ABCDE METRO tuesday, september 7, 2010 LOCAL HOME PAGE 72, 9 a.m. 83, noon 88, 5 p.m. 79, 9 p.m.


Obituaries Jefferson Thomas volunteered in 1957 to break Central High School’s color barrier as a member of the Little Rock Nine. B4


On the road again The Washington region’s freeways, buses and trains will be crowded Tuesday. Stay ahead of the traffic game with Dr. Gridlock at PostLocal.com.


VIRGINIA


Three dead in car crash The owner of Nichols Hardware, a historic family-owned shop in Loudoun County, his wife and one of her relatives were killed in a single-car accident near Front Royal on Sunday. B6


JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON


Misplaced rage? Using the horn as a rebuke isn’t usually helpful when frustrated by traffic, but it’s not always easy to resist the urge. B2


PHOTOS BY KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST


Royce Hanson, center, talks with John and Gertrude Layne at a store in Germantown on a campaign stop Thursday. Hanson is running for Montgomery County Council.


Craig Rice greets Sharon Reid as he campaigns for County Council in Montgomery Village. Rice decided not to run for a second term in Maryland’s House of Delegates.


Worlds collide in Montgomery council contest


2 DEMOCRATS, STARK DIFFERENCES Decades of experience vs. political pragmatism


by Michael Laris Royce Hanson was born to an


unwed mother at a church mis- sion in Oklahoma City in 1931. He was adopted as an infant


and at age 7 moved with his new family to a log cabin in an impov- erished corner of northwestern


Arkansas, not far from where the founding family of Wal-Mart would get its start. Craig Rice arrived to a much


different world. It was 1972, Ro- berta Flack topped the Billboard chart, and his parents drove him from a District hospital to a mod- est single-family home in subur- ban Montgomery County.


The two men, with starkly dif- ferent histories and professional experiences, are the leading Dem- ocratic candidates in a race for the sole Montgomery County Council seat with no incumbent running. Rice gave up a chance to run for


a second term in Maryland’s House of Delegates to try to repre- sent a sprawling district that cov- ers more than half of the 495- square-mile county. Hanson end- ed his second stint as chairman of the county’s planning board this year — his first began in 1972 — and jumped into an already crowded contest.


At stake in the Sept. 14 primary is a choice between generations of leadership, personal styles and governing philosophies that pit Hanson’s decades of experience and expansive thinking against Rice’s deal-making skills and po- litical pragmatism. Although the two men began life more than 40 years and 1,300 miles apart, their introduction to community work started in the same place: in homes with chal- lenges and outward-looking par- ents. Hanson’s father served in World War I and had a fourth-


grade education but made his way onto the school board in Arkansas (after another member drove his Model T into a ditch). In Okla- homa, Chester Hanson had helped with local campaigning and became a deputy county clerk responsible for court and land records — the type of documents that would underlie his son’s eventual work shaping land use. Hanson’s mother, Ila Mae, ral- lied other mothers in Arkansas to improve living conditions. “All the kids in the school drank from a


council continued on B6 B DC MD VA S


Life after Rhee: How D.C. schools might look


Supporters fear erosion of gains; critics foresee continued progress


by Bill Turque The scenario is familiar in the


District and big cities across the country: An ambitious leader is appointed to reform schools. Pol- icies and practices are upended, five-year plans unveiled, a flurry of initiatives launched with high hopes. After two or three years, political pressure from interests and constituencies unhappy with the changes forces the newcomer out.


Enter a successor, with a new


agenda. That is what many supporters


PETULA DVORAK


Mom needs a cure for volunteering hangover


like I did after that college week- end in Ensenada. Flashbacks and regrets.


I


Shame. My editor had a talk with me. A colleague later explained: “We’re just worried about you.” My husband wasn’t just wor-


ried. He was angry. “You’re a mother. You have a full-time job. You’re a wife. You can’t live like this.” That weekend was a new low


in my addiction, and I’m ready to admit it. I am a classroom volun- teeraholic.


Rare is the tutoring, baking,


fundraiser-hosting, field-trip- chaperoning opportunity that I pass up. On that lost weekend in June, commitments I had made with a quick “sure, no problem” months earlier came crashing to- gether on consecutive days. I baked, cooked, organized, shut- tled and ran so hard, I slept about three hours in three days. I felt so hung over that I looked around to make sure I wasn’t in Vegas with a tiger in my hotel room.


So as the new school year opens for hundreds of thousands of families in Virginia, I am promising those around me that I will give up excessive volun- teering, one day at a time. And that’s the last thing schools want to hear today. From the sound of the doom- and-gloom budget battles that escalated in the spring, it seems as though our children could be heading into classrooms with dirt floors and stone tablets. Prince William County schools


cut 200 jobs this year, as did Fairfax County schools, where parents will have to pay for many activities that once were free. Most classes in Prince George’s


dvorak continued on B2 XIAOMEI CHEN/THE WASHINGTON POST Buster Payne, left, and Brandon Robertson work from an energized bucket truck to repair a power line in Remington on Aug. 26. High-voltage bonding


Grueling hours working with live power lines help elite crews build trust crews repair


by Kafia A. Hosh


On a recent morning last month, a Dominion Power crew made the bumpy ride to a dam- aged transmission line in Fau- quier County, bouncing in a bucket truck along the make- shift dirt and gravel road. They stopped near a 150-foot tower in a clearing filled with rocks, mud and branches. The crew is among an exclu- sive group of linemen who work on energized power lines. Do- minion’s 40 transmission line- men are all trained in the work, referred to as barehanding be- cause the crews wear special suits and gloves that allow them to touch the powered lines. Few- er than 20 utilities out of about 200 in the nation have bare-


handing teams. Dominion’s


high-voltage transmission lines that carry electricity into sub- stations and then into smaller distribution lines that power homes, businesses and public buildings. Millions of customers across the country benefit, in- cluding high-profile clients such as the Department of Homeland Security and several Northern Virginia data centers responsible for half of the world’s Internet traffic. Barehanding is “a huge part of being able to keep our cus- tomers from being exposed to an outage,” said Wade Bunn, manager of Dominion’s trans- mission line crews. “That is why we try to work on as many of these energized lines as pos- sible.”


The unusual profession has brought this group of six line- men closer together. For one thing, they spend 10 hours a day, four days a week with each oth- er, deepening their bond. But it helps that they have similar backgrounds: All are from small Virginia towns — Orange, Afton and Culpeper among them — and many started with Domin- ion right out of high school. When it comes to experience, though, they are an eclectic group, ranging from two to 32 years as a lineman. In addition to their skills, Bunn said, an effective crew re- quires the right mix of person- alities. He once fired a transmis- sion lineman in North Carolina because of his attitude. “It’s a huge benefit to have the guys get along,” Bunn said. “I’ve


had it the other way, and I tell you, it doesn’t work.”


At the work site, Cecil Spitler, the team’s newly minted super- visor, gathered the rest of the crew together for a pre-job briefing. He explained that they were repairing a 580,000-volt transmission line that had been clipped by a bullet, probably from a hunter’s gun. The dam- age was barely visible — just two small, dangling pieces of wire. The team discovered it during a routine patrol in the spring, when the line made a loud buzz- ing noise that sounded “kind of like frying bacon,” Spitler said. Spitler went over their indi- vidual tasks, noting that the job to repair the wire would require two linemen, while the rest


power continued on B2


remember the day I hit bot- tom: I was a wreck. My body ached. My head hurt. I felt


of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee fear will happen if Fenty los- es to D.C. Council Chairman Vin- cent C. Gray in the Sept. 14 Demo- cratic mayoral primary. Gray has not committed to re- taining the chancellor Fenty named in 2007, and he has crit- icized Rhee for her hard-edged management style and prickly re- lations with some community stakeholders. A Washington Post poll taken last month showed that support for Rhee among black res- idents has fallen sharply over two years, to 27 percent. More than three-fourths of D.C. public school children are African American. Rhee has hinted broadly that she cannot work for Gray because she doubts his resolve to support the unpopular personnel and budget decisions that have marked her tenure. She has said that if Fenty is reelected, she’s pre- pared to stay for his second term. If she leaves, her successor would be the school system’s fourth head in 10 years — not


rhee continued on B4


D.C. mayoral candidates labor through the holiday


by Nikita Stewart


District Mayor Adrian M. Fenty roused supporters with a fiery pep talk Monday morning in Ward 5 while chief rival D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray visited the mayor’s home base, Ward 4, and tried to win over voters by en- gaging them in long, one-on-one conversations.


With the Sept. 14 Democratic


primary a week away, there was no Labor Day break for the leading candidates or the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics, which con- tinued to conduct early voting at four satellite polling sites and at the board’s headquarters at Judi- ciary Square. The Chevy Chase Community Center in Ward 3, which received the most voters Saturday, again had the highest turnout Monday, with 1,032 visitors. Hine Junior High School in Ward 6 followed, with 658. Turkey Thicket Recrea- tion Center in Ward 5, Southeast Tennis and Learning Center in Ward 8 and the board headquar- ters had 583, 220 and 61 visitors respectively, according to the elec- tions board. An electronic count showed


that 7,956 people have voted since the headquarters opened for early voting Aug. 30 and the neighbor- hood sites opened Saturday. Between 700 and 800 others cast provisional ballots while some entered but did not vote, said Alysoun McLaughlin, spokes- woman for the elections board.


mayor continued on B4


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58