Baltimore Harbor

WASHINGTON -- The port of Baltimore stands to receive about $40 million for improvements -- including money for harbor dredging intended to help woo the Sea-Land and Maersk shipping lines there -- under a water resources act that is to be considered by the House this week.The authorization bill, which has cleared the House Transportation Committee, is expected to pass, but congressional passage would not automatically free the federal money to help pay for the projects.The payments must await approval by appropriations committees on which, however, Marylanders hold key positions.

Nearly $36 million has been set aside for the port of Baltimore in the U.S. Senate version of the federal Energy and Water Appropriations bill.The House of Representatives will consider the bill next week. If it is passed, it would then go to President Clinton for final approval, said Kara Peterman, a spokeswoman for Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes."This funding is essential for the economic health and prosperity of the port of Baltimore, the state of Maryland and our maritime industry," Sarbanes said in a joint statement with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski.

Breezing through Maryland in search of votes in Tuesday's presidential primary, Patrick J. Buchanan invited former supporters of Sen. Phil Gramm to join him "as the last conservative in this race who can win."Mr. Buchanan, the TV commentator with the fervent America-first message, paused on his blistering, cross-country campaign to meet the news media yesterday on the 21st floor of the World Trade Center in downtown Baltimore. With Baltimore harbor -- and by extension the busy port of Baltimore -- as a backdrop, Mr. Buchanan pledged as president to preserve American jobs, stop illegal immigration and protect the rights of the unborn.

HONOR CALEven if you can't score tickets to Wednesday night's Big Game (surely, you don't need to ask, "Which game?"), you can be part of a celebration honoring Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken on Thursday.Starting at noon, you can watch a parade and ceremony saluting, assuming all goes well, Baltimore's holder of the record for most consecutive games played in major-league baseball history. He's expected to have broken the 2,130-game record held by New York Yankee Lou Gehrig on Wednesday night.

It sounds like a waterproof miracle.Roland W. Bark has heard the radio commercials many times. You probably have, too.A leak springs in the plumbing. The house starts to flood. A panicky son home alone calls his father.Dad, on his car phone, saves the day by telling his half-wit progeny how to find the water cutoff valve as he's driving under Baltimore Harbor.The fictional father ponders: What's more amazing, my goofball son (we paraphrase slightly) figuring out how to turn off the water, or the technology that permits a phone conversation in a tunnel?

In yesterday's Around the Inner Harbor column, the Baltimor Harbor Endowment's phone number should have been 732-8155.The Sun regerts the errors.BUY A BRICKYou can have people walk on your name for years if you buy a brick from the Baltimore Harbor Endowment. The bricks -- engraved with your name -- will make up parts of the Baltimore Waterfront Promenade, a continuous walkway that will stretch 7.5 miles around the harbor when completed. Waterfront residents and business owners are invited to Bohager's Bar and Grill, 515 S. Eden St. from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Monday for a reception aimed to raise community awareness of the campaign.

Here's one way to be optimistic about Maryland's looming crisis over where to put the considerable ooze dredged every year to keep the Chesapeake Bay navigable for shipping.You could hold it all in a space the size of a football field.Of course, you would have to stack it about half a mile high.Or, it could be spread out, not much thicker than the butter on your toast; but that would mean annually slathering a slice of land a fifth the size of Maryland.Neither solution is realistic, but then Maryland has never yet dealt with the full reality of maintaining a great economic heart like the Port of Baltimore.

Lucia H. Fickenscher, a retired retirement benefits analyst for the Baltimore City pension system, died Sunday at Good Samaritan Hospital after a lengthy pulmonary illness. Mrs. Fickenscher, who was 60, worked for the city's retirement system for 27 years, advancing to the position of supervisor. She retired Aug. 25, 1989, because of illness. At that time, then-Comptroller Hyman A. Pressman presented her with a merit award. In June 1987, she received a similar award for "splendid quality of public service" and was named an admiral of the Baltimore Harbor.

CATCH THE RHYTHM: Hear salsa, merengue, cumbia, Latin jazz and music of the Andes. Sample Latin American food. Experience Baltimore's growing Latino community.Where to do all this is the 13th annual Latino Festival, Encounter '92, from noon till 9 p.m. today and Sunday at Market Square in Fells Point.You'll find exhibits and information booths on Hispanic and Latin-Caribbean culture. Bilingual children's books and cookbooks will be on sale. This annual fund-raiser supports the East Baltimore Latino Organization's education and cultural activities.

Ralph E. Ford Sr. was Baltimore harbor captainServices for Ralph E. Ford Sr., a Baltimore harbor captain known along the waterfront since the 1940s, will be held 10 a.m. tomorrow at the Crownsville Veterans Cemetery, 1080 Sunrise Beach Road in Anne Arundel County.Known to all who met him as "Captain Ralph," he died of heart failure early Monday in his home at the Baltimore Yacht Basin marina near the Hanover Street Bridge. He was 81.Born in the river town of Portsmouth, Ohio, Captain Ford moved to Baltimore before World War II and pursued his love of the water by joining the Coast Guard.

