A man was stabbed and is under arrest after trying to rob a South Philadelphia sushi restaurant Thursday afternoon.
Authorities say that just before 3 p.m. an armed 19-year-old man whose mom identified him as Tishon Jones tried to rob the Terryin Sushi Bar on the 300-block of Synder Avenue at gunpoint, but a restaurant employee decided to make matters into his own hands.
The restaurant's owner, Ryan Zheng, told NBC10 that he struggled with Jones before an employee grabbed a sushi knife and stabbed the would-be robber in the back twice, stopping the suspect in his tracks, according to police.
The owner's wife and young son were inside the restaurant, watching the scary struggle.
"We're fine. Everything feels alright and police got the guy," said Zheng.
Today's incident would have been the third time the sushi bar was robbed in less than three weeks and police say Jones is the man responsible.
The Lyn Grocery Store on South 4th Street was robbed on November 30. The suspect got away with $50. Two days later, South View Pizza was hit. $500 was taken from the register.
Detectives are on the scene interviewing Terryin's owner and witnesses. The suspect was transported to Methodist Hospital after the stabbing before being moved to Jefferson. He is in stable condition.
We'll keep you updated as details become available.
Anti-apartheid activist and former President of South Africa Nelson Mandela has died at 95 leaving behind a legacy that spans from the small villages of the Eastern Cape of South Africa to right here in Philadelphia, Pa.
Mandela’s death comes after a string of hospitalizations that began in Feb. 2011 with a respiratory infection, and later, a lung infection that worsened in early June of this year. For several days this summer, the Nobel Peace Prize winner was reported to have been in critical condition spurring numerous premature announcements of his death.
But Mandela eventually recovered from his illness, went on to celebrate his 95th birthday in July, and was released from the hospital in September.
South African President Jacob Zuma announced Mandela's death at a press conference Thursday.
Among a long list of accomplishments, Mandela is best known for his self-sacrificing efforts to overthrow the National Party's apartheid policies as a member of the African National Congress in South Africa in the 1940s. Mandela was arrested in 1962 and eventually spent 27 years as a political prisoner.
Gray credited Mandela for being a “spiritual giant.”
“I think when history is written of the twentieth century, beside Ghandi and Martin Luther King, I think the next giant is going to be Nelson Mandela,” Gray said. “He was an unusual man who had been in jail for almost 30 years because of his beliefs in equality and the dignity of the human spirit. But yet he did not hate; he came out and became a force for reconciliation and healing.”
Less than three years after his release from prison, in July 1993, Mandela’s life’s work led him to the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia where he and then South Africa president F. W. de Klerk were presented with the Philadelphia Liberty Medal by then U.S. President Bill Clinton.
In his acceptance speech, Mandela spoke of the many obstacles that had yet to be overcome and sought Americans’ continued support of his efforts to bring equality to his country.
“In the struggle for real change and a just peace, we will have to overcome the terrible heritage of the insult to human dignity, the inequalities, the conflicts and antagonisms that are the true expression of the apartheid system. To overcome them, we will have to succeed to build one nation in which all South Africans will be to one another sister and brother, sharing a common destiny and shorn of the terrible curse of having to define themselves in racial and ethnic terms,” Mandela said.
In a last minute addition to his trip to Philadelphia, Mandela obliged an invitation to visit Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia where Gray then served as the church’s reverend. There, Mandela appealed for supporters to raise money for a voter-education campaign in anticipation of elections in his country the following year.
Gray cited the visit as one of the proudest moments of his career.
“The most important thing to me, for those people who know me, was my ministry. I'm a Baptist minister first. And so to have him come to North Philadelphia, stand in the pulpit of the Bright Hope Baptist Church, and speak to that congregation was the most emotional moment, really, I think of my whole legislative career. Not passing 4 trillion dollar plus budgets, but that moment when he stood at Bright Hope Baptist Church up at 12th and Cecil B. Moore and spoke to an overflowed crowd that was all over 12th street, all over Cecil B. Moore Avenue; that was just unbelievable,” Gray said.
One year later, on May 9, 1994, Mandela was elected by Parliament as the first president of a democratic South Africa.
Though now deceased, he left a lasting impact on many of Pennsylvania’s leaders, including former Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode.
Goode met Mandela during his visit to Philadelphia and participated in fundraising efforts for his presidential run in South Africa.
