Jacksonville officials said they’ll start checking for wires in front of the Municipal Building as they prepare to bury the city’s bicentennial time capsule.<\/p>\n
An unexpected and unmarked live wire at the intended site of the interment delayed plans.<\/p>\n
Mayor Andy Ezard said he hopes the burial will take place next week, though preparations are still ongoing.<\/p>\n
“We will get out a quick PSA about the time when it will be dropped if folks want to watch and also to explain that West Douglas will be limited for 5-10 minutes,” Ezard said.<\/p>\n
John Green, the City Hall and plaza maintenance superintendent, was digging May 22 to prepare for the bicentennial time capsule’s burial when he came across a live electrical wire. It wasn’t found when employees made marks about live wire locations, and Green said it wasn’t on documentation about wires in the downtown square.<\/p>\n
“It’s not uncommon to have something mismarked, and that was the case,” Green said. “I mean, it’s not a big deal. It’s just, they missed a couple lines.”<\/p>\n
Green said he put in an order so workers can mark where not to dig for the new burial spot: on the Municipal Building’s property.<\/p>\n
The change in plans wasn’t announced publicly until the day it was supposed to take place, May 26.<\/p>\n
“We’re very happy John didn’t get hurt. And you know, we unearthed an issue right away. But instead of canceling, we wanted to keep the event going today,” Ezard said.<\/p>\n
A time capsule had previously been buried on the northeast corner of the downtown square during Jacksonville’s sesquicentennial celebration in 1975 was dug up in 2025, though the process was complicated by the marker having been moved at some point during the square’s renovations over the ensuing years.<\/p>\n
Green\u00a0said the new vault, which is made of concrete, couldn’t be used in the old time capsule’s burial hole because a tree nearby would likely have to be removed.<\/p>\n
“Many underground obstacles remain and the vault is extremely heavy, so after our first choice fell thru we went with plan b and that was the Municipal Building,” Ezard said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jacksonville officials said they’ll start checking for wires in front of the Municipal Building as they prepare to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":301863,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[116,118,117,115,105313,278],"class_list":["post-301862","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville","tag-jacksonville-headlines","tag-jacksonville-news","tag-news","tag-onebig","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301862"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301862\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/301863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301862"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301862"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}