The Fishers Health Department is reporting unsatisfactory E. coli test results at three local water locations following recent testing.

The locations are:

White River at the 116th Street Bridge
Fall Creek at Geist Park
Fall Creek at Canal Place

Health officials say elevated E. coli levels often occur after periods of heavy rainfall. Rain can wash sediment, agricultural runoff, urban runoff, wildlife waste, and other contaminants into creeks, rivers, ponds, and other open-water areas.

The Fishers Health Department and its water quality programs test 40 creek and open-water locations throughout the city. Nine area test results are published monthly during the spring, summer, and fall.

E. coli is a naturally occurring bacteria found in warm-blooded animals and is commonly used as an indicator of possible contamination from fecal matter. While E. coli itself does not always cause illness, its presence can signal that other harmful bacteria or viruses may be in the water.

Health officials say waterborne illnesses can include dysentery, Hepatitis A, and bacterial or viral gastroenteritis. Monitoring for E. coli is considered an important public health measure, particularly in areas where people may come into contact with creeks, rivers, or other open water.

The department also tracks water temperature and dissolved oxygen levels. Warmer water can allow bacteria to grow more quickly, especially when combined with sediment and runoff after rain events. Dissolved oxygen is important for fish and other aquatic life, with lower levels potentially harming organisms that live in or near the sediment.

Fishers officials note that the city’s watershed is affected by both urban and agricultural runoff.

Two games remain in the Fishers Freight’s season, spread across the schedule’s final three weeks, and the math is simple to state and hard to pull off: win, and keep winning.

At 7-7, the Freight sit fifth in a seven-team Eastern Conference where the top four advance. Green Bay (12-2) and Jacksonville (9-4) have already clinched. That leaves two playoff spots and four teams still chasing them — Tulsa (8-5), Orlando (8-6), Fishers (7-7) and long-shot Quad City (5-8).

Here’s the good news for Freight fans: Fishers control their own fate. They play at Quad City on July 11, sit out a bye during Week 19, then host Orlando on July 26 in what amounts to a play-in game. Beat both, and the Freight finish 9-7. Beat Orlando head-to-head, and the Pirates can climb no higher than a tie with them.

So the obvious question: does winning out guarantee a playoff berth? Almost — but not quite.

At 9-7, the only team that can finish with a better record is Tulsa, which has three games left (Jacksonville, then Quad City twice). Orlando, having just lost to Fishers in that scenario, could only tie the Freight at 9-7. Quad City, if it loses to Fishers on July 11, tops out at 8-8 and falls away. In the large majority of outcomes, 9-7 is comfortably good enough for third or fourth.

The lone escape hatch: a tiebreaker logjam. If Orlando beats San Antonio on July 11 to reach 9-7, and Tulsa wins at least two of its final three to pass the Freight, Fishers could be squeezed into a tiebreaker for the final seed despite winning out. It’s a narrow path — and one Fishers can’t fully control — but it’s why “win and you’re in” comes with an asterisk.

Everything else is worse. Split the two games and the Freight land at 8-8, needing significant help and likely on the outside. Lose to Quad City on July 11 and even a season-ending win over Orlando gets them only to 8-8 — probably not enough. Lose both and they’re done.

The cleanest path is also the most demanding: two wins. Step one is the trap game at Quad City, a team Fishers already beat 45-27 in the March opener. Step two is the home finale against the Pirates, who edged the Freight 60-57 back in May and will arrive with a playoff spot of their own on the line.

Freight fans should also scoreboard-watch Tulsa. Every Oilers loss — starting with their July 11 home date against Jacksonville — widens Fishers’ margin for error.

Two games. One realistic route. The Freight don’t need a miracle, a calculator or a lucky bounce elsewhere in the conference. They need to take care of business twice, starting in Moline. Win both, and they’ll almost certainly be playing in August for the first time in franchise history.

Recently, tens of thousands of us crowded downtown Fishers for our pre-Fourth of July event — the parade down the Nickel Plate District, the drone show (delayed by weather to July 31), the fireworks that closed out Spark Fishers and, this year, the nation’s Semiquincentennial. For one summer day, the city looked like the answer to a worry that has been building across the country for two decades: that Americans have stopped gathering.

The worry is not imaginary. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its 2025 American Time Use Survey last month, and the trend line is hard to miss. The average American now spends about 35 minutes a day socializing and communicating in person, down from 41 minutes in 2015 and roughly 45 minutes in 2003. On any given day in 2025, only 30 percent of us did any in-person socializing at all — down from 38 percent a decade earlier.

