ABCDE METRO tuesday, july 27, 2010 LOCAL HOME PAGE 77, 9 a.m. 84, noon 87, 5 p.m. 79, 9 p.m.


Obituaries James E. Akins, 83, known as “Mr. Oil” in the State Department, predicted the risks of U.S. dependence on Mideast oil. B6


Liquor sale slip-ups Use our database to find Virginia businesses that have been charged with selling alcohol to underage customers. Go to PostLocal.com.


VIRGINIA


‘It’s such pain’ A Fairfax man shot to death while on a job-interview trip in California is remembered as a devout Christian, devoted family man, and generous host and friend. B4


The power of community keeps neighborhood going Storm outages abound


in Rock Creek Woods, but so does goodwill


by Theresa Vargas


Blame the storm: On Sunday night, Pati Young was offering refuge. By Monday night, she was seeking it.


On Sunday, as a powerhouse of a storm stomped through the Washington region, knocking trees out of its way, Young opened her Rock Creek Woods home to two families that had lost power in their District neighborhoods. By 10:45 p.m., guest beds were made, preparations done. One of the families had arrived; the oth- er was on its way. That’s when Young heard an all too familiar sound. Think muf-


fled fireworks. “It makes that boom, and you know exactly what it is,” Young said. The transformer blew. Power was out. Refuge was lost. On Monday, most residents of Rock Creek Woods, a neighbor- hood of 76 historic homes just north of Kensington in Mont- gomery County, were among the hundreds of thousands in the re- gion without power — a frustrat- ingly familiar feeling for a com-


munity that also went dark for days during February’s snow- storms. “We added it up to be 92


hours,” Young said. Ninety-two hours in which neighbors who could get around checked on those who couldn’t. Ninety-two hours in which those with elec- tricity opened guest rooms to oth- ers. Ninety-two hours in which residents learned that when the power company failed them, they


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could depend on each other. Here in this neighborhood of mid-century modern houses, power outages are no longer counted in blips that make micro- wave clocks blink. With a power line dangling in the middle of the street, many anticipate — al- though they hope to be wrong — that theirs will be among the last neighborhoods to see the lights


PETULA DVORAK


Think the bay’s a sewer? Don’t insult the sewer


They jump in, flip-dive, splash and kick around, undaunted by the jellyfish or the color of the water. To them, it’s the brown,


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brackish, beautiful Chesapeake Bay. To others, it looks about as


inviting as a sewer. “I’m not going in; it just looks so gross,” is something I hear at least once each season, when a friend who has joined us on the bay won’t dive in. I’m reluctant to finally say it, but the water weenies might have a point, particularly after a pounding rainstorm like the one we had Sunday. This was made clear by some


eye-opening and disgusting tests done this month by a group of students in a University of Maryland fellowship program called News 21. With the help of Sally G. Hornor, a biology professor at Anne Arundel Community College who is an expert in the field of estuary biology, the students compared samples from the Chesapeake Bay with actual toilet water. Not Ty-D-Bol-blue fresh water, but some seriously dirty water — the kind that has marinated a substantial load of its intended contents for four hours without being flushed. The upshot: In some places


after it’s rained, the Chesapeake Bay is six times dirtier than the unflushed john. Let me take a moment to shudder. We swam in the bay a week ago. State and federal


environmental folks frequently test the bacteria levels in spots all over the bay where folks are most likely to swim. There are certain acceptable levels of enterococci, the bacteria found in the poop of humans and warm-blooded animals, and when those levels are exceeded, that’s when you see the “no swimming” warnings go up. In its water quality reports,


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t turns out my kids have basically been swimming in toilet water this summer.


B DC MD VA S


JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON Sweet success


A financial adviser collects coins from an M&M machine and prods co-workers to give more, and groups large and small chip in to help the Send a Kid to Camp campaign. B2


Time may heal budget wounds


Government workforce in Montgomery may get 117 years of comp leave


by Michael Laris


To salve the wounds left by an unusually tight budget, Mont- gomery County Executive Isiah Leggett has agreed to give county employees the equivalent of more than 100 years off. The compensatory leave, es- sentially paid vacation, would be doled out in chunks: The coun- ty’s general government workers and police officers would each get 26 hours of extra paid leave; many firefighters would get 48 hours off, or six additional days. If the approximately 8,700


government employees who are covered took all that time, they’d be away from their duties for about 117 years, according to a County Council analysis. Leggett (D) and leaders of the


PHOTOS BY MARK GAIL/THE WASHINGTON POST Yahye Wehelie looks through a family photo album. He was stuck in Cairo for about two months after being placed on a no-fly list. Truly no place like home


U.S. citizen detained by FBI mid-trip in Egypt didn’t know he was on no-fly list by Ian Shapira


