Dublin's Mystery Plane, Explained

Local News

Unfortunately the good air we had on Saturday didn't stick around. MORPC issued a new air quality alert for Franklin, Delaware, Licking, and Fairfield counties today, running 6 a.m. to 9 p.m., as another big cloud of wildfire smoke moved in behind a departing cold front and settled in with today's calm winds. Here’s what the air quality forecast looked like Sunday night.

The good news: Today's air alert is supposed to be a lot milder than Friday's hazardous stretch and it's rated "unhealthy for sensitive groups" — kids, older adults, and anyone with asthma or COPD are the ones who should take it easy outside, especially later in the day once the sun and warmer temps kick ozone levels up. Everyone else should be fine going about their day.

Real relief is hopefully close: levels are expected back to normal by tomorrow as a storm system moves through. But of course again I must preface this with that weather tends to change quickly here. So ideally you don't rely on my one day old info and instead track it yourself anytime at AirNow.

Local News

3,000 subscribers. 72 days.

Thank you. Genuinely — every one of these milestones still catches me off guard, and it comes down to you: reading, replying, sharing this with someone else in town.

Here's the number that actually humbles me the most: about two-thirds of you open this every single morning. The best newsletters in the industry are usually thrilled to hit 50%. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. All I can really say is: thank you for that.

And here's another way to look at it: do the math on Dublin's roughly 38,000 adults, and that's about 1 in every 13 of us who now get this in their inbox each morning.

That being said, there are of course still plenty of neighbors out there who haven't found this yet, and it would be wonderful to have them reading too. So if Dublin Daily's become part of your morning, forwarding it to one person — a neighbor, a coworker, someone new in town — genuinely helps get us there.

And I still love every single email I get with feedback. What do you love? What would you change? What do you want to see more of? Hit reply — I read every one.

Nick

Local News

If you were at Muirfield for the Memorial Tournament in June, or out at the Jack Hanna Legacy Cup last week, you may have noticed a plane towing a banner over the golf courses, pointing people to a website critical of the Columbus Zoo.

As one could expect, there's a real story behind it. The plane was chartered by a Dublin father who's been in a years-long dispute with the zoo over an accessibility accommodation for his autistic son. That dispute has escalated over the past year — the zoo has since barred him from visiting, and the two sides are now in a lawsuit in Franklin County court.

It's a complicated situation, with real people and real frustration on both sides, and it's still an active civil case. If you want the full story, including how each side describes what happened, the Columbus Dispatch has it here.