survive what a doctor called “a severe heart attack” after waiting more than a half hour for an ambulance to arrive at his Bowie home. While Clemence, 82, awaited paramedics, emergency personnel were battling an active fire on Church Road, during which 17 people were dispatched from Bowie stations, leaving the nearby Belair station unmanned and Bowie’s
three other stations understaffed, Prince George’s County fire/EMS officials said. “There’s no life saving involved if you don’t have a driver for the ambulance,” Barbara Clemence said. “I’m thinking about next time. We’ve got to do something here. We lucked out.” The nearly fatal incident underscored the need for more personnel, said county fire/EMS chief Marc Bashoor at the Aug. 5 Bowie City Council meeting. Vail Clemence had a heart attack during the first ten minutes of another emergency call when there was no time to call in staff from other locations to fill the empty spots left at Bowie stations, Bashoor said. “All resources available had been committed to that fire,” he said. “We simply do not have enough people to staff every piece of apparatus across the county.”
See STATIONS, Page A-7
Appointed school board members seen as at-large representatives Four new members have wholistic take on jurisdiction n
BY JAMIE
ANFENSON-COMEAU STAFF WRITER
Prince George’s County parents will have more contacts for assistance on the Board of Education in the 2013-2014 school year with the addition of four appointed members this year, officials say. “The four appointed members function as at-large board members,” said Christian Rhodes, County Executive Rushern Baker’s III (D) education advisor. “Their constituency is anyone in the county, the entire school district.” New legislation passed in April added four appointed board seats to the board, which includes nine district elected memPHOTOS BY BILL RYAN/THE GAZETTE
Denise Bryant of Bowie takes part in the line dance social on Aug. 4 in the Glenarden/Theresa Banks Complex.
Seniors on the move at popular class BY
ERIC GOLDWEIN
See DANCE, Page A-7
Area had high number of pedestrian crashes in recent years
NEWS
A DECADE IN THE MAKING
$3.8 million North Forestville Community Center opens.
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BY
AMBER LARKINS STAFF WRITER
Glojean Wallace of Mitchellville keeps cool with her fan during the line dance social.
SPORTS
A FRESH START
Princeton Day starts football team from scratch, changes its name.
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See BOARD, Page A-7
Forestville pedestrians cheer signal between intersections
STAFF WRITER
For Katie Pannell of Landover Hills, line dancing is more than just a workout with strangers. “We just call each other family,” Pannell said. Pannell, 66, said she did not go out much after retiring from her customer representative job at the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration in December. However, when she discovered classes for senior line dancing — a group dance with a repeated sequence of steps — at the Glenarden/Theresa Banks Complex on McLain Avenue, she started showing up each morning at 8 a.m. Pannell isn’t alone. According to center officials, the daily line dancing class started for seniors in late June has exploded in popularity,
bers and a student member. “With the nine elected board members, their area of concern is often their own district,” Rhodes said. “This is an opportunity to have board members who are able to look beyond a single district.” Curtis Valentine, the council’s parent appointee, said that as he was appointed by unanimous vote of all nine County Council representatives, he viewed himself as an at-large representative. “And although I am a parent of two public school students and a former middle school educator in our system, I represent the interests of not solely the students, parents and teachers but of all those who rely on the school system to produce the next generation of competent and compassionate leaders, and
Lanice Lancaster of Forestville said she feels safer walking to and from the Forestville Shopping Center with her daughter Aaliyah, 2, now that a midblock crossing signal has been installed. “It was very hard because we had to wait for that [light] to turn,” Lancaster said, pointing to the traffic signal at Walters Lane and Md. 4. Many people didn’t bother waiting to cross at Donnell Drive or Walters Lane before an $186,000 midblock crossing signal was activated Aug. 6 in Forestville, said John Richardson, who chaired the
Automotive
Md. 4 Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Community Task Force. Richardson, a Forestville resident who works as a constituent services liason for state Sen. Ulyssess Currie (DDist. 25) of District Heights, said on a daily basis, 641 pedestrians walk along the shoulders between Walters Lane and Donnell Drive. He said that 410 pedestrians a day would cross between the two intersections around the spot where the midblock crossing signal was installed. Between 2006 and 2010, there were 15 pedestrian crashes and seven of them were fatal, Richardson said. He said there were another two fatalities in 2011. Maryland has the eighth highest number of pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 people in the nation, and Prince
See SIGNAL, Page A-7
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