A day after Tropical Storm Isabel left the state, Marylanders were left to assess the damage. Some suffered devastating losses, but others were able to come through the storm with their good humor intact. A look back over the days since the storm:
Bel Air
With hundreds of thousands of Marylanders still waiting for the power to come back on, at least one family became big BGE fans yesterday.
Dan and Carol Neith of Bel Air have two generators to make sure they can power the kidney dialysis machine their son, David, 11, uses every night. But the generators can't power the air conditioner, and without it, the 10- or 11-hour procedure is extremely uncomfortable, Dan Neith said.
Their electricity went out at 3 p.m. Friday, so they called Baltimore Gas and Electric to remind the company about their son's needs.
"The stress level was getting a little high," Dan Neith said.
Yesterday morning, power was starting to come back in the neighborhood, and BGE linemen came back to the Neith house to make sure the electricity was on. Then one of the company's representatives called back just to make sure everything was OK.
"The personal follow-up to our concerns by the BGE rep was a big help," Dan Neith said. "We really did appreciate that."
Baltimore
About 1:30 a.m. Friday, Mayor Martin O'Malley was talking to firefighters in Fells Point when up walked a young woman in distress. Allison Newell, 27, a Johns Hopkins University graduate student, fretted about the knee-deep water separating her from her condo at Henderson's Wharf.
"I'll carry you," O'Malley said, holding his arms out like a forklift. He wore his usual disaster attire of jeans, boots and Fire Department ball cap.
"You're not going to carry me," she replied.
"No, I'm serious," the mayor said. A moment later, glancing at a reporter, he reconsidered.
But O'Malley did, in the end, offer his amateur help, even though he didn't show off his strength of his biceps.
"I'll walk you," he said. "It's the only chivalrous thing to do."
So Newell rolled up her jeans, took off her shoes and away the two sloshed, arm in arm. It was classic O'Malley, except she had no clue.
"Am I walking with the mayor?" she asked when someone pointed out that not everyone gets a mayoral escort. "I thought he was just some nice citizen."
Baltimore
In Lauraville, as she was out in her yard yesterday morning with her black Lab, Sophie, on a leash, the Rev. Lee Ann Tolzmann was thinking about how she was going to write her sermon.
The Episcopal priest said she had been saving battery power to be able to type her sermon out on her laptop yesterday afternoon. Her home at Walther Avenue and Moravia Road has been without power since Thursday evening. She was scheduled to preach today at the Church of the Messiah on Harford Road. At least two blocks were without power on Walther.
Tolzmann had hot water, and her gas stove worked, but she had to get rid of the food in her refrigerator and freezer and make a trip to the laundromat.
She said a city dump truck had come by in the morning to chop up and haul away a 20-foot tree that fell across a sidewalk into her yard.
"This is the mayor's neighborhood," she said. "I know [Baltimore Gas and Electric is] doing the best they can."
Turners Station
Rescue workers helped dozens of residents evacuate Turners Station in boats early Friday. At 2 a.m., and then again at 5 a.m., residents of the 300 block of Sollers Point Road asked the workers to help them out of their homes, too. At 3 p.m. Friday, they were still waiting.
"They said they were coming back to pick us up, but they never did," said Shirley Brantley, 55, who sat with daughter Kianta Carroll, 9, on the front porch, with water creeping up the steps.
Kianta estimated they had been outside for 40 hours. Inside, the carpet was soggy and a bicycle floated up the basement staircase. The air reeked of the oil that had spilled out of a tank in the back yard, where the flooding was waist-deep.
Two porches down, Margaret Risher, 73, hoped that the water holding her hostage would recede enough by this morning for her to attend the funeral of her best friend, who died last weekend. She would have weathered the storm elsewhere had she known how hard it would hit her home of 57 years.
"I didn't expect Isabel to do this," she said.
Harford County
With the water 6 feet above normal and 58 boats just removed from harm's way, it wasn't much of a party atmosphere at the Otter Point Yacht Club on Friday.
Except for the girl in the tiara and sash.
Bev Guthrie, commodore-elect, sporting a Western hat, collection of glittering emerald charms on a necklace and two packs of Marlboro Lights in her T-shirt pocket, shared the skinny: That's Angela Kregar, yacht club princess, whose big crowning party got canceled after floodwaters blew out a clubhouse window and flooded the downstairs.
So they crowned her out by the picnic tables instead.
"Kind of a downer," Angela said, shrugging.
Baltimore
