Patapsco River

Two people were rescued from a 38-foot fishing boat after it collided with an object in the Patapsco River near Fort Smallwood State Park in Anne Arundel County on Friday, Coast Guard officials said. Thomas H. Tolson Sr., 49, of Severn and John L. Sullivan Jr., 60, of Columbia were pulled from the boat at about 2:30 p.m. When the Coast Guard crew began pumping water from the boat, the water was already up to the boaters' knees and began to wash over the sides. The crew was forced to remove the lines and the fishing boat capsized, officials said.

Doug Ashton takes pride in Orchard Beach, his community of small homes and cottages nestled along northern Anne Arundel County's waterfront, where the laid-off construction superintendent has organized cleanups of shorelines sometimes littered with beer cans and other trash. Now Ashton is pushing to clean up his area's reputation as an outpost of the scrappy South Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay, leading an effort for his community to get its own ZIP code. Orchard Beach is one of six waterfront communities of cottages and townhouses that recently banded together to lobby the U.S. Postal Service to officially recognize their communities; though they won't get their own ZIP codes, they'll soon be listed as independent postal destinations.

In the end, it was chicken on a string that brought a wayward "alligator" out of the Patapsco River. A two-hour search on Monday evening by Natural Resources Police failed to find a trace of the critter. But Eric Hammack Jr., the 16-year-old fisherman who first reported the reptile on Sunday, returned to the pond off Belle Grove Road in Patapsco Valley State Park on Tuesday. He had decided to try luring the gator with a hunk of chicken on a string. "It was a chicken wing," said Hammack, who lives nearby in Pumphrey and fishes in the park often.

Maryland Natural Resources police have interviewed the young fisherman who reported spying an alligator in the Patapsco River. And they say they believe him. But a preliminary search of the area late Monday failed to turn up any further evidence of the tropical reptile. "We believe the gentleman. That's why we sent an officer out to investigate," said Sgt. Art Windemuth, spokesman for the Department of Natural Resources Police. Animal control officers also joined the search. But no alligator appeared.

Maryland will revel in its War of 1812 history with a two-year celebration of the pivotal battles, enduring sites and hometown heroes that played a role in the conflict that culminated in America's defeat of the world's strongest military force. Boston remembers annually the events that sparked the Revolutionary War and Virginia recently marked the 400 t h anniversary of its founding at Jamestown. Now the 200-year-old war with the British that ultimately ended on Maryland's shores will take on renewed significance as communities across the state focus on stories many have forgotten.

There's new life in Back River — though not quite what folks had been hoping for. The eastern Baltimore County waterway, long degraded by sewage and development, has been humming the past few summers with hordes of midges, gnat-like insects that swarm over the water and along the shoreline. They don't bite, though they look like mosquitoes. But their mating swarms are bedeviling waterfront residents, boaters and marina operators because the bugs are drawn to lights and light-colored objects.

It is an outrage that liberal Maryland politicians and the Maryland press blame livestock farmers as a primary source of pollution in the Chesapeake Bay ("The cost of farming," June 22). Politicians and environmental organizations such as Sen. Benjamin Cardin and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation never give Maryland farmers credit for the utilization of best management practices, and they fail to tell Maryland citizens that Maryland agriculture is moving out of the state. My question to Senator Cardin, is why are Maryland livestock farmers being targeted primary polluters of the Chesapeake Bay?

For much of the 20th century, the steelmakers of Sparrows Point dumped their waste into crude landfills along the Patapsco River. Large iron containers, heavy piping and other metal was left to rust, relics that continue to blot the landscape some 40 years after environmental regulators shut the landfills down. Now a market that has pushed the price of scrap iron to $450 a ton has created an incentive for steel manufacturers to retrieve some of that refuse. But their efforts are meeting resistance from neighbors and environmental activists who worry about the consequences of disturbing trapped contamination.

The posters pleading for help finding Matthew C. Martin went up in tavern windows and on telephone poles along South Baltimore's East Fort Avenue the day the 31-year-old went missing April 9. It was unlike the him to just disappear, his family said. A few days later, police found his Honda abandoned on Woodall Street in Locust Point. On Saturday, five weeks later, two fishermen found a partially decomposed body in a shallow grave in Patapsco Valley State Park in Anne Arundel County.