“Anyone who is found in his presence is said to be inspired by the magnitude of what he went through, and what he accomplished, and the boldness of his character, and the stick-to-it-ness, and his determination to bring equality and freedom to South Africa,” Goode said.
“I think I was inspired by the essence of the man who spent 27 years in prison because of what he believed and was able to come out of prison and become president, and lead a nation to a new level. That is inspiration for anyone, anywhere, in any country.”
Gray said his life would have been different had he not known Mandela.
"I think what would have changed, is not my work in ministry, not my work in the Congress so much, but me as a person. In 1991, I did something that defied the world and that was I left Congress as the highest ranking African-American, the majority whip, and went back to education to raise money to send low income African-American kids to college. And I think I would not have done that had it not been for the influence of a Nelson Mandela who said, "Stand up for what you believe in. And no matter what the rest of the world says or does, go do it.”
The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) today confirmed the agency’s investigation of the Center City building collapse that left six people dead and injured 13 others has concluded, with no additional fines being levied against any of the other entities involved in the collapse, including the Salvation Army.
During the five month long investigation, OSHA interviewed and took oral depositions from numerous people involved in the collapse, but only two, Griffin Campbell and Sean Benschop were penalized by the agency.
Attorney Robert Mongeluzzi, who is handling several civil lawsuits related to the building collapse, said he was not surprised by OSHA’s decision not to penalize other parties involved in the collapse including, The Salvation Army or developer Richard Basciano and his company STB Investments.
“OSHA would not have jurisdiction to cite The Salvation Army since they weren’t doing construction at the site. The building owner did not have employees on the site at the time of the collapse; OSHA also would not have jurisdiction to cite them. So it does not surprise us that OSHA did not cite them,” Mongeluzzi said.
“What we should not forget is that whether OSHA cites or does not cite is inadmissible in any court and is irrelevant to whether or not any parties involved are innocent.”
Campbell's construction company was hired to demolish the four-story building at 2136 Market Street, where on the morning of June 5, the building's western wall collapsed into a Salvation Army thrift store burying its occupants in rubble.
According to investigators with the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office, an excavator operator working for Campbell, Sean Benschop a.k.a. Kary Roberts, was allegedly high on drugs while operating heavy machinery on the demolition site. Benschop is currently behind bars and faces six counts of involuntary manslaughter and 13 counts of reckless endangerment.
OSHA says the fines against Campbell and Benschop were based on an inspection that was conducted prior to the collapse, on May 15.
According to OSHA, both companies were given 15 days to respond to the citations. S&R Construction contested the citations shortly after they were issued, on Nov. 21; and Campbell Construction filed to contest the citations on Dec. 4.
A huge sinkhole on a city street nearly swallowed a pickup truck this morning, now what?
Now, the Water Department says that a resident of the 900-block of Randolph Street in Northern Liberties has to pay for the repair of the gaping hole that almost swallowed a gray Dodge pickup.
"$2600," says Larisa Dersko.
When asked why she had to pay, Dersko says she didn't know. The water company found the infrastructure of the street completely washed away with a 6-inch water main leak and they say Derkso is responsible because they believe the hole was caused by a leak in her service line.
Derkso, who's been without water for a week, tells NBC10's LuAnn Cahn that she called on Thanksgiving, days before the hole opened up, to report that something wasn't right.
Neighbors are frustrated that Derkso is responsible for the hefty repair bill. They say that this has happened many times, as recently as last May. They want the water department to fix the entire street.
The hole has been covered with wood planks pending permanent repairs.
NBC10's LuAnn Cahn is working on getting residents the answers.
Check back with NBC10.com for new developments in the story.
When Patrice and Philip Morgan bought a house near the ocean in Brooklyn, they were not particularly worried about the threat of flooding.
Federal maps showed their home was outside the area at a high risk of flood damage. For that reason, the government did not require them to buy flood insurance, a cost imposed on neighbors on more vulnerable blocks.
Even so, the couple decided to raise their house four feet to protect their basement from the effects of heavy rain storms.
"We thought we might have a foot or two of water," Patrice said, "so we put a sump pump in to avoid any small issues."
But the maps drawn up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency were wrong. And government officials knew it.
According to documents and interviews, state, local and federal officials had been aware for years that the crucial maps of flood risks were inaccurate; some feared they understated the dangers in New York City's low-lying areas.
