Nelson Weekly
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tuesday 14 november 2017
our top students
7s stars in action
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Half marathon a heart stopper Andrew Board Craig Vercoe expected to get his heart pumping during the Nelson Half Marathon last week – he didn’t expect to get someone else’s pumping before it. Craig was on his way to register for the half marathon at Saxton Field last Sunday when he saw one of the entrants in the walkers race, which started earlier, had collapsed. He rushed over and got to local woman Sharon McDonald at the same time as a St John medic. Sharon had had a heart attack, so Craig started to
Craig Vercoe and Sharon McDonald reunited after Craig saved Sharon’s life at the Nelson Half Marathon earlier this month. Photo: Andrew Board.
perform CPR while the medic went to fetch a nearby defibrillator. After six minutes of CPR and at least two shocks of the defibrillator, Sharon’s pulse finally returned just as an ambulance arrived. Sharon was loaded into the ambulance and Craig was left standing there shocked when he wife asked him if he still wanted to compete. “Well, it’s what we came for,” he told her. Craig raced to the start line with just minutes to spare before taking off and completing
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Crying foul over pollution Charles Anderson Editor
charles@nelsonweekly.co.nz
One day Clare Scott hopes her two-year-old daughter Alyssa will be able to paddle in the York Stream, which runs behind their Nelson South property. “How cool would it be to paddle
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in the stream? It would be great for the kids to explore up and down here,” she says. But right now, every two days, her husband Mike jumps down into the water to fish out myriad trash that has been dumped there by people in the neighbourhood. There have been mattresses, televisions, rubbish bags and bro-
York Stream. ken windscreens – all casually discarded upstream.
“A neighbour even found a car battery once,” Clare says. “We like taking care of the places we love. We want to do what we can to protect it. I would love it if the neighbourhood attitude would change.” A few days ago, Clare came out to find the entire stream had been contaminated with a white sub-
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stance. “It looked like an industrial load of milk. We had no idea what it was.” Mike took a water sample for the Nelson City Council to analyse. “This area has been degraded for a while so there is this misperception that the stream is in a hor-
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