Story by Sandy Giordano – Beaver County Radio. Published January 10, 2024 11:46 A.M.

(Hopewell Township, Pa) Two new head coaches were hired by the Hopewell Area School District at Tuesday night’s work session. John Rosa was named varsity football coach at a rate of $9,768 for the season, and Nathan Richter was hired as the head varsity coach for the soccer team at a salary of $5,139.

Consolidation of Hopewell’s elementary schools was discussed, as Dan Engen–owner and architect of Draw Collective–reported that the high school has underutilized space. The school board plans to have another meeting with Mr. Engen on Monday about the long-term goals of the school.     

Story by Curtis Walsh – Beaver County Radio. Published January 10, 2024 10:43 A.M.

(Monaca, Pa) An explosion occurred at a house on McClelland Street in Monaca before 8am Wednesday morning. Chief David Piuri of the Monaca Police Department told Beaver County Radio two men were taken to the hospital for burns. The state of the victims is not known at this time, but they were said to have been conscious and alert following the incident.

When crews arrived on scene, a small fire was still burning and firefighters extinguished it. Initially, there were concerns over the amount of ammunition in the home, as one of the men is a licensed arms dealer. One of the men also told Police that they had a water leak overnight and a crew was working to clean it up.

Due to the uncertainty of the cause, the bomb squad was called in. The bomb squad determined that the ammunition most likely did not have anything to do with the blast. The Chief says at this time, evidence indicates that a gas leak was most likely responsible, possibly triggered by the operation of a shop vac.

The State Fire Marshal is investigating the cause of the explosion.

According to the Chief, the area is safe and there is no threat of another explosion.

Monaca Police, Monaca Fire Department, Allegheny County Police Bomb Squad, and Peoples Gas were among those on scene.

Video & Photos from the scene:

 

PITTSBURGH (AP) — Mason Rudolph’s unlikely renaissance will continue into the playoffs.

Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin said he is sticking with the former third-string quarterback ahead of a trip to AFC East champion Buffalo (11-6) on Sunday.

Rudolph is 3-0 as a starter since taking over for an ineffective Mitch Trubisky before a game against Cincinnati on Dec. 23. While starter Kenny Pickett has fully recovered from right ankle surgery in early December, Tomlin doesn’t want to chance derailing the rhythm Pittsburgh’s offense has found under Rudolph.

The Steelers (10-7) have averaged 27 points since Rudolph took over, a full 10 points more than they had been averaging during a sometimes rocky season that included a 1-4 stretch from mid-November to mid-December that dropped Pittsburgh out of playoff position. The move to Rudolph — languishing at the bottom of the depth chart for the past two seasons — in search of a “spark” turned into one of the league’s more unlikely success stories.

Rudolph has thrown for 719 yards and three touchdowns without an interception while leading the Steelers to wins over the Bengals, Seattle and Baltimore as Pittsburgh slipped past several teams to reach the playoffs for the 11th time in Tomlin’s 17-year tenure.

“We’re simply staying with the hot hand and not disrupting the apple cart,” Tomlin said Tuesday. “We’ve been in some tough circumstances. He’s delivered, we’ve delivered.”

Rudolph has had a quarterback rating of 112 or higher since becoming the starter and expertly navigated the elements during a driving rain in Baltimore last Saturday, completing 90 percent (18 of 20) of his passes and hitting Diontae Johnson for a go-ahead 71-yard touchdown early in the fourth quarter.

“He’s making good decisions,” Tomlin said. “He’s working hard from a preparation standpoint and that preparedness is showing. There’s a cumulative body of work to speak to. Mason’s been here a long time and I think that’s a component of it as well.”

Rudolph, drafted by the Steelers in 2018, is on a one-year deal. It’s too soon to tell what this rise over the past month means for his career going forward and Tomlin cautioned against reading too much into the fact that he remains, at least on paper, third on the depth chart behind Pickett and Trubisky.

“We’re going about our business cultivating a plan to win this week,” Tomlin said. “We care less about division of labor in terms of pieces of paper and depth charts and so forth.”

While Rudolph is in, star outside linebacker T.J. Watt is out. The NFL sack leader injured his left knee in the second half against the Ravens. Rookie Nick Herbig and veteran Markus Golden will fill in for Watt as the Steelers try to win a postseason game for the first time since beating Kansas City in the divisional round of the 2016 playoffs.

“You’ve got a few lines in the water when you’re trying to replace a guy like TJ,” Tomlin said.

Pittsburgh has struggled over the years during the rare times Watt, in the mix to win his second AP Defensive Player of the Year award, has been out of the lineup. The Steelers went 1-6 last season when Watt went on injured reserve with a pectoral injury then responded with a 7-2 finish.

