Color Hair Salon near North Charleston, SC

The North Charleston Cougars will head out on the road to take on the Beaufort Eagles at 6:00 p.m. on Friday. Both teams come into the game bolstered by wins in their previous matches.

Having struggled with 11 losses in a row dating back to last season, North Charleston finally turned things around against Fort Dorchester on Wednesday. North Charleston put the hurt on Fort Dorchester with a sharp 10-4 win. Considering North Charleston's hitters had been struggling lately, the high-scoring outing was a much-needed turnaround.

Meanwhile, Beaufort had already won two in a row (a stretch where they outscored their opponents by an average of 12.5 runs), and they went ahead and made it three on Thursday. They walked away with a 6-2 victory over the Trojans.

Kylie Rast made a splash while hitting and pitching. She struck out 16 batters over seven innings while giving up just one earned (and one unearned) run off two hits (and only one walk). Rast has been consistent recently: she hasn't pitched less than six innings in six consecutive pitching appearances. Rast was also big at the plate, scoring two runs while going 2-for-3.

Rast wasn't the only one making solid contact as three players wound up with at least one hit. One of them was Caylin Adkins, who went 2-for-4 with an RBI.

North Charleston's win ended a six-game drought on the road dating back to last season and puts them at 1-4. As for Beaufort, their record is now 12-5.

North Charleston might still be hurting after the 15-0 defeat they got from Beaufort when the teams last played last Tuesday. A big factor in that loss was the dominant performance of Beaufort's Adalyn Johnson, who struck out eight batters over three innings while giving up no earned runs or hits (and not a single walk). Now that North Charleston knows the damage she can cause, will they be able to stop her this time? There's only one way to find out.

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NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - The City of North Charleston has been working with High Water Music Festival organizers for months to make sure this year’s event is a great one for everyone.

The festival is happening April 20-21 at Riverfront Park in North Charleston along the Cooper River.

This year is expected to be bigger than ever, but officials say parking could be an issue. They say 15,000 tickets to the two-day festival have been sold, which is thousands more than last year. But because of the construction in that area, there will be limited parking available — about half of that number to be exact.

“Every day we are losing parking with all the development that is happening out here,” Amy Heath, North Charleston’s Director of Tourism, says. “We have approximately about 7,500 parking spaces.”

Heath says one thing that will be different this year, to help things move a little smoother, is there will be two ride-share lots for drop-off and pickup.

“This year with High Water we are going to have two ride-share lots,” Heath says. “One is going to be down at the Water Mission side on the north side of the bridge. It will be very much labeled so people can get in and out. And then also on the north side, where McMillan was at Hobson Avenue and Bainbridge Avenue.”

Heath says her biggest suggestion is to ride-share or carpool, plan to come early and stay late, and prepare to be patient.

But even with the challenges, Heath says they’re especially excited for this year.

“Each event that we do out here is very different. It doesn’t have like an exact roadmap, but we have been working with the folks from C3 Presents all year long in preparation for this. So, we have done stuff here out on the park, like trimming trees, working on flooding issues, and also signage just to make the guest experience better.”

Normally, there are two ways into Riverfront Park, however, the Pedestrian Bridge is going to be blocked off specifically for the artists to use. The only way in and out for attendees is going to by the Momo restaurant.

This festival has a huge economic impact on the area. Heath says the 2023 High Water Music Festival contributed $45.4 million to the Charleston area economy.

The festival is responsible for 363 full-time job equivalents hired or sustained. More than $14.9 million in labor incomes were paid to Charleston area employees as a result of the High Water Music Festival.

All of these numbers are based on festival operations and festival attendee expenditures, and with 2,000 more people attending this year, Heath expects there will be a slight uptick.

For more information on this year’s High Water Festival, click here.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.

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NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — The future of Baker Hospital Boulevard in North Charleston remains uncertain amid debate over how the property should be redeveloped.

Councilmembers in North Charleston will discuss the zoning of the former Baker Hospital's property on April 18 at 5:30 p.m.

Read more: Community resistance grows against proposed boat facility at former Baker Hospital site

The over 40-acre property is owned by Charleston County Parks of Recreation and Commission, but the City of North Charleston controls the zoning. The zoning is currently for residential use.

Freddie Renken, the owner of Sea Fox Boats' plan, won a bid from the county to redevelop the property for industrial use with a boat facility and space for a park. However, some see it as detrimental for the community.

"We have to take a look at what else is around these communities," Lowcountry Alliance for Model Communities Co-Executive Director Rodley Millett. "Bringing in another heavy industrial operation is not the answer to that. Look at the communities in this area and things are done to them. Including them in the discussions and identify what their needs are, what their likes are, and what they've tolerated that for a while."

Metanoia CEO Billy Stanfield said, "Folks are dealing with industrial uses and the problematic things they bring to the neighborhood, such as pollution and traffic. To see yet another one and be told this is the only way you can get a park when they see other communities getting parks without those of uses feels unfair."

