The area’s latest and/or top news stories at 7:06-a.m. From KJAN News Director Ric Hanson.
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The area’s latest and/or top news stories at 7:06-a.m. From KJAN News Director Ric Hanson.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (4.5MB)
Subscribe: RSS
FOR SALE: Gibson Dishwasher, never been used, portable with counter top. $100. Call: 712-249-6202.
FOR SALE: Kimball piano. Good condition, with Bench. Slight water spots on top. Exira area. $325. Need to pick up. Also, Kittens. 6 weeks old. Calico and black and white ..very cute and friendly. $5 Each. Exira area. Call or text. 712.304.2951.
FOR SALE: Band saw and drill press. Asking $100 apiece or $150 for the pair, the band saw needs a new blade. Call 712-243-1166 and if no answer leave a message. SOLD!
GARAGE SALE: 1511 Olive Street, Atlantic. 8-5 on Friday & Saturday, July 26-27. Puzzles, books, VHS tapes, CDs, DVDs, popcorn tins, food processor, used tennis, golf and baseballs, punch bowl set, metal music stand, miscellaneous.
The crowning of Royalty for the Cass County Fair in Atlantic takes place this evening. Little Miss and Little Mister Contest kicks-off the activities at 7-p.m., followed at 7:30 by selection of the Cass County Fair Queen and King. This year’s Queen candidates include Shelby Stephenson, Jocelyn Amos, Carli Henderson, Haley Becker, Alyssa Brockob, , Madison Mills, Kaitlin Jensen, JoAnn Brahms, and Katie York.
The King candidates are Nathan Behrends, Teaguen Sothman, Garrett Reynolds, Tate DenBeste, Mitchell Williamson, Caine Page and Devlyne Sunderman. After the Queen and King are selected, Senior Recognition will take place, followed at 8:45-p.m. by an outdoor movie.
Today’s events begin with the Livestock weigh-in’s (Swine, Meat Goat, and Sheep), and check-in’s for the Rabbits, Poultry, Dairy, and Horses. 4-H Exhibits open at 5-p.m.
SIOUX CITY, Iowa (AP) — A man accused of trying to kill someone he thought would provide drug trafficking information to police has pleaded guilty. The Sioux City Journal reports that 23-year-old Isaac McDonald pleaded guilty Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Sioux City to several crimes, including tampering with a witness by attempting to kill a person.
Prosecutors say McDonald conspired with three other people to kill John Mercure. Court documents say McDonald used a handgun to shoot Mercure as Mercure was driving down a Sioux City street last Aug. 1st. Mercure soon crashed into a tree, but survived.
CLASS 3A:
ADM, Adel 3 , Harlan 1
Assumption, Davenport 3 , Fairfield 2
Bishop Heelan Catholic, Sioux City 3 , Sergeant Bluff-Luton 2
Boone 10 , Ballard 3
Centerville 4 , North Polk, Alleman 1
Central DeWitt 3 , Wahlert, Dubuque 2
Marion 2 , Solon 1
Xavier, Cedar Rapids 17 , Charles City 2 (4 Innings)
CLASS 4A:
Ankeny 16 , Des Moines, Roosevelt 0 (4 Innings)
Dowling Catholic, West Des Moines 5 , Valley, West Des Moines 3
Epworth, Western Dubuque 8 , Davenport, Central 0
Iowa City, West 2 , Prairie, Cedar Rapids 1
Johnston 10 , Indianola 0 (5 Innings)
Pleasant Valley 3 , Linn-Mar, Marion 0
Southeast Polk 6 , Ankeny Centennial 3
Urbandale 2 , Waukee 0
Wednesday, July 24
Class 1A Semifinals
Collins-Maxwell 9, Newell-Fonda 1
Clarksville 1, Lisbon 0
Thursday, July 25
Class 1A Third Place
5:00 p.m. – Iowa Central Field –
Newell-Fonda (38-6) vs. Lisbon (33-7)
Class 1A Championship
6:00 p.m. – Kruger Seeds Field
Collins-Maxwell (27-1) vs. Clarksville (33-1)
Wednesday, July 24
Class 2A Semifinals
North Linn 8, Mount Ayr 1
Alta-Aurelia 2, East Marshall 1
Thursday, July 25
Class 2A Third Place
7:00 p.m. – Iowa Central Field
Mount Ayr (26-3) vs. East Marshall (32-5)
Class 2A Championship
8:15 p.m. – Kruger Seeds Field
North Linn (41-4) vs. Alta-Aurelia (22-9)
Wednesday, July 24
Class 3A Consolation
Treynor 7, Mount Vernon 6
Class 3A Semifinals
Davenport Assumption 6, Columbus Catholic 0
