With the August 1 hurricane clean-up deadline approaching, Health Commissioner Wilbur Callender says those not in compliance will be cited and fined.
Callender commended those who have made an effort to clear away debris in preparation for hurricane season, but said the amnesty program ends August 1 and those who are not in compliance will be penalized. Fines up to $500 can be levied for non-compliance.
"During this hurricane season, if we should experience a storm large items such as old stoves, refrigerators, galvanized and abandoned vehicles pose a danger to life and property."
For more information call Division of Environmental Health on St. Croix at 773-1311 and on St. Thomas at 774-6880.

With the August 1 hurricane clean-up deadline approaching, Health Commissioner Wilbur Callender says those not in compliance will be cited and fined.
Callender commended those who have made an effort to clear away debris in preparation for hurricane season, but said the amnesty program ends August 1 and those who are not in compliance will be penalized. Fines up to $500 can be levied for non-compliance.
"During this hurricane season, if we should experience a storm large items such as old stoves, refrigerators, galvanized and abandoned vehicles pose a danger to life and property."
For more information call Division of Environmental Health on St. Thomas at 774-6880 and on St. Croix at 773-1311.

The third shooting in four days this week, all of them apparently connected, has resulted in the death of the victim. Sources told Radio One the dead man was the father of Leslie Hyndman, 21, of Oswald Harris Court who was shot early Monday morning in Savan.
Unknown assailants opened fire in the latest incident Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning as the victim was walking near the Red Ball grocery in Savan, Radio One reported. He later died of his wounds.
As of early Wednesday morning, the Police Department had not issued any information.
The series of shooting began around 9:15 p.m. last Saturday night as Abijah Brown, 17, of Donoe Apartments, was walking toward the basketball court at the housing project. He was shot in the shoulder and the side of the neck.
On Monday morning, young Hyndman was shot.
Unnamed sources told Radio One the shootings may have been in retaliation for the fatal shooting of a 14-year-old boy, Kishawn Daly, as the St. John Carnival in the early morning hours of July 7.

The scenic overlook on Valdemar A. Hill Drive — known also as Skyline Drive — will undergo extensive reconstruction. When it is finished there will be parking for six cars and five Safari buses, and accommodations for handicapped parking.
The completed overlook will be 150 feet long and 60 feet deep. Forty feet of the facility will be supported on an elevated bridge, with columns reaching 35 feet down to the ground. There will be benches, walkways, and extensive landscaping.
Public Works Commissioner Harold Thompson Jr. said vendors and taxi operations will be relocated during the construction period. He expects minimal disruption to traffic while the work is going on, he said.
A groundbreaking ceremony will be held at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
Thompson expects work to be complete by April 2000. He added that he had begun working with other agencies to develop plans for more scenic-view locations throughout the territory.
The Valdemar A. Hill project will cost $950,000 and is funded by the Federal Highway Administration.

Foreign sales corporations — the V.I.-based subsidiaries of U.S. export companies which pump $8 million to $10 million a year into the territory's treasury — have drawn the scrutiny of the World Trade Organization and the European Union.
The WTO recently issued a preliminary report on FSCs following a complaint lodged by the EU. The report has not been made public and its contents were the subject of intense speculation in the national and international media Monday and Tuesday.
Early assessments of the WTO ruling's impact on the FSC program range from catastrophic to marginal; what appears clear, however, is Congress may have to change the laws regulating FSCs and the territory's program will go through some alterations.
FSCs are set up in the Virgin Islands and five or six other jurisdictions by U.S. exporting companies seeking tax breaks on federal income taxes.
Graham Dunn, vice president of the V.I. FSC Association, said the adjustment may even mean more FSC activity in the territory.
"Up until now the EU has claimed the FSCs don't have a sufficient nexus in the offshore jurisdictions. My understanding is that the corporations will have to create offshore entities that have more substance," he said.
In other words, FSCs may have to expand their local operations from the management companies that currently represent the extent of their existence in the territory; such expansion would likely generate more taxes and could mean hiring more employees.
It remains to be seen, however, how U.S. corporations would react to the increased costs of FSCs and if that would drive them out of the Virgin Islands.
"It's a little bit anxious, but eventually there could be extra work and extra finances for the industry and extra finances for the local government," Dunn said Tuesday.
The WTO's final report is expected in September and the U.S. will have until November to appeal the decision, Dunn said.
"A large percentage of Fortune 500 companies have FSCs and they're not going to sit back and watch their millions disappear," he said. "And the U.S. itself isn't going to let the program fall down, even if it's in retaliation against the EU."
The Division of Corporations and Trademarks in the Lieutenant Governor's Office oversees FSCs. As of Tuesday afternoon, Lt. Gov. Gerard Luz James and his staff were still reviewing documents and other information received from the Clinton administration and the U.S. Trade Office.
James will make a statement on the report later in the week, an aide said.
"It's a very important program," Dunn said. "It certainly makes the Division of Trademarks one of the more profitable agencies in the government."

