Rescue Workers

Rescue workers and dogs searched unsuccessfully for seven hours yesterday after reports that a baby wrapped in a blanket and seated in a child carrier was floating down Deep Run Creek in Elkridge Sunday night.Two people reported seeing the baby."Nothing has been located -- no child, no carrier, no blanket," said Battalion Chief Donald R. Howell, Howard County fire and rescue spokesman.Police said there have been no reports of missing children in Howard, Baltimore or Anne Arundel counties.

A tree trimmer was injured about 9 a.m. yesterday near New Windsor when he fell into a sinkhole following a mishap involving an electrical line. He was listed in fair and stable condition last night at the Maryland Shock Trauma Center.Robert G. Tasker, 23, of Kingwood, W. Va., was trimming trees in a small wooded area near Nicodemus and Brick Church Roads when one of the branches fell and hit a power line, rescue workers said.Mr. Tasker -- an employee of Penn Line Services of Scottsdale, Pa. -- was knocked about 35 feet into the sinkhole, the rescue workers reported.

Rescue workers planned to continue searching waters near Gibson Island in Anne Arundel County on Wednesday for a missing man who was tossed from a boat in the area during a squall Monday, according to a Maryland Department of Natural Resources Police spokesman. The man, identified as Jason Wesley Ryman, 27, of the Philadelphia area, was on a sailboat with three others when the squall caused the boat to tip, said Sgt. Brian Albert, the spokesman. Ryman and his girlfriend were both thrown from the boat, Albert said.

Once he left Miami Airport Sept. 18, fire department Battalion Chief Donald R. Howell said he couldn't believe the mass destruction, the despair, the poverty and the desperate messages scrawled on homes in hurricane-ravaged Homestead, Fla.One message he saw read: "You loot, we shoot!"Chief Howell and a team of seven county emergency workers and mental health professionals made the trip to help Florida rescue workers deal with their own losses during the costliest disaster in U.S. history -- Hurricane Andrew.

Concerned about damage to homeland security, federal officials have reversed plans to slash training classes for firefighters and other rescue workers this summer at the National Fire Academy in Emmitsburg. The decision, announced yesterday, means more than 1,000 rescue workers who were told last month their training was canceled can once again make the trip to the academy's sprawling Frederick County campus. Academy and local officials say that fire departments nationwide will be able to rely on the academy for free top-notch training on how best to respond to manmade or natural threats to their communities.

Baltimore rescuers were searching Monday night for a man they think lowered himself into the harbor by the 900 block of Fell St. after a what may have been an argument with his wife. Firefighters, a diver and other rescue workers searched for the missing man, as a city police helicopter scoured the area from above, Fire Department spokesman Kevin Cartwright said. They were responding to a call that came in shortly before 10 p.m. Monday. The man, who was described as 30- to 40-year-old white male, ran from his wife after a domestic dispute, and witnesses told police he lowered himself into the water from a pier, Cartwright said.

Acting in a "precautionary manner," hazardous materials teams spent more than four hours yesterday investigating a mishap at Lehigh Portland Cement in Union Bridge that turned out not to involve toxic waste.Lehigh officials said a private waste hauler arrived at the plant about 10:30 a.m. yesterday to pick up seven drums of nontoxic waste gathered from the cleaning of tanks used in cement manufacturing.As the tractor-trailer driver started to pull away from a building at the plant, the truck struck a dust collector, damaging the device and puncturing the side of the truck.

NEW YORK - Fire engines - some in neat lines, some parked haphazardly, all of them covered in ash and debris - sat as though frozen in time. One was sliced in half by a steel beam. The windows of nearly all of them were blasted out. Found around the gray trucks yesterday: an abandoned bagel cart, a shoe, a wallet, an accountant's list of things to do, a child's toy. Above, a sickly, yellowish smoke was billowing. And, just down the road, people were applauding. With such devastation all around the collapsed World Trade Center - with bodies and body parts scattered in rubble - it was not realistic to expect the shock that began a day earlier to wear off so soon.

It was the most powerful tornado in memory, perhaps the worst ever to hit Carroll County. But county emergency, police and fire officials say there is little they would do differently in responding to the storm that ripped through the Gamber area packing 180 mph winds Friday afternoon."

At first, he chuckled at the sight of two boys taking a playful ride on a motorbike near Queenstown.Seconds later, Richard Dudley winced as the unthinkable happened, right there in front of his delivery truck.Mr. Dudley saw one of the boys fall from the off-road dirt bike and then try to reach up with both arms.But the left one had been severed below the elbow by the whirring spokes of the motorbike's rear wheel.Aaron Thompson, 8, lay on the ground, bleeding from his injury and screaming.