Water

The story of a 24-year-old Georgia graduate student fighting a flesh-eating disease has prompted a microbiologist with the Veterans Affairs Maryland Health Care System to speak out about the infection. Aimee Copeland lost most of her left leg after the flesh-eating bacteria necrotizing faciitis is believed to have entered a cut on her leg, according to the Associated Press, which reports she may also have to have her fingers amputated. The waterborne bacteria Aeromonas hydrophila is believed to have caused the infection.

Swimmers should avoid contact with tidal and fresh water for 48 hours after a big rain storm this summer, warns the Chesapeake Bay Foundation . The precaution is suggested by state and county health departments, but foundation officials believe it's not widely known by the public. The foundation says runoff makes the water unsafe, and the large fish kills already seen this year could be a sign that poor water quality is arriving earlier than usual. “I'm amazed how few people know our water can be unhealthy for days after a storm.

North County High School freshman Jack Andraka stood on the auditorium stage, speaking about the invention that earned him the $75,000 grand prize at the recent Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Behind him stood Dr. Anirban Maitra, a professor in the Johns Hopkins University's department of pathology who gave Jack use of his lab to craft his invention, a cheap and effective "dipstick-sensor" method of testing blood or urine to identify early-stage pancreatic cancer and other diseases.

After eight days, 15 rides and who knows how much peculiarity, John Waters has wrapped his cross-country, "Zen-like," hitchhiking journey and plans to recount his adventures in a book he'd like to call "Carsick. " The New York Times just spoke to Waters, who's coming down from his adventure in San Francisco, where he has an apartment. We learned yesterday that Waters reached his destination in no small part thanks to a 20-year-old Maryland councilman , who drove the filmmaker through several legs of the trip and for his troubles, earned a key to Waters' San Francisco pad and a personal tour of the city.

Haven't paid your city property taxes? Then you're on the city's list of owners whose properties could end up in tax sale this May, along with nearly 27,000 others who (as of last week) were behind on taxes, water bills or other city tabs. That's more than 10 percent of city properties, located in neighborhoods as varied as Poppleton and the Inner Harbor . If previous years are any judge, many owners will pay up quickly and avoid tax sale altogether. Here's an interactive map that shows where all the properties are. You can click on the dots for more details, including the address, who owns and how much the city says they owe. (Keep in mind that some may have paid already -- and at least one is an error .)

Albert Lord doesn't like to wait - not in business or on the golf course. The colorful chairman of student loan behemoth Sallie Mae, who's embroiled in a nasty fight over the failed sale of the company, has spent 40 years in the accounting and banking industries. He said that experience should have instilled in him a measure of patience, but it hasn't. Whether in traffic, at the office or on the links, Lord said, he just doesn't like to wait. He can't do much about the first two, but he's got a sure-fire solution for the last one: He's building his own, an 18-hole golf course on land he's acquired amid shuttered tobacco farms and grazing horses in southern Anne Arundel County.

The first time I watered my poinsettias a little black fly flew out. Should I be concerned? Fungus gnats often enter the home on new plants. Their larvae feed on organic material in potting soil, but also feed on roots. To break their life cycle, allow the poinsettias' potting soil to dry to a depth of about 1/2 inch in between waterings. Now that a gnat is loose in your house, follow this rule for all your other houseplants, too, so its eggs cannot hatch in another pot. I found a bag of old flour, and I'm afraid to use it for holiday baking.

Not so long ago, when life was simpler, kids amused themselves in their own neighborhoods all summer, instead of at the mall. We played tag and kick-the-can and danced away hot afternoons in the cool shower of a lawn sprinkler, shrieking as we dashed through the spray and leaped across the little rainbows in it.Now we're grown-up techno-wizards with pagers and cell phones, but sprinklers of all kinds are still an important part of the life of the garden....

Editor: I am responding to the news of yet another drowning in Deer Creek. Many such deaths can be avoided by an awareness of how they occur and of what to do. A person standing on rocks in moving water that is only as high as their knees can easily lose their balance and as their foot slips it can wedge into a crevice in the rocks. The enormous power of the moving water will push them down and hold them down, resulting in a drowning death. To avoid foot entrapment, one can fall backwards into an imaginary inner tube, drawing up the knees and feet out of harms way. Then the hands and arms swing the feet downstream to meet obstacles, protecting the head.

Water ought to be treasured, not wasted Water is the lifeline of all creation. We humans are the conscience of life; therefore, it falls on each of us, the responsibility to care for, share, and save water. For people to water their grass — a poor habitat site that usually bounces back after a shower — is totally irresponsible. It shows a lack of knowledge, or a flaunting denial of the importance of safeguarding our water. If people won't stop watering their grass, then let's make a law forbidding such blatant waste of our precious resource.