Young people have pulled back the furthest. Fifteen-to-24-year-olds who once spent close to an hour a day hanging out with others now spend a little over half that. Writer Derek Thompson has called it “the anti-social century,” and the health data explains why anyone in public life is paying attention. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory declared loneliness a public-health epidemic, estimating that about half of American adults report feeling lonely and that chronic isolation raises the risk of early death by roughly 29 percent — comparable, the report noted, to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Gallup found about one in five adults feeling lonely on a given day, and AARP reported last year that four in ten adults 45 and older now describe themselves as lonely, up from about a third in 2010.

Some causes are structural, not personal. A 2025 University of Colorado Boulder study documented the steady loss of “third places” — the libraries, coffee shops, museums and houses of worship where neighbors used to run into one another. Bigger homes, bigger TVs, food-delivery apps and phones that hold a whole social world have made staying in easier than ever. Teens now average close to five hours a day on social apps, Gallup reports.

But the full picture is more complicated than a straight line down — and that is where a week like last week matters. Recent time-use data showed Americans watching less television than at any point in a decade and, notably, spending less time alone than during the pandemic years. Adults have clawed back some of the in-person time they lost after 2020, even if teenagers have not. And we are still willing to show up for things we care about: Live Nation reported about 159 million people attended its events in 2025, up 5 percent, and a Deloitte survey found 61 percent of Americans had gone to a live event in the previous six months.

Fishers looks a lot like that second story. The Saturday Farmers Market, now in its 2026 season at the Nickel Plate Amphitheater, draws more than 80 vendors and ranks sixth in the state. Spark Fishers fills days each June. The Fourth of July still empties living rooms and fills streets.

The national data is a real warning: connection is not automatic anymore, and for our kids especially, it is slipping. But warnings are not verdicts. The 35-minute average describes ordinary days — and last week reminded us we still know how to make extraordinary ones. The question for our 251st year is whether Fishers can carry a little of the Spark Fishers and Fourth-of-July habits into the quiet Tuesdays in between.

On a day when Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc stole the headlines with an emotional British Grand Prix win, the Fishers Cadillac Formula 1 team quietly delivered one of its more encouraging afternoons of a demanding rookie season, bringing both cars home and gaining track position at one of the sport’s most storied venues.

Sergio Perez crossed the line 15th and Valtteri Bottas 17th in a race that finished behind the safety car after a dramatic late sequence of events. It was not the points-scoring breakthrough the team is chasing, but for an outfit that spent the winter openly warning it would run at the back of the grid in year one, a clean race with forward progress counts as a step in the right direction.

Perez, the six-time grand prix winner, made the most of the afternoon. He started 20th and but picked his way up to 15th over the course of the race, benefiting from a chaotic finish but also from the steady, mistake-free running that has become Cadillac’s calling card in its debut campaign. Bottas, who out-qualified his teammate in 18th on Saturday, brought the sister car home 17th, keeping the team’s strong reliability record intact.

The result came on a weekend that showcased both how far Cadillac has come and how far it still has to go. The team, which is constructing its permanent headquarters in Fishers, entered Formula 1 this season as the grid’s 11th team, pairing veteran drivers Perez and Bottas with customer Ferrari power. Team leadership, including racing boss Graeme Lowdon, tempered expectations from the outset, telling stakeholders that points would be a bonus rather than a target in 2026 as the organization builds toward the future.

That candor has been borne out by results. Cadillac has yet to score a championship point through the opening stretch of the season, and Silverstone extended that wait. The closest the team has come was in Monaco, where Perez ran inside the top 10 on the road before a penalty erased a hard-won point. Still, the operation has impressed with its dependability — Perez has reached the checkered flag in nearly every race he has started, a rarity for a brand-new team facing the steep learning curve of top-flight motorsport.

Sunday’s race itself was a spectacle. Leclerc claimed his first win in more than a year after championship leader Kimi Antonelli suffered a mechanical failure while closing in on the lead, and a late crash for Max Verstappen brought out the safety car that ultimately decided the finish. Mercedes’ George Russell took second and Ferrari’s Lewis Hamilton third in front of a roaring home crowd. Amid the drama, Cadillac’s two cars ran their own race near the tail of the field, gaining ground and gathering data.

For fans in Fishers watching a hometown-connected team compete on the world stage, the takeaway is one of patience and gradual momentum. The points haven’t come yet, and the team has been honest that they may be slow to arrive. But finishing races, climbing the order, and learning with every lap is exactly the foundation Cadillac said it would build in 2026 — and at Silverstone, that foundation looked a little more solid than it did a few months ago.

FYI, the fireworks over Geist could not be safely done Saturday night, so the display is now set for Sunday, July 5, 10pm

As the fireworks fade over Fishers this Fourth of July, the harder question lingers: what does the next chapter hold for a country that just turned 250? The polling offers a portrait of a nation that is worried but not resigned — a people wrestling with doubt while refusing to give up on the ideals that got us here.

