Failed ATM robbers crash truck into Walgreens storefront, leave empty-handed
Pierce County Sheriff’s Department
(TACOMA, WA) — Two individuals drove a flatbed truck through the front doors of a store in Washington state in what appears to be a failed ATM robbery, according to surveillance footage recently released by the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department.
Police are now seeking the two would-be robbers who quickly fled the scene after failing to remove the automated teller machine from the Walgreens where it was installed.
The attempted robbery took place just before 5 a.m. on Dec. 9, according to ABC News’ Washington affiliate KOMO.
It involved a flatbed truck backing into and shattering the front windows of the entryway to a Walgreens in Pierce County.
Once the truck has successfully smashed its way into the store, two individuals can be seen getting out and running toward the ATM.
The two individuals, who are wearing reflective garments and balaclava-style masks during what the police have labeled a “commercial burglary,” then attempt to loop a cable around the machine. However, they appear to be unsuccessful in their attempts to dislodge it.
Realizing that they have not been successful, the individuals then decide to give up and instead flee the glass-spackled scene, according to the store’s security video.
The Pierce County Sheriff’s Department is now seeking information from the public about the crime.
(LOS ANGELES) — The power of the ocean could soon be used to power homes in the U.S. as scientists prepare to test an untapped form of renewable energy.
The U.S. Department of Energy has invested $112.5 million to advance the commercial readiness of wave energy technologies by harnessing the powerful waves of the Pacific Northwest.
The first-ever facility, equipped with open water testing is set to begin operations off a seaside Oregon town next summer, Burke Hales, a professor of oceanography at Oregon State University who has involved in the launch, told ABC News.
Named Pacwave, PacWave the facility was built with the infrastructure to house four separate test berths, each with its own dedicated cable that leads from about 7 miles offshore back to the coastal facility, Matthew Grosso, director of the Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office, told ABC News.
It’s a project that was more than a decade, requiring years of permit approvals with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and input from all of the federal ocean agencies, including the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the National Fisheries Service and the Marine Mammal Commission, Hales said.
The five-year investment from the federal government will involve testing by companies to accelerate the design, fabrication and testing of wave energy converters (WECs), which will harness power from ocean waves, which will then be converted at PacWave into energy that will supply the power grid.
Ocean wave energy could soon become synonymous with other natural sources of power like wind, solar and geothermal. In the U.S., there’s enough marine energy resources, including waves, tides, rivers and ocean currents to power over half of the country’s energy demands, Grosso said.
The renewable could prove to be even be more abundant, unlike solar, which ends when the sun sets, and wind, which isn’t always available, Hales said. The biggest challenge marine energy presents is how new it is compared to the other renewables, which have extensive existing infrastructure, Grosso said.
“Wave is this great complement to the other renewables, because it’s sort of slow and steady, he said. “There are basically always waves on the ocean.”
How is it possible to collect energy from ocean waves?
Using water to create energy is nothing new, the experts said. Traditional water mills were found in China as early as 30 A.D., and humans have been extracting power from the flow of water ever since.
But while water mills rely on the movement of the tide, PacWave will be focusing on surface waves in the open ocean, Hales said.
Devices bobbing up and down on the ocean surface like a buoy harness the natural movement of the water and send the captured energy back to shore via underwater pipes, Grosso said. The devices are located about 7 miles offshore.
One of the challenges is the waves can arrive erratically, so building devices that can withstand a challenging environment is key, Maha Haji, an assistant professor of mechanical, aerospace and systems engineering at Cornell University, told ABC News.
From its shoreside facility, PacWave then takes the power that comes from the wave generation devices and makes it compatible to enter the Central Lincoln Public Utility District, Grosso said.
The PacWave facility is currently in its commissioning phase, Hales said.
“We have to run the system through a number of tests to make certain that we don’t have a short circuit out there miles into the ocean that we have to go fix,” he said.
These US locations are best suited for harnessing ocean energy
While the U.S. is surrounded by coastlines, there are only a few regions where the generation of ocean wave power is viable.
Places with the biggest waves — Hawaii, Alaska and the Pacific coast — are the best locations to utilize wave energy converters due to the strength and consistency of the waves, the experts said.
However, wave energy can also be combined with other renewables, so there are benefits to combining wind, wave and solar together — making Texas another viable option, due to its existing renewable infrastructure, despite the Gulf of Mexico being in calmer waters, Haji said.
When it came time to selecting the best location to put the test facility, Northern California and central Oregon were deemed best suited, Hales said.
Southeast Alaska also has energetic waves, but the coastline is challenging, and the region is not equipped with the necessary infrastructure to connect the collected energy to the local grid.
Input from local communities played a big role in planning
PacWave will be operating out of two different sites — each located near Newport, Oregon, a deepwater port. The inception of the project was devised “hand-in-hand” with the local community, Grosso said.
The exact locations of the sites were picked by local fishers, who made the determination based on the location of the tow lanes that access the port, depth conditions, strength of the waves and whether the local community would be supportive, Hales said.
That level of consideration for the local ecology and economy continues to impact the PacWave project, the energy experts said.
Application documents included fine details on the regional ecosystem, including what kind of shrimp burrow in the nearby sand, fish that are attracted to the region and the marine mammals that could possibly be impacted by the presence of the devices, Hales said. The permits contain a requirement for acoustic monitoring to make certain the devices aren’t changing the underwater noise distributions and ways that impact marine mammals.
