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Cheers & Jeers

3 min read
article image - Jon Andreassi
Gov. Josh Shapiro speaks last week in North Franklin Township, flanked by Supervisor Bob Sabot. Employees of Penn Mechanical Group stand in the background.

Cheers: Cheers to Belle Vernon senior baseball player Parker Lind for throwing the first no-hitter among local baseball teams this season in the Leopards’ 14-0, five-inning win at McGuffey Tuesday. It was an impressive first game for Belle Vernon, which was one of the area’s most successful baseball teams last year, going 13-4 overall and winning their first section championship since 2012 with a 9-1 record. Lind walked three and struck out 11 in a dominating performance; senior Lucas Judy was 3 for 4 with two RBIs and two runs, and junior Connor Bergman doubled, singled and had three RBIs. All three are key returning starters from the 2024 squad.

Cheers: The state continues to chip away at the monumental task of locating and capping orphan and abandoned oil and gas wells. Gov. Josh Shapiro visited Washington County last week to mark his administration capping its 300th well, which is just a fraction of the sites in need of remediation. The Environmental Defense Fund said 8,840 abandoned wells have been documented in the state and says thousands more are out there, potentially polluting the air and water, and harming people’s health. The wells could be in farm fields, forests, waterways, in basements and around homes, according to the Defense Fund. “We know that we’ve got a lot of wells out there,” Shapiro said. “We also know that we don’t know where all of them are. A lot of the mapping that we have for these old wells is just that, old. If you stumble across an orphan or abandoned well, alert DEP. Don’t assume they know it’s there.”

Cheers: Kudos to Bethlehem-Center Middle School students, who spent the better part of Wednesday morning cleaning up Beallsville Cemetery, a sprawling final resting place where at least 4,500 are buried. Forty-five student council members rolled up their sleeves to fill trash bags with old Christmas decorations, flowers, aluminum cans, broken bottles, and other items, and re-set flags and markers that had been blown down. They also tackled the back-breaking task of cleaning nearly 200 years worth of dirt that had accumulated on the tombstones of Revolutionary and Civil War veterans buried there, a job that requires repeat application of a special cleaning solution to break down the grime. Ella Valentino, one of the students involved in the project, embraced the work, saying it offered her the chance to help her community. “It makes me feel really helpful that we can clean the (headstones) and make them look nice again, and it’s just nice to do this to honor the veterans who served in wars,” she said.

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