Transformer

Harford County Hazmat and BGE responded to a call for a blown telephone transformer in Belcamp Tuesday, but no hazardous chemicals materials leaked into the area, according to officials. "The hazmat trucks cleared almost as soon as they got there," Rick Ayers, emergency operations manager for Harford County, said Tuesday. Around 10:11 a.m. Harford County Hazmat was dispatched to Independence Square in Belcamp after a neighbor in the area called 9-1-1 reporting a transformer on a pole had blown overnight.

When Evelyn Gorman bought her then-10-year-old contemporary brick townhouse in Ruxton 25 years ago, change was the first order of business. To this seasoned interior designer from New York City, there was no reason not to create everything in her style - one she calls "country French in an eclectic, sophisticated approach. " The obvious starting point was getting rid of the 1980s kitchen that was prominently avocado green. "I have always tried to be true to my own design concepts," said the award-winning designer and former interior design columnist for the Baltimore Jewish Times.

About 4,500 Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. customers lost power for a half-hour Friday morning after a transformer failed at the company's station on Carroll Street in Westminster.Customers in the area, which ran east along Route 140 and included much of the city, were switched to other feeder lines until the transformer was repaired, said Peggy Mulloy, BG&E spokeswoman.The largest customers in the section that lost power are Carroll County General Hospital, Western Maryland College, Cranberry Mall and the Carroll County Times.

Walk through a graffiti-tagged corridor, under a light rail bridge, past the cars hurtling down the Jones Falls Expressway and you've entered what some believe could become a wonderland. A group called Section 1 envisions a skate park built under a labyrinth of highway support columns. They see concrete walls as canvases for street artists. A weedy lot, the setting for food truck rallies and art fairs. And an overgrown field near CSX tracks could hold a concert stage with space for an audience of thousands.

The huge gray metal object stands 27 feet tall on an oversize flatbed with 144 wheels, weighs 431,000 pounds and is hauled by a lumbering beast of a truck that looks like something out of a Stephen King novel. All this week it's been roaming the darkened roads of Harford County, drawing crowds of gawkers for its nocturnal procession to the Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania. Last evening, it made the delicate crossing of Deer Creek on Route 136, which was reinforced in advance to bear the crushing weight.

More than 50 families will be forced to move out of the Lexington Terrace housing complex next week after vandals destroyed a 300,000-volt transformer that left them without electricity.Yesterday, the power problems at the housing development were exacerbated when repair crews ruptured a water main, killing electricity at an adjacent high-rise and shorting out the mobile generators brought in to replace the vandalized XTC transformer.The families, already scheduled to vacate the development because of its planned demolition in July, were left without electricity Monday night when vandals, apparently looking for copper, destroyed the transformer outside the 770 W. Saratoga St. high-rise.

Annapolis residents have started a drive to raise money for an 8-year-old boy severely burned in an electrical transformer in the Robinwood public housing development.Terrence Tolbert was burned three weeks ago when he crawled into a 13,000-volt transformer. He was rescued by Annapolis police Officer Peter Medley and Robinwood resident Joseph Parker, but he lost an arm in the accident. He is in serious condition at Children's Hospital National Medical Center in Washington."He's coming along pretty good," said his mother, Juanita Johns.

Traffic along northbound Interstate 95 was delayed for more than two hours yesterday as firefighters and electrical workers battled an electrical fire on a transformer pole alongside the interstate near Route 175.Maryland state police said the fire started about 4: 15 p.m. when the transformer malfunctioned.Police diverted traffic to Route 175, Columbia's main east-west thoroughfare, while Baltimore Gas and Electric Co. workers fixed the transformer, state police said. No one was injured in the incident.

About 7,000 Anne Arundel County residents were without power for more than an hour yesterday afternoon after a transformer failure.The transformer apparently blew because of a faulty part about 4 p.m., said BGE public relations director Darcell H. Guy.The outage affected private residences and businesses around Gambrills and Odenton. Traffic signals also were affected."It was a bit of a traffic mess," Guy said.BGE employees fixed the equipment by about 5: 15 p.m., and power was restored to the area.

Workers at Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Southern Maryland were working Sunday afternoon to bring a reactor online after it was shut down late Saturday when a piece of debris tossed by heavy winds from Hurricane Irene damaged a transformer. Spokesman Mark Sullivan said "Unit 1" remains off-line while workers inspect the transformer and ensure it is in "safe and workable condition. " A second reactor was working fine at 100 percent power, and the plant remains stable, Sullivan said.

