Three-Alarm Fire Burns Through Restaurant Building

Orange, CA -

(FOX 11 / CNS) A three-alarm fire ripped through an Orange commercial building housing a restaurant this morning but no injuries were reported, authorities said.

The fire at 800 N. Main St. was reported at 12:51 a.m., said Capt. Ian MacDonald of the Orange Fire Department.

First-arriving crews encountered heavy smoke and fire shooting through the roof of the one-story building and were soon forced into a defensive posture, meaning they fought the flames from outside the structure, he said.

The building's primary tenant was Ruby's Grill Baja Style restaurant, which sustained the bulk of the damage, MacDonald said.

The blaze eventually went to a third alarm, bringing a total of 57 firefighters to the scene, MacDonald said, adding that the fire was knocked down around 2:15 a.m.

The cause of the fire was under investigation. Main Street was shut down between Collins and Walnut avenues as firefighters fought the blaze.

From Hal Eisner:

What a tough morning for Armando Arredondo, his family and workers. He's owned Ruby's Baja Style Grill for 7 years on Main St. in the City of Orange. Just after midnight his restaurant - which is named after his grandma - was destroyed by fire. His lip quivering he told me "Thanks God no one was hurt."

He explained that he got that disturbing middle of the night call that his business was on fire. His heart, he says, was racing all the way from his home in La Habra to Orange.

Orange City Fire Captain Ian MacDonald says this was a tough fire. It took over an hour to knock it down. When they got there they got up on the roof, but the quickly had to get off when flames started blowing through the roof. The Incident Commander, he says, very quickly switched to master hoses raining down from high elevations to soak and subdue the blaze. His business was totaled. So was the wedding planning shot on one side of it and a catering company on the other side.

Ruby's, he says, was named after his grandma. He says there will be a Ruby's TWO. 

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Now sharing a building, 2 Philly schools seek collaboration

Rayette Bosley (left) and her daughter Raynae stand outside Beeber Middle School in Wynnefield. They campaigned to save it when it was threatened with closure.

Dimner Beeber Middle School was headed for extinction. 

Since it was barely a quarter full and posted poor academic indicators, the District planned to close it and send a few hundred Beeber 7th and 8th graders to nearby Overbrook High School.

But for Raynae Bosley, a rising 8th grader, Beeber was working.

In 7th grade, she said, “all of the teachers didn’t give up on me and they kept getting me up to the next level.”

“I really didn’t want the school to be closed at all.”

She was not alone. The Beeber community, including Raynae and her mother Rayette, launched a fierce and successful campaign last spring to keep the school open. 

But the Bosleys are still concerned about the school’s future because Beeber’s rescue came with a catch. They were never formally notified that the middle school would be sharing the building this fall with the first cohort of 9th graders attending a new satellite campus of Science Leadership Academy, a popular special admission high school. 

“I believe a lot of the parents were hoodwinked because we weren’t told until after the fact … that there was going to be another school pretty much renting space with our students,” said Katherine Stokes, another Beeber mother. 

Stokes believes SLA is moving into Beeber’s Wynnefield neighborhood to test the location for expanding its enrollment and ultimately push Beeber out. 

“I truly believe this is probably the last year for this building and this school as Beeber itself,” Stokes said. 

“We fought long and hard to keep this school open, not knowing that this was in the works. So we basically saved the school for someone else.”

Superintendent William Hite focused attention on Beeber on opening day in September, when he chose to escort one of its students to school in the morning.

A study in contrasts

Beeber, in a stately and sturdy 1930s building, started out as a junior high school, with a 7th, 8th and 9th grade. This is just what it will have next year, although in two distinct schools with different demographics and different educational approaches.

The building sits in a pleasant, almost bucolic neighborhood, surrounded by neat twins and row houses and just a block away from parts of Fairmount Park. Nevertheless, it has the statistics associated with a failing urban school. 

Test scores have been mostly below those of the District as a whole, although 7th and 8th graders did better than entering 6th graders. (This year, the school no longer has a 6th grade.)

Beeber was once on the city’s persistently dangerous schools list, and last year almost all its students – 95 percent – qualified for free and reduced price lunch. Its enrollment, almost entirely African American, has been plunging, largely due to the lure of charter schools. Since 2010-11, it fell from nearly 500 students to just over 250 last year. The building can hold 1,100. 

SLA, on the other hand, which operates in partnership with the Franklin Institute, has become one of the District’s most popular schools in the eight years since its founding. It is known for its interdisciplinary, project-based curriculum, in which students pose and answer essential questions. Its test scores are high, and its student body encompasses the races and ethnic groups of the city as a whole.

SLA is gaining a national reputation – Microsoft founder Bill Gates has visited the school – and it holds a major annual conference on educational technology called EduCon. It has far more applicants than slots in its Center City campus, which enrolls fewer than 500 students.

“The whole impetus for [SLA@Beeber] was that so many kids were coming and interviewing and we had so few seats,” said SLA founder and main campus principal Chris Lehmann. SLA had 800 students on its waiting list – students deemed suitable and qualified for whom there was no room. 

Plus, Beeber’s location in West Philadelphia makes it easier for more students from other parts of the city to get there.

Sonia Giebel, a Haverford College senior, was an intern at the Notebook this past summer. 

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Blast damages Libyan foreign ministry building in Benghazi

1 of 3. People look at the site of an explosion at a Libyan Foreign Ministry building in Benghazi September 11, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Esam Omran Al-Fetori

BENGHAZI, Libya | Wed Sep 11, 2013 11:14am EDT

BENGHAZI, Libya (Reuters) - A car bomb damaged a Libyan foreign ministry building in Benghazi on Wednesday, causing no known casualties on the first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. consulate in the country's second largest city.

Two years after the revolt that toppled Muammar Gaddafi, Libya is riven along regional and tribal lines and dogged by armed violence, leaving the central government struggling to curb the clout of rival militias and radical Islamists.

Local security officials said a car packed with explosives was left beside the ministry building where it detonated at dawn, badly damaging it and several other buildings in the center of Benghazi. There were no reports of casualties.

A few hours before the Benghazi explosion, security forces defused a large bomb placed near the foreign ministry headquarters in the eastern Zawyat al Dahmani district of the capital Tripoli, the government said.

"Libyans cannot ignore the timing of this explosion. It's a clear message by the forces of terror that they do not want the state or the army to stand on its feet," Prime Minister Ali Zeidan told reporters.

Zeidan did not directly blame any group for the attack, but alluded to Islamist militants blamed for a spate of recent car bombs targeting security and army officers.

As well as militia violence, Zeidan's central government has also struggled to end strikes by oil workers and armed guards at oil installations that have paralyzed the North African state's crude production.

A year ago, four Americans including the U.S. ambassador to Libya were killed in an attack on the Benghazi consulate.

Washington initially said the assault had grown out of anti-Western protests. But it later turned out Islamist militants were the perpetrators, marking the 11th anniversary of al Qaeda's September 11 attacks on the United States.

Acting Interior Minister Al-Sadeeq Abdul Karim said the army and police were stepping up measures to stem the deterioration of security in Benghazi and other parts of the vast country.

Benghazi has seen a spike in car bombings and assassinations of army and security officers, many of whom served in Gaddafi's security contingents and then joined successor formations after the 2011 civil war.

Analysts say rebels and militants seeking revenge against former security officers who served under Gaddafi, and frustrated with the limited progress in bringing his ex-henchmen to justice, have sought to take the law into their hands.

(Reporting by Ayman al-Warfalli in Benghazi and Suleiman al-Khalidi in Tripoli; editing by Patrick Markey and Mark Heinrich)

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