Gazette Daily News Briefing, July 1
This is Stephen Schmidt from the Gazette digital news desk and I’m here with your update for Friday, July 1.
Some rain early will give way to eventually sunny skies and cooler temperatures Friday. According to the National Weather Service it will be around a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 7 a.m. It will be cloudy, but gradually sunnier as the day goes on, with a high near 84 degrees. Friday night will be mostly clear, with a low around 63 degrees.
Adventureland Park was negligent when a water raft last year flipped over and killed an 11-year-old boy and seriously injured his 15-year old brother, the sons’ Cedar Rapids parents asserted in a wrongful-death lawsuit filed Thursday.
The Jaramillo family were suddenly put in danger when their 1,700-pound raft on the Raging River ride suddenly flipped them all underwater on July 3 of 2021, according to a 55-page lawsuit filed in Polk County District Court.
11-year-old Michael, and 15-year-old David Jr. remained trapped underwater for more than five minutes as their injured parents struggled and failed to free them.
David Jr. turned 16 while in a medically induced coma after the raft trauma and Michael was pronounced dead the day after the accident from “freshwater drowning,” the suit states.
The suit alleges the park did not turn off the ride quickly enough and also had been negligent in maintaining that and other rides for years. The park was later sold to another owner.
Guy Cook, the Des Moines lawyer for Adventureland, told The Gazette on Thursday the claims of the lawsuit will be specifically addressed in future court filings.
In a seismic shift in college athletics, the Big Ten voted Thursday to add Southern California and UCLA as conference members beginning in 2024.
According to the Associated Press, the expansion to 16 teams will happen after the Pac-12’s current media rights contracts with Fox and ESPN expire, making the Big Ten the first conference to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
The Big Ten is building on previous expansion into the nation’s largest media markets, and the move allows the conference to keep pace with the SEC as one of the most powerful entities in college sports.
The move could set off a chain reaction of other schools leaving their conferences as they want to latch onto these growing super conferences and their lucrative television deals. The announcement came almost a year after Oklahoma and Texas formally accepted invitations to join the SEC in July 2025.
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling Thursday that limited the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants left many Iowa officials and environmental advocates concerned about its implications in the state.
Nearly 24 percent of Iowa’s energy in 2020 was generated with coal — a figure overshadowed by wind power, which was responsible for 57 percent of the state’s energy that year. Still, there are nine utility-owned coal-fired power plants remaining in Iowa.
Thursday’s court ruling means that federal regulations can’t take a systemwide approach to regulating greenhouse gas emissions, said Kerri Johannsen, energy program director for the nonprofit Iowa Environmental Council. Instead, future regulations would have to focus on specific power plants, which could each challenge regulatio ns individually.
It is unclear how this will affect Iowa energy long term, as coal power has been losing steam for awhile now. MidAmerican would not comment to the Gazette about its 6 coal power plants still in operation, but Alliant said Thursday that it still plans to sunset the three plants it owns by 2040.
