Good morning, Whitewater.
Sunday in town will be cloudy with a high of seventy. Sunrise is 7:11 AM and sunset 6:09 PM, for 10h 58m 12s of daytime. The moon is full, with 99.9% of its visible disk illuminated.
Jessica McClure Morales (born March 26, 1986) became famous at the age of 18 months after falling into a well in her aunt’s backyard in Midland, Texas, on October 14, 1987. Between that day and October 16, rescuers worked nonstop for 58 hours to free her from the eight-inch (20 cm) well casing 22 feet (6.7 m) below the ground. The story gained worldwide attention (leading to some criticism as a media circus), and later became the subject of a 1989 television movie Everybody’s Baby: The Rescue of Jessica McClure on ABC. As presented in it, a vital part of the rescue was the use of the then relatively new technology of waterjet cutting….
Rescuing McClure proved to be a much more difficult ordeal than initially anticipated. Within hours of discovering the situation, the Midland Fire and Police Departments devised a plan that involved drilling an additional shaft parallel to the well and then drilling a perpendicular tunnel from the shaft toward where McClure was stuck in the well. Enlisting the help of a variety of local (often out-of-work) oil-drillers, the Midland officials had hoped to free McClure in a matter of minutes.
However, the first drillers to arrive on the scene found their tools barely adequate in penetrating the thick rock that surrounded the well. It would take approximately six hours to complete the parallel shaft and a substantially longer period of time to drill the tunnel, attributable to the fact that the jackhammers used were developed primarily for drilling downward, as opposed to sideways. A mining engineer was eventually brought in to help supervise and coordinate the rescue effort. 45 hours after McClure had fallen into the well, the shaft and tunnel were finally complete.
Ron Short, a muscular roofing contractor who was born without collar bones because of cleidocranial dysostosis and so could collapse his shoulders to work in cramped corners, arrived at the site and offered to go down the shaft. They accepted his offer, but did not use it.[1][2] One report[3] said that he helped to clear tunneling debris away.
Ultimately, Midland Fire Department paramedic Robert O’Donnell was able to inch his way down into the tunnel and wrestle McClure free from the confines of the well, handing her to fellow paramedic Steve Forbes, who carried her up to safety.
CNN, then a fledgling cable news outlet, was on the scene with around-the-clock coverage of the rescue effort. This massive media saturation of the ordeal prompted then-President Ronald Reagan to state that “everybody in America became godmothers and godfathers of Jessica while this was going on.”
On this day in 1968, the Bucks play their first game:
On this date the Milwaukee Bucks opened their first season with an 89-84 loss to the Chicago Bulls. The loss was witnessed by 8,467 fans in the Milwaukee Arena. The starting lineup featured Wayne Embry at center, Fred Hetzel and Len Chappell at forward, and Jon McGlocklin and Guy Rodgers in the backcourt. Larry Costello was the head coach. The Bucks had its first win in their sixth game of the season with a 134-118 victory over the Detroit Pistons. [Source: Milwaukee Bucks]