Another bit of the increasingly oddball John Waters hitchhiking mystery has been revealed. We knew the filmmaker started his cross-country adventure in Baltimore. And we knew a touring indie band had picked him up in Ohio. We also knew a married couple helped ferry him to from Kansas to Denver. But we had no idea -- until now -- how Waters made it from here to the Buckeye State ... and beyond. The Frederick News-Post helped clear that up today with a crazy story that details how a Myersville, Maryland councilman named Brett Bidle spent four delicious hours in the car with Waters in Maryland, dropped him in Ohio, and then, defying belief, hooked up with the director again further west.

For the fourth consecutive year, Baltimore officials are proposing a 9 percent increase to water and sewer rates — and the charges will continue to grow indefinitely to cover the costs of major projects, they say. The proposed rate increases come as the Department of Public Works has been grappling with high-profile billing problems that have been attributed to faulty water meters, outdated computer programs and, in some neighborhoods, fictitious meter...

Something's rotten on the Baltimore area waterfront. Fish are washing ashore by the thousands in a mass die-off that officials say appears to be caused by a weather-driven worsening of the pollution that chronically plagues the Chesapeake Bay. State investigators expanded their probe Wednesday into what they believe are algae-related fish kills in Marley, Furnace and Curtis creeks in Glen Burnie, raising the estimated death toll there tenfold, while...

A recent article about two former Department of Public Works meter readers did not accurately reflect the proactive steps taken by DPW to reduce water meter billing errors ("City official: Lazy workers faked water meter readings," May 15). The agency's new quality control processes were instrumental in identifying, addressing and resolving the issue by removing the two employees from government service before the reporters' inquiry. The truth is that when a pattern of errors emerged in December of 2011, the former employees were confronted, and they were quickly removed.

It's 1943. First light colors the summer Chesapeake Bay off the fishing village of Rock Hall, revealing a 6-year-old boy rowing a wooden skiff, struggling to do it quietly, so not to scare the blue crabs his great-grandfather dips as they run their trotline. The crabs back then came up "thick as mosquitoes at dark," several at once attacking the eel baits tied along the trotline. As they work, the old man teaches the boy skills he'd need in the water business; he also speaks with sadness about how the state arbitrarily changed the fishing rules, ending his long career as a top bay captain.

A warning against water contact in the lower Patapsco River issued nearly two months ago has been lifted, the Anne Arundel County health department announced Monday. Health officials had ordered an emergency closure of the river downstream from Annapolis Road in Brooklyn and warned against swimming or other water contact after sewage spilled March 25 from a Baltimore County pumping station. Workers halted the spill soon afterward, according to a spokesman for the county public works department.

I live in the Phoenix area of Baltimore County and we didn't get power back in our homes until Sept. 2. I understand that power has to be restored to hospitals, nursing homes, emergency treatment centers and other places of critical importance. But BGE should have given more priority to the homes that depend on well water. When the electricity is out, well pumps do not function, leaving our homes without running water and plumbing as well as power. I prepared for the storm by filling pots and bathtubs with water, but it wasn't enough to carry us through six full days without power.

For nearly a year, I have been trying to re-immerse myself into the sport and skill of swimming — more specifically open-water swimming, in which one entrusts the body and mind to a lake or bay of some unknown power and depth. This is more terrifying than that calm sentence implies. Sure, I have been swimming in pools — clear, visible, well-demarcated lanes of civility — for nearly 40 years. But this hardly prepares one for murk, chop, tides, wind, waves, passing vegetation that wraps the feet and legs, cold spots and warm currents.

Filmmaker John Waters' crazy cross-country hitchhiking journey continues, with word Monday that he sped through Kansas with a middle-aged married couple from Illinois. Laura Broviac and Michael McHaney, she a county Democratic Party chief, he a circuit judge, were motoring through Junction City, Kansas, this weekend and according to wjbdradio.com, saw a man near an exit ramp holding a sign. She thought he looked like Waters and after a quick Google search, found that the Baltimore filmmaker was in fact hitchhiking across country.

John Waters could have been starring in a John Waters movie today when he was picked up hitchhiking in Ohio by members of an indie rock band. It's so weird, it can only be true. The website DCist had the amazing details. The band Here We Go Magic was motoring in a van through eastern Ohio, close to the Pennsylvania border, when they pass a dude on the side of the road holding up a sign. They pick the dude up, who turns out to be Baltimore's own quirky filmmaker Waters.