The flaws in the maps had significant impact. Developers relied on FEMA's assessment of risks when they built new homes near the water. And homeowners and businesses made crucial decisions about where to buy or lease property on the assurance that they were outside of the high-risk zones.
Thousands of the buildings incorrectly identified as outside the flood zone were damaged when seawater surged ashore as Hurricane Sandy made landfall on Oct. 29, 2012.
State and city officials had been asking FEMA for years to revise the maps with technology and modeling methods that didn't exist when they were first drawn in the 1980s. William S. Nechamen, New York State's floodplain chief, warned FEMA in a 2005 letter that the failure to do so "will lead to higher than necessary flood damages and more expenses placed on individuals and on FEMA."
Yet, despite Nechamen's warning, FEMA missed chances to make changes that could have protected city dwellers from some of the worst of Sandy's destruction.
During a push to modernize flood maps in the mid-2000s, FEMA decided to save money in New York City and much of the rest of the country by digitizing old flood maps without updating the underlying information, rather than using new technology to create more accurate maps.
The agency changed course in 2006, but didn't release maps with better elevation data and more accurate storm-surge models until months after Sandy – too late to help New Yorkers like the Morgans.
When FEMA finally released a preliminary version of those maps this January they showed that the number of city structures considered at high risk of flooding had doubled. More than 35,000 additional homes and businesses were added to the map's riskiest zones, according to a study by New York City's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. Some 9,503 of those buildings suffered damaged during Sandy, a ProPublica analysis of flood maps shows.
FEMA did not respond to specific questions about the adequacy of its flood maps or glitches in the modernization process. Bill McDonnell, the deputy director for mitigation for FEMA's Region II, acknowledged that no new data had been collected to update maps for New York or New Jersey in the mid-2000s. In a statement, the agency said it began giving priority to map updates for "high-risk, coastal areas" in 2009. These included 14 counties in New Jersey and New York City. The agency said it continues to work with state and local officials to "incorporate the best available data into maps."
That didn't help the Morgans. Their home, a 1920s bungalow to which they added a second floor, was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy.
"The whole basement was destroyed," said Patrice Morgan, a professor at Kingsborough Community College who was pregnant with her third child when Sandy arrived. "We had to rip out four feet of our walls, replace all of our appliances."
The family spent more than five months at Patrice's parents' house in Bensonhurst before they could move back in. The Morgans received $17,000 from FEMA and $6,000 from their homeowners' insurance, but spent nearly $50,000 out-of-pocket to rebuild their home.
The error in calculating the Morgans' flood risk was substantial. The map that existed when they bought the house in 2008 predicted that floodwaters would rise less than a foot even in rare storms, those with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any year. The new maps predict floodwaters 11 feet deep for that block under those conditions.
Philip Orton, an oceanographer at the Stevens Institute of Technology who worked as a technical reviewer on the new maps, said most of the difference can be accounted for by more accurate mapping data and technology. Rising sea levels due to climate change accounts for no more than six inches of the increase, Orton said.
If they'd known in 2008 what they know now, Philip Morgan said, the house's entire layout would be different.
"Our utilities are in the basement," he said. "We would have moved that to a higher floor. Higher, that's the key."
FEMA's sputtering effort to update its flood maps dates back about a decade.
The maps serve several crucial functions. Beyond helping to set standards for development in areas considered high-risk, they determine the rates homeowners pay for insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program. Homeowners with federally backed mortgages in high-risk flood zones — where the annual chance of flooding is estimated at 1 percent or higher — are required by law to purchase flood insurance.
Until 2003, FEMA had been using mostly paper maps drawn in the 1970s and ‘80s. That year, at the urging of floodplain administrators, Congress passed legislation allocating about $1 billion -- $200 million a year for five years -- to update and digitize the nation's flood maps.
But David Maurstad, who ran the flood insurance program from 2004 to 2008, said he told the White House's Office of Management and Budget early in his tenure that the money authorized wouldn't come close to covering the cost of updating all the maps.
"I indicated to them that I want to make sure you understand that this is a down payment — less than a third of the maps are going to get new engineering," he said.
New engineering was crucial because modern technologies are capable of producing far more accurate maps. Lidar, which is collected by airplanes that shoot laser pulses at the ground, can detect differences in ground elevation of as little as 3 inches and produces data that's 10 times as accurate as that used to generate earlier maps. And computer programs such as ADCIRC can model storm surge and wave action with far greater accuracy.
