West Tisbury town administrator Jen Rand picked up her phone last week and heard the words no one has heard in at least three decades.
On Thursday morning all was right with the Lagoon Pond. The water was clear, blue-green crystal, by all appearances the very picture of estuarine health. Just a day before, the water was clouded by an unsightly yellowish-brown fog from the head to the mouth of the Lagoon. It was an explosion of prorocentrum, an algae, and the largest one that Martha’s Vineyard Shellfish Group director Rick Karney has ever seen.
By PETER BRANNEN
For Jaws production designer Joe Alves, frights were in short supply on set during the early summer of 1974.
“My concern was the audiences might laugh at the shark,” he said in a telephone conversation from his Hollywood home on Tuesday.
There’s nothing worse than getting sick in the summer, and no group knows that better than the Island seal population which hopes to shake off a mysterious illness that has brought several weary seals ashore to die over the past couple months.
Oak Bluffs raced to balance its current town budget at the finish line of the fiscal year, after voters at Tuesday’s special town meeting moved to transfer more than $216,000 to cover shortfalls.
About 100 residents appeared at the Oak Bluffs School on Tuesday to vote on the six-article warrant. It was the town’s third special town meeting since January.
The scramble included taking $106,000 from the town’s so-called “rainy day” fund to pay for unforeseen health insurance costs.
