Quarry

John Lutz has spent 37 years looking for ghost cats. Puma concolor is most often called a puma, cougar or mountain lion. But its more supernatural nickname seems fitting considering Lutz's quest: collecting evidence of the cats in the Eastern United States, from which they are believed to have vanished. National and state wildlife officials say that native populations of cougars disappeared from the East because of hunting and development, except for a small number of Florida panthers, a subspecies.

Emerson might look a lot like its forebear to the north, but another Howard Research and Development neighborhood nearby will not be Columbia-style. Stone Lake, on a 137-acre parcel used until the late 1960s as a quarry, will be a gated residential community, said David Forester, the company's senior vice president and senior development director. Seventy single-family houses and 154 townhouses are planned. North of Gorman Road and east of Interstate 95, the development runs for nearly a mile along the Middle Patuxent River.

QUARRIES are dangerous places to swim. Too often romanticized as the "old swimmin' hole" of bygone eras, these excavated holes in the ground contain a tangle of hidden dangers for unwary swimmers. They are very deep, with uneven and slippery ledges, and the water is much murkier than in a pool. A jumble of rock at the bottom can readily trap a swimmer who sinks. Not only abandoned quarries can pose swimming hazards. Four people have drowned in four years at Beaver Dam Swim Club, a former stone quarry that now operates as a monitored swimming facility in northern Baltimore County.

A day after a 20-year-old man drowned in Beaver Dam Swimming Club's deep, chilly waters, a Baltimore County official said the one-time stone quarry complies with state and county regulations for swimming areas. Thomas L. Vidmar, deputy director of the county Environmental Protection and Resource Management Agency, said yesterday that inspectors found no violations at the popular Cockeysville swimming area during a routine visit June 22. Some people have called for the closing of the privately run 30-acre complex because of drownings at quarries in Baltimore County, Vidmar said.

A day after a 20-year-old man drowned in Beaver Dam Swimming Club's deep, chilly waters, a Baltimore County official said the one-time stone quarry complies with state and county regulations for swimming areas. Thomas L. Vidmar, deputy director of the county Environmental Protection and Resource Management Agency, said yesterday that inspectors found no violations at the popular Cockeysville swimming area during a routine visit June 22. Some seek closings Some people have called for the closing of the privately run 30-acre complex because of drownings at quarries in Baltimore County, Vidmar said.

Anne Arundel prosecutors hoped to mark the 27th anniversary of the killing of Bowie teen-ager Donna L. Dustin today with a plea, but the kind that happens in court. Instead, they are making a plea for anyone who knows what happened to her to come forward. People who tell them what happened in 1973 - but who were not involved in the crime - will not be prosecuted for failing to tell the truth earlier, they said. "We have information that some people may have information - people [who]

How depressing. The directorial debut of Christopher McQuarrie, who wrote the smart, snappy screenplay for "The Usual Suspects," was supposed to be a bright spot on an otherwise bleak cinematic horizon. Instead, it turns out that "The Way of the Gun" is as ugly, excessive and vulgar as "The Usual Suspects" was stylish, subtle and suave. Taking one page each from Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Robert Towne and Quentin Tarantino, McQuarrie has emerged not with a movie of his own but with a derivative, overheated pastiche of a myriad cinematic cliches.

After working for 11 hours, divers ceased their search last night for the body of a Howard County woman who presumably drowned Saturday at Beaver Dam Swim Club in Cockeysville. They will resume this morning. Baltimore County fire and police officers began their search for Jamee Eben, 24, of Ring Dove Lane in Columbia, Saturday evening after she disappeared beneath the water while swimming with her boyfriend and two other friends at the club, in the 10800 block of Beaver Dam Road. The club is a filled quarry used as a swimming hole.

With what sounded like a muffled thunderclap in the distance, 25,000 tons of rock crashed to the ground yesterday afternoon in a billowy cloud of dust near the banks of the Susquehanna River. It took less than a second, and thousands of people cheered. It's not every day that one gets to see 14,700 pounds of explosives shear the side off a stone wall. "I used to camp out here, do some hunting and fishing and climb the cliffs when I was a young," said Bob Einwachter, 69, as he videotaped the bulldozers, barges and stone crushers spread out along 600 acres of a stone quarry in Havre de Grace.

For more than 100 years, workers have blasted and dug into the earth at the Greenspring Quarry, hauling out about 30 million tons of stone that was used to build Baltimore and its suburbs.But today, the only sound to be heard in the gigantic crater is the trickle of water from underground springs creating what one day will be Maryland's deepest lake.Yesterday, quarrying operations at the Arundel Corp. facility off Greenspring Avenue stopped forever, meeting the terms of a 1985 agreement with the surrounding neighborhoods.