Others feel many in the community are missing the bigger picture. They note Renken is promising 300 jobs with his boat facility and the project would be self-funded without money from taxpayers.

"We talk about funds, funding, city budgets, county budgets and how we are seeing so many tax increases because of certain projects," North Charleston resident Johnathan Thrower said. "It's great to see someone come in and be able to take a project or land that's not being used and build it into something that the community would be able to use."

"The city of North Charleston doesn't even have the funding available to even develop the land, clean it up, or anything else," he continued. "They're giving us an incomplete vision and it's not even their land, where somebody else is saying he has the funding available and he's ready."

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — At its 787 Dreamliner manufacturing complex on Monday, Boeing responded to damaging new whistleblower allegations by detailing the results of testing it has done since small gaps between fuselage pieces on the jets were discovered four years ago.

Boeing has made meticulous, time-consuming changes to the way it manufactures the 787’s carbon composite airframe to eliminate the gaps. It must do so to meet the specification.

More important, Boeing insists that extensive testing overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration and inspections of the current 787 fleet show definitively that the gaps, which exist in nearly 1,000 Dreamliners flying today, pose zero safety risk.

“We haven’t identified any safety issues,” said Steve Chisholm, chief engineer for Boeing Mechanical and Structural Engineering. “We have not seen anything in service related to [the gaps] that would indicate that there is an issue with the in-service fleet.”

In a news briefing and tour of the 787 fabrication and final assembly facility in North Charleston, S.C., Boeing scrambled to respond to the allegations by Sam Salehpour — an Everett engineer who worked on the 787 and 777 programs, now a public whistleblower — that it has not eliminated the gaps and that they pose a risk of “catastrophic failure.”

Salehpour’s allegations come as Boeing continues to face fallout from a Jan. 5 midair blowout that saw a panel pop out of a 737 MAX 9. That incident prompted ongoing inquiries into the 737 program and raised fresh questions about Boeing’s broader safety culture.

In response to Salehpour’s claims, Boeing described its testing and manufacturing changes to journalists during a visit to its North Charleston facility.

Engineers smashed 300-pound spheres swinging on a pendulum into a fuselage section to deliberately damage it, causing one of the stiffening rods to break. They then applied loads 15% greater than those typical in flight and repeated the load tests 40,000 times. Boeing found “there was no growth in the damage,” Chisholm said.

He contrasted this with what happens on a metal airframe, such as the 737 or the 747. If a crack develops in the thin metal skin, it can propagate and tear through the structure as if it were unzipping.

While metal fatigue might result in such cracks, Chisholm said fatigue damage to a composite material would take the form of delamination, when the plies of carbon fiber separate.

But no delamination was observed. The localized damage Boeing deliberately inflicted did not spread.

The engineers also cut through a pressurized fuselage with a guillotine blade, slicing a 4-foot section and severing one of the circumferential frames.

The fuselage didn’t even lose pressure, and testing showed the tear did not propagate. The fuselage was able to maintain its structural integrity well above the loads expected in normal operation.

Boeing said the gaps were present in the first Dreamliners ever built, including the ground-test airplane that over five years starting in 2010 was cycled through the loads and pressurization of 165,000 simulated flights — 3½ lifetimes — without showing any structural damage.

Salehpour, the whistleblower, claimed last week that Boeing’s own data from detailed inspections of 26 airplanes showed nearly 99% had gaps larger than the specification of 5 thousandths of an inch, about the thickness of two sheets of paper, and the small filler pieces of glass fiber material used to fill such gaps — known as shims — were not inserted.

At two of the main circumferential joins on those 26 airplanes, “98.7% of the time, the gaps exceeding 5 thou are not shimmed,” Salehpour said at a virtual news conference last week with his lawyers. “Nearly 8,000 gaps exceeding 5 thou were not shimmed.”

Chisholm said the result was “exactly opposite.”

He said Boeing removed every fastener on each of the five circumferential joins on all of those airplanes, about 2,000 fasteners for each join, and measured the gap at each hole — a so-called through-hole inspection.

“Close to 99% were fully conforming and met the 0.005 inch requirement,” Chisholm said.

Boeing also addressed a second claim by Salehpour: that Boeing’s use of a technique to join the airplane sections called “One Up Assembly” left drilling debris in the gaps.

Historically, Boeing would mate two sections together and drill holes, then separate them to clean the holes and smooth out any metal edges on the holes, and only then put the sections back together and insert fasteners.

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One Up Assembly, used for some 787 joins, means drilling and fastening the sections together precisely in a single pass, without separating them to clean the drilled holes.

Salehpour said drilling debris was found “80% of the time” on those 26 airplanes Boeing studied in detail.

But Chisholm said the technique is used only when it can be demonstrated that it doesn’t cause debris in the gaps. Furthermore, he said Boeing did tests deliberately inserting both composite and metal drilling debris into the gaps at the interface to assess the impact.

