Kittleman and Councilman Jon Weinstein, Ellicott City’s representative on the council, proposed the five-year mitigation plan during a legislative hearing on Aug. “I can’t risk my son’s life and my life any longer.” “My only other choice if this plan didn’t move forward and we weren’t made safer was to