Herbig has shown flashes during his first season, including getting a key strip-sack against the Seahawks that allowed Pittsburgh to pull away late. Golden has four sacks this season while playing a limited number of snaps.

“It is going to be a committee approach,” Tomlin said. “Even in doing so, we better strengthen our output in other areas because TJ is one of a kind.”

Pittsburgh is optimistic Pro Bowl safety Minkah Fitzpatrick will be able to return after missing three games with a knee injury. Fitzpatrick is likely to be limited in practice early in the week, but indicated he expects to be ready to go. The Steelers will also have Damontae Kazee available at safety after he served a three-game suspension for a series of illegal hits.

(Matt Drzik/Beaver County Radio)

Gas prices continue to drop due to low demand across Western Pennsylvania. According to AAA East Central’s latest report, the average price for a gallon of unleaded gasoline is down to $3.39. That average is down from last week’s average of $3.41 by two cents, and down a full 35 cents from the average of $3.74 one year ago.

Beaver County goes from $3.46/gallon to $3.44/gallon, which is a two-cent drop. Butler stands pat at $3.43/gallon, while the Pittsburgh region drops three cents to also be at $3.43.

The national average is currently at $3.07 according to AAA East Central, 32 cents below the regional average.

This week’s average prices: Western Pennsylvania Average                          $3.386
Average price during the week of January 2, 2024                                           $3.414
Average price during the week of January 9, 2023                                           $3.743

The average price of unleaded self-serve gasoline in various areas:      

$3.189      Altoona
$3.448      Beaver
$3.614      Bradford
$3.228      Brookville
$3.426      Butler
$3.362      Clarion
$3.232      DuBois
$3.280      Erie
$3.459      Greensburg
$3.456      Indiana
$3.431      Jeannette
$3.654      Kittanning
$3.449      Latrobe
$3.286      Meadville
$3.424      Mercer
$3.073      New Castle
$3.448      New Kensington
$3.388      Oil City
$3.432      Pittsburgh
$3.222      Sharon
$3.413      Uniontown
$3.599      Warren
$3.367      Washington

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A crippling fuel leak forced a U.S. company on Tuesday to give up on landing a spacecraft on the moon.

Astrobotic Technology’s lander began losing fuel soon after Monday’s launch. The spacecraft also encountered problems keeping its solar panel pointed towards the sun and generating solar power.

“Given the propellant leak, there is, unfortunately, no chance of a soft landing on the moon,” Astrobotic said in a statement.

Astrobotic had been targeting a lunar landing on Feb. 23, following a roundabout, fuel-efficient flight to the moon. It could have been the first U.S. moon landing in more than 50 years, and the first by a private company. A second lander from a Houston company is due to launch next month.

Only four countries have pulled off a successful moon landing.

The company said the new goal was to keep the lander operating as long as possible in space, in order to learn as much as possible for its next mission a year or so from now. Flight controllers managed to keep the spacecraft pointed toward the sun and its battery fully charged, with another 40 hours of operations anticipated.

The Pittsburgh-based company did not elaborate on why the Peregrine lander’s propellant system failed just hours into the flight.

NASA paid Astrobotic $108 million to fly its experiments to the moon on this mission, part of the agency’s commercial lunar program.

Story by Curtis Walsh – Beaver County Radio. Published January 9, 2024 12:35 P.M.

(Beaver, Pa) The Borough of Beaver announced that their council meeting scheduled for Tuesday, January 9th has been cancelled. The council will meet again on Tuesday, January 23rd at 7pm.

Story by Curtis Walsh – Beaver County Radio. Photo of Heinz Field courtesy of Aliquippa AD Dr. Jennifer J. Damico. Published January 9, 2024 11:20 A.M.

(Aliquippa, Pa) It was recently announced that the PIAA intends on moving the Aliquippa Quips to 5A for the 2024 football season. State Representative Rob Matzie tells Beaver County Radio, him and the PA Athletic Oversight Committee are preparing legislation to bring some reform to the PIAA.

It’s been 25 years since the state legislature has taken a look at PIAA.
At that time, 13 recommendations for how they should operate were made,
and the PA Athletic Oversight committee was formed. The committee holds a hearing with the PIAA every year, where they talk about mainly finances and issues, but the committee ultimately has no governance.

The PIAA removed a rule that kept safety in the equation for determining how far teams can play up. Matzie says the PIAA removed the rule without telling anybody, and nobody knew until this week. The removal of the role effectively makes it so that the safety of players is not considered when making a team such as Aliquippa play up against teams that have over double the players they do. “What kind of message are we sending our kids?”, Matzie said. The PIAA will only consider success and transfers.

Southern Columbia has one seven straight titles, but has a “boundry list” that allows them to effectively recruit from nearby areas without punishment. St. Joes Prep, a 6A school in Philadelphia, currently dominates the 6A division and openly recruits players from other states. 6A is the highest division of the PIAA, so they are not met with any consequences.

