Given a paragraph, generate a claim that is supported by the given paragraph. 1) The claim must contain information from within the paragraph. 2) A sentence within the paragraph can be used as a claim. 3) The claim should not have contradictions within the paragraph. 4) The claim should be at most one sentence long.
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Question: The two on Thursday toured a Lowndes County neighborhood where residents say the sewage system regularly overflows into their yards and homes. They then held a town hall in Hayneville. Charlie Mae Holcombe, 70, of Hayneville, said heavy rains are always a sign of trouble. Holcombe described the problems she faced as Gore and Barber spoke with her in her driveway. She said the toilets in her house will begin to bubble as a sign the sewage system is about to backup, sometimes filling her yard — including the area around a child’s swing set — and her house with raw sewage. “They have had to come and pump it out of my yard with the pump truck,” Holcombe said. “It’s backing up, even in my bathtub. The sewage has run over all in the house.” Her home in Lowndes County is in an area that has been plagued by sewage problems and concerns about potential illness. “I have heard about it and seen pictures of it for a long time, but it was shocking to see it in person,” Gore said of the conditions he saw. Alabama’s Black Belt region gets its name for the dark rich soil that once gave rise to cotton plantations. But the type of soil makes it difficult for traditional septic tanks, in which wastewater filters through the ground, to function properly, said Alabama State Health Officer Scott Harris in an interview with The Associated Press. The region’s intense poverty and inadequate municipal infrastructure contribute to the problem. “Sewage is typically handled at a local level... These counties haven’t always been able to do that,” Harris said. Catherine Coleman Flowers, an activist who has worked on rural environmental issues in the county for years, said wastewater sanitation problems are not limited to Alabama’s Black Belt. “It’s all over the country,” Flowers said, adding that climate change, with heavy rains and rising water tables, will make it worse. Holcombe said she’s not sure what it means, but when a red light flashes at a sewage treatment lagoon across the street, it is a reliable sign that her yard will flood. In addition to overwhelmed septic and sewage systems, some homes in the rural county are on “straight pipe” systems where sewage runs untreated from home to yard. Harris said a May survey of almost 200 Lowndes County households found that two to three percent of the households were on straight pipe systems. Holcombe’s home sits not far from the state highway where voting rights marchers walked from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. Barber noted the proximity to the key sites of the civil rights movement and said the environmental issues are about the continued fight for justice. The town hall, held at a community center in Hayneville, focused on a number of environmental issues. Birmingham resident Jimmy Smith described living near a Superfund site in Birmingham. Others described concerns about landfills, straight pipe sewage systems and coal ash disposal in the Black Belt. At the town hall, Gore criticized what he described as the continued resistance from power companies and politicians to switching to renewable forms of energy such as solar energy. “It’s really a disgrace that this far Southern state with abundant sunshine is deprived of the advantages of the solar revolution being enjoyed all over the world,” Gore said.

Answer: Environmental justice issues focus of town hall.


Question: Over 100 residents of the apartment buildings in southeast Colorado Springs have been told to leave in recent weeks, according to Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment officials. Making matters worse, residents who left said looters broke in and took belongings they left behind. A Colorado Springs Gazette reporter witnessed a person break a window Friday  at the buildings owned by Denver-based Slipstream Properties. Attempts by the newspaper to reach company officials for comment Friday were unsuccessful. Exposure to even minute amounts of asbestos can cause lung cancer and other deadly respiratory conditions. Slipstream Properties bought the buildings in 2018, raising hope that conditions in the apartments would improve after years of disrepair and code violations. The asbestos problem arose during recent renovations. Renovation work can disturb asbestos, which decades ago was used in a variety of building materials including insulation. “We’re trying to understand how widespread this is, how many apartment complexes there are,” said Curtis Burns, field operations unit supervisor for the state health department’s asbestos unit. The building owners could face fines of $25,000 per day of noncompliance with asbestos-handling regulations, Burns said.

Answer: Asbestos, looting plague Colorado Springs apartments.


