Weekend wrap-up: Here are the biggest Arizona stories from Dec. 28-30
Dec 30, 2018, 8:15 PM
(AP File Photo)
(AP File Photo)
New Year’s festivities, the Fiesta Bowl Parade and National Bacon Day.
Here are some stories that headlined the news cycle, both locally and nationally, over the weekend.
New Year’s festivities in the Valley
If you haven’t found something to do on New Year’s Eve, you aren’t looking hard enough.
This weekend, we found the Valley’s best bars, nearly 30 tons of snow at the Phoenix Zoo and a parade of lights at Snowbowl, all for Monday’s holiday.
If you’re looking to recreate the Times Square moment of watching the ball drop at midnight, Arizona is offering many unique options, including boot, pine cone and playing card drops.
Planning to celebrate with fireworks or alcohol? Stay safe by leaving explosives to the professionals and calling AAA when you need a ride.
Fiesta Bowl Parade
The Desert Financial Fiesta Bowl Parade made its way through Phoenix this weekend, ushering in a new bowl game and a new year.
The two-mile parade route rolled through the city on Saturday, starting at Central and Montebello avenues at 10 a.m.
It made its way down Central to Camelback Road, then continued to Seventh Street and ended at Indian School Road.
Bob Whitehouse with the Fiesta Bowl Committee said 86 floats were expected to participate in this year’s parade. Thousands of people were expected to attend, he added.
National Bacon Day
There was a major holiday this weekend that you hopefully didn’t miss.
National Bacon Day was Sunday, and as much as that sounds like we made that up to have an excuse to indulge in as much bacon as possible, it’s actually a real thing.
If this sounds like a dream to you, just know you are not alone: 21 percent of Americans said they would eat bacon every day for the rest of their life. Another 16 percent of Americans said they can’t live without bacon, while 18 percent said it is their favorite food.
Wanting some great bacon this week? Here are some top-notch restaurants in the Phoenix area for honoring the meat.
Migrants in the Valley
The steady flow of asylum seekers through Valley houses of worship continued Friday afternoon when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement dropped off two busloads of migrants at a Phoenix church.
“If the churches don’t open the door for this humanitarian crisis we will have people in the streets, sleeping in the streets,” Magdalena Schwartz, a Mesa pastor who has been coordinating ICE drop-offs at a network of Valley churches, told KTAR News 92.3 FM before the buses arrived.
With Friday’s drop-off of around 90 people at Monte Vista Baptist Church, Schwartz said the churches she works with have taken in more than 10,000 asylum seekers released by ICE in recent months.
“ICE drops the people in the church,” she said. “We feed them. We give them a hot meal. They can take a shower.”
CenturyLink outage
A national telecommunications company tweeted Saturday that it restored service to customers after a lengthy outage that began Thursday affected parts of Arizona.
CenturyLink said in the post that the network event was resolved, and services for business and residential customers were restored.
The company did not immediately provide further details about the cause of the outage or how it was fixed.
The Cochise County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday its 911 centers were experiencing intermittent phone service disruption.
According to ABC15, the sheriff’s office was redirecting all 911 and administration lines to the Douglas Police Department.