As of Tuesday evening, the beleaguered LBJ sewage pumping station was again out of commission, forcing the Department of Public Works to bypass wastewater over Long Reef.
Acting Public Works Commissioner Wayne Callwood said that a blown mechanical joint forced the activation of an auxiliary pump that discharges sewage, treated with chlorine, out to sea. Callwood said repairs were expected to be completed by Tuesday evening.
The pump station, on the shore west of Christiansted in Orange Grove, was activated on Friday after being off-line since the middle of June. Public Works officials said people should avoid the water near LBJ to La Grande Princesse while the discharge pumping continues. In the meantime, the Department of Planning and Natural Resources will test the water quality in the area.
At a Senate Committee on Planning and Environmental Protection meeting on July 17, Adam Hoover, the director of Antilles Resort Management Inc., which operates Club St. Croix, Colony Cove and Mill Harbor resorts just up the shore from the pump station, said the sewage discharges had forced him to curtail business.
Because of the sewage being piped out just past nearby Long Reef, he said the company had to inform major tour operators on the mainland that the resorts will not accept guests.
Hoover said Antilles Resort Management had lost $100,000 over the last year and about $75,000 in gross revenues in the 30 days prior to the committee meeting.
When sewage is bypassed into the sea, DPNR is mandated to post warning signs along the shore while it tests the water. Since the pump has been off-line for almost two months, warning signs are constantly up. Hoover said that while the DPNR tests show that the water complies with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency standards, beaches in the area remain closed as a precautionary measure. And that kills businesses that rely on beaches and water sports as attractions.

Vitelcom's voice mail service went down last Thursday, and pager customers lost their greetings and ability to retrieve messages.
Most of the service was restored Tuesday, but under a new voice mail system with different coding. Also, voice mail customers must call the Vitelcom office to get instructions on how to reload their voice mail messages.
Vitelcom, a communications company selling business phone systems, voice mail, pagers and other communications services, is one of the companies under the Innovative Communications Corp. umbrella and is a sister to the Virgin Islands Telephone Corp.
Victoria Squires, marketing and sales manager of VitelCellular, Inc. said the new service will be a "tremendously better" product. She did not indicate why the systems went down.
Squires told St. Thomas Source on Tuesday afternoon that she would issue a press release about the problem on Wednesday.

Finance Committee Chairperson Sen. Lorraine Berry has announced the new dates for her panel's budget hearings, which were delayed one week by request of the Turnbull administration.
"In a spirit of cooperation with the administration as it attempts to cope with the worsening fiscal crisis, and upon request of Office of Management and Budget Director Ira Mills, budget hearings have been rescheduled," Berry said Tuesday in a written statement.
The hearings were supposed to have begun on July 27, but officials requested more time to implement the 10-percent cuts ordered by Gov. Charles Turnbull, Berry said. The heads of government departments are now supposed to be cutting their budgets by 10 percent.
The budget hearings will begin on August 4 in St. Thomas, when Mills and other top finance officials will present a budget overview and the administration's revenue projections.
During the afternoon, the same officials will discuss what contributions will be made to the government's various special funds. The V.I. Lottery Commission will also make its budget presentation that day.
On Thursday Aug. 5, OMB, the Office of the Lieutenant Governor and the V.I. Water and Power Authority will present their budgets.
The Territorial Court, the Department of Finance and the Public Finance Authority will present budgets the following day.