Louisa-Muscatine 10, West Liberty 2
Friday, July 26
Class 3A Third Place
2:30 p.m. – Iowa Central Field
Columbus Catholic (36-5) vs.West Liberty (29-6)
Class 3A Championship
3:30 p.m. – Kruger Seeds Field
Davenport Assumption (40-2) vs. Louisa-Muscatine (35-4)
Wednesday, July 24
Class 4A Consolations
Independence 3, Denison-Schleswig 0
Dallas Center-Grimes 1, Oskaloosa 0
Class 4A Semifinals
Carlisle 7, West Delaware 6 (8 innings)
North Scott 3, Charles City 2 (9 innings)
Friday, July 28
Class 4A Third Place
4:45 p.m. – Iowa Central Field
West Delaware (31-11) vs. Charles City (36-4)
Class 4A Championship
5:45 p.m. – Kruger Seeds Field
Carlisle (37-3) vs.North Scott (27-4)
Wednesday, July 24
Class 5A Consolations
Indianola 4, Ottumwa 1
Fort Dodge 8, Cedar Rapids Kennedy 0
Class 5A Semifinals
Waukee 3, Johnston 1
West Des Moines Valley 4 Iowa City High 2
Friday, July 26
Class 5A Third Place
7:00 p.m. – Iowa Central Field
Johnston (35-9) vs. Iowa City West (35-8)
Class 5A Championship
8:00 p.m. – Kruger Seeds Field
Waukee (40-3) vs. West Des Moines Valley (31-10)
Today: Partly cloudy. High 85. S @ 10-15.
Tonight: P/Cldy w/isolated thundershowers. Low 65. S @ 5-10.
Tomorrow: P/Cldy w/isolated thundershowers. High 87. S @ 10-15.
Saturday: P/Cldy w/isolated thundershowers. Highs near 87.
Sunday: P/Cldy to Cldy w/showers & thunderstorms possible. High 85.
Yesterday’s High in Atlantic was 80. Our Low 52. Last year on this date our High was 84 and the Low was 59. The record High in Atlantic on this date was 117 in 1926 (that was also the All-Time Record High in Atlantic). The Record Low was 44 in 1894.
(Radio Iowa) – A northwest Iowa man is alive today, thanks to fast action from his golfing partners. Sixty-eight-year-old Dick Beaulieu, of Hinton, was golfing in Hinton on July 2nd and had just hit a shot onto the green when he collapsed on the course. Dean Burger explains what happened next. “Threw my clubs down and ran up the hill. The other gentleman did the same thing and there was no hesitation,” Burger said. “It sounds funny, but we just went on automatic…and we got ‘er done.”
Beaulieu had a slight pulse when the two golfers got to him, but then he stopped breathing. “At that point, we put him on his back and started doing CPR. I started first,” Burger said. “The other gentlemen started second. We just alternated.” It took about 10 minutes for E-M-Ts to arrive. Beaulieu’s memory of what happened “is pretty vague.”
“I hit a shot on number 3 — probably the best shot I’d hit all year. The next thing I remember is waking up in the hospital,” Beaulieu says. “They said I coded. As we got to the end of the lane, they stopped and shocked me, got me going again. This is all what I’ve been told.” Beaulieu, who is the former mayor of Hinton, had suffered a minor heart attack 19 years ago — AT THE SAME GOLF COURSE.
“Cardiologist said I was a good candidate for a pacemaker, a defibrilator and like most people I put it off and put it off — and if your cardiologist tells you need one, you really ought to get one from I’ve found out the hard way,” Beaulieu says. “…Poor old heart decided it was time to quit. Thank goodness a couple of guys were there who knew what to do.” Beaulieu got a pacemaker on Friday, July 5th and was released from the hospital the next day.
(Story Credit to Kelly Page for IowaWatch.org)
DES MOINES, Iowa – Iowa does not have enough psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists or other mental health care providers to handle an increasing need to care for farmers dealing with relentless flooding this year, several mental health experts IowaWatch interviewed warned. Many health care specialists don’t want to work in small, rural areas for reasons ranging from a lack of local resources to seeing few options for personal growth that comes from cultural events or entertainment, the interviews revealed.
