Good Morning, RVA: Couldn’t ask for a better Thursday

If today’s weather doesn’t bring a smile to your face, you may want to see a mouth doctor.

August 13, 2015; 7:02 AM • by Ross Catrow

Photo by: sandy’s dad

Good morning, RVA! It’s 70 °F. Today you can expect highs in the mid-80s, plenty of sun, and a strong urge to get outside and play ultimate frisbee.

Water cooler

The mayor’s office is blowing up my inbox with press releases about updates to a million and a half things. I guess it’s like doing that last round of panicked cleaning before guests arrive at your house for a dinner party–except instead of a dinner party it’s a Big Bike Race™. Yesterday, he held a press conference to talk about progress on the Riverfront Plan (PDF), which coincided with the demolition (or beginnings of) the Lehigh Cement Silos. That’ll clear up the viewshed from Libby Hill and make way for the Capital Trail. Today he’s at it again and will present plans for advancing the Lumpkin’s Jail project. Stay tuned!

I wrote the third piece in our ongoing series of Bus Rapid Transit FAQs: What’s the timeline, and when did it all begin?. If your eye glaze over at the sight of folder filled with a trillion PDFs, don’t worry! I read the studies so you don’t have to! In short, BRT has been in the works for over a decade and will open for your riding pleasure in the fall of 2017.

This longread in Richmond Magazine by Mark Robinson about the Richmond Free Press is fascinating. They don’t have a Facebook!?

Reported.ly has a giant Twitter thread of updates on yesterday’s massive explosion in Tianjin, China. They’ve got photos, video, seismograph data, and even a video a weather satallite took of the explosion.

A correction! Turns out, yesterday’s amazing obituary was originally penned by Emily Debrayda Phillips, who died earlier this year. Still an amazing, self-written obituary, just less local than I originally thought.

Sports!

• Squirrels rocked Bowie, 9-1, last night. They return home after tonight’s game at 7:05 PM.
• Nats broke their 9-game streak of alternating wins and losses by losing a second in a row against the Dodgers, 0-3. They’ll start a new West-Coast-series with the Giants tonight at 10:15 PM.
• D.C. United takes on the NYC FC inside Yankee Stadium tonight at 7:00 PM.

This morning’s longread

The Roanoke Island Colony: Lost, and Found?

They call the spot Site X. Down a dusty road winding through soybean fields, the clearing lies between two cypress swamps teeming with venomous snakes. It is a suitably mysterious name for a location that may shed light on an enigma at the heart of America’s founding: the fate of the “lost colonists” who vanished from a sandy outpost on Roanoke Island, about 60 miles east, in the late 16th century.

This morning’s Instagram

— ∮∮∮ —

Email

Want to automagically get Good Morning, RVA in your inbox every morning? Sign up below!

August 13, 2015 7:02 AM 0