First it was days of heavy rain and flooding…now, farmers in Baldwin County are bracing for possible freezing temperatures this week. Will Mother Nature give them a break?
“When you get that much rain the strawberries soak up the water and they get mushy,” says Dennis Young, who manages Burris Farm Market in Loxley, a leading, local strawberry provider. “We had 13, 14 inches of rain and it was just too much. We had to throw out as many strawberries as we kept.”
The 22nd Annual Baldwin County Strawberry Festival will be held on both Saturday and Sunday. The festival is one of the largest in Baldwin County and has received regional attention as a top attraction and festival event.
With a new management team in place, Deep South Speedway is back open, after a brief closure, and is offering racing in eight classifications starting Saturday.
“Basically, what we want to do is put all of the rumors and all of the fears to rest in the racing community and bring racing back to a local level,” said Chuck Day of Performance Racing Group, the new leaseholder at Deep South. “We want to try to create the same old Saturday night racing atmosphere that they started with a couple of years ago.”
The four-tenths-mile track, which features a dirt surface with 23-degree banked turns, an 18-degree back stretch and 12-degree front stretch, was started in 1997 and opened in July 2004 by the Darby family
Here’s the transcription of the March 19, 2009 dash cam video involving a Loxley, Alabama police officer and Robert O’Ryan, a man who five days later was arrested for allegedly stalking Shawn Johnson, an Olympic gymnast and Dancing With The Stars Contestant. According to Los Angeles police, O’Ryan was spotted by a security guard trying to sneak into a “DWTS” rehearsal at CBS Studios.
Loxley, Alabama may be a small town, but it sees more than its fair share of characters traveling Interstate 10.
“You’d be surprised at how many guys they encounter that are just crazy,” said Loxely Police Chief Chip Cason.
It’s no surprise then, that a police officer making an early morning traffic stop didn’t think much of a guy claiming to be driving 2,400 miles to marry an Olympic gymnast.
According to a report received by the Baldwin County Health Department, heavy rainfall on Saturday caused a manhole on Holly Street to overflow and resulted in an undetermined amount of sewage being discharged to a ditch that empties into Blackwater River
The rain also caused the retention pond at the sewage treatment plant to overflow on Sunday and continued into Tuesday.
The overflow resulted in an undetermined amount of sewage being discharged to a ditch that empties into Corn Branch.
On Saturday, April 11, attendees at the Strawberry Festival will be treated to the sight of classic and not-so-classic but nicely tricked out cars at the festival’s car show. The festival will be be April 11 and 12 this year There will be a “cruise-in” event on Sunday, according to the Festival’s Web site.
The show will be held on the Festival grounds, in Loxley’s Municipal Park, along Highway 59, just a few putt-putts from I-10. Forms to pre-register a vehicle can be found at the Strawberry Festival Web site, baldwincountystrawberryfestival.org.
Heavy rains caused some big problems in Baldwin County. In Loxley, ditches filled up quickly with storm water and area creeks became raging whitewater rapids! Many roads were underwater. Several homes in the area nearly flooded leaving rising water just feet from neighbors’ doorsteps.
And just west of Loxley, a section of Highway 90 was shut down for several hours this morning. A drain pipe broke sending water across the highway and washing out part of the asphault.
The situation was not that much different in Daphne. The Lake Forest community got their fair share of the rain too. Several area creeks spilled their banks and caused some problems there as well. At least four homes were flooded.
According to a report received today by the Baldwin County Health
Department from Riviera Utilities, a sewage spill occurred in the Foley area on East Berry Ave.
Also, a manhole and lift stations overflowed on March 28th and March 29th in Fairhope, Alabama
And, heavy rainfall has caused a manhole and the retention pond at the sewage treatment plant
to overflow in Loxley, Alabama
A dispute over lease payments has idled racing at Deep South Speedway in Loxley, but the track’s owners, Benny and Madeline Darby and their son, Michael, are set to see racing start up again on the 156-acre property.
We have Chuck Day from the Atmore-Brewton area ready to go, and we hope to be racing by next weekend,” said Michael Darby in a telephone interview. He later indicated that April 4 should see racing resume at the track.
Deep South was previously leased by Bill and Karen Webb of Pensacola. Michael Darby claims that the Webbs failed to pay the lease on the track
The driver in a September wreck that killed a 19-year-old soldier from Baldwin County and two other passengers was highly intoxicated at the time of the one-vehicle crash, according to military and police reports.
Pfc. Desmond Morrisette of Loxley died in the Sept. 14 wreck at Fort Bragg, N.C., that also killed Pfc. Shelly Monique Brown, 20, of New Orleans and Spc. Alexander Llewelyn Thomas, 20, of the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The driver of the GMC Yukon had a blood-alcohol level of .18 percent, according to investigative reports obtained last week by the Baldwin Register through a Freedom of Information Act request originally filed in September
While most of us laugh and crack a few jokes, there’s nothing funny about discovering a “peeping Tom” outside your window
That was the situation Valentine’s Day when a Loxley woman discovered a “peeping Tom.”
Police are still monitoring the area, says Lt. Raymond Lovell, a spokesperson for the Loxley Police Department, but he says police think the incident was a “boyfriend-girlfriend situation.”
A judge last week refused to reinstate bail for a man charged with manslaughter and assault in connection to a 2006 wreck that resulted in the death of one person and serious injury to another.
Joseph Edward Davison, 19, of Loxley, faces those two charges for an April 23, 2006, wreck in which Michael Sean Henshon, 22, died and Dennis Webber, of Pensacola, incurred “serious bodily injury,” according to court documents. In January, Derek Rose, Davison’s attorney, filed a request asking Presiding Circuit Court Judge James H. Reid to reconsider bail for his client. The filing states that he has discovered a witness whose testimony indicates that “the defendant could not have been the driver of the vehicle on the date the accident occurred.”
It’s a handsome building just of County Road 68 in Loxley. Several “portable” buildings have been converted into modern classrooms, connected with an attractive wooden walkway and covered deck, tricked out with benches and tables, perfect for children to play on in bad weather
The center is one of the newest Head Start centers in the area, and is run by the East Coast Migrant Head Start Project.
The center is especially designed to assist families who come to the area to help with Baldwin County’s three growing seasons of crops, and is slated to open in April.
