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Mabank clinic gets suspicious letter
Monitor Staff Reports
MABANK–A suspicious letter received at Dr. Chaim Banjo’s Mabank clinic at 802 W. Mason St. prompted quick action by Mabank police chief Kyle McAfee.
The clinic was quarantined for three hours until a bio-hazmat team from the Garland Health Department and bomb squad gave the all clear.
It contained a white powdery substance that turned out to be nontoxic, McAfee said.
Office manager Judy Crocker said she knew right away the letter wasn’t right because it listed the clinic as the sender. It was part of her mail as a returned letter.
“We hadn’t addressed any letter to the Washington D. C. area,” she said. “I handle all the mail for the office,” the 22-year-old Kaufman resident told The Monitor.
After receiving the letter in question, she telephoned the doctor at his Mesquite office, who told her to call the police.
Crocker added that she had heard the news reports of other suspicious letters being received at restaurants and schools along the Eastern Seaboard recently. At least 20 suspicious letters were reported in news reports this past week in the Washington D.C. area, and six states. One school was evacuated due to a note received there. The white substance in that case turned out to be flour, according to news reports.
Several schools in the Dallas area, a middle school in Connecticut, an art museum in New York City, a bank in Birmingham, Ala. and schools in Massachusetts and Rhode Island all received similar letters.
The FBI and an investigator from the postal service were also dispatched to the clinic, McAfee said.
If anyone receives a suspicious piece of mail, it should be secured immediately along with anyone who has been in contact with the letter in a closed up area away from anyone else. “Evacuate the area and don’t touch it anymore,” McAfee said. “Don’t wave it around or show it to everyone to get their opinion,” McAfee cautioned. “And call the police right away. We know how to handle these situations.”

ERCOT sets new wind record
Special to The Monitor
AUSTIN– The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state grid operator and manager of the wholesale electric market, hit a new wind record March 8, exceeding the previous record by almost 200 megawatts (MW).
Wind output reached 7,599 MW at 8:41 p.m., Wednesday, March 7, exceeding the 7,403 MW record from the previous day, March 6, by 196 MW. Prior to March 6, the record for wind output in ERCOT was 7,400 MW, recorded on Oct. 7, 2011.
At the time of Wednesday’s record, wind was supplying 22 percent of the total system load, 34,318 MW.
Coastal wind farms supplied 1,018 MW of the new record, along with 6,581 MW from the west and north zones. ERCOT currently has 9,838 MW of installed wind capacity, the highest of any state in the US, including 7,531 MW in the western part of the state, 232 MW in the north, and 2,075 MW in the coastal region.
“March is typically a high wind month for ERCOT, but these new records are also due in part to a new transmission analysis tool. We started using this new tool this week which allowed us to move more wind energy from the west zone,” director of grid operations and system planning Kent Saathoff said.
ERCOT began using the new tool March 6 to calculate day-ahead and real-time west to north stability limits.
“In the past, we’ve had some slack built into some of our transmission limits because these limits had to be set well in advance,” Saathoff said. “The new tool runs an analysis on real-time conditions every 30 minutes so it gives us a more fine-tuned analysis,” Saathoff explained.
ERCOT increased its installed wind capacity last month by 9 MW with the addition of Trinity Hills Wind in Nueces County.
Projects currently under review are expected to add 18,000 MW of wind generated energy, according to the February system planning update.
According to records dating back to 2010, wind generated energy has provided between 15 to 26 percent of daily electrical energy consumption (7,227 MG to 7,600 MG) in Texas.