July 31, 2016 – AssociatedNews.info

Sports July 31, 2016

The Australian Olympic Team Is Having A Rough Week

Australian Olympic team delegation head Kitty Chiller speaks to the media during a press Conference on Thursday in Rio de Janeiro. Ryan Pierse/Getty Images hide caption

toggle caption Ryan Pierse/Getty Images

The Australian Olympic team has had a difficult week.

First, upon arrival at the Olympic Village, delegation head Kitty Chiller said their allotted building was not “safe or ready” to receive the athletes.

Then, after quick efforts to get the building ready, the athletes moved in — only to have a fire break out two days later. It has now emerged that clothing and at least one laptop were stolen from the team during the fire evacuation.

The fire broke out on Friday evening in the building’s underground parking lot, according to a statement from the team. About 100 athletes and officials evacuated the complex for about 30 minutes while firefighters put the blaze out, and nobody was injured.

“The stairwells and corridors on the first few levels filled with smoke,” Chiller said — but the smoke alarms did not go off. Here’s more:

“The fire alarm had actually been silenced in our building while they were doing maintenance work on the building next door — so the alarms and the sprinklers did not activate. It’s concerning that that the fire system had been turned off and that we hadn’t been aware of that.”

It’s not clear what caused the fire, but authorities have launched an investigation. Chiller suggested that the fire could have started from a contractor’s cigarette.

“What we think has happened, is that a cigarette was thrown in a rubbish bin or on rubbish and that’s what started the fire,” she said, and called for a reminder to be sent to staff that the Village is non-smoking.

The team had previously complained of numerous problems with the building, including electrical issues. “Problems include blocked toilets, leaking pipes, exposed wiring, darkened stairwells where no lighting has been installed and dirty floors in need of a massive clean,” Chiller said in a statement last week.

She addressed the thefts at a press conference Sunday in Rio and described them as ” ‘concerning,’ but added ‘unfortunately theft is going to be inevitable,’ in a compound with 31 buildings and up to 18,000 athletes and staff,” according to The Associated Press.

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Business July 31, 2016

Oyster Farming Takes Off With Farm-To-Table Movement

Oyster farming on the East Coast has doubled in the past six years and shows no sign of slowing. Not only is this good for consumers and fishermen. Apparently it’s good for our waterways.

Transcript

ELISE HU, HOST:

Oyster farms are rapidly sprouting up along America’s eastern shoreline. Production doubled in just the past six years, driven by the farm-to-table movement. As Delaware Public Media’s James Morrison reports, the comeback of the oyster, which are filter feeders, are also good for our waterways.

JAMES MORRISON, BYLINE: Jimmy Parks is shucking the meat out of a cell-phone-sized oyster shell and preparing to drop it into a deep fryer.

JIMMY PARKS: For my fried oyster platter, I do my – I toss the fries in Old Bay for a little more Maryland flair.

MORRISON: Parks is a longtime chef and owner of The Butcher Station in Winchester, Va. He says the way we eat oysters has changed in the past 10 years.

PARKS: As much food as possibly can go on my plate at the least amount of money I can spend used to be the way things were. And now people are getting away from that, and they’re gravitating more towards I want cleaner sources.

MORRISON: Not only are we demanding clean sources, we’re becoming foodies. A decade ago, you probably would have just ordered oysters. Now, we pay attention to the taste profile, which is sometimes called a merroir of where our oysters come from. Oysters from New England are usually saltier than Chesapeake Bay oysters, which are considered milder and with a buttery finish.

PARKS: Now there’s, I think, over 3,500 different varieties of oysters in the world, but only five species. So it’s all about where they come from. So each area has a unique oyster to their water.

MORRISON: I’m heading out to Tim Devine’s oyster farm in the Chesapeake Bay. He was a photographer in New York before starting Barren Island Oysters in Maryland five years ago.

TIM DEVINE: The cages come up, and then they dump them into here. The upfeed takes them up into our chipping mechanism, which is – they call it a tumbler. It is essentially a rock tumbler that has some holes in it that sorts oysters.

MORRISON: Devine grows a strain of oysters that are immune to diseases that have devastated wild oyster populations, and his operation is sustainable. He’s taking nothing out of the water except the nutrients his oysters have eaten, and he’s putting nothing in but the cages that hold his oysters.

DEVINE: The coolest thing is within our cages we see these little shrimp-like creatures that actually eat the pseudofeces of the oysters. And then things like seahorses and crabs and other things eat those little guys, and then the food chain has begun.

MORRISON: The cages are creating reef-like habitats, and that’s helping small sea creatures survive. But the biggest benefit of these farms could be their ability to filter water.

GULNIHAL OZBAY: Oyster tissue is being blended in the blender. So now they are going to process it.

MORRISON: Gulnihal Ozbay is an oyster researcher at the University of Delaware. She says oysters are filtering phytoplankton and excessive nutrients out of our waterways.

OZBAY: It’s like almost like in the aquarium we have filters, same thing with oysters.

MORRISON: Farmed oysters are raised in clean, monitored waters, so they’re basically making clean water cleaner. Ozbay says what we really need are sacrificial oysters in our most polluted waterways.

OZBAY: These are filter feeders. As they filter, they will accumulate some of the contaminants.

MORRISON: States like Virginia have these programs and are working to expand them. East Coast states are also processing a backlog of applications to lease thousands of acres of sea floor for new oyster farms. For NPR News, I’m James Morrison.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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