Downstream

As a wall of white water gushed from slits near the top of the T. Howard Duckett Dam, a Laurel business just downstream was surrounded on three sides by water from the rain-swollen Patuxent River. Waves lapped against the front steps. Even though Bill N. Polizos, owner of Progressive Rent a Car, said, "We're like a post office, we're always open," he then had to explain yesterday to a customer on the phone why this week's deluge and the nearby dam meant he couldn't clean a car that the customer wanted.

A political truism in Maryland is that everyone is in favor of cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay. Anyone who has lived in the Free State for more than a few years has at least a passing familiarity with stories of the Chesapeake's seemingly limitless bounty in years gone by. Rockfish, crabs, oysters, shad, clams, perch and even sturgeon and diamondback terrapins from the bay provided fine table fare to the cities surrounding the waterway and well...

Rescue workers in Zimbabwe were searching yesterday for the body of a Maryland man whose riverboat capsized downstream of Victoria Falls during a whitewater rafting trip. HTC Tour operators and the U.S. State Department said he is presumed dead.John Mayer, 45, of Rockville has been missing since Feb. 11. A tour operator in Zimbabwe said Mayer had moved from Maryland to Hong Kong and was vacationing when the accident occurred.In addition to Mayer, six other passengers and a guide on the inflatable riverboat were tossed into the Zambezi River during an afternoon trip, said Jeremy Brooke, owner of Shearwater Tours in Harare, which organized the outing.

When storms as severe as the deluge of recent days sweep through the Susquehanna River Valley, residents downstream from the Conowingo Dam look at the massive concrete structure with trepidation. They know that Exelon Power - Conowingo's operator - might have to open some of the dam's gates to relieve the pent-up pressure of billions of gallons. Already, 13 gates are open - enough to cause the river to threaten to spill over its banks and cause minor flooding near towns such as Port Deposit, only 11 miles to the southeast.

Mike Fiorita, a 17-year-old from Falling Waters, W. Va., set a Maryland record for brook trout with a 6-pound, 1.75-ounce catch on the North Branch of the Potomac River last month.The previous state mark of 4 pounds, 12 ounces was set by Rick Joyce at Western Run on May 30, 1985.Fiorita's fish, taken from the put-and-take area at Barnum on April 10, was 22.5 inches long and 15 inches in circumference.Fisheries service biologists believe the monster brook trout moved downstream to the Barnum area after beefing up outside the trout rearing pens below Jennings Randolph Dam."

The death of a disabled man whose body was found Saturday morning in a creek near his Southeast Baltimore home has been ruled a s u i c i d e by drowning, city police said. The 41-year-old was born with cerebral palsy and lived with his mother and sister in the 900 block of Alricks Way in Armistead Gardens, police said. The man, who had been depressed, was reported missing less than an hour before his body was found in water about feet deep, said homicide Detective Mark Hughes. The body was about 300 feet downstream from where police found his electric wheelchair at the end of a wooded path, he added.

NOW OR NEVER The Jones Falls Valley Celebration will transform the JFX into the functional equivalent of a sidewalk when the northbound lanes of traffic are closed this Sunday. Runners, bikers, inline skaters and walkers are invited to experience the sights and sounds of the Jones Falls. This year's celebration includes a 5-mile race, a canoe and kayak race and the first ever Downstream Frog Race, where participants can sponsor a rubber frog to see which will be the fastest as they race (or, you know, float)

The state Department of the Environment will review its decision to grant permission for Annapolis Mall to expand, a department spokesman said yesterday, one day after Woodward Lothrop Inc. raised new allegations in its fight against the expansion.Woodies, embroiled in a public squabble over the mall's plans to add a Nordstrom department store and 45 smaller stores, has asked the state to revoke or modify the mall's approval for a storm-water management pond.In a June 10 letter to department Secretary Robert Perciasepe, Woodies' attorneys charge that the proposed storm-water basin would violate environmental laws and increase chances of downstream erosion, undercutting stream banks and washing out trees and vegetation.

25 Years Ago (Week of Aug. 4-10, 1968):* The latest plans for Columbia's downtown area were unveiled this week. These included office buildings, a hotel, a high-rise apartment building near Wilde Lake, and Columbia's mall, which was scheduled to open in 1970.50 Years Ago (Week of Aug. 8-14, 1943):* A pile of trash, dumped into the Tiber River under a building on Ellicott City's Main Street, caught fire, endangering the building above, which had recently been remodeled by the Coroneos brothers.

WITH 15 million people in the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay, and millions more moving in, you wonder if we can ever save the natural environment of the place. But consider Billy Frank Lucas. He works with farmers in Pennsylvania, both Amish and "English," to fence streams so cattle don't wade in and send pollution downstream. He's managed 55 miles of stream, both sides. It's just "a dent" in the problem. But he's convinced, "one farm at a time, strand by strand of fence, our work can become the norm."

