Emergency

Get Arbouretum frontman Dave Heumann started on certain topics - such as maximizing the sound quality of vinyl, fictitious narrators in songwriting, photography - and expect long-winding exchanges full of ideas and anecdotes. But ask the 40-year-old Roland Park musician why he started playing music in the first place and the answer is uncharacteristically succinct. "You start a band and you get to play guitar solos for as long as you want," Heumann said from a corner of a coffeeshop late last month.

Going back 25 years, mobile phones, as they were called in those days, were the size of small briefcases, and were prohibitively expensive and impractical for the average person. In those days, police officers communicated mainly by radio dispatch and volunteer firefighters and ambulance crews in Harford County were issued radio pagers which activated whenever a network of transmitters broadcast a signal that emergency help was needed at a particular location. Now, of course, almost everyone has at least one portable phone - we call them cell phones or just "our" phones - and they're small enough to carry just about anywhere.

A woman's body was found Thursday in rising waters near a homeless camp in Laurel, as flooding closed roads throughout the region and a dangerously high reservoir prompted the evacuation of Laurel's historic district. The discovery of the body came as police in Laurel were going door to door to warn residents and business owners about likely flooding from a release of water at the T. Howard Duckett Dam by the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission. The commission also released water from Brighton Dam in Brookeville.

If you lost your job, do you have enough savings to cover basic expenses at the federal poverty level for three months? A new report released today by the Corporation for Enterprise Development found that 36 percent of Marylanders don't. Among them are residents with income below the poverty line, which is defined as $23,050 for a family of four. But the report noted that 13 percent of households here earn $80,197 to $125,376 annually and don't have three month's worth of savings, either.

Prior to the preseason, so much was expected of Pernell McPhee that the second-year defensive end was already penciled in as a starter. But a nagging right knee forced him to undergo a pair of arthroscopic surgeries during a minicamp and before training camp, and McPhee, who had collected six sacks as a rookie, recorded just 1½ this past season. McPhee eventually began the year as the starting end on the defense's 3-4 front, but after six games, he gave way to Arthur Jones who started six of the next seven contests in which the unit opened with three down linemen.

Emergency legislation to raise the speed limit on the Intercounty Connector from 55 mph to 60 mph has been filed by two Montgomery County state senators. Democrats Jennie Forehand and Nancy King want the speed increased on the 18.8-mile toll road between Interstate 270 in Gaithersburg and Interstate 95 and U.S. 1 in Laurel to take effect immediately because it is "necessary for the immediate preservation of the public health or safety. " The majority of the road opened in November 2011, and almost immediately critics demanded a speed hike.

Maryland had just encountered its first bit of adversity of the young basketball season - its second straight conference defeat - and Dez Wells looked crestfallen. The swingman wore a faraway stare as he talked in a monotone to the media about Maryland's 54-47 loss to Miami on Sunday night, about his two charging fouls, and about needing to "look in the mirror" to see if there is more he can do for the team. "We just can't make a freaking shot," a still-frustrated Wells said Tuesday as the Terps (13-3, 1-2 Atlantic Coast Conference)

Among the 84 calls for medical and fire-rescue service that the Arbutus Volunteer Fire Department received during the period Jan. 6-13 were the following: Circle Drive, 1100 block, 3:29 a.m. Jan. 10. Crews from the Arbutus volunteer station and Halethorpe career station responded to the report of a person having fallen and experiencing seizures in Arbutus. One critically injured person taken to University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center. Silerton Road, unit block, 12:13 a.m. Jan. 10. Crews from the Lansdowne and Arbutus volunteer stations and Halethorpe career station responded to the report of a person having trouble breathing in Lansdowne.

The multiple-day outages might have enraged some customers, but Baltimore Gas and Electric Co.'s power restoration work after the derecho and Superstorm Sandy last year won it an industry award for "outstanding efforts. " It's the third year in a row that BGE won an "Emergency Recovery Award" from the Edison Electric Institute, the shareholder-owned electric companies' association. The group's president, Thomas R. Kuhn, praised BGE in a statement for how it responded when faced with "a major restoration effort throughout 2012.

Bryan Johnson didn't know he had bipolar disorder until he ended up at the emergency room, where he assaulted a police officer. His family had taken him to the University of Maryland Medical Center because he was acting strangely, staring into the distance and constantly pacing as he struggled with the death of his brother and the loss of his job. He was sent to Central Booking as soon as he was released from the hospital, and wound up with a...