Equipment Repairs

Improperly adjusted brakes and the driver's failure to use a low enough gear apparently were major factors in the July crash of a chartered school bus near Palm Springs that killed four teen-age Girl Scouts and three adults, a California Highway Patrol officer said Thursday.

BP and government officials said Thursday that they planned to remove the damaged existing blowout preventer on top of the company's troubled oil well and replace it with a new, stronger one — a move they said would allow them to safely carry out the final "kill" of the well, but would delay the ultimate fix until after Labor Day. Earlier in the crisis, BP had estimated that it would be able to complete the final step to plug the well, called...

BY the time a musical instrument arrives at the Los Angeles Unified School District repair shop, it might be dented, cracked, scratched, bent, chipped, smashed, warped, jammed, gouged, rusted or snapped. It might be missing strings, keys, valves, hooks, hammers, springs, pads, paint, cork, felt or horsehair. Somebody might have carved "Tony {heart} Jenny" on its side. Maybe somebody kicked it or threw it. Maybe somebody used it as a club or bowled with it. Never heard of piano bowling?

Repairs underway at the riot-damaged California Institute for Men at Chino include replacing ceramic bathroom fixtures with stainless steel and cotton bedding with flame-retardant fabrics to prevent the kind of widespread destruction that occurred there in August, state prison authorities said Tuesday. In a report on lessons learned from the Aug. 8 riot that injured 249 prisoners and eight staffers, investigators with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation praised staff response to the violent disturbance for preventing escapes and fatalities.

Los Angeles drivers "knock over fire hydrants with the regularity of Big Ben in London going off," said Harvey Lutske of the Department of Water and Power. But if you're the unlucky motorist who dings a hydrant, damages a power or telephone pole or wipes out a freeway guard rail, you've got a nasty surprise coming. You'll have to pay for the mess. And chances are it won't be cheap.

The U.S. military logicians who so successfully built up the war machine in the Persian Gulf now have to build something else: the world's largest car wash. Before any of the 110,000 U.S. tanks, armored vehicles and cargo trucks used in Operation Desert Storm can be shipped home, ALL THE DIRT, GRIME AND DESERT MUCK MUST BE CLEANED OFF to the satisfaction of inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The majority of Long Beach's harbor commissioners said Wednesday they will not agree to pay $6.2 million to immediately dry-dock the Queen Mary and repair its rusty hull, as recommended by experts earlier this week. The harbor commissioners had agreed to pay $6.5 million for repairs that were already planned. But three of the five commissioners said in interviews that they would rather sell the ship to a Hong Kong firm for $20 million than put more money into the Long Beach landmark.

A judge on Friday placed the financially troubled city of East St. Louis on one year of probation for potentially endangering its police officers by not repairing their squad car radios. The city was convicted on Jan. 4 of reckless conduct. That was the city's second reckless conduct conviction in three months and only the third such conviction known against a city in Illinois in more than 75 years, St. Clair County State's Atty. John Baricevic said.

A tram leading to the top of the Gateway Arch began moving again this weekend months after a snapped cable shut it down, leaving only one route up the 630-foot-tall monument on the banks of the Mississippi River. Trams from each leg of the arch carry visitors back and forth. The north leg of the tram was not affected. "We're absolutely confident the problem has been corrected," said Frank Mares, acting superintendent for the National Park Service office in St. Louis, which operates the monument to westward expansion.

Power lines are the suspected culprit behind at least five of the 12 major fires that burned in Southern California last week, including the Witch fire, which burned nearly 200,000 acres, destroyed 1,041 homes and killed two people. Although acts of arson generate public outrage and police action, power lines pose a thorny problem with no easy solution: Should utilities do more to prevent failures, particularly in wild-land areas prone to high wind? And are ratepayers willing to pay the bill?

A decadelong effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays and exacerbated concerns about the Energy Department's ability to maintain the nation's strategic deterrent. The program involves a type of warhead known as the W76, which is used on the Navy's Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the U.S. stockpile.

Astronauts Michael Massimino and Michael Good were hoping that their tough repair mission Sunday to fix the Hubble telescope's black-hole hunter would go as smoothly as Saturday's spacewalk, which revived a dead space camera on the observatory. No such luck. The two managed to pull off the fix after eight hours and two minutes, but it was one of the most frustrating spacewalks in NASA history, stymied by a stuck bolt and a balky tool.

The space shuttle Atlantis blasted off Monday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a challenging 11-day mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. The shuttle and its seven-person crew lifted off on schedule at 2 p.m. EDT, reaching orbit after an eight-minute jump from a standing start to 17,000 mph. At a post-launch media briefing, NASA officials said it appeared the spacecraft had performed nearly flawlessly.

After 19 years of service, during which time it has provided the most eye-popping images ever of galaxies, nebulae and, most recently, of a planet orbiting an alien star, the Hubble Space Telescope is suffering the pains of old age. It's unsteady, with only half its gyroscopes working, and several of its key science instruments are broken. To restore the ailing telescope to its former glory, NASA on Monday is set to launch the fifth and final repair mission to the orbiting telescope.

NASA is unsure what caused the hydrogen gas leak that prevented space shuttle Discovery from flying, but will attempt another launch today. Shuttle managers are hopeful that repairs at the Cape Canaveral launchpad have solved the problem. There is "a potential risk" that the leak will recur, said Mike Moses, chairman of the mission management team. That would mean yet another delay for the international space station construction mission, which is already more than a month behind.

Amid allegations of conflict of interest, the five members of the California Energy Commission voted unanimously Wednesday to tell lawmakers there was no benefit to fixing service station pumps to end an inequity that may be costing Californians millions of dollars a year.

In spring, glove restringer Mark Cole is busier than a baserunner caught in a pickle. To his right, spread over the floor of his Claremont living room, are busted gloves bearing the signatures of Hall of Famers Johnny Bench, Yogi Berra and Mickey Mantle. To his left are dismantled mitts, minus web and finger strings, signed by former big-leaguers Wes Parker and Fred Lynn. In his lap, he's relacing an aging Rawlings glove autographed by ex-Cardinal catcher Ted Simmons.

BP said Tuesday that it had halted about half the output from its Alaska oil operations but hinted that it might stop short of completely shutting production from America's largest oil field as it repairs corroded pipelines. The news came as lawmakers in Washington, outraged by the interruption of a major source of U.S. crude, called for hearings on the BP debacle and pushed for tighter regulation of the nation's pipelines.

The first of four new steam generators needed to keep the San Onofre nuclear power plant in operation is making its way -- slowly and carefully -- to the facility in northern San Diego County by ship, barge and a tractor-trailer-like vehicle with 256 wheels. The 650-ton pieces of equipment are intended to extend the life span of the power plant, which has come under scrutiny from regulators in the last year because of safety lapses.