The PIAA has repeatedly alleged that Aliquippa is recruiting. At least one Aliquippa player, who has attended the district since kindergarten, was allegedly named a transfer. “I’m not sure what type of leg Aliquippa is going to have to stand on”, Matzie said. “They may have to go to court”. Families and people close to the situation, including Matzie, say that some of these alleged transfers are people just trying to keep a roof over their head.

Matzie says legislation is in place and they preparing to put pressure on the board of the PIAA. The first bill will state, “if you are using a rule to determine classification every two years, that rule can only be used by following the exact census of students in the school.” Under current census data, Aliquippa would be classified as a 2A school, in the past they were 1A, but chose to play up in 2A for many years.

The PIAA is an independent non profit organization, in which schools pay dues to, and doesn’t fall under any department of the state. Matzie calls them “quasi-government” and says he believes approximately 90 percent of their funding is coming from tax payer dollars.

Matzie would like to see a super majority implemented into the PIAA, which could give the PA Athletic Oversight Committee voting and veto power against the PIAA. He believes state legislation has the power to perform a takeover on the PIAA, adding “They got comfortable”, and “I’m gonna poke the bear”.

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — The National Park Service withdrew a proposal Monday to take down a statue of William Penn at a Philadelphia historical site as part of a renovation that touched off a torrent of criticism over the legacy of the man who founded the province of Pennsylvania.

In a brief statement, Independence National Historical Park said it has withdrawn the proposal it had announced quietly before the weekend about a wider renovation of Welcome Park, located just blocks from the Liberty Bell and the National Constitution Center.

The proposal, it said, was released “prematurely” and hadn’t undergone a complete internal review.

“No changes to the William Penn statue are planned,” it said. The park service never explained the reason for the impetus to remove the statue.

The plan had also involved expanding the telling of Philadelphia’s Native American history and fixing up a deteriorating hardscaped park.

Taking down the statue of William Penn, however, looked like it might become the latest front in a fight over how to tell the nation’s history through its monuments.

Pennsylvania’s top Republican state House member, Rep. Bryan Cutler, had accused President Joe Biden in a statement of trying to “cancel” William Penn. Cutler called it “another sad example of the left in this country scraping the bottom of the barrel of wokeism to advance an extreme ideology and a nonsensical view of history.”

Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro took credit for the park service’s reversal, saying in a statement that “my team has been in contact with the Biden Administration throughout the day to correct this decision.”

Welcome Park is a section of a city block bordered by apartments and a bed and breakfast. It is named for the ship that brought Penn to Philadelphia from England in 1682 and is built on the site of Penn’s home, the Slate Roof House, which was demolished in the 1800s.

Penn founded Pennsylvania after King Charles II granted him a charter for over 45,000 square miles (116,500 square kilometers) of land in 1681.

Andrew Murphy, a political science professor and biographer of Penn at the University of Michigan, said it didn’t surprise him that some people would object to tearing down the Penn statue.

Murphy said that being a Quaker in Penn’s time meant dressing in plain clothes, using plain speech and worshipping in plain spaces. Quakers at times refused to have grave markers to avoid calling attention to themselves.

Penn claimed that he did not want Pennsylvania named after him and that King Charles II chose the name to honor Penn’s father, Murphy said.

Murphy wondered if Penn would have even wanted a statue of himself.

“It may or may not make a difference, but the idea of there being a statue of Penn himself, it strikes me as something that Penn himself might have been quite ambivalent about,” Murphy said.

(Matt Drzik/Beaver County Radio)

Hopewell graduate Paul Posluszny was named as a new member of the College Football Hall of Fame last night. He was selected as one of nineteen players and three coaches announced as members who will be formally inducted into the Hall of Fame later this year.

Following a WPIAL Championship in 2002 with the Vikings, “Puz” went on to play at Penn State University at linebacker for four seasons. He was a two-time winner of the Chuck Bednarik award for best defensive player in college football, adding the Dick Butkus award for top linebacker in 2005.

Posluszny was then drafted 34th overall by the Buffalo Bills in the 2007 NFL Draft for what would become an 11-year career with Buffalo and Jacksonville. He would earn a Pro Bowl appearance with the Jaguars in 2014, and helped Jacksonville to the AFC Championship in what would be his final season. He retired in 2018.

Former Pitt wide receiver Larry Fitzgerald will also be inducted this year. The Minnesota native played two seasons for the Panthers, catching for 2,677 yards in just 26 games. He finished as runner-up to Oklahoma QB Jason White in voting for the 2003 Heisman Trophy. He would then be selected 3rd overall in the 2004 NFL Draft by the Arizona Cardinals, where he would spend the entirety of his 17-year professional football career.