After selling a prime piece of Mandela Circle real estate for the Friends of the Virgin Islands National Park, McLaughlin Arguin & Curreri Realtors has donated $10,000 to the St. John organization.
The two-acre property was sold for $2 million in June to Plessen Enterprises, which owns the Plaza Extra Supermarket in Tutu Park Mall. Plessen is planning to build a new supermarket on the Mandela property within the next two years, company officials have said.
The $10,000 donation represents the realty company's interest in the community, said Claire Mancilvalano, the McLaughlin Realtor who represented Plessen in the purchase.
"We hope other corporations might consider supporting the preservation of the physical beauty of the Virgin Islands which lures so many people to our shores, and allows generations of Virgin Islanders to grow up surrounded by beauty in its most natural state," Mancilvalano said.
"Like most commercial deals," she continued, "we encountered many bumps between offer, acceptance, and closing, but we got the deal done."
The Mandela property was given to the Friends of the National Park by a New York philanthropist in 1997.
McLaughlin Arguin & Curreri's founder, Frank McLaughlin, and his son Brendan, also a Realtor and appraiser, worked together closely on the transaction.
McLaughlin Arguin & Curreri, which has been doing business in the territory for 25 years, is closing August 31. Many of its Realtors, however, will remain active in Virgin Islands real estate. Mancivalano will be joining Curreri & Company, a new firm formed by Lisa Curreri, one of the principals of the shuttered outfit.
Frank McLaughlin will continue his practice as a consultant and mediator while Brendan McLaughlin will concentrate on the growth of Appraisal Associates, the real estate appraisal firm he owns and operates.

From Serfdom to Fireburn and Strike comes at a time when there is tremendous local, regional and international interest in 19th century Emancipation in the West Indies.
That event occurred in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the erstwhile Danish West Indies, on July 3, 1848. Peter Hoxcer Jensen's fascinating new book takes up where the story of slavery leaves off and where the hard road to freedom begins.
Employing previously unused materials from Danish archival and administrative sources, Jensen traces the ex-slaves' journey from servitude, through neo-serfdom on the sugar and cotton producing estates where they had previously been slaves, to their emergence as an autonomous labor movement in the early 20th century.
In the middle years of World War I, the disenfranchised laborers formed a labor union and struggled for recognition from the colonial government and the plantocracy, both of which continued to regard them narrowly through the distorting lens of race, color and class interests.
The successful strike of 1916 played a significant role in the development of a cohesive labor movement, the nurturing of local leadership, the granting of freedom of the press and, eventually, the sale of the Danish islands to the United States in 1917. Jensen has provided the first scholarly study of this important period, in a treatment that is both broad and deep.
From Servitude to Fireburn and Strike is destined to take its rightful place alongside earlier ground-breaking works of Waldemar Westergaard, Isaac Dookhan, N.A.T. Hall, C.G.A. Oldendorp, and John Knox as an original, seminal study that advances Virgin Islands and Caribbean historiography.
Peter Hoxcer Jensen (cand. mag.) studied at the University of Aarhus and subsequently taught in several schools in his native Denmark and in Europe. In the early 1980s he did field work on St. Croix and taught briefly at the College of the Virgin Islands. Among his publications on the Danish West Indies figure bibliographical studies and a short biography of D. Hamilton Jackson. His sudden death in November of 1989 deprived Caribbean scholarship of one of its brightest young researchers.
The book is available at Antilles Press for $24.
P.O. Box 8619 Christiansted
St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands 00823
For more information on this and other Virgin Islands and Caribbean-related
books, check out http://www.antilles-press.com