This was all done to minimize the impacts on the environment, Hales said, adding that community members have been concerned about the potential hazard to wildlife and the presence of offshore wind infrastructure.
“It was an exhaustive effort to identify where the problem might be, avoid those problems, and, if they’re unavoidable, talk about mitigating them,”
Engaging the community has resulted in “very little footprint” in the construction of the sites, Grosso said.
“It’s hard to tell that there’s anything there,” he said.
(WELCHES, Ore.) — A search continued Tuesday for a missing hiker and her two large Malinois-mix dogs believed to be in the Green Canyon Way Trail area of Welches in Oregon, according to officials.
Susan Lane-Fournier, 61, was reported missing after failing to show up at work, according to the Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office.
Searchers looked for Lane-Fournier on Monday in the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness, covering over 100 miles of trail.
Deputies did not find Lane-Fournier at her residence after she was reported missing by her employer. A community member saw her white 1992 Ford F-250 parked along a road near the trail a day later.
Lane-Fournier, who also goes by the name “Phoenix,” is 5-foot-2-inch, weighs 150 pounds, and has reddish-brown hair.
“Although she is familiar with the area, it is not known if Ms. Lane-Fournier was prepared to stay out overnight. Temperatures in the area have dropped into the 30s with light rain,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement.
Anyone who has seen Lane-Fournier or her dogs is asked to contact the sheriff’s office.
(MIAMI, FLORIDA) — As Election Day nears, Donald Trump is continuing his long-standing effort to recast the violent events of Jan. 6, 2021, now calling it a “day of love” even as he tries to distance himself from what happened.
A Republican audience member, during a Univision town hall on Wednesday, pressed Trump on his actions that day as thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, temporarily disrupting the congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
“I want to give you an opportunity to win back my vote,” the participant said, adding he found Trump’s actions and alleged inaction on Jan. 6 a “little disturbing” and wanted to know why some of Trump’s former top administration officials are no longer supporting him — some even calling him a danger to national security and democracy.
Trump quickly went on defense and in the process repeated some false or misleading claims that have been long disproved or debunked.
The former president said he “totally disagreed” with then-Vice President Mike Pence’s adamance to his constitutional duty to uphold the certification process and not unilaterally reject the election results. Pence has said he is not endorsing Trump this cycle.
Trump then claimed thousands of his supporters who traveled to Washington “didn’t come because of me,” despite his posting on social media in mid-December 2020 that there would be a “big protest” on Jan. 6.
“Be there, will be wild!” Trump famously wrote on Twitter, where he’d amassed some 88 million followers.
One man who admitted to illegally entering the Capitol that day, Stephen Ayres, testified in court documents and before the House Jan. 6 committee that he was influenced heavily by Trump’s activity on social media to come to Washington for the rally at the Ellipse.
“They came because of the election,” Trump said on Wednesday. “They thought the election was a rigged election, and that’s why they came. Some of those people went down to the Capitol but I said peacefully and patriotically. Nothing done wrong at all.”
Trump went on to say, “Ashli Babbitt was killed. Nobody was killed. There were no guns down there.”
Babbitt, a 35-year-old Trump supporter and Air Force veteran, was fatally shot by a U.S. Capitol Police officer as one of a group of rioters who tried to break into the House floor through barricaded entrances near the Speaker’s Lobby.
She was one of several people who died during or after the riot of various causes. Four officers who responded to the Capitol attack later died by suicide. Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, who was pepper sprayed by rioters, suffered strokes and died the next day. A Washington medical examiner determined he died of natural causes but said his experience that day played a role.
The Justice Department has noted that in court it has been proven that “weapons used and carried on Capitol grounds include firearms; OC spray; tasers; edged weapons, including a sword, axes, hatchets, and knives; and makeshift weapons, such as destroyed office furniture, fencing, bike racks, stolen riot shields, baseball bats, hockey sticks, flagpoles, PVC piping, and reinforced knuckle gloves.”
More than 1,500 people have been federally charged with crimes associated with the Capitol attack, the Justice Department said earlier this year. That includes 571 charged with assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement agents and 171 defendants charged with entering a restricted area with a dangerous or deadly weapon.
At least 943 individuals have pleaded guilty — including 161 who pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement and 67 who pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement with a dangerous or deadly weapon — and an additional 195 people have been found guilty at trial.
Approximately 140 law enforcement officers were injured during the riot, the DOJ has said.
Jan. 6 began with Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, in which he did tell supporters to march “peacefully and patriotically” to the Capitol, as he now likes to note, but also stoked tensions by saying they have to “fight like hell” or they wouldn’t have a country.
“But that was a day of love,” Trump said at the Univision town hall. “From the standpoint of the millions, it’s like hundreds of thousands. It could have been the largest group I’ve ever spoken to before. They asked me to speak. I went and I spoke, and I used the term ‘peacefully and patriotically.'”
The comments come as Trump and his running mate Ohio Sen. JD Vance continue to deny the 2020 election outcome and downplay what transpired on Jan. 6.
Vance on Wednesday when asked if Trump lost the election replied, “No, I think there are serious problems in 2020 so did Donald Trump lose the election? Not by the words that I would use.”
Vance has also said he wouldn’t have certified the election were he in Pence’s shoes in 2021.
The election denialism and Jan. 6 comments have prompted swift push back from Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris has cast Trump as a threat to democracy as the 2024 campaign enters its final weeks.
ABC News’ Jack Date, Soorin Kim, Lalee Ibssa and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
