Around Maryland

The container ship Dali is gone. So, too, is the bulk of the 50,000 tons of wreckage that tumbled into the Patapsco River when the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed on March 26. Some of the last vestiges of the Key Bridge and its demise are the two existing ramps — which led to the bridge’s main span — still standing in the water. They, too, will be gone soon as authorities make way for a rebuilt Key Bridge by October 2028.

When the proposed Red Line transit project was canceled in 2015, Holly Arnold was angry. As the manager for the Maryland Transit Administration’s capital program at the time, it had been her job to plan out the money for the new east-west light rail. She loved the job. But then her boss’s boss canned the project. “Having to take the funding out of the program was one of the most depressing days of my career,” Arnold said in an interview Friday, just after the announcement by Gov. Wes Moore that the relaunched project would be a light rail, not a rapid bus.

After the 116,851-ton container ship Dali slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it into the Patapsco River, an alarming fact became widely known: The structures designed to protect it from ship strikes installed half a century ago were no match for the huge vessels plying the waters today. The Maryland Transportation Authority, which owns the Key Bridge, never upgraded the original system of small protective cells near its piers as cargo ships quadrupled in size over the years.

Baltimore's Brooklyn community continues to heal amid the trauma that lingers a year after a mass shooting killed two people and injured 28 others. Multiple people opened fire at a neighborhood celebration on the night of July 2, 2023. It became the worst mass shooting in Baltimore's history, taking the lives of Aaliyah Gonzalez, 18, and Kylis Fagbemi, 20.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Daniel Egtvedt heard then-President Donald Trump say that if he didn’t “fight like hell,” he was “not going to have a country anymore.” Coming from his home in western Garrett County to “stop the steal,” Egtvedt joined the crowd of marchers moving from the White House to the U.S. Capitol. There, he watched the “unfolding chaos,” prosecutors said, as rioters scaled walls, waved flags and edged closer to the building, where Congress was set to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory.

Maryland utilities are averaging more than $700 million a year in gas infrastructure spending, worsening the energy burden on low-income communities and hampering the state’s efforts to hit its ambitious clean energy and emissions reduction targets. That’s according to the Office of People’s Counsel, the state agency representing Maryland utility customers in federal and state rate cases. The warnings were included in the OPC’s most recent report, unveiled last week.