Marcus Hook

A six-hour search yesterday proved fruitless for a stowaway believed to have jumped into the Delaware River near Marcus Hook after escaping from the locked cabin of a foreign ship. "We think we would have found someone in that time period if there was someone to be found," Cari Savarese, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, said yesterday of the 10 1/2-mile search that included a helicopter and at least three utility boats. She said the man, a Colombian national who is believed to have been wearing only shorts, probably could not have survived for more than two hours in the 60-degree waters.

By this time next year, the Coast Guard Auxiliary hopes one corner of Marcus Hook will have become a bustling hub for local members to train, teach classes, patrol the waters, and more. Marcus Hook officials, businesses, and politicians are collaborating with the auxiliary, a uniformed, all-volunteer branch whose members perform almost all of the tasks associated with the National Guard, to build a training facility on the edge of the Delaware River. The facility, which Coast Guard members are aiming to have completed by midsummer, will have room to hold boating safety and other classes for recruits, and the river will provide a site for training with the auxiliary's boats and floating piers.

These are the ones that didn't get away. Joshua Boyd, 5, inspects the bait while his brother, Brian, 12, casts along the Delaware at Market Square Memorial Park in Marcus Hook. Today, the heat continues, but with a bonus: humidity.

A woman who operated what she called an animal rescue operation has been charged with 43 counts of animal cruelty after sick and underweight animals were found in her filthy Delaware County house, the Pennsylvania SPCA announced Friday. Last month, PSPCA officers, executing a search warrant, removed 28 dogs from Sixth Angel Shepherd Rescue Inc., which Terry Silva, 53, operated out of her Marcus Hook property. Many of the dogs - German shepherds and shepherd mixes - were ill, the agency said.

Groundbreaking took place Sunday on a memorial dedicated to the memory of 183 Delaware County residents who died in the Vietnam War. Work on the $20,000 bronze-in-granite structure in Market Square Memorial Park in Marcus Hook was made possible by the efforts of the Delaware County Vietnam Veterans Memorial Project, founded by a group of area veterans.

The head of Sunoco has met with officials in Marcus Hook to object to a zoning change that could limit the company's plans for its soon-to-be-closed refinery. Incoming Sunoco Inc. CEO Brian MacDonald met with local officials Wednesday, only hours before the local zoning board was to take up the issue, the Delaware County Daily Times reported. Later that night, the board voted in favor of an amendment that would restrict storage of petroleum products at the Marcus Hook site to only those manufactured there, which would severely limit the potential for bringing in imported refined products to store there.

"When I fly a kite, I feel like I have no problems. " So it's no wonder that Johnny Junto, 78, is out flying kites almost every day of the year, weather permitting. Sometimes in the summer, he'll be out from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. at Market Square Memorial Park along the Delaware River in Marcus Hook. Junto, who became interested in flying kites about five years ago, likes to help get children involved in the activity. He once bought 150 small kites to give to children who wanted a kite to fly.

Each day, patrol boats from the U.S. Coast Guard Base in Gloucester City, N.J., keep an eye on the Delaware River. A northern patrol takes a crew from its base, just south of the Walt Whitman Bridge, to the Tacony Palmyra Bridge; a southern patrol goes just beyond Marcus Hook. The 122-member base has a search-and-rescue area of 79 miles - 31 miles north to Trenton and 48 miles south to the Cohansey River - and is also responsible for private- boating safety and law enforcement.

Here's what most people see when they visit Market Square Memorial Park in Marcus Hook, a tiny patch of green squeezed between two huge refineries: Jumbo tankers and cargo vessels plying the Delaware River. Washed-up plastic bottles. And lots and lots of marine debris - thick mooring rope, rusted cable, driftwood. But when John McNally, an unemployed electrician and amateur marine archaeologist from nearby Wallingford, looks out at the river, he sees something altogether different: Marauding pirates.