Terminal

BALTIMORE will have a $14.5 million Greyhound Lines bus terminal and garage next to Penn Station by mid-2002, if financing and design arrangements can be firmed up this fall.The city's Design Advisory Panel approved preliminary plans last week that call for the bus terminal to be constructed on a triangle of land north of the train station at Charles and Lanvale streets.The bus terminal would occupy the first level of a five-story building and be linked to the train station by a pedestrian sky bridge.

OF ALL THE weekends in the year, the one after Thanksgiving is among my favorites. I regard it as the lull before the storm, the last chance for tranquillity before the frenzied holiday season starts.Experience has taught me, however, that to get the maximum enjoyment out of this weekend, there are certain things I must not do. There are urges I must suppress, advice I should disregard. I have a short list of "don't-go-theres," regarding trouble spots I try to avoid on Thanksgiving weekend.

The competition among all the cable news channels and network news divisions in covering the Kenneth W. Starr report was fierce yesterday. But it was nothing compared with the battle television journalists were collectively fighting with new technology and matters of taste in trying to tell the story.How do you report a story in which the main bank of data -- several hundred pages of the report itself -- is in cyberspace?For CNN, part of the answer was simply to show congressional correspondent Candy Crowley seated at a computer terminal, reading the report and commenting on it as she read -- an electronic version of the town crier.

WHEN the British were giving Hong Kong back to China, it has been said, they did not want the colony's treasury to go along. So they embarked on a large, speculative project -- the world's greatest (or nearly so) airport.A year after the handover of Hong Kong to China, the airport has opened with hardly a hitch. In one day, everything moved from Kai Tak Airport, where planes had to elude the skyscrapers, to the $20 billion Chek Lap Kok Airport.They filled in the sea. They built a bridge, highway, railroad and one of the world's biggest roofed spaces -- a 6-million-square-foot terminal.

Two of the world's dominant shipping lines tapped the port of Baltimore as a finalist yesterday in their search for a place to build one of the largest cargo terminals in the country.Maersk Inc. and Sea-Land Service Inc. also will consider New York and Halifax, Nova Scotia, as sites for a new base of operations.If placed in Baltimore, the terminal could triple the amount of container cargo shipped through the port and add a corresponding boost to Maryland's economy. State officials refused to discuss the deal's cost, expected to run well into the millions of tax dollars.

Major portions of Baltimore-Washington International Airport were closed yesterday morning when an unattended car parked in front of the terminal caused a bomb scare that delayed flights, created widespread confusion and tied up traffic for several hours.Hundreds of passengers were cleared from piers A and B in the terminal just before 7 a.m. after a state police dog alerted officers four times to the scent of explosives in the trunk of a gold-colored Ford, police said. A subsequent check by a bomb robot found packages but no explosives in the car.The car's driver, Leslie Hoffman of Pennsylvania, who was delivering packages for a Pennsylvania company, was questioned by officials from the state fire marshal's office and FBI agents.

Eight employees of the Baltimore Public Works Department were fired this week over allegations involving missing materials at a municipal work yard.City officials acknowledged yesterday that they terminated the workers, some of whom were supervisors, but would not discuss the reason. However, employees at the city's Park Terminal yard at 2231 N. Fulton Ave. said the department investigation began because of allegations of missing materials, including city equipment, bricks and wood.Public Works Director George G. Balog said yesterday that the workers were fired after an internal department investigation.

State officials approved plans to build and lease a new automobile terminal at the port of Baltimore to a Florida-based distri- butor yesterday, a deal that one private terminal operator has called anti-compet- itive and promised to contest before the Federal Maritime Commission.The Maryland Board of Public Works approved the lease with ATC Logistics Inc., conditioned on changes that would allow for its review if construction costs at the terminal rise too high. Opponents argued that soil contamination at the Brooklyn-area site could more than double the estimated $18.6 million cost of developing it.Yesterday's unanimous vote means that the Maryland Port Administration, after revising the lease, can seek bids from developers to turn the 50-acre "Masonville" site into a marine terminal for loading and unloading automobiles.

OK, so it took a decade to convert Washington National Airport from a construction nightmare to an airport equipped for the 21st century. But it's finally happened. And today, with the opening of its $450 million terminal, National officially sheds its reputation as one of the nation's most outdated and bewildering airports.The three-tiered steel and glass terminal with a panoramic view of the nation's capital is the capstone of the $1 billion renovation program that has made Washington's close-in airport far more user-friendly.

