Oxygen

The two construction workers who died after losing consciousness in a sewer manhole Wednesday evening at Villa Julie College's Owings Mills campus were identified yesterday by Baltimore County police, while state occupational safety officials tried to determine what caused their deaths. Cesar Salazar, 22, of the 300 block of Middle Grove Court in Westminster went into the manhole first, apparently to retrieve a tool, and lost consciousness, according to state and local authorities. A second worker, Craig Michael Gouker, 47, of the 1000 block of Old Westminster Road in Hanover, Pa., went in the 15-foot hole to attempt to rescue Salazar but also lost consciousness, officials said.

Two construction workers died yesterday after losing consciousness from an apparent lack of oxygen in a sewer manhole - one after jumping in to rescue the other at a construction site on Villa Julie College's Owings Mills campus. The worker who first went underground - to retrieve a dropped tool - was pulled out by firefighters, but died at a hospital, a Fire Department offical said. The would-be rescuer was dead at the scene. The men, who were not identified because police were trying to notify relatives, had been pouring concrete in the 10900 block of Boulevard Circle, said Elise Armacost, a Fire Department spokeswoman.

For the fifth year in a row, unusual wind patterns off the coast of Oregon have produced a large "dead zone," an area so low in oxygen that fish and crabs suffocate. This dead zone is unlike those in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere, which result from fertilizer, sewage or runoff from hog or poultry operations carried by rivers. The Oregon zone appears when the wind generates strong currents carrying nutrient-rich but oxygen-poor water from the deep sea to the surface near shore, a process called upwelling.

On the surface, being a correctional officer at a Maryland prison seemed like the perfect job for Tiffany Jones. She was tall for a woman, 5 feet 8 inches, and weighed a formidable 245 pounds. Most of all, this Bronx-born Baltimorean ... Took. No. Mess. On TV Mo'Nique's F.A.T. Chance will air Saturday at 8 p.m. on Oxygen. Encores are at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday.

Chesapeake Bay grasses could rebound slightly this summer, and dead zones are likely to cover less of the bay than they did last year, according to predictions released yesterday by the federal-state Chesapeake Bay Program. The news isn't all good for the second year that the Annapolis-based program has tried to forecast conditions. This summer is expected to be an average one, but for the scientists trying to improve the bay, average isn't something to celebrate. "The good news is, it's not going to be as bad as it was last year.

Another explosion deep underground, another American mountain community enveloped in grief, another tragedy that only begins to make any sense if it adds impetus for much tougher inspections and enforcement of worker safety conditions at this nation's coal mines. This time - only a little more than five months after 12 West Virginia miners survived an explosion but then exhausted their emergency oxygen while waiting to be rescued - three of the five dead southeastern Kentucky miners appear to have suffocated in similar fashion after an underground blast Saturday.

Providing new details about the final desperate hours of the Sago Mine disaster that left 12 miners dead in West Virginia, a letter sent this week by the sole survivor said that at least four of the oxygen masks meant to protect the men from dangerous smoke and fumes did not work. "The first thing we did was activate our rescuers, as we had been trained," said the letter, which was sent Wednesday by Randal McCloy Jr. to the families of the victims. "At least four of the rescuers did not function.

Challenger Park Stephen Harrigan Alfred A. Knopf / 300 pages / $24.95 Sometimes authenticity is a bad thing. Stephen Harrigan's Challenger Park is a case in point. Harrigan, talented author of the brilliant historical novel The Gates of the Alamo, now brings us this lukewarm tale of a shuttle astronaut in training, in angst, in love and, finally, in space, which seems like blessed relief until that, too, grows stale faster than you can say Beta Gimbal Assembly - one of the zillion examples of NASA-speak cluttering the narrative.

MTBE, the gasoline additive that has become synonymous with tainted wells, including many throughout the Baltimore suburbs, is finally on the way out - but some in the oil industry warn that gas prices could soar this summer as a result. The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that starting in May, federal regulators no longer would specify the oxygen content for clean-burning gasoline in smog-afflicted areas such as Baltimore and Washington - easing air pollution regulations that had resulted in MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, being added to fuel sold throughout most of the state for more than a decade.

Switching their focus from the farthest galaxies to Earth's nearest neighbor, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed the presence of a mineral on the moon that might someday provide human explorers with life-sustaining oxygen and rocket fuel. Researchers said yesterday that they had detected ilmenite - a compound of iron, titanium and oxygen - at two Apollo landing sites and another region never visited. NASA officials said the work lays the scientific foundation for robotic prospecting missions - an orbiter due for launch in 2008 and one or more landers later.