The University of Maryland University College has long been at the forefront of online continuing education and job training for its mostly adult student body, so a recent proposal by UMUC President Javier Miyares to tie the school's future more closely to the private sector and adopt a learning model that lets students progress at their own pace seems like a natural evolution of the institution's history of innovation. The plan is still in the preliminary stages, with many details left to be worked out. But overall it could represent a way forward for an institution with a worldwide student body that has experienced declining enrollments, staff cuts and increased competition from for-profit schools in recent years.

On February 19, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama promised to "fundamentally transform America. " This was no mere rhetoric from the telegenic man who would go on to best Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. Rather, it was an audacious (to borrow a term) pledge to transform America's economy, culture and standing in the world. Some on the right responded with unfounded allegations against candidate Obama, claiming he was a socialist, closet Muslim or racist. All were off base, but lodged often enough to allow the mainstream press to paint anti-Obama-ites with a broad brush - often laced with its own hint of racist innuendo (This defense mechanism continues to act as sword and shield for the president and Democratic leaders in Congress.

Amelia and Thorpe Staylor's suburban garden began about 15 years ago when the former bankers downsized from a 12½-acre property in Havre de Grace to a quarter-acre lot in Abingdon. The smaller space gave them new opportunities to focus on garden design, Amelia Staylor says. But first, they had to solve the problems of a steeply sloping backyard that was susceptible to erosion. Their solution was to create three outdoor rooms and position higher plants on the downward slope. They also "borrowed" the landscape of a wooded common area to provide a backdrop to their design.

At 90 years old, Betty Williams' clearest memory of her days at Colored School 115 is running through an alley the schoolchildren thought was haunted. "It was a game to run through and not get caught," she said, describing the lane between two of the old school's buildings. Williams attended grades one through six at the school, built in 1888 in Baltimore's Waverly neighborhood, from 1929 to 1935. It was declared unfit for children in the 1920s but continued in use because of "the feeling that black children weren't deserving of anything better," said historian JoAnn Robinson.

Five community art projects, including a sculptural weather station featuring a giant pig, a children's garden full of upward-growing, kinetic "sculptures" and Baltimore's tallest mural, will begin transforming some of Baltimore's underused public spaces later this year. The Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts has announced the winners of the annual Transformative Arts Prize. This year, PNC Bank will donate more than $100,000 to enable artists working with neighborhood residents to permanently reinvent vacant lots, parks and streetscapes.

When M.P. Mariappan was born 95 years ago, England's King George V was emperor of India. Mahatma Gandhi hadn't yet taken up India's struggle for independence. Most Indians lived in small, scattered villages instead of in cities. Mariappan survived plague, the Great Depression, World War II and a 1,700-mile death trek from Burma, where he was living at the time, to his homeland. He became a respected fruit merchant who struggled to educate his eight children, boosting the family decisively from their lowly caste and into the middle class.

Juanita Johns said the road has been long for her and her son Terrence, who had to have an arm amputated after falling into a 13,000-volt electrical transformer near their home in Annapolis six weeks ago. But she sees a light at the end of the tunnel for her 8-year-old."

Police say drug dealers often break into electrical transformer boxes to hide their inventories there, and the practice endangers children who find the ground-level boxes unlocked.Two children suffered serious electrical burns this week while playing near 13,000-volt electrical transformers they found unlocked at housing projects in Baltimore and Annapolis. Both remained hospitalized today.The 4 1/2 -foot high, green transformers belong to the local housing authorities, and normally are secured by padlocks.

Keith Kratz grew up in White Hall in northern Baltimore County with happy memories of visits to the general store just across the two-lane street from his home. "It was a mom-and-pop convenience store back then," he said. "There was even a gas pump out front. " Kratz, 49, hasn't strayed far from his roots. In fact, he purchased that general store in 2001 for $170,000. His intention was to turn the property, sitting on 2.2 acres, into a home for himself and commercial space for his landscaping business, Outdoor Expressions.

Seventy years ago today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill that transformed the economic and social structure of the United States and paved the way for the post-war boom. It was called the GI Bill of Rights. One of its many unintended byproducts was the way it revolutionized higher education. Just 16 days after D-Day, as American troops began the torturous battle to retake Hitler's Europe, President Roosevelt said in his signing statement that the bill "gives emphatic notice to the men and women in our armed forces that the American people do not intend to let them down.