UPS: 2 workers killed in shooting at Alabama package processing plant were supervisors
UPS: 2 workers killed in shooting at Alabama package processing plant were supervisors
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — The fiancee of one of two UPS supervisors who police say were slain by a fired employee said Wednesday her boyfriend had expressed sympathy for the man over the dismissal but didn’t fear him.
Brian Callans, 46, wasn’t pleased when he found out the shipping company planned to fire 45-year-old Kerry Joe Tesney, partly because the man had a family to support, said Erica Carmichael, who was engaged to Callans.
“He told me, ‘I’m not happy about it, Erica. The guy has been with the company a long time. That’s a huge change in somebody’s life,’” Carmichael said.
UPS identified Callans, a business manager from Birmingham and driver supervisor Doug Hutcheson, 33, of Odenville, as the victims in the shooting at a package-sorting center on Tuesday. Callans had worked for the shipping giant for 26 years, and Hutcheson since 1999.
Police previously identified the men’s killer as Kerry Joe Tesney, 45, of Trussville. The driver had been with UPS for 21 years but had been fired recently, authorities said in a statement Wednesday.
Vast, man-made caverns in Utah hold promise for balancing out renewable energy supply, demand
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — A proposal to export twice as much Wyoming wind power to Los Angeles as the amount of electricity generated by the Hoover Dam includes an engineering feat even more massive than that famous structure: Four chambers, each approaching the size of the Empire State Building, would be carved from an underground salt deposit to hold huge volumes of compressed air.
The caverns in central Utah would serve as a kind of massive battery on a scale never before seen, helping to overcome the fact that — even in Wyoming — wind doesn’t blow all the time.
Air would be pumped into the caverns when power demand is low and wind is high, typically at night. During times of increased demand, the compressed air would be released to drive turbines and feed power to markets in far-away Southern California.
It’s a relatively simple concept proved decades ago on a much smaller scale by utilities in Alabama and Germany. Yet, experts said Wednesday there’s a reason similar projects don’t exist elsewhere: The technology known as “compressed air energy storage” is expensive, particularly when stacked against other power sources such as cheap, natural gas.
FBI report says mass shootings in US occurring more frequently
WASHINGTON — The number of shootings in which a gunman wounds or kills multiple people has increased dramatically in recent years, with the majority of attacks in the last decade occurring at a business or a school, according to an FBI report released Wednesday.
The study focused on 160 “active shooter incidents” between 2000 and 2013. Those are typically defined as cases in which a gunman in an attack shoots or attempts to shoot multiple people in a populated area.
The goal of the report, which excluded shootings that are gang and drug related, was to identify common themes and to help local law enforcement prepare for or respond to similar killings in the future, law enforcement officials said.
According to the report, an average of six shootings occurred in the first seven years that were studied. That average rose to more than 16 shootings per year in the past seven years of the study.
By wire sources