Are we in for more rain or will the sun hold out? Get a bead on the weekend with local weather coverage.
Here are some of the stories that grabbed readers’ attention this week.
Jollie’s Restaurant & Lounge, the family owned watering hole for locals and passing truckers in Ridgefield, will close for good Sunday night.
Restaurant owners said they sold the 4-acre property to developers Killian Pacific, a Vancouver firm that owns most the surrounding property.
Closing has so far been a “pretty emotional” experience, they said Wednesday. Besides the more than 20 people who work there, restaurant mainstays are sad to see it go, they said.
Nearly an Olympic-sized pool worth of raw sewage was released into the Columbia River on Saturday.
About 400,000 gallons of untreated sewage left Vancouver’s Westside Wastewater Treatment facility, preceded by 110,000 gallons of partially treated effluent.
The release, according to the city, was due to a rapid series of power surges and failures at the plant between 8:30 to 11:15 a.m.
A longtime worker for a Catholic health care system in the Northwest sued the organization Thursday, saying its employee insurance plan refused to cover gender-reassignment surgery for her teenage son.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington filed the discrimination lawsuit against PeaceHealth in federal court on behalf of Cheryl Enstad of Bellingham and her son, Paxton Enstad, 17. She said she and her husband eventually took out a second mortgage and dipped into Paxton’s college fund to pay more than $10,000 for his surgery last fall.
Smoking coupled with the use of medical oxygen sparked the fire that led to a woman’s death in a east Vancouver house fire Sunday night, according to the Vancouver Fire Marshal’s Office.
The fire was reported at 10:12 p.m. at a single-story home in the 800 block of Southeast 122nd Avenue, according to the Vancouver Fire Department. Crews arrived within five minutes to see smoke pouring from the back of the residence, the department said. After being told there could be someone still inside, firefighters attacked the fire and began a search in the still-burning house, the department said.
Port of Vancouver commission District 1 candidate Kris Greene told The Columbian’s Editorial Board Friday that a recent $75,000 contribution from Vancouver Energy was “problematic” for his campaign.
But later that day, the company gave Greene’s campaign $150,000, according to documents filed to the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission on Monday.
