Rumor mill ellicott city flood8/1/2023 Talk to residents, business owners, and government workers and they’ll tell it to you straight: It has been a long, hard slog. With such widespread destruction, it was never going to be an easy recovery-and it hasn’t been. And this doesn’t even begin to touch the damage inflicted on residences and hundreds of cars. The list goes on: Portalli’s Italian restaurant, Shoemaker Country furniture store, Bean Hollow coffee shop, The Forget-Me-Not Factory, Tea on the Tiber. And just up the street, Craig Coyne Jewelers was obliterated, too. Tammy Beideman’s clothing boutique, Sweet Elizabeth Jane, was wiped out. The owners of Tersiguel’s French Country Restaurant lost about $250,000 worth of equipment and foodstuffs, including a painstakingly curated wine collection. ![]() “I mean, the day after, I was shell-shocked,” he says.Įmergency crews surveying the damage on Main Street. ![]() And then, most dramatically, he became an unwitting viral video star when he and a few others formed a human chain to pull a woman to safety from her soon-to-be-swamped VW bug. Next, he watched helplessly as his car floated away in the current rushing down Main Street. Instead, Barnes watched as a wall of water burst through his back door, eventually flooding his store’s basement all the way to the ceiling, ruining all of his online retail and backup stock in the process. “I was just planning on setting up dehumidifiers and fans and waiting it out,” he says. Jason Barnes, the owner of All Time Toys, was on his way home from work when he decided to turn around and check on his shop’s basement, which sometimes takes on water during storms. And while mourning the dead, residents and business owners struggled to understand their own losses, too. As far as anyone could remember, theirs were the first deaths to result from flooding since Hurricane Agnes in 1972. Each had come to Ellicott City for a fun night out-Watsula for a paint night with friends Blevins on a date-only to be swept to their deaths in the turgid waters that sluiced down Main Street. On Sunday morning, the bodies of Jessica Watsula, a 35-year-old single mother from Pennsylvania, and Joseph Anthony Blevins, a 38-year-old director of financial aid at the University of Baltimore, were recovered. “It really looked like Katrina, just on a smaller Scale,” says County Executive Allan Kittleman. “It really looked like Katrina, just on a smaller scale.” “I got to Main Street about 11 o’clock that night, but it was probably the next morning, when light came, when I really saw it and could better comprehend it,” he recalls. Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman, one of the first officials on the scene that night, says it took him some time to process the scope of the destruction. I didn’t even know where businesses were supposed to be,” remembers Maureen Sweeney Smith, the executive director of the Ellicott City Partnership, the town’s de facto chamber of commerce. With all these factors at play, flooding can and does occur here regularly, even during modest storms. ![]() In addition, three substantial tributaries of the Patapsco-the Hudson, the Tiber, and the New Cut-thread through the area, sometimes running directly underneath buildings. Tucked inside a narrow valley, the town’s sloping Main Street acts as a funnel, whisking runoff from parking lots, rooftops, sidewalks, and streets down to the Patapsco River at the eastern end of town. ![]() This kind of deluge would be cause for alarm anywhere, but it’s especially problematic in Ellicott City, a former mill town that owes its very existence to its ability to channel water. What meteorologists could see-but many of those patronizing Ellicott City establishments could not-was that a line of rain-soaked clouds had merged into a mega storm that was moving west to east across the region, with Ellicott City right in its crosshairs.Īs anticipated, the heavens opened, dumping 6.6 inches of rain over the town, much of it falling in one particularly intense two-hour period. Precipitation continued steadily, however, and at 7:18 p.m., the National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning.
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