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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (July 8, 1996)
Page 2 • The Battalion • Monday, July 8, 1996 IS NEW BRA\ $2 Parson’s Mounted Cavalry fights cutbacks with fundraising By Ann Marie Hauser The Battalion Bus /f 8 a.m Inserti VIS 1986 F< (409)6? 88 Dal tery, rrv Budget cutbacks by Texas A&M motivated the Parson’s Mounted Cavalry (PMC) to be gin fund-raising efforts this past spring. University funding was re duced by about 75 percent last year for the cavalry and other University-wide organizations. Jim McFadin, PMC comman der and a senior agricultural eco nomics major, said the cavalry needs $30,000 per year to cover expenses for the unit. “Without this money the caval ry would not function,” McFadin said. “We are raising this money now so three or four years from now we will still be in existence.” Members have begun a letter writing campaign targeting for mer cavalry and Corps of Cadets members for donations. Aggie Moms’ Clubs and former students from cavalry members’ hometowns are also receiving let ters. This method was modeled after the fund-raising efforts uti lized by the redpots for Bonfire. Donors have the option to give their money to two separate funds, operational or endow ment. Operational funds go to wards everyday expenses such as feed and hay for the horses. The endowment funds will re main untouched until a goal of $500,000 is reached. Mickey Gerdes, a junior histo ry and political science major, said his efforts for fund-raising are worthwhile for the cavalry. “I love it,” Gerdes said. “Being in the cavalry gives you some thing to work for, and it moti vates me to study.” McFadin said the Parson’s Mounted Cavalry began in 1974 to help publicize A&M and the Corps. “It was formed to keep the old traditions alive and give favorable publicity to A&M and the Corps,” McFadin said. The cavalry is one of the last mounted ROTC units left in the United States. The members of the cavalry participate in various parades and drill and ceremony functions and A&M football — they fire the cannon. McFadin said he hopes the cavalry can continue because of all the unit has done for him and others. “Caring for the animals teach es us responsibility and respect,” McFadin said. “A special bond ex ists between us (the cavalry).” Luna’s case against UT System begins this week AUSTIN — A trial is slated to begin this week for a former accountant who sued claiming he lost his job after alleging the Uni versity of Texas System was being ripped off by millions of dollars. Jose “Joe” Luna contends he was “tortured” out of his job with the UT System in August 1994 after reporting that gas companies operat ing on university land were underpaying royalties to the Permanent University Fund. That endowment helps sup port the UT and Texas A&M University systems. Luna, who is seeking $2 million in damages, claims the underpayments amount ed to between $25 million and $50 million. Instead of being reward ed, Luna said, he was threatened with being beat en with a two-by-four, told to change his audit findings and, ultimately, stripped of his duties — all of which led him to leave his job and seek psychiatric care. His bosses included an official who once had an interest in a well with a gas company that Luna audited. UT lawyers say there is no substance to Luna’s alle gations, including the charges that his bosses re taliated against him in vio lation of the Texas Whistle blower Act. That law, which is designed to protect public servants who report wrong doing, is the basis for Lu na’s suit. UT auditors did not un cover any improprieties af ter Luna’s bosses ordered an in-house audit of Luna’s al legations, UT officials said. UT plans to produce doc tors who will say Luna’s mental trauma was of his own making — that the ac tions he perceived as retalia tion were “ordinary and be nign personnel measures" aimed at improving his per- formance. UT says Luna walked off his job one day and never came back. Luna will produce his own doctor to disagree with UT’s. He also will argue that he effectively was fired and had little choice but to leave. It will be up to a Williamson County jury, which is ex pected to be seated Tuesday or Wednesday, to decide whether Luna has a claim under the law. (401 $ Investigators work to determine cause of Delta mishap PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) — Shattered pieces of jet engine were gathered off an airport runway Sunday, remnants of shrapnel that shredded part of an air liner’s fuselage and devastated a vacationing family. Investigators had yet to determine why the left engine on a Delta Air Lines jet blew apart during takeoff, whether there was some internal problem or whether it sucked in a foreign object such as a bird, said George Black, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board. Metal pieces flying from the engine, mounted