Danbury, Fairfield County | featured news

The program has since leveraged more than $1 billion through public-private partnerships to make clean energy more affordable and accessible to homeowners, businesses and industry. The bank recently received a prestigious innovation award from Harvard University, which called it an “examplar” of how to use public assets to leverage private investment.

The event includes a portion of the library being turned into a mini-golf course for the Inaugural Challenge Cup, a tournament with adult teams on Friday night, and family activities on Saturday.

The weekend will also include a performance at the Ridgefield Playhouse on Friday night, which will feature the winning plays from a summer playwriting contest for middle and high school students and the Ridgefield High School Theatre Group.

BROOKFIELD—The Candlewood Lake Authority announced Wednesday that it accepted the donation of two portable AED defibrillators.

The defibrillators were donated by a Brookfield couple for the CLAMP vessel and will be used to train those that will use them. The couple also donated two defibrillators to officers from the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

The Public Awareness Committee will send a formal thank you to the residents, officials said.

aquinn@newstimes.com

RIDGEFIELD—The high school announced that tours of the school are available for incoming freshmen on Aug. 23 and Aug. 24.

The tours, to be led by counselors, will start at 9:30 a.m., 11 a.m. or 1 p.m. Freshmen interested in attending should email jgormley@ridgefieldps.net to reserve a spot.

Ninth-graders will start school a day before the rest of the high-schoolers on Aug. 31. The rest of the school’s students will start the school year on Sept. 1.

aquinn@newstimes.com

The Federal Aviation Administration said the plane, a Cessna 172, departed Danbury Municipal Airport around 8:30 a.m. and crashed about an hour later in a grassy area a quarter-mile from the New Milford runway.

The student pilot, a juvenile female whose name has been withheld, needed to be extricated from the plane by the New Milford Fire Department, police said in a release Saturday.

The third person on the plane was 44-year-old Peter Jellen, of New York, who was seriously injured but able to walk from the crash to a nearby home and call for help, police said.

According to police, the robbery occured around 7:30 p.m. on Thursday when there was little customer traffic in the store. Police said the first officer arrived at the store about one minute after receiving a call about the robbery, but the thieves had already fled.

BROOKFIELD - Volunteer firefighters from throughout the area responded to a fire that erupted in a home on Candlewood Lake Road late Wednesday.

According to authorities, members of the Brookfield Volunteer Fire Department Candlewood Company responded to the blaze along with firefighters from the Stony Hill Volunteer Fire Company, the Hawleyville Volunteer Fire Company and the Germantown Volunteer Fire department.

Officials said that firefighters were able to get the blaze under control in a short period of time.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation by the town’s fire marsha

Keeping an eye peeled for students smoking cigarettes in school buildings is largely a thing of the past, but now school officials are struggling with a newer but scarcely less dangerous trend — vaping.

Vaping, or “smoking” electronic cigarettes powered by nicotine, has surpassed every other tobacco product in popularity among high schoolers, according to 2016 reports from the Connecticut Department of Health.

McMorran has sent emails to parents to warn them that vaping devices are easily concealed and are mostly odor-free, although some flavored options produce a fruity smell.

Vapin

Around 8:30 p.m. Conservation Police from the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection saw a boat near Candlewood Shores that did not have on the proper navigation lights, according to a DEEP press release. The officers brought Muelfeld to shore to perform sobriety tests, where they said she became agitated and began punching and kicking a picnic table and power transformer and was verbally abusive to marina patrons.

Redding residents will have a chance to discuss the local train noise at a special meeting this week.

First Selectman Julia Pemberton will host a community meeting with state Department of Transportation Commissioner James Redeker and officials from Metro North.

The meeting will be at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the Redding Community Center.

Topics of discussion will include: concerns about train horn noise levels at and approaching the Long Ridge and Topstone railroad crossings, the Federal Railroad Administration Train Horn Rule, rail crossing safety, and quiet zones.