American Scene

ALABAMA

Father’s Day comes with six times the joy

BIRMINGHAM — It was a big Father’s Day for an Alabama man whose wife gave birth to sextuplets.

More than 50 medical professionals helped deliver the six babies born by cesarean section Saturday to Heather and Mitchell Carroll at the Brookwood Medical Center in Birmingham.

The five girls and one boy all came out crying and breathing on their own after 28 weeks, although they needed some assistance in the delivery room and were on ventilators, Brookwood neonatologist Vick DiCarlo told the Birmingham News.

Hospital officials said the babies were in stable condition in the neonatal intensive care unit, their weights ranging from 1 pound, 10 ounces, to 2 pounds, 5 ounces.

“That weight spread is a good sign that there was not one baby that was lagging behind, that all of them had grown and developed well,” Dr. Bill McKenzie, Mrs. Carroll’s gynecologist, said Saturday.

Mrs. Carroll, 30, was stable and resting well. The Carrolls have three other children. Many more tasks are coming, including finding a van that will fit the entire family, although Mr. Carroll joked to the Birmingham paper that they could just “throw them in the back of the truck like ripe watermelons.”

ARIZONA

Winds hamper efforts to fight wildfires

PHOENIX — Crews battled a pair of wildfires Sunday in the face of high winds that officials feared could drive flames toward small towns in Arizona and New Mexico as firefighters tried to protect threatened homes.

The massive Wallow Fire that has been burning in eastern Arizona for three weeks breached a containment line along Highway 180 on Saturday.

The homes of about 200 Luna residents remained under an evacuation order, with forecasts of 40- to 50-mph wind gusts renewing fire threats for the community.

Despite the evacuation order, about half of Luna’s residents remained in town. They have been told to stay off the roads so they don’t get in the way of fire crews, Catron County Undersheriff Ian Fletcher said. Few people went to a Red Cross shelter set up in Reserve, N.M.

“If the fire comes back around or things change where they have to get out, we still have an egress point, so we will still escort them out of town,” he said. “We’re expecting high winds this afternoon. We’re preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.”

With summer rains still weeks away, forecasters said, fire crews in much of Arizona and New Mexico likely will have little relief from the hot, windy weather that has dogged them for days.

MISSOURI

River starts pouring over stressed levees

KANSAS CITY — Several levees in northern Missouri were failing Sunday to hold back the surge of water being released from upstream dams.

Authorities said water — some of it from recent rain — began pouring over levees Saturday night and Sunday morning in Holt and Atchison counties, flooding farmland and numerous homes and cabins. A hole in the side of a Holt County levee continued to grow Sunday, deluging the state park and recreational area of Big Lake, a community of fewer than 200 people located 78 miles north of Kansas City.

Jud Kneuvean, chief of emergency management for the corps’ Kansas City District, said the Missouri River dipped by almost 1 foot after the Big Lake breach but that the water level started to rise again by Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, the Nebraska Public Power District issued a flood alert Sunday for its Cooper Nuclear Station power plant near Brownville as the Missouri River continued to rise. The declaration is the least serious of four emergency notifications established by the federal commission.

The plant was operating Sunday at full capacity, and there was no threat to plant employees or to the public, said Mark Becker, a spokesman for the Columbus, Neb.-based utility.

NEW YORK

Pharmacy robbery ends with 4 shooting deaths

MEDFORD — A gunman shot four people inside a pharmacy in a New York suburb Sunday morning, killing everyone inside the store in what police said looked like a robbery gone wrong.

The massacre happened at about 10:20 a.m. inside a family-owned pharmacy in a small cluster of medical offices in Medford, a middle-class hamlet on Long Island about 60 miles east of New York City.

Police rushed to the scene after getting a 911 call from someone in the pharmacy’s parking lot. When they arrived, they found two employees and two customers dead, said the Suffolk County Police Department’s chief of detectives, Dominick Varrone. No one inside the shop survived.

The pharmacy, Haven Drugs, opened for business at 10 a.m. Chief Varrone said investigators’ initial belief was that a single gunman was responsible for the bloodbath and that the motive was robbery. Just how the shooting unfolded, and why, were unclear, he said.

The gunman fled the pharmacy, and no suspects were in custody. Officials weren’t releasing additional details about the shooting, or the names or ages of the victims.

From wire dispatches and staff reports