Caliber Systems Inc., a trucking and package delivery company, said it had shut its Viking Freight plant in Elkridge and laid off the plant's 110 employees.The plant closure is the result of steep losses by Caliber last year. The holding company reported a $127 million loss after it merged five regional carrier companies under one umbrella, Viking Freight Inc.Nationwide, Caliber said, it would cut 4,000 Viking Freight jobs and close 83 terminals in the Midwest, South and East.Caliber said it is eliminating or selling virtually all of Viking's East Coast terminals.

Opponents of a liquefied natural gas terminal in eastern Baltimore County stepped up their attacks Tuesday, hosting an appearance by a former CIA officer who said the $400 million project lacks critical safeguards and raises the specter of terrorism and piracy. "The more I looked into this project, the more I thought the company building it does not care about the safety implications," said Charles S. Faddis, who retired a year ago as chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's anti-terrorism unit and is a security consultant, based in Davidsonville, and a writer who has published two books on security issues.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it will not issue a permit for a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal at Sparrows Point and a pipeline through Maryland to Pennsylvania until the project's developer has complied with federal wildlife regulations, prepared mitigation plans for wetlands that might be disturbed during construction and met other requests for information. The Corps is the second agency this month to question plans by Virginia-based AES Corp. to build the terminal and lay 88 miles of pipe to transport the gas. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to delay its vote on the project, scheduled for tomorrow, until concerns about habitats for the bog turtle and Indiana bat can be addressed.

Federal officials have determined that a proposed liquefied natural gas terminal at Sparrows Point in eastern Baltimore County would have "mostly limited adverse environmental impact" if constructed and operated with certain measures in place, according to a report released yesterday. The final environmental impact statement, by the staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, comes months after a preliminary report, which recommended conditional approval for the project proposed by the Virginia-based AES Corp.

You recently took my daughter to the airport for an 8:50 a.m. flight. Although you did a good job of getting her there - she was an hour early - she missed the flight. Her ticket said US Airways (which is in Terminal 1 at Los Angeles International Airport), but she actually was on a United flight (which is in Terminal 7). It was a code share. How were we supposed to know? Why didn't you know this? What kind of aunt-sister are you? Judith Ramsey, Arnold, Md. Wait a minute. You think just because you're my older sister you can yell at me and boss me around?

The Maryland Port Administration has taken the first step toward leasing the Seagirt Marine Terminal to a private company that would spend more than $100 million to expand the terminal and then run it. The agency has agreed to hire a Florida-based consulting firm to identify possible bidders willing to spend $100 million to $120 million to expand Seagirt's capacity and then manage the terminal under a long-term lease with the state. The money is needed to build berths with a depth of 50 feet to accommodate the larger container ships that are expected to dominate world commerce after the widening and deepening of the Panama Canal is completed in 2014.

Maryland undoubtedly needs more and cheaper energy, but we're not going to do just anything to get it. We won't strip state forests for fireplace fodder. We won't reverse pollution controls on cars and power plants. And we shouldn't let ships carrying liquefied natural gas sail into the mouth of the Patapsco River. Importing small but potentially catastrophic industrial risks into highly populated areas may have been OK for the 20th-century economy. It doesn't work now. With hundreds of miles of coastline to accommodate freighters bringing gas from the Caribbean, why choose one of the few spots where an accident or terrorist attack could do grave damage?

A Capitol Heights-based scrap metal processor has purchased a Baltimore County scrapyard and is pushing to build an export terminal in Curtis Bay to meet a surge in demand from the global steel industry. Joseph Smith & Sons Inc. began operations this week at the former Recovermat Mid-Atlantic LLC demolition waste facility in Halethorpe, retaining its 20 workers. Smith Vice President Bob Bonnes said the company is converting the facility into a shredding plant for autos and steel scrap.

The state has struck a deal with the airlines that use Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport not to collect $32.2 million of the $57.3 million in terminal rents and other fees it undercharged them over the past four years. The Maryland Aviation Administration said it plans to recover only $25.04 million of those uncollected fees over the next five years. Southwest Airlines, BWI's dominant carrier, has agreed to pay $12.2 million of that sum - in exchange for reduced rents and landing fees in the future, company spokeswoman Whitney Eichinger said.

State aviation officials have tentatively hired a contractor to build a new baggage system at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport that could allow AirTran Airways, the airport's second leading carrier, to double its daily departures. The two-year, $32 million project at Terminal D would begin later this spring if approved by the state Board of Public Works. It would triple both the size of the baggage screening area and the rate at which bags are processed as creaky conveyor belts are replaced, BWI spokesman Jonathan Dean said.

Critic's Pick -- Unauthorized to enter the U.S., a European man (Tom Hanks) begins living in a N.Y. airport in The Terminal (8 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2).