The result is that people who need mental health care immediately have a difficult time getting it, a problem in the parts of rural Iowa hit this year by devastating flooding. “We turn people away every day because we don’t have available appointment slots. We do a lot of referring to other agencies,” said Susan Ecker, director of Waubonsie Mental Health Center, which has locations in Fremont, Page and Montgomery counties in southwestern Iowa, all hit hard by the flooding.
“There is no competition between service agencies in our community because all of us combined cannot handle the volume of people that are seeking service. “Fifty of the 59 Iowa counties designated as disaster areas because of flooding this year also have been designated by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration as having inadequate mental health care. In all, 86 of Iowa’s 99 counties are designated mental health professional shortage areas because they do not have an adequate number of providers for the number of people living in those counties.
Some of the counties hit hardest by flooding are not targeted by national programs that encourage young healthcare professionals to work in the rural U.S. with incentives like student loan forgiveness, scholarships and grants. Many mental health professionals still feel a strain on mental healthcare resources in heavily-flooded counties even when provided these incentives, interviews revealed.
For many, their caseloads become too large to handle adequately, leaving them with an ethical dilemma of taking on more clients at the expense of others they already are seeing. Meanwhile, patients in these underserved areas rely on therapists who get shuffled to multiple locations during the week. Patients have to wait five to six weeks to be seen if not needing urgent care – one to two weeks if they do, health care professionals said in interviews.
Alecia Dougherty, clinical supervisor at Plains Area Mental Health Center, which covers a wide patch of northwest Iowa, said some patients are on their second or third therapist in one to two years. She said switching therapists, especially after building a therapist-client relationship over the course of years, can be traumatizing. “Turnover is probably the biggest barrier to getting good services to people in this area,” Dougherty said. “It affects community coalitions, it affects clients.”
Clinicians at Plains Area Mental Health Center move to places like Sioux City or Des Moines after starting in the smaller, rural areas Plains Area serves, Dougherty said. “I have actually two clients on my caseload right now who saw their previous therapist – one of them saw her for nine years, the other one saw her for 13 years – who were honestly traumatized by having to start seeing me. So it was a major setback for their treatment.”
Ecker works in Clarinda but lives on a farm near Elmo, in northwest Missouri just south of the Iowa-Missouri border near where she grew up on a rural Big Lake, Missouri, farm. Both areas sustained serious flooding this year. She said she feels connected to her community. Her husband, Terry Ecker, is a farmer. “I’ve lived here all my life. This is home to me. It makes me really sad that there’s this disaster in the community, and there’s such a great need, and I don’t know how to employ therapists to meet those needs,” Ecker said.
Unmet demand for mental health care services in disaster-ridden, rural regions in the state are part of a larger problem in Iowa, mental health care advocates said. “We don’t have psychiatrists, psychologists, nurse practitioners, therapists, clinical social workers,” Peggy Huppert, executive director of the Iowa chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said. “It goes all the way down the line. We just don’t have enough.”
Even if enough care providers were available, barriers exist in linking farmers, whether they are in flood zones or not, to mental health care services, the IowaWatch interviews revealed. Financial difficulties, transportation issues, time constraints and limited internet access, but also many therapists’ lack of understanding of agriculture and a stigma attached to mental healthcare in farm communities also make it difficult for farmers to get the help they need when confronting stress and behavioral health issues.
“I guess that agriculture’s a tough job anyways, but this year is probably a hundred times more stressful than a typical year,” said Corey McIntosh, a fifth-generation farmer near Missouri Valley, Iowa, on the western side of the state, which has had some of the worst flooding from the Missouri River. “I’d say a lot of the people around here are probably experiencing, you know, certain levels of depression.”
McIntosh’s farm has flooded twice this year. Although he is not seeking counseling, he said it would be difficult if he were because he would not have time to do it.
He sees more flooding in the future. “It can’t be denied that we’re experiencing more extreme weather events,” he said. “The Corps of Engineers recognizes that climate change is happening but they have yet to start planning for it.”