A sober mood

The numbers are candid. In Pew Research Center surveys this spring, 59% of Americans said the country’s best years are behind us, while 40% believe they are still ahead. As 2026 began, 69% told Pew they were dissatisfied with the way things are going, against just 29% satisfied. Look further out and the gloom deepens: asked about the U.S. 50 years from now, 44% are pessimistic and only 28% optimistic. Majorities expect a country that is more politically divided (66%), less influential in the world (58%), and more dangerous (56%) by 2050.

Gallup adds another data point: American pride has slipped to a 25-year low, and fewer than half of Americans now believe everyone has a fair shot at the American Dream.

But not without hope

The full picture is more layered than the headlines suggest. In the same Pew research, Americans split almost evenly on the near term — 48% optimistic and 51% pessimistic about the country’s future overall. Most say they feel “hopeful” when they think ahead, and 54% describe themselves as “happy” about it. Compared with 2023, more adults now expect the economy to grow stronger and political divisions to ease in the decades to come.

The American Dream itself remains stubbornly alive. In the Milken Center–Gallup study of more than 6,300 adults, 69% still believe they can personally achieve it, and Americans across party lines agree the Dream is worth striving for. Republicans, Democrats and independents also broadly share the view that the Dream is “unfinished” — a rare patch of common ground in a divided age.

What the experts say

Scholars and commentators tend to resist writing America’s obituary. Many point to the country’s demonstrated resilience — its technological edge, economic depth, military strength and entrepreneurial streak — as durable reasons for optimism. Historians note that this is a nation that has survived a civil war, the upheavals of the 1960s, segregation, and the “malaise” of the 1970s, and emerged intact each time.

Writing in The Fulcrum, a nonpartisan civic-affairs publication, historian Joe Palaggi frames the moment in terms of that resilience. “The story of America is not the story of avoiding failure,” he writes. “It is the story of recovering from it.” The health of the republic, he argues, is measured not by the absence of disagreement but by “the ability of citizens to disagree while maintaining a shared commitment to the nation itself.” The real risk is losing confidence, because “a confident nation can confront its failures.” Ultimately, patriotism is less about believing the country is flawless than about whether “we care enough about it to leave it stronger than we found it.”

Looking forward from here

For a community like Fishers — consistently ranked among the best places to live in the country — the same tension runs through both national and local life: real anxiety about institutions and direction, paired with an enduring belief that the work of the republic is unfinished rather than over.

Two and a half centuries in, that may be the most American posture of all — clear-eyed about the problems, unwilling to surrender the promise. The next 250 years will be written by the people who choose to keep building.

When the fireworks go up over Fishers this Fourth of July, they’ll mark something bigger than a long weekend. Saturday is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — the semiquincentennial, if you want to impress somebody at the cookout. It’s worth pausing on what those 56 men actually did when they put their names on that parchment, because it was a good deal braver than the picnic version we usually tell.

Signing was treason. Not treason as a figure of speech — treason as a capital crime under British law. The Treason Act of 1351, still on the books in 1776, defined “levying war” against the king as high treason, and the punishment was as gruesome as English law got: a traitor could be hanged, drawn, and quartered, his property seized by the Crown, his family left with nothing. These weren’t anonymous pamphleteers. They signed their real names, in a document they knew would cross the Atlantic and land on the king’s desk.

They understood the stakes. That famous closing line — “we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” — wasn’t flourish. It was a list of exactly what they stood to lose. Benjamin Franklin is supposed to have put it more bluntly at the signing: “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.” Historians can’t confirm he said it, but the sentiment was accurate enough.

And some of them did pay. Richard Stockton of New Jersey was captured by British forces, imprisoned and reportedly mistreated, his estate looted; his health broke and he died in 1781. Others saw homes burned and fortunes ruined in the fighting. It’s fair to note, as historians do, that no signer was executed for signing — the Revolution succeeded, and Britain never got to hold its trials. But that outcome was far from certain in the summer of 1776. When those men dipped their pens, they were betting their necks on a war they had not yet won.

Two and a half centuries on, the country they gambled on is still here — and still arguing with itself about what it has become. A new Associated Press-NORC poll, part of a series marking the anniversary, offers a candid snapshot of how Americans feel at 250. The picture is more conflicted than celebratory.

Start with the American Dream — the idea that hard work gets you ahead. Only about a third of Americans say it still holds true today. Half say it once held true but no longer does, and 15% say it was never true to begin with. That tracks with recent Wall Street Journal/NORC surveys, so it isn’t a blip. Belief in the Dream is far from evenly held: 57% of Republicans say it still holds, versus 24% of independents and 17% of Democrats. Older adults keep more faith than younger ones — 46% of those 60 and up still believe, compared with just 22% of adults under 30.