on the side of the fuselage near the tail, ripped a gash about a foot wide and more than 4 feet long across the side of the plane, killing Anita Saxton, 39, her son Nolan, 12, and injuring two of her other children. Mrs. Saxton, of Scottville, Mich., had been vaca tioning with three of her five children in the Pen sacola area. The two injured children were discharged from Sacred Heart Hospital on Sunday and joined with their father, Randy Saxton, who flew to Pensacola late Saturday. Although dazed and burned, 15-year-old Der rick Saxton carried his sister, 9-year-old Spencer, from the plane after the pilot made an emergency stop on the runway, said their grand father, William Saxton. Spencer had leg and fa cial injuries. “Then he wanted to go back inside to get his mother and brother,” said William Saxton, who said he spoke with Derrick by telephone soon af ter the accident from his home at Pentwater, Mich. “He seems all right now, as much as he can be after this.” Five of the other 142 passengers aboard the jet liner also were injured, but only one remained hos pitalized Sunday, listed in critical condition after surgery for a broken leg. None of the five crew members was hurt. Delta officials said Sunday there was no connec tion between the accident and deep cost-cutting that has pruned about 12,000 jobs from the At lanta-based carrier since 1994. Delta has had four engine-disabling incidents since April, according to NTSB records, The Tam pa Tribune reported Sunday. No one was hurt in any of those cases. Two of them involved MD-88 airliners, the same model in volved in Saturday’s accident. In one of those engine accidents on June 22, a turbine blade punched a hole in the engine case and made a small hole in the engine’s exterior metal covering. While the cause of the latest engine failure is not yet known. Black explained what made it so lethal. “Any engine has a lot of fairly massive parts ro tating very rapidly,” he said. “It’s just like slinging keys around on a chain. If something happens to that object it has to dissipate that energy. So it would be a violent event.” The seven-member NTSB team was assisted by experts from Delta, the Federal Aviation Adminis tration, plane manufacturer McDonnell Douglas and Pratt & Whitney, which made the two JT8D- 219 engines that powered the MD-88 jetliner. They were checking all of the plane’s systems, maintenance records and its flight data and cock pit voice recorders, the so-called “black boxes.” They also were interviewing the pilot and co-pilot. Black said experts would try to reconstruct the failed engine to find out what went wrong. The runway where the accident happened could not be reopened until all the debris was removed, but airport operations continued uninterrupted on an alternate runway. Also Saturday, another Pratt & Whitney engine failed, on TWA’s Flight 114 from Seattle to St. Louis, prompting the pilot to land the MD-80 at Omaha, Neb. However, no debris escaped from that engine, a slightly less powerful model called the JT8D-217, Pratt & Whitney spokesman Mark Sullivan said Sunday. The JT8D is one of the most common and reli able types of engines used on commercial air craft, said Pratt & Whitney spokesman Mark Sullivan from the company’s East Hartford, Conn., headquarters. The engine powers 4,000 passenger and cargo jets. About a quarter of the engines are from the 200 series that was in the Delta plane. This type of engine accident is “very unusual — catastrophic and unusual,” said NTSB spokesman Michael Benson. A similar failure involving a JT8D-9A engine, an earlier version of the type that failed here, pen etrated the cabin of a ValuJet DC-9 preparing to ALA. GA. © Atlantic Ocean Tallahassee Pensacola Delta jet aborts takeoff Gulf of Mexico 100 miles 100 km V Associated Prts take off from Atlanta on June 8, 1995. A flight at tendant and six passengers were injured; a result ing fire destroyed the plane. NTSB investigators found evidence that com sion on a piece of that engine called a compressor disc had been plated over during a 1991 overhaul in Turkey. The agency then conducted special in spections of other engines that ValuJet had pur chased from a Turkish airline. Winds top 80 mph as Tropical Storm Bertha bears down on Caribbean CHARLOTTE AMALIE, U.S. Virgin Islands (AP) — Tropical Storm Bertha bore down on a swath of Caribbean islands Sunday, heading directly for the U.S. Virgin Islands with gusts of up to 80 mph. Hurricane warnings were issued for all of the Caribbean’s northeastern islands. The eye of the storm is expected to cross directly over St. Thomas, the main U.S. Virgin Island, sometime Monday. Bertha should become a hurricane before mid night and advance on the British and U.S. Virgin Is lands early Monday. “They now have it passing right over the Virgin Islands and just north of Puerto Rico,” said Miles Lawrence, a specialist at the U.S. National Hurri cane Center in Miami. The U.S. National Weather Service posted hurri cane warnings from Puerto Rico east and south to Do minica, warning residents to expect winds of at least 74 mph and high waters in the next 24 hours. Gov. Roy L. Schneider ordered shelters to open Sunday on St. Thomas, where hundreds of residents are still living under tarpaulins covering roofs dam aged and destroyed in last year’s storms. Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Rossello activated his disaster plan, which fixes prices on hurricane-relat ed items and bans alcohol sales. Bertha raced toward the islands at 22 mph Sun day — fast for a tropical storm — packing sustained winds of 70 mph and gusts up to 80 mph. Tropical storms become hurricanes when their maximum sustained winds reach 74 mph. At 2 p.m. EDT Sunday, the storm was 210 miles east of Antigua. Hammers rang out on that island Sunday afternoon, as people hastily boarded up win dows and tried to secure roofs unrepaired since last year’s storms. Two hurricane aircraft flew into the eye of the storm early Sunday, enabling the National Weather Service to estimate the storm could first hit land around Antigua and Barbuda about 10 p.m. EDT Sunday. Bertha, which has tropical-force winds extending 145 miles from its center, is then projected to cross numerous Caribbean islands, from St. Martin, St. Kitts and Nevis, to Montserrat, where residents have also been dealing with threat of a volcano erup tion for more than a year. On St. Thomas, residents shopping for emergency supplies created traffic jams Saturday around the main shopping area. The governor asked bottled wa ter companies to open Sunday because so many stores had run out of supplies. People loaded shopping carts with batteries, matches, propane, lanterns — all the things they didn’t have enough of when Hurricane Marilyn struck last Septem ber. Others sat near radios and televisions, anxious for news as Bertha approached. Nigel John, a 34-year-old police officer, ham mered away at a blue tarpaulin covering what used to be the roof of his trailer home in Charlotte Amalie, the main city on St. Thomas. “He’s trying to make it stronger,” said his wife, Janet. “I’m just sick of it,” she declared as she wrapped in plastic the new television and microwave oven that replaced ones destroyed by Hurricane Marilyn last year. Forecasters predict Bertha will turn into a Catego ry 1 hurricane — the least dangerous of five cate gories of hurricanes. But since many people have not recovered from last year’s storms, and fewer sound shelters are available, even a low-grade storm could cause great damage. Hurricane warnings were broadcast in Antigua, Barbuda, Nevis, Montserrat, St. Kitts, Anguilla, Saba, St. Eustatius, Dominica, Guadeloupe, St. Barthelemy, St. Martin, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. Most of those islands were hard-hit last year, when Hurricanes Marilyn and Luis pummeled through within days of each other, destroying thou sands of homes in the worst Atlantic hurricane sea son in 60 years. Eighty percent of homes on St. Thomas were de stroyed or damaged by Hurricane Marilyn and fewer than half have been repaired. Forecasters said Bertha was following the same trajectory as Marilyn and Hurricane Hugo, which devastated Puerto Rico in 1989. The Atlantic hurricane season’s first tropical storm doused coastal areas of the Carolinas with rains and gusty winds last month. TUNE UP PLUS ^ is offering a Wednesday evenings from 7 - 8:30 p.m. Learn how not to get ripped off and how to properly maintain your vehicle. Starting June 26th RSVP 693-6189 and ask for Bruce 601 Harvey Rd C.S. It happens when you advertise in The Battalion Call 845-2696 SALE • SALE • SALE • SALE • SALE • SALE • & CONTACT LENSES SALE </. cn m ui in AND QUALITY CARE FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY AT AFFORDABLE PRICES l* BUY TWO PAIR AND GET TWO PAIR FREE $9 050* or LJ m ONE PAIR in Mi Clear or Tinted Standard Soft Contact Lenses Plus Free Care Kit WE HAVE ALL TYPES OF CONTACT LENSES AVAILABLE AND SATURDAY HOURS m Call 846-0377 for information on FREE LENSES ui SAME DAY DELIVERY ON MOST LENSES •EXAM NOT INCLUDED CHARLES C. SCHROEPPEL, O.D., PC. 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Second class postage paid at College Station, TX 77840. Postmaster: Send address changes to The Battalion, 230 Reed Mi A&M University, College Station, TX 77843. I McDonald Building, Texas MON- july 8, 1 No imrn jerse etiqi I ’ve i ticed distu ing trend sports a nas, coll< campu s and just run-of-tl mill c: streets i cently: P< pie with concept sports a w e a r i r sports jei enhancem Jersey-i what you fashion ste Insteac commitme: not only t< player wh his body, t sports fans There a: sports far don’t take general pi our turf ai jersey-we trendy for e Let me 1 for you: 1) Know team. 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