Y


ahye Wehelie, 26, born and raised in Fairfax County, was supposed to have been home this spring, telling friends


and family about his 18-month stay in Yemen: the technology classes, his quest for a Muslim bride, the wedding and reception that featured a DJ playing music by Michael Jackson and Celine Dion. Instead, while on his way home in early May, Wehelie was stopped while changing planes in Cairo. It turns out he had been placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list. From that moment un- til last weekend, Wehelie, a grad- uate of Lake Braddock Secondary School in Burke, was stranded in Egypt, shuttling between a $16-a- night Cairo hotel room and a win- dowless room at the U.S. Embas- sy. There, he said, FBI special agents fed him Oreos and chips and told him he might never see Virginia again. In his first extensive interview


since his return home July 17, We- helie said the FBI peppered him with questions about possible ties to terrorists. In about six ex- hausting sessions over his 11 weeks in Egypt, agents made We-


helie log his daily activities dat- ing back several months. They asked whether he was a “devout” Muslim. They probed about con- nections he might have to Islamic radicals, including Sharif Mobley,


an alleged al-Qaeda recruit from New Jersey whom Wehelie met on a street in Yemen.


And then their tone changed, morphing into entreaties to help protect his native land: Might Wehelie consider being a mole in the Muslim community when he got home? “I’ve lived in Virginia my whole


life,” Wehelie said, dressed in loose jeans and a striped Ralph Lauren shirt. “I listen to rap. I play basketball. I watch football. I wasn’t brought up the way these crazy people [terrorists] are brought up. I just want to live on with my life. I don’t want to be an informant. I want to work for an IT company. I want to be a nor- mal person.” Wehelie — who says he was in


Yahye Wehelie’s mother, Shamsa Noor, wanted him to learn Arabic.


“I’ve lived in Virginia my whole life. I listen to rap. . . . I wasn’t brought up the way these crazy people


[terrorists] are brought up.” — Yahye Wehelie


Yemen because his mother sent him to learn Arabic and find a Muslim wife — sees his experi- ence as what could be described as a Kafkaesque ordeal in which he agonized for weeks over how to prove that he was no threat to his native land. But the govern-


stranded continued on B5 D.C. COUNCIL CHAIRMAN’S RACE


Orange returns, with updated focus Former D.C. Council member runs for chairman, calling for fiscal restraint


“Vince is very, very focused, by Ann E. Marimow JUANA ARIAS FOR THE WASHINGTON POST


Despite missteps, Vincent Orange was viewed as a hard-working, fiscally savvy dealmaker during his D.C. Council terms.


t a retail conference in Las Vegas a decade ago, Vincent Bernard Orange Sr. helped plant the seeds with Home Depot representatives that eventually led to the transformation of the District’s car impoundment lot, which for years was an eyesore for the Northeast Washington communities he represented on the D.C. Council.


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very well prepared. He was right up there in making that happen,” said former mayor Anthony A. Williams, who remembers the Las Vegas trip with Orange as a “hit line drive, right down the middle.” Former colleagues and observ-


ers say that in his two terms on the council, Orange was a bull- dog for Ward 5, pressing for the redevelopment projects that cre- ated a bustling shopping center


This is the second of two articles looking at the leading candidates for D.C. Council chairman in the Sept. 14 Democratic primary. Yesterday: Council member Kwame Brown (D-At Large).


on Brentwood Road at a time when major retailers had little interest in locating in the city. His penchant for promoting


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county’s public employee unions signed agreements for the addi- tional time off in the weeks after the passage of a $4.27 billion county budget in May that trimmed overall government spending for the first time in more than 40 years. To close steep gaps, county leaders froze employee pay, imposed fur- loughs and broke provisions in negotiated labor contracts, in- cluding a scheduled 10.5 percent raise for most firefighters. Leggett said his willingness to provide employees with addi- tional comp time for one year is critical for morale and would ac- knowledge what employees have given up. “The granting of addi- tional leave is a reasonable and modest concession in light of the


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Red Line crash verdict may be felt nationwide


by Ann Scott Tyson


The announcement by the Na- tional Transportation Safety Board on Tuesday on the likely cause of the June 2009 Metro crash might have major safety and financial implications for transit systems nationwide. Federal investigators have fo-


cused on the failure of Metro’s automatic train-control system in the accident, in which one train slammed into the back of another that was stopped north of the Fort Totten Metro station in Northeast Washington. The accident killed a train operator and eight passengers, injured scores of others and caused $25 million in damage. But the NTSB meeting Tuesday


is expected to go well beyond a narrow conclusion on the causes of last year’s crash, both because of the spate of accidents that have plagued Metro and possible consequences for other subway systems, according to Metro and NTSB officials. “My expectation is this will be broader than the usual technical report,” said Mortimer Downey, a federally appointed member of Metro’s board of directors. The NTSB report “could well go be- yond [the crash] to talk about general safety concerns.” Questions remain about how Metro would carry out the rec-


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