Pride in the country’s institutions has also cooled over the past decade. Just 28% of Americans say they have a lot of pride in how U.S. democracy works, down from 42% back in 2017. Pride in the nation’s history slipped from 58% to 44%, and pride in the armed forces fell from 78% to 59%. Americans still take the most pride in the military and in the country’s scientific and technological achievements — but the trend line, across the board, points down.

Ask what holds us together and what pulls us apart, and the answers are almost mirror images. The most common thing people name as uniting Americans is freedom or liberty. The most common thing they name as dividing us is politics — “political interests or values.” In other words, the thing the signers risked everything for is still the thing we most agree on, even as the political arguments around it grow louder.

There are gentler notes, too. Nearly half of Americans, 47%, still see the American flag as more of a unifying symbol than a divisive one, though only about one in five fly it at home regularly. And roughly four in ten say the 250th anniversary makes them feel “proud,” with about a third “excited” — even as a quarter say they feel “conflicted” and another quarter “indifferent.”

Put those two portraits side by side — the men who signed under threat of the gallows, and a country now split on whether the promise held — and you get something more useful than a greeting card. The founders didn’t hand us a finished nation. They handed us a bet, and 250 years later the wager is still open. However you’re marking the Fourth here in Fishers, that seems worth a moment’s thought.

It’s another summer season road construction week in Fishers. Be aware of some closures on 131st Street.  That’s just part of a long list of construction in and around our city.

Here is the full road construction listing, for the week beginning Sunday, July 5, as provided by the City of Fishers:

• 96th Street and Cyntheanne Road – Full Closure
• 136th Street Widening – Southeastern Parkway to Prairie Baptist Road – follow detour route
• 116th and Allisonville Intersection Improvements Project – Down to one lane in all directions
• Southeastern Parkway & Olio Road Roundabout Improvements – Periodic lane restrictions
• 126th Street – single-lane restrictions (Beginning July 13)
• 131st Street Road Closure – Follow posted signage

Continue reading Road construction update for the week starting Sunday, July 5 →

Dangerous heat will remain a concern for Fishers and Hamilton County even after the current Extreme Heat Warning expires Friday evening.

The National Weather Service in Indianapolis says the Extreme Heat Warning remains in effect until 8 p.m. Friday, with heat index values reaching as high as 110 degrees. A Heat Advisory will immediately follow, remaining in effect from 8 p.m. Friday until 9 p.m. Saturday, with heat index values expected to reach up to 105 degrees.

Hamilton County Emergency Management is urging residents to take extra precautions, especially with the holiday bringing outdoor events, gatherings and travel.

Officials say high heat can affect people quickly. Residents are encouraged to drink plenty of water, limit beverages that can contribute to dehydration, such as alcohol and caffeine, and pay close attention to how they feel throughout the day.

Anyone who begins to feel overheated, light-headed or unusually tired should get to a cool indoor space as soon as possible. If going indoors is not possible, people should seek shade and slow down until they recover.

The National Weather Service says heat-related illnesses increase significantly during periods of extreme heat and high humidity. Residents are advised to stay in air-conditioned areas when possible, avoid direct sun, and check on relatives, neighbors and others who may be vulnerable.

Officials also remind residents never to leave young children or pets in unattended vehicles. Vehicle interiors can reach lethal temperatures within minutes during extreme heat.

Hamilton County Emergency Management is asking residents to keep themselves, their neighbors and visitors safe as the holiday weekend approaches.

When a large media company bought the local newspaper in Sullivan County, Indiana, reporter Angela Allen lost her job. For a rural community in the southwest corner of the state, that meant losing something bigger than a byline — it meant losing the person who showed up to the meetings, asked the questions, and told residents what was happening in their own backyard.

But the community wasn’t ready to let local journalism disappear. By public demand, Angela was brought back on a part-time basis to continue her reporting. It was a rare and encouraging thing: readers standing up and insisting that their local news matters.

The comeback, however, came with hard realities. Part-time reporting doesn’t pay a full-time living. Angela had taken another full-time job after losing her reporter position — and she says she then lost that job as well, due to political pressure on her employer. The result has been real financial hardship for someone who simply wanted to keep informing her neighbors.

This week’s episode of Fridays With Larry tells Angela’s story in full: how corporate ownership is reshaping small-town newspapers, why her readers fought to bring her back, and what it costs one person to keep the truth flowing in a community that depends on it.

Angela is still reporting for the paper part-time, but she can’t live on that income alone. If you’d like to support her work and help her through this period of hardship, you can contribute to her GoFundMe page: Support Angela Allen — Stand Up for Truth

Fridays with Larry is sponsored by Citizens State Bank.

You can watch the podcast on YouTube at this link, or listen to the audio version using this link.  Or, use the links below: