Water Damage

The boys basketball game between Digital Harbor and No. 11 Lake Clifton on Friday has been moved. The Rams were supposed to host Friday's game, but because of water damage in the Digital Harbor gym, the Lakers will host the game instead. Friday's JV game is set to tip at 3:45 p.m. at Lake Clifton, while the varsity game will follow at 5:15.

The Dunbar at Digital Harbor boys basketball games set for 5:15 p.m. Friday has been postponed due to water damage to the gym floor. The game has been rescheduled for Jan. 18 and will now be played at Dunbar.  The junior varsity teams will tip off at 3:45 p.m. with the varsity to follow at 5:15.     

Hurricane Irene apparently was even worse than anyone thought. Forget about downed power lines - the storm knocked out Baltimore's sweet tooth. For much of the past three weeks, nearly 600 area stores and countless customers have been denied their accustomed fix of Berger Cookies, which for the past 175 years have been one of Baltimore's best-loved snacks. Though the cookies are locally manufactured, there were none to be found, because the boxes in which they were to have been wrapped were a waterlogged, soggy mess.

Todd Ferrante, an Ocean City business owner and resident, was surveying the storm's damage Sunday morning at about 8 a.m. from the boardwalk, which had some small piles of sand caked to it. The damage he saw, he said, was cosmetic. "I have to say, Ocean City was lucky again," Ferrante said. He was looking for signs of wear at the Kite Loft, a store on the boardwalk that is in the first row of businesses along the shore, that his friend owns. The only damage he had to report back to the store's owner was one shingle missing from the roof.

An order by a U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge has cleared the way for a lender to foreclose on the Jefferson Building, where work on a planned Staybridge Suites Hotel stalled during the financial downturn. RL BB Financial LLC had been prevented from foreclosing on the former office building after the developer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2010. An order Tuesday by Judge Nancy V. Alquist lifted a stay preventing a sale. The developer, 101 Charles Street LLC, completed about half the renovations, the order says.

How many Donna's were there? In the days following the Park Plaza fire that closed the flagship location, I tried to piece together all of various Donna's cafes, coffee bars, kiosks and full-service restaurants that have come and gone over the past 18 years. Somewhere in the mid-1990s, though, when there were cafes and kiosks in bookstores and malls stretching from Bel Air to Columbia, the timeline unravels, and not even principal owners Donna Crivello and Alan Hirsch have been able to produce a full and detailed timeline.

Holding a little wooden toy and a pair of computer discs that she had salvaged from her desk, Denise Miller Martin was sobbing, her face lined with tears. "Your office is gone, Donna — it's burned out," she kept telling Donna Crivello, owner of the Mount Vernon restaurant that bears her given name, now closed in the aftermath of Tuesday's fire. Martin's revelation came Wednesday after she had inspected the devastated second floor of 800 N. Charles St., which housed both the law firm in which she worked and the offices Crivello shared with her business partner.

A five-alarm fire tore through a pair of historic buildings facing Mount Vernon Place early Tuesday, causing heavy damage to restaurants and offices in the heart of the city's cultural district. The blaze broke out about 1:30 a.m. in the 800 block of Charles Street in a pair of four-story brick buildings that house Donna's Coffee Bar, restaurants Indigma and My Thai, and several offices. More than 150 firefighters, many of whom had battled a five-alarm fire on The Block earlier in their shift, worked to control the fire.

Crews shoveled charred debris and soaked piles of ashes Tuesday afternoon from a pair of historic Mt. Vernon buildings that were badly damaged in a five-alarm fire, the city's second in fewer than 12 hours. Owners of three restaurants in the brick buildings in the 800 block of North Charles Street said that they could be closed for months for repairs, following the blaze that burned for more than four hours. Several streets around Mount Vernon Place remained blocked off, a sign that the afternoon commute could be slowed for the second day in a row. A massive fire Monday afternoon in The Block, the city's red-light district, slowed traffic to a crawl.

Firefighters have extinguished a blaze on the roof of Pazo, a Mediterranean restaurant in the 1400 block of Aliceanna St. in Baltimore. The blaze started at 11 a.m. Tuesday and was under control by 12:30 p.m., said Chief Kevin Cartwright, a Fire Department spokesman. While the blaze officially was only one alarm, Cartwright said the department called for additional units, resulting in about 40 firefighters at the scene. He said it took about an hour to extinguish. There were no injuries, he said.