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Those tests “show that it’s not detrimental,” Chisholm said.

On a tour of the building where the two aft fuselage sections are fabricated and joined, Lisa Fahl, Boeing’s vice president of airplane programs engineering, described the steps Boeing has taken to eliminate any gaps above the 5 thousandths of an inch specification, adding considerable work and delay to the assembly process.

New laser measuring devices are used to detect surface unevenness at the edges of the fuselage sections where they are joined, which can result in gaps.

And since 2020, as part of what it calls the “Join Verification Process,” Boeing has inserted a time-consuming extra step at certain difficult joins.

In the normal process, after pulling the sections together, temporary fasteners are inserted and the gaps are measured. After any necessary shims are inserted, permanent fasteners are then tightened.

Since 2020, there’s now an extra step for certain joins with complex contours such as the join of the two aft body sections: a “through-hole” inspection. Each of the 2,000 fasteners at each join is removed by hand and a small tool is inserted to measure the gap. When it is within specification, a new permanent fastener is inserted.

All the 787s previously built and still parked now have to go through this process before they can be cleared for delivery.

A Boeing engineer on the tour said the hope is that as control of the gaps is tightened in the build process for new 787s, this extra check can eventually be dropped.

Chisholm said Boeing is heartened by the data from the 787s in service.

He said 671 have completed their heavy maintenance check required after flying for six years. Another eight have completed their 12-year check.

Boeing sent teams of engineers to take a close look at 10 of those maintenance inspections.

“Through all of this, there’s been zero airframe fatigue findings on the 787 fleet,” Chisholm said.

Boeing said it is up to the FAA, once it has all the data from Boeing’s tests and from the in-service fleet, to decide if anything needs to be done about the fuselage gaps on the 787s flying today.

“It’s a long, very deliberate process,” Chisholm said. “We do expect to complete it this year.”

In addition to discussing the 787 in detail, Boeing also responded to Salehpour’s critique of a new 777 build process that was introduced in 2015.

Salehpour said the 777’s metal fuselage panels that are fastened together into fuselage sections in Everett don’t come together easily and that machinists sometimes jump on the panels to force them into position.

“That’s not part of our process,” said Boeing’s Fahl.

And Chisholm said: “I would expect any employees who are seeing other employees jumping up and down on panels to let us know.”

He added that 27 airplanes built in the new process have completed their eight-year heavy maintenance checks with no issues found.

On Wednesday, Salehpour is due to speak at a U.S. Senate hearing.

After the Boeing briefings finished, his lawyer, Debra Katz, issued a statement saying that Salehpour had tried for years inside Boeing to see data that would allay his concerns but was rebuffed and managers retaliated against him for raising the issue.

“Boeing has always said ‘just trust us,’ when it comes to safety,” Katz wrote. “It’s clear that standard is no longer sufficient, and any data provided by Boeing should be validated by independent experts and the FAA before it is taken at face value.”

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or [email protected]; Dominic Gates is a Pulitzer Prize-winning aerospace journalist for The Seattle Times.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - One North Charleston school gives back to the community one piece of clothing at a time.

Military Magnet Academy on Carner Avenue hosts the first day of the Compassion Closet clothing drive on Saturday.

The clothing drive begins Saturday at 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and runs until May 11. Items are free for the community to take. Over 300 pairs of shoes along with clothes ranging from children’s sizes to plus sizes, jewelry and hats are available.

Officials say the amount of clothing donated is overwhelming.

“Anytime someone takes a piece of clothing off of a hanger…we have someone to put more clothes back on that hanger,” SGA Advisor Marla J. Mitchell says.

The academy’s Student Government Association members accepted clothing donations from the start of the school year. The last day to donate clothes is April 27.

This year’s drive is the second year of the program for the school. School officials say the program started as a small act of service with students and staff. The need for donations quickly spread to parents, community churches and organizations.

Academy officials say the backbone of students and staff is to serve the community. This project is not only one of the SGA community initiatives but the biggest act of service for the year.

“This is a way for the students to give back to the community and build comradery amongst themselves,” Mitchell says.

Mitchell says the program is a huge resource for people dealing with hard times. She teaches students that “Compassion is the wish to free others from suffering.” The closet gives back to neighboring homeless populations and students’ families experiencing hard times.

“A lady came in last month and she said, ‘I’m so glad that you’re giving out clothes because I have to start over and I don’t have anything,” Mitchell says. “It is interesting how our students see that and they’re able to identify with that person and feel some empathy for them. So that they can just say ‘Here’s another bag’.”

SGA Vice President Maliah Patton says this experience builds character for her and other members.

“It helps us basically give back to the community instead of us taking from the community,” Patton says. “I think that the compassion closet really plays that part for us. Us as young students, rising up to be amazing adults and it really helps us to talk to other people.”

Leftover clothing is sent to transitional home organizations such as homeless shelters.

Copyright 2024 WCSC. All rights reserved.