Police, firefighters and the state fire marshal are investigating a rare arson in the Tower Hill neighborhood of Edgartown, and the owner of the home is offering a $10,000 reward for information that leads to an arrest in the case.
There was good news this week for Islanders struggling to pay for child care, including preschool: a state grant has come through that will make child care subsidy money available for income-eligible families in five of the six Island towns.
Compromise and congeniality were the hallmarks of the West Tisbury annual town meeting this year, as 210 voters marched through a 48-article warrant in three hours flat, first pausing at the outset to hear the annual reading from the town poet laureate and shower the retiring police chief with accolades and long-stemmed red roses.
“Isn’t this a great town?” beamed moderator F. Patrick Gregory following the reading by Fan Ogilvie.
A huge fire erupted in the U.S. Coast Guard boathouse in Menemsha yesterday afternoon, completely destroying the 68-year-old building along with an extended wooden pier that leads to the west dock on the Menemsha harbor. Also destroyed in the blaze were at least one truck and an unknown number of small boats nearby. Miraculously there were no injuries save one minor injury to a volunteer fireman, a Coast Guard public affairs spokesman confirmed last night.
One letter at a time. That was the drill on Wednesday morning this week as the nameplate went up over the entrance to the new Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. A Columbia Construction worker was perched on a ladder to do the job, while project manager Connie Bulman looked on, standing in an empty parking lot awash in unseasonably warm April sunshine. It was one of a flurry of final touches underway as the hospital prepares for its grand opening on Saturday night and Sunday morning this weekend.
A Melrose woman who took a trip to the Vineyard for the day with her husband, friends and young family, was killed in a grisly accident on Tuesday afternoon when she fell from her bike on State Road in Vineyard Haven into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer.
Adding another twist to the high-stakes gamble for who will win the right to use the ocean waters around the Vineyard for industrial wind power development in the name of green energy progress, a formerly prominent member of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) has publicly disputed the claim that Nantucket Sound is sacred ground traditionally used by the tribe for sunrise ceremonies.
As public attention ratchets up surrounding the controversial Cape Wind project planned for Nantucket Sound, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court is set to hear arguments next week in a case that will decide whether the wind farm developers can sidestep review by the Cape Cod Commission.
If you wake up seeing double in the wee hours Tuesday morning you will no doubt want to go to the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital to be seen by a doctor. But once there, you may find yourself seeing double all over again. For a brief few hours before dawn on Tuesday, the hospital will finally make the big move — from the old 1972 building to the new, $52 million 2010 building that was just completed two months ago.