The body of a Washington, D.C., councilman's aide was pulled Tuesday morning from the Baltimore Harbor near Canton, more than a day after the man disappeared from a boat after a night of drinking, according to Baltimore police. Desi Deschaine, 30, was found about 15 feet deep in the water near the Baltimore Marine Center at Lighthouse Point about 8 a.m., police said. He had worked for Councilman Jack Evans. Deschaine was last seen about 10:30 p.m. Sunday, when he and four other people were on a boat.

The day couldn't have been nicer. Gauzy clouds dotted an otherwise crisp blue sky. Just a wisp of a breeze and a gentle late-summer sun rounded things out. The water of the Inner Harbor, however, was anything but. Empty soda bottles bobbed and snack bags undulated with the tide as a ribbon of oil tied the entire trashy necklace together. Discarded lures, cigarette butts and webs of monofilament fishing line hugged the shore. And this, Eliza Steinmeier insisted, was a good day. No fish kills and no recent downpours flushing trash from city streets and gutters.

More than 80 percent of Baltimore-area residents say they're willing to do "a lot more" to prevent water pollution, but they don't want to pay more taxes to solve the problem, according to a newly released opinion survey. This suggests an ad campaign to educate people about steps they can take in their personal lives - picking up pet waste, using less lawn fertilizer and stopping littering - could help clean up Baltimore Harbor and the Chesapeake Bay, according to a pair of local environmental groups that commissioned the research.

Air Greenland quitting BWI Air Greenland is stopping its short-lived service out of Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, leaving BWI with one trans-Atlantic daily flight. The airline said it will cancel 10 flights scheduled for this summer. The move comes less than a year after Air Greenland began seasonal service to Baltimore. Grace to pay cleanup cost W.R. Grace & Co. has agreed to pay 40 percent of the cost - about $41 million - to clean up contamination at Baltimore's Curtis Bay, where the company extracted radioactive thorium from ore in the 1950s.

This week, in 1888, Baltimore caught the edges of what The Sun described as "one of the severest blizzards ever known on the Middle Atlantic coast." Cold air swept down from Lake Superior, while a powerful storm swirled north from Cape Hatteras. Ice, winds to 48 mph, and up to a foot of snow cut off telegraph and telephone communications with harder-hit cities to the north. Northwest winds dropped the Chesapeake tides 5 feet, emptying parts of the tidal Potomac and Baltimore harbor.

A wind-whipped rainstorm, part of a brawny system hammering the Northeast, swept into Baltimore and its surrounding counties with a bang yesterday, knocking over trees and utility poles and leaving more than 46,000 Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. customers around the state without electricity. In Baltimore Harbor, a car-carrying ship broke free from its dock in the rough weather while being unloaded and drifted off, a Coast Guard spokeswoman said. Tugboat operators were still trying to secure the ship, which broke loose from a terminal in the Fairfield area, in the late evening.

HOLIDAY EVENT THANKSGIVING PARADE Usher in the holidays with the Best Buy Thanksgiving Parade downtown Saturday. This year's 55th annual parade includes marching bands from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, Randallstown High School and Dulaney High School, as well as the Baltimore Westsiders, Charm City Challengers and USA Cheerleaders. Other participants include Miss Maryland 2006, Mrs. Maryland International, the Baltimore City Mounted Police and performers from the Night of 100 Elvises.

Among the many Baltimore treasures preserved at the Maryland Historical Society, visitors will find a painting and a piece of paper. The piece of paper, along with the star-spangled banner it celebrates, is an American icon. It bears the immortal words of a Georgetown lawyer bursting with patriotic pride. The painting, Defense of Baltimore, Assembling of the Troops, gets much less attention. It is the work of an unschooled Irish immigrant, a Baltimore house painter. A large landscape, it has a hint of Grandma Moses, but its subject is dramatic, even sweeping.

The owner and the operator of the Seaport Taxi that capsized March 6, killing five people, asked the U.S. District Court in Baltimore yesterday to take jurisdiction over a lawsuit filed by three of the accident's survivors. In their complaint, the boat's owner, the nonprofit Living Classrooms Foundation, and its operator, Baltimore Harbor Shuttle, said their liability for the accident should be limited under a federal maritime law that restricts possible damages to the value of the vessel involved -- in this case, the pontoon boat Lady D. "The Accident and the damages arising therefrom were caused by an Act of God, namely, the sudden, unexpected and extremely violent winds which struck the Baltimore Harbor that afternoon," they said in the complaint.

As rescue workers continued to search yesterday for three missing passengers of the Seaport Taxi overturned by a vicious storm Saturday, federal investigators questioned the captain, first mate and other survivors, trying to learn more about the fatal capsizing in Baltimore harbor. Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were trying to ascertain, among other things, why word of a rapidly moving thunderstorm did not reach the 36-foot pontoon boat before it left its dock at Fort McHenry.