Question: Among the soda tower, the tables of puzzles and games, and the incongruous cabinet of stuffed penguins — it’s a long story — you’ll find a place for mental health support, not from doctors or professionals but from those who have been through mental illness themselves. The unusual mind running it all is Randy Hoover, who started Freedom Pointe with help from Ken Hays, former Webster County community services director, and Bob Lincoln, CEO of the 22-county mental health region called County Social Services. Hoover was a college graduate with a double major in education and psychology, and was working as a teacher when his own mental illness sent him running from everything he knew in Iowa. “I ran away from home — that’s the only way to put it,” Hoover told The Messenger. “You know the fight or flight syndrome; I picked flight. I ran away from my job, from my wife and a bunch of kids.” Hoover graduated from Prairie Community High School, before it was Prairie Valley, and got his college education at Buena Vista. Hoover ended up in North Carolina; without consciously meaning to, he found his way to within 10 miles of his daughter. “I stayed with her for a while. She convinced me to go to the doctor,” Hoover said. The doctor diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder. “When I asked what that was, she gave me the symptoms of, you feel like you have no value,” Hoover said. “You feel like you don’t belong anywhere. You feel like no one wants you; like everyone will leave you before it’s done. And it has a lot of suicidal ideations connected to it. “I’ll be honest, I usually go through that about three times a day. Thinking, let’s just end it, and not worry about other people. But then you think about, like they say, suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” Hoover tried different medications, but the only real treatment for borderline is therapy, he said. This was 15 years ago, and he never lost contact with that doctor. “I talk to her almost every day on the phone yet,” Hoover said. “She says, I understand you, I want to help you. You’re doing good things, and you can’t do that if you’re not in a good place yourself. She has made a big impact in my life.” Hoover had a long road back to recovery. A group at a church raised money to send him back to Fort Dodge, and bought him food. He made it home, got divorced, and lived in his van for some time, eating just a can of green beans every day. Eventually he was convinced to visit the peer support center that was available at the time. He didn’t think it would be for him, but once he was there he changed his mind. “I listened to them talk and I realized — they have the same thoughts I do. So I talked to them, I got a therapist up here. And they helped me through.” Later in life, this experience would inspire him to say yes to starting Freedom Pointe. “I know what it was like out there for me. I was out there and no one was even paying attention. Nobody cared — or that’s what I felt,” he said. “Some of the people in the center just got my attention. Suddenly I had friends again.” Irene Blair, the now-retired director of the Webster County Community Services Department, offered Hoover a job at the center. By this point, he had rented an apartment and was working at the Rabiner Treatment Center. Some years later, Bob Lincoln spoke with Hoover about starting a new program. “I said, ‘I suppose I could give it a try,’” Hoover said. “We spent a lot of time putting things together. We started meeting down at the library, in one of their conference rooms. I think we met three days a week. Then we had to get out of there because you can only use it so many times. “We moved to Snell-Crawford Park, and met in the shelter house. We all became really good at croquet.” After this, Theresa Naughton of Lifeworks asked Hoover if he would like to have his own space, he said. Freedom Pointe isn’t affiliated with Lifeworks, but as of today it has shared a building with the organization for about a year and a half. “I will be honest, I’m not sure if Freedom Pointe would even be where it is if it wasn’t for Theresa Naughton,” he said. “We talk, and she has given me a lot of advice. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes, no I want to do it this way. It’s wrong, but it’s more fun.” Hoover has never been about following the well-worn path. “What is the famous poem, the road less traveled,” he said. “I had someone tell me once the biggest mistake you can make in life is the mistake of omission. Not trying. He said you’ve got to try. At least if you failed, you failed trying.” Freedom Pointe has game nights and activities, and keeps a space for people to meet. Members of the organization get out into the community to give others a helping hand. “The idea that, if you get people together, we all kind of help each other,” he said. “We do one-on-ones. We go out, we listen to them, we help them with forms they need to fill out, we get them to doctor appointments, we help them go to the grocery store to get groceries. “We’re working on a pilot prevention program with Amerigroup. I was told the average hospital stay for a mental health issue costs Amerigroup $28,000. We’re willing to take much less than that to try to prevent people. In the three years we’ve been going, no one connected to us has been committed, and no one has even gone to the emergency room for mental health issues. “We’re not therapists. We help them get to either Berryhill or Community Health. Both those places are really good.” The idea is to make sure people get to the resources that are available. Hoover also keeps track of the group’s successes. There’s a bag full of rocks at the center; each one represents a suicide that was stopped. “It has 18 in it now,” Hoover said. “One of those rocks is me. Theresa was the one who stopped that one.” The center sees about 83 clients, Hoover said. It gets paid for about eight of them. In both funding and finding the best ways to help, mental health work is not easy. Hoover jokes that he wouldn’t have taken it on if he’d known it would be this much work — but the truth, he said, is that he did it because of how much having peer support helped back when he was trying to get back on his feet. “When Bob offered me the chance to open it back up, I jumped at the chance, because I thought we have to do something,” he said. “I think sometimes it’s possible the reason I do this is very selfish; it’s to help me.” Hoover has remarried in the years since returning to Fort Dodge. He still loves walking the trails outdoors, at Dolliver Park, Ledges State Park, or elsewhere around the state. “I enjoy writing short stories,” he said. “I have written I bet close to 500 or 600 short stories. I never had any published, because I don’t even try. I just write them for me.” Although he’s thought of retiring, Hoover said his work keeps him from just sitting at home with nothing to do. And, of course, making a difference is important to him. “It is a lot of work, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It is so cool to know you are making a difference in people’s lives. And by doing that, knowing that they’re making a difference in mine.” ___ Information from: The Messenger, http://www.messengernews.net

Answer:
Man returns to Fort Dodge to help others with mental illness.