Ordeal

Last year, Mary Lamielle, of Voorhees, N.J., traveled to Washington for a business meeting. Her room at the Grand Hyatt "was perfect," she recalled. But when she ventured into the conference area, she experienced vertigo and breathing problems, which she believed were caused by chlorinated water in the hotel's decorative pools. Within a day, she was so sick, she said, that she couldn't attend the session she had organized on healthy housing for people with disabilities. Lamielle, executive director of the National Center for Environmental Health Strategies, an advocacy group, suffers from what doctors variously label "multiple chemical sensitivities" or "environmental illness," an elusive malady that can make exposure to household and industrial chemicals debilitating.

NEARLY TWO weeks after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, its surrounding parishes and Mississippi's Gulf Coast, interest in this tragic and far-reaching story has not diminished. It is the largest natural disaster in American history. With thousands feared dead and hundred of thousands displaced from their homes, and with monumental recovery costs and staggering economic ramifications, it will have serious impact on life in the United States for years to come. With the storm, the media has regained its confidence after its post-9/11 passivity and the fallout from several high-profile scandals.

NEW ORLEANS - The 14 refugees from the city school system's McDonald School No. 42 loitered in the morning heat on the crescent of an onramp of Interstate 10 here yesterday, gulped military meals ready to eat, sat on the asphalt and counted themselves lucky. Over the previous week, they had been buffeted by Hurricane Katrina, cut off by 15-foot-deep floodwaters and held hostage, they said, for 2 1/2 days by a loosely affiliated gang of armed looters. After their escape, they sat stranded on an exposed highway overpass for two nights while convoys of relief vehicles roared indifferently past.

In the middle of Children of Beslan, an emotionally powerful HBO documentary about the 2004 terrorist attack on a Russian school, one of the young hostages tells of her fantasy during the 57-hour ordeal. "I was hoping that Harry Potter would come," she says. "I was thinking he had a cloak that made him invisible, and he would come and wrap me in it, and we'd be invisible and we'd escape." Russian soldiers did come, but in the battle with Chechen extremists holding more than 1,100 children and adults in the gymnasium of Middle School No. 1, some 200 adults and 171 children died.

The New Colony Village development was formally divided into individual house lots, as promised, Friday, ending a two-year legal ordeal for residents unable to sell or refinance their homes. The subdivision filing prompted quiet celebration in the long-suffering Jessup community, residents said. "We're very pleased. I'll finally be able to move forward with some things we plan to get done," said D'Wayne Strawbridge, who served on the 228-home community's steering committee. A sign reporting the legal subdivision of the lots was posted at the entrance gate Friday, along with several celebratory balloons.

With a public apology from the governor, the state agreed yesterday to pay Michael Austin $1.4 million for the 27 years he spent in prison for a murder he did not commit. Along with the payments, which will be spread out over 10 years, the Board of Public Works approved money for Austin to seek financial counseling. The award was the largest the state has ever made to an exonerated prisoner. "This board has been asked under the state finance and procurement act to value days, to value time spent behind bars for no reason, for inappropriate reasons, for unlawful reasons," Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. told Austin.

I WAS FLYING to Nashville, Tenn., last week with my 21-year-old daughter to explore some new musical ideas with a record label there. Ironically, I was trying to remain low-profile because of the speculation that it might have raised in the music world about a return of "the Cat." Media attention was the last thing I wanted. But it seems God wanted otherwise. Toward the end of our journey from London to Washington, the plane was diverted. The captain announced something about "heavy traffic."

ATHENS - Kevin Hall wanted to finish first. He didn't want to be first. But because the sailor from Bowie needed medical clearance for a weekly injection of testosterone, first is where he found himself in January, when the new World Anti-Doping Agency code went into effect. And being the guinea pig has been a painful experience for the two-time America's Cup veteran. This week at the Olympics was no different. Hall, 34, is a testicular cancer survivor who requires the hormone his body no longer produces.

For Ken Hovet, life now is a mixture of relief, anger and anxiety. The 43-year-old former Oakland Mills High School athletic director and football coach got his teaching job and back pay restored by the Howard County school board this week. Today, he is due in Circuit Court, seeking $113,000 in legal fees and damages from his fight to obtain access to documents he needed to prepare a defense against charges that he should be fired in a grade-changing scandal. But important as all that is, there is something more vital to Hovet, a plain-spoken father of three who agreed to be interviewed yesterday in the downtown Washington law office of Thomas R. Bundy III, a 1991 Oakland Mills High graduate who represented Hovet.

A Howard County Board of Appeals decision to grant zoning variances to residents of New Colony Village in Jessup promises to end the long legal and financial ordeal that left them unable to sell their homes. The board voted, 4-0, Tuesday night to grant the lot-size variances that will allow residents to subdivide and buy the land under their manufactured homes, making them eligible for bank financing. "Boy, are we happy," said Brian Hartford, 61, a heart transplant recipient who with his wife, Dorothea, is renting a New Colony unit until they can get financing to buy it. "I'd be surprised if there isn't a serious block party after this," said Kimberly Fisher, another resident.