High-Tech Telephone and 'the Rest of the Story'

Every once in a while as a reporter you feel like a dog. (OK, you feel like a dog more often than I care to admit.) Today is one of those days. Specifically, I feel like one of those dogs who chases his tail in circles.

Sometimes when you're chasing a story or news breaks you find yourself making as many calls as you can as fast as you can, only to get either silence or an echo chamber of sources who repeat to you what little you already know. They're trying to be helpful, it's just that, well, they can't.

Sometimes you catch your tail. Perhaps unsurprisingly, you often find that you wished you hadn't.

Such was the case this morning when our regional editor texted me around 8:30 a.m. "On MARC train. Just announced sewer line burst in rockville," was all it said.

After sending an email to City Hall to see if it was a city sewer line and making a couple of inquisitive phone calls to the Maryland Transit Administration and the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, all I could come up with was an Associated Press story posted on WJLA.com. The story also popped up on www.wbaltv.com and The Daily Record sites out of Baltimore, where it was retweeted by Twitter users.

Despite the story—and my boss's text—no one with whom I initially spoke in MTA or WSSC's media shops new anything about it.

There were some signal problems on the Brunswick line near Barnesville that delayed two trains by 30 minutes, MTA spokesman John Wesley reported.

WSSC didn't know anything.

Then, a little before noon, I got a call from JoAnn Grbach, a spokeswoman with the City of Rockville.

It was part of the city's sewer system, she said. But it wasn't a burst line or backup.

Last week, workers on the CSX tracks near the Twinbrook Metro station damaged a manhole cover, leaving a 10-inch down pipe exposed, Grbach said.

Since then, two- to three-inch diameter stones—presumably from the track bed—had filled the hole, pushing sewage closer to—but not actually on to—the surface, she said.

A citizen spotted it on Monday night and city workers came out to clear the debris. The city also called on a contractor to "vacuum" out the drain.

"So it's in service, everything's flowing," Grbach said.

No reason to rush out with a camera to shoot photos of a MARC train slogging through the muck.

Thanks to I.J. Hudson from WSSC and MTA's Wesley, both of whom followed up a short time later with much of the same information. Hudson also noted how Twitter is helpful—he recently used it to help his daughter out of a traffic jam while she was traveling in North Carolina, he said—but can also be a bit like a game of telephone when someone doesn't get the facts quite right.

So there's my Paul Harvey moment. Now, on with "the rest of the story" edition of "The Rundown":

• Town Square will light up tonight (hopefully not due to Mother Nature). Students from the Corcoran College of Art and Design Festival of Lights are participating in a daylong in Lyon, France. From 5 to 10 p.m., the Rooftop at Town Square will feature live entertainment, food and beverages and a stained glass workshop for kids—who get in for free with a $5 adult admission. Corcoran students will put their creations on display with a free light show at 8:30 p.m.
• The Rooftop's calendar of events for this season is quickly filling up. It's not all "boom-sha, boom-sha" dance parties. Beginning tomorrow, The Rooftop hosts Zumba Wednesdays.
• Need a date to take up on the roof? Take a single mom. (Or maybe meet one there?) Rockville ranks on the Match.com's Top 10 cities for dating single moms.
• Town Square's summer concert series returns on Thursday with Cletus Kennelly and Lori Kelley from 6-8 p.m. Chairs and blankets are welcomed for these free concerts and Austin Grill will feature a beer garden in Town Square, just in time for .
• Friday is the deadline to nominate members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community to be honored at the Capital Pride Heroes Gala and Silent Auction. Heroes are selected for their outstanding actions to improve the lives of LGBT people in the region and across the country and are honored at numerous events as part of Capital Pride, the annual celebration of the LGBT community in the nation's capital. The 36th annual Capital Pride celebration will take place June 2–12.
• "Like" Rockville Patch on Facebook. Follow us @RockvillePatch on Twitter.