Community Corner

Call Me a Doctor...Gabe the Eagle (Scout)... and Suspicious Speeders

Snippets from the City Room floor, stories of life in Lamorinda that never quite made it to the front page, and the just plain odd.

Welcome to Neighborhood Tales, the small corner of our e-newspaper dedicated to the completely random, deliciously obtuse, sometimes silly but always interesting tidbits that just don't have the oohmph required to propel them onto our pages.

Call it "snippet journalism," or a pitiful attempt to emulate an old friend - Herb Caen, King of Three Dot Journalism.

Physician, Heal Thyself...

Find out what's happening in Lamorindawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

A Moraga mom and her brood were tooling down Glenside Dr. in Lafayette on her way to a football practice Wednesday when the sharp-eyed future Hall of Famer in the front seat spotted a lady cyclist in distress and said: "Mom, turnaround, we gotta go back!"

Cool kid. So Mom spins the car around and returns to the scene to find a woman hurt very badly in a fall from her bike, apparently as she was looking for a runaway pet. All appropriate emergency people are summoned and as they're onboarding the morphine for an injured arm the cool, calm, and collected cyclist instructs them as to the preferred method and dosage.

Find out what's happening in Lamorindawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

"What are you, a nurse?" one of the paras was heard to ask.

"I'm a doctor," the injured party responds, and apparently a quite well known one at that, head of a prominent local hospital. We hear she is okay and on the mend. The front seat teen spotter got a nice reward at dinner that night.

Fly Like An Eagle

In the office at Springhill School in Lafayette, Gabe Samaniego from Boy Scout troop 204 has set up a bin for the collection of tattered U.S. flags for permanent retirement. As part of his Eagle project, Gabe is organizing a Flag Retirement Ceremony open to the public, which will take place on October 18th at Rancho Laguna Park from 5:30 to 6:30 pm.  Please leave any damaged or tattered American flag in this bin for a proper disposal. 

As proud principal Bruce Wodhams says: "Thank you, Gabe, for supporting the Pillars of Respect and Citizenship!"

"I Swear, Officer, I Wasn't Doing A Mile Over a Hundred and One!"

Lamorinda Patch gets a lot of email. This one got our attention Wednesday:

I was wondering if you have access to the following information regarding the stretch of St. Mary's Road, between St. Mary's Parkway and Moraga Road.

Specifically, I would like to find out the following information if you have it:

1. The date that the stretch of St. Mary's Road, between St. Mary's Parkway and Carter Drive was most recently repaved.

2. The Pavement Condition Index (PCI) data for years 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009, for the same stretch of road.

Please let me know if you have this information.

Well, we don't but we contacted the sender, a Southern California man, and asked why he was looking for such deep data.

It appears he's fighting a traffic ticket issued by Moraga PD in the recent past, and intended to contest the fine based on road conditions and his speed that day.

"It turns out that there was only one accident that resulted from a driver driving at an unsafe speed on St. Mary's Road at Carter, between 2002 and 2007. That is one out of approximately 17,603,950 cars that passed that intersection over the same period. According to the survey, this constitutes a "high percentage of accidents caused by unsafe speed. I believe that the Survey results were cooked to justify keeping the speed limit lowered to 35 mpg. I'm not saying that people shouldn't drive safely, they should. But if a speed limit is posted that makes 85% of drivers that pass that stretch of road criminals, the data supporting the lowering of the speed should at least be accurate."

I'm just trying to get the data, so I can prove that the survey is not valid."

Pretty impressive, but only one accident at that location between 2002 and 2007? I can remember at least two, no?


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