As a wall of white water gushed from slits near the top of the T. Howard Duckett Dam, a Laurel business just downstream was surrounded on three sides by water from the rain-swollen Patuxent River. Waves lapped against the front steps. Even though Bill N. Polizos, owner of Progressive Rent a Car, said, "We're like a post office, we're always open," he then had to explain yesterday to a customer on the phone why this week's deluge and the nearby dam meant he couldn't clean a car that the customer wanted.

BOWIE -- Joseph Mills just wants to keep doing what his family has been doing on the outskirts of this town for 30-some years - raise a few cattle on the hilly 10-acre plot his aging parents entrusted to him. Oasis Farms, they call it. It has been anything but that the past six months. The stream that used to meander through Mills' pasture has gone dry, apparently an unforeseen result of runoff control measures taken by a developer building an 1,800-home planned community on three sides of his property.

The death of a disabled man whose body was found Saturday morning in a creek near his Southeast Baltimore home has been ruled a s u i c i d e by drowning, city police said. The 41-year-old was born with cerebral palsy and lived with his mother and sister in the 900 block of Alricks Way in Armistead Gardens, police said. The man, who had been depressed, was reported missing less than an hour before his body was found in water about feet deep, said homicide Detective Mark Hughes. The body was about 300 feet downstream from where police found his electric wheelchair at the end of a wooded path, he added.

NOW OR NEVER The Jones Falls Valley Celebration will transform the JFX into the functional equivalent of a sidewalk when the northbound lanes of traffic are closed this Sunday. Runners, bikers, inline skaters and walkers are invited to experience the sights and sounds of the Jones Falls. This year's celebration includes a 5-mile race, a canoe and kayak race and the first ever Downstream Frog Race, where participants can sponsor a rubber frog to see which will be the fastest as they race (or, you know, float)

HAGERSTOWN - Downstream communities fretted yesterday over the effect on their drinking water supplies of about 20 million gallons of sewage that have spilled from a Hagerstown treatment plant since Saturday. Meanwhile, Hagerstown public works officials scrambled to get their disabled sewage treatment plant, which discharges into a Potomac River tributary, back in full operation. Brunswick, the first community downstream that draws drinking water from the river, closed its Antietam Creek intake pipes about 11 p.m. Tuesday "as a precautionary measure," said Kevin Brawner, the Frederick County town's director of public facilities.

WITH 15 million people in the watershed of the Chesapeake Bay, and millions more moving in, you wonder if we can ever save the natural environment of the place. But consider Billy Frank Lucas. He works with farmers in Pennsylvania, both Amish and "English," to fence streams so cattle don't wade in and send pollution downstream. He's managed 55 miles of stream, both sides. It's just "a dent" in the problem. But he's convinced, "one farm at a time, strand by strand of fence, our work can become the norm."

My father hung the hammock in the shady side yard on Sunday afternoons when it was too hot to do anything but swing back and forth, watching dragonflies hover over the phlox. ''Cruising down the river,'' my mother sang as she layered baked beans in a steamy kitchen.Pushing the hammock back and forth, grass tickling my foot, I could almost see rowboats drifting along under overarching branches, women in white, hair piled on their heads, trailing their fingers through water while sunburned swains plied the oars.

It might be some of the best money ever spent by the state of Maryland - $16,200 for Carrie Dixon's two old house-trailers, her trampoline-size satellite dish and one acre of bottomland on a section of the Potomac River that had been poisoned for a century, left for dead and forgotten. Now the Dixon place, across some railroad tracks in an eye-blink of Allegany County called Black Oak, is about to become one of the few public access points to the North Branch - a place where people with kayaks and fishing rods might start to visit a long, tree-lined stretch of "the nation's river" that few Marylanders have ever seen.

It might be some of the best money ever spent by the state of Maryland - $16,200 for Carrie Dixon's two old house-trailers, her trampoline-size satellite dish and one acre of bottomland on a section of the Potomac River that had been poisoned for a century, left for dead and forgotten. Now the Dixon place, across some railroad tracks in an eye-blink of Allegany County called Black Oak, is about to become one of the few public access points to the North Branch - a place where people with kayaks and fishing rods might start to visit a long, tree-lined stretch of "the nation's river" that few Marylanders have ever seen.

The oil that spilled from a Prince George's County electric plant over the weekend and fouled beaches on the Calvert County side of the Patuxent River has started moving downstream with the tide toward the Chesapeake Bay. The plume of oil that once stretched about five miles south along the eastern shore of the river went three miles farther yesterday -- reaching Buzzard Island and Sandy Point on the Calvert County side and was found on Golden Beach and...