Around Maryland

On Jan. 2, 2023, during a pivotal Monday night National Football League game, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin tackled Cincinnati Bengals receiver Tee Higgins. It was a standard tackle. One that the then 24-year-old had been making for years playing the game. Hamlin got up, adjusted his face mask and then collapsed a few seconds later, laying motionless on the field. His heart stopped beating due to a condition known as commotio cordis, in which the heart stops beating after a severe blow to the chest at the exact wrong time and location during heartbeats.

Overall, crime increased in Montgomery County for the third year in a row. In a briefing before the Montgomery County Council Public Safety Committee, legislative analyst Susan Farag laid out the data: Auto thefts spiked by 131%, Carjackings rose by 28.6%, Crimes under the category “crimes against society,” including drug offenses, fell by 13.8%, Crimes under the category “crimes against persons,” including homicides, rose 6.6%.

Some 6,000 Anne Arundel County residents will soon find out whether they need to check their water pipes for lead. Federal guidelines require that every water utility across the country announce publicly by October how many water pipes need to be checked for lead and report the results. WBAL-TV 11 News Investigates was the first to report in November that some 230,000 residents in Baltimore City and Baltimore County need to check their pipes for lead.

PJM, the nation’s largest grid operator, is changing how it plans transmission upgrades needed to ensure reliable service for the 65 million people who live in its footprint. The effort comes after plenty of criticism of how the regional transmission organization, responsible for coordinating the flow of electricity in all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, including Maryland, has traditionally conducted planning.

The world’s largest library has launched a new campaign to record and archive millions of COVID-19 pandemic stories. The Library of Congress is calling for many different American voices to share their experiences for posterity. “You can read something in a history book, but to hear someone’s voice tell of their lived experience is immensely powerful,” said Nicole Saylor, director of the library’s American Folklife Center, which is leading the project.

At 8:30 a.m. each day, before the doors of Baltimore’s National Aquarium open to the public, its resident bottlenose dolphins begin the first of their six daily training and feeding sessions, structured much like a school day for human children. Lessons are taught, knowledge is tested, and rewards given by the humans who represent the center of their universe.

Chants of “three, two, one…LEGO!” rang out repeatedly on Sunday in the Urbana High School gym, where 32 teams of students were participating in the Frederick County qualifier for the FIRST LEGO League Challenge. The FIRST LEGO League Challenge is an engineering competition for elementary and middle school students between the ages of 9 and 14. Each team has at least two adult coaches and can have anywhere from two to 10 members.

Baltimore County’s superintendent of schools proposed cutting hundreds of jobs, but the school board won’t know which ones until after it votes on the $2.5 billion budget at the end of February. That was by design. When Superintendent Myriam Rogers proposed her fiscal 2025 budget at the beginning of January, she highlighted $29 million in savings from eliminating around 500 positions, most of them vacant.