Wind gusts of 25-30 miles an hour Tuesday morning worried Central Yavapai firefighters as they battled a blaze in Dewey-Humboldt.

The call came in about 9:20 a.m. of a structure fire off Blue Ridge Road in the Foothills area of Dewey, said CYFD Assistant Chief Charlie Cook. A large RV garage belonging to Mark and Adriana Elsholz burnt to the ground. Cook estimated damage for the building and the contents of about $100,000.

Preliminary investigation is leaning toward an electrical problem in the garage, he said.

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PRESCOTT - With mounds of crushed rock lining one side and cavernous holes running down the middle, portions of Demerse Avenue in central Prescott bear little resemblance to a street these days.

In fact, a detour has been in effect for months, directing traffic around the most intense construction, which currently features rough surfaces, deep trenching and as many as three or four pieces of heavy equipment.

Now into its fourth month, the Demerse Avenue reconstruction project is nowhere near its expected October completion date, and no one involved can pinpoint exactly when the project will wrap up.

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MESA, AZ — Lee Shipman didn’t think twice at first when a group of guys in the neighborhood asked to borrow his telephone last Friday.

However, he did take extra precautions to make sure they didn’t come inside his home near the Loop 202 and Alma School Road.

“I took the phone out there to them not intending to have them come in the house,” said Shipman.

Shipman said he believed the men had been looking at a house for sale across the street, and when they used his phone, they even made it seem like they calling their realtor.

But Shipman quickly discovered they wanted more than just his phone.

One guy came inside the house. Shipman said he told him, “I gotta go to the bathroom. I gotta go to the bathroom real bad.”

Shipman allowed the man to come inside his home, but while he said he thought one man was using the restroom, another man started distracting him, asking to meet his wife, who suffers from Alzheimer’s.

As he tried to check on the guy in the bathroom, the men in the front of his house kept trying to get his attention.

“I didn’t know they had stolen anything until I came back in the house,” he said.

“I started thinking, he was back there too long, and I looked where I laid my rings and they were gone.”

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