MENTAL HEALTHCARE DILEMMAS IN SHORTAGE AREAS
Eight of the counties hit by flooding have not received designation by the national Health and Resources Service Administration as mental healthcare provider shortage areas (Cass, Dallas, Fremont, Mills, Montgomery, Page, Polk and Pottawattamie). This designation can have importance for healthcare providers in rural areas because the National Health Service Corps uses the administration’s designations to decide where to help clinics provide financial recruiting incentives to bolster rural healthcare systems.
Though a recruiter at one clinic IowaWatch spoke with said the clinic used the National Health Service Corps program as part of a more robust recruiting strategy that produced helpful results, many others said the program is not the complete answer when attracting mental healthcare providers to rural areas.
Ecker, from the heavily-flooded southwest of the state, practices in counties that previously had been declared a shortage area but lost their designation for reasons she said she does not fully understand. She said National Health Services Corps helped Waubonsie Mental Health Clinic for many years but that has changed. “Every few years, they rewrite the different areas. And our rating scale changed somewhat by a point or two,” she said.
Dougherty said Plains Area Mental Health Center employees continually feel understaffed and are fighting high turnover rates, even with Service Corps funding and employment benefits such as numerous health insurance policy options and pay that is 7% higher than the state average.
Dougherty blames high turnover and a perceived unattractiveness of rural communities, in part, on colleges failing to prepare students for the specific needs in rural areas. She said she has seen employees straight out of school quit the profession within their first few weeks because the work was too challenging.
“A lot of treatment models are set up for urban areas – I would say most of them, to be honest – and then we try to implement them in rural Iowa, because they have such good outcomes,” Dougherty said.
Despite widespread challenges with recruiting mental healthcare professionals to rural America, employees at one clinic IowaWatch spoke to said they have doubled their staff in the past year and are expanding services. The clinic is Crossroads Behavioral Health Center in Creston, Iowa, in a region that also has experienced heavy flooding. Last November, it hired human resources and marketing director Macie Blazek, who has a recruiting background.
Crossroads provides employees some of the same financial incentives as other clinics: service corps backing and what Blazek called a good retirement program. The clinic additionally pays for an independently-licensed therapist to supervise a clinic therapist’s first two years in practice. This process can be a financial drain on therapists if they have to pay it.
Many mental healthcare clinics do not have full-time recruiters. “We’re still hiring several positions, currently,” Blazek said. “And so even though we feel like we’re in a good place right now, it’s something we still kind of have to keep working at.”
Here is the latest Mid-America sports news from The Associated Press
DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — A tribute is planned at the US track and field championships to honor Gabriele “Gabe” Grunewald. She died last month of cancer at 32. Grunewald ran the 1,500 meters at nationals in between rounds of cancer treatment in 2017. It was an inspiring and public fight that connected a running community.
PITTSBURGH (AP) — Paul DeJong hit three home runs, one as part of a record-tying, nine-run second inning as the St. Louis Cardinals walloped Pittsburgh 14-8 to complete a three-game sweep of the Pirates. DeJong, Andrew Knizner and Paul Goldschmidt each hit two-run homers in the second inning as the Cardinals batted around. St. Louis also had five doubles in the frame for a total of eight extra-base hits, tying an MLB record.
ATLANTA (AP) — Brad Keller thrived in his Georgia homecoming, both on the mound and at the plate. Keller, from nearby Flowery Branch, allowed only four hits in seven innings while adding a second-inning single for his first career RBI as the Kansas City Royals beat Julio Teheran and the Atlanta Braves 2-0.
ST. JOSEPH, Mo. (AP) — Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce missed the entire offseason after having surgery to solidify an ankle that had become loose over time. Kelce said he had felt discomfort in it the past couple years, mainly on Monday and Tuesday, when his entire body was still sore from a Sunday game. But he is back at practice, working out with quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs’ rookies.
ST. LOUIS (AP) — The Stanley Cup champion St. Louis Blues have hired Marc Savard as an assistant coach. The 42-year-old Savard spent 13 years playing in the NHL, splitting time among the Rangers, Flames, Thrashers and Bruins. The two-time All-Star was part of Boston’s 2011 Stanley Cup title team.
UNDATED (AP) — Don Mossi, a left-handed pitcher who won 101 games in over a decade as a major leaguer and was an All-Star for the Cleveland Indians in 1957, has died. He was 90. The Cremation Society of Idaho says Mossi died Friday. Mossi pitched five seasons for Cleveland and five for Detroit, then spent a year each with the White Sox and Athletics.