"There can be massive under-predictions with the old technology," said Joannes Westerink, an engineering professor at the University of Notre Dame and a co-developer of ADCIRC, "simply because it wasn't representing the physics right."
But updating maps with new engineering isn't cheap.
When FEMA started updating New York City's maps in 2003, it used elevation data from the old maps and matched it up with modern satellite imagery "in order to stretch the mapping budget," said Lisa King, a spokeswoman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
The result: Digital maps that weren't much more accurate than the paper ones they replaced.
City and state officials weren't happy.
New York City specifically requested that FEMA gather lidar data for its new maps and was rebuffed, according to a city official who requested not be named.
"The City had serious concerns about the accuracy of this data," the official said in an email to ProPublica, "and stated this in numerous meetings and then in a formal letter to FEMA."
Nechamen, the state floodplain chief, called FEMA's strategy "misguided and counterproductive" in his 2005 letter to Maurstad at FEMA.
"This is insufficient and will result in poor quality, but really good looking maps that fail to provide the data needed to adequately manage development in floodplains," he wrote. "Many errors on existing maps will continue to appear on the new maps."
Nechamen referred requests for comment to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which did not respond to requests to make him available for an interview.
In an interview, Maurstad said he had received similar complaints from officials from other states as well.
"This is consistent with what many of the state folks were expressing at the time," he said.
As a result, in 2006, FEMA changed its flooding-mapping strategy in what it called a "midcourse adjustment," which called for producing digital maps for about 92 percent of the country, rather than the whole nation. The agency said it would use the money it saved to increase slightly the number of areas that got new engineering.
But New York City's flood maps didn't get much new engineering — not new storm-surge analyses or lidar elevation data.
Some states saw the need for better maps as so urgent that they took it upon themselves to gather the data. North Carolina decided to pay for mapping the state using lidar after Hurricane Floyd in 1999. "We were concerned at the time that FEMA didn't have the money," said John Dorman, the director of the North Carolina Floodplain Mapping Program.
Other parts of New York had more accurate data than New York City. The maps for Nassau and Suffolk counties on Long Island, finalized in 2009, had been drawn using lidar and new storm-surge models. (Much of that data had been gathered by the Army Corps of Engineers.)
It made a huge difference when Sandy struck. According to ProPublica's analysis, 75 percent of the flooded area in Suffolk County and 89 percent of the flooded area in Nassau County fell within the high-risk zones on the new maps.
No map, of course, can predict all the idiosyncrasies of a particular storm, a FEMA specialist told ProPublica.
But maps for Brooklyn and Queens, the city's hardest-hit boroughs, predicted Sandy's flooding far less reliably. Only 47 percent of the flooded area in Brooklyn and 54 percent of the flooded area in Queens was in the area considered high-risk. (See our interactive news application to explore how coastal New York and New Jersey counties rank at predicting Sandy's surge. See our methodology for more about how we analyzed the flood map data.)
FEMA started updating New York City's maps again in 2009, only two years after the previous flood maps had been released. This time they undertook a new storm-surge analysis and included lidar data that the city itself spent $450,000 to gather in 2010. (The effort was partly financed with a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.)
But these maps weren't ready in time for Sandy, a delay that carried a high price.
Nearly 400 of the buildings that suffered damage during Sandy had been built or modified since 2007, when the less-accurate maps came out, ProPublica's analysis showed. Those buildings weren't included in high-risk flood zones; now they are.
Rita Brummer and Steven Ferrara, who live in the Belle Harbor neighborhood in Queens, paid flood insurance premiums for more than 20 years before they dropped their coverage less than a year before Sandy flooded their home. On the 2007 maps, their home wasn't in a high-risk flood zone.
"Nobody believed the storm was going to hit us like this," Brummer said.
The surge of salt water and sewage that flooded their home caused more than $100,000 in damage, much of which the couple paid to repair themselves. On the updated maps released this year, their house was in a high-risk zone. Had she known that sooner, Brummer said, she "never would have dropped" her flood insurance.
More than 100 other homes that suffered damage in Belle Harbor also did not fall into the high-risk flood zone on the old flood maps but are considered high-risk on the maps released this year.
Those maps are in the process of being refined further. In the weeks after the storm, FEMA rushed to release incomplete "advisory" versions, then issued more complete updates this January. The maps are expected to be finalized in 2015.
Imperfect as they remain, New York City's flood maps are more advanced than those covering some other parts of the country. Five coastal counties in New Jersey still use paper maps dating back decades. FEMA has been in the process of revising New Orleans' maps since the Army Corps shored up the city's flood protection after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and still officially relies on paper maps from 1984.
Though the federal government approved more than $60 billion in aid after Hurricane Sandy, including a $9.7 billion increase in the National Flood Insurance Program's borrowing limit, it has actually cut spending on flood mapping in recent years. Congress allocated $99 million for updating maps in 2012, roughly half of what it had spent annually since 2004. About the same amount was allocated for this year.
In a report released in March, the Association of State Floodplain Managers estimated the total cost of updating flood maps nationwide at $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion. It also estimated that the maps, even in their current state, save the country about $1 billion a year in flood-related damages.
Chad Berginnis, the association's executive director, said that the absence of accurate flood maps could lead to an "entire cascade of impacts": higher costs to taxpayers in the form of disaster assistance, higher likelihood of injury and death for residents, lost tax revenue and damaged infrastructure after flooding occurs.
"All of those typical effects are things that happen when you don't have good, accurate flood data that you're using," he said.
The unemployment rate fell to 7 percent, its lowest level in five years, and employers added a better-than-expected 203,000 workers in November.
So, based on Friday's jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, our economy is back on track and policy makers can start the holidays early, right?
Maybe not. While this was report was good enough to cheer Wall Street -- the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 100 points after it was released -- there's still enough bad news in it to prompt calls for action in a variety of areas.
But first the good news.
"It is clear the the recovery has gained traction," said Jason Furman, chairman of Obama's Council of Economic Advisers. Read more about this story on PBJ.com
Police searched for a hit-and-run driver after a woman’s body was found along an area roadway.
A passerby made the grisly discovery around 8:45 Friday morning in a grassy area along the 600 block of Marsh Road in Wilmington, Del.
Paramedics announced the yet-to-be-identified woman a short time later.
According to Delaware State Police, preliminary evidence indicated that a vehicle struck the woman then fled the scene, which is near a community and sports fields.
The exact cause of death and a time line of events are pending an ongoing investigation, according to police.
Troopers remained on the scene for about two hours as they gather more evidence and cleared the scene.
A school bus and a sports utility vehicle collided this morning landing two people in hospital.
The bus crashed along Kelly Drive near Sedgely Road near Boat House Row in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park around 9 a.m.
Two people from the Lexus SUV were transported to the hospital with undisclosed injuries.
There were kids on the bus but none of the kids were hurt.
It appeared the bus crashed into the back of the Lexus. The front of the bus showed damage while the rear of the SUV showed significant damage.
It wasn't clear where the bus was going since normally large vehicles don't travel on the river drives in Philly.
The yellow bus was leased out from Holcomb Bus Service in Bellmawr, N.J. The company had no comment about the crash and didn't say which organization has rented the bus.
The cause of the crash remained under investigation.
This wasn't the only incident involving a school bus Friday. According to firefighters, a mechanical issue caused a school bus to catch fire just after 9 a.m. at 33rd Street and Girard Avenue. No one was hurt and it wasn't clear if anyone was on board.
The fight became symbolic of outrageous Black Friday behavior around the country when one woman, who'd been punched and yanked to the ground, pulled out a stun gun and shocked the other. But by all official accounts, after bystanders and security broke up the fight, the women walked off into mall-brawl oblivion.
Police don't know who they are.
"No reports were filed and no calls were made to 911," said Philadelphia Public Affairs Officer Christine O'Brien.
Franklin Mills Mall management doesn't know who the women involved are (and would really just love to have this whole episode fade away).
"Neither one filed a report and neither was injured," said mall spokesperson Lauren Fyke. "At this point, no, we really don't have any further comment."
Nautica workers who saw the stun gun brawl don't know who the women are. And one week later, they still don't know what started the fight, which took place right outside their store.
"Nobody knows what it was about," one worker, who didn't want to be identified, told us today.
"Just something about the holidays; reminds us of how we like to gather with our loved ones around the crackle of a stun gun," Stewart said. "That's just Philly though man, we just know that's just a little spirited."
Often, with attention like that, someone pipes up and says, "I know who they are!" Maybe that's the real shocker here...
Snowy owls hailing from the Arctic tundra have been seen all over Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, and though it's not unusual for the owls to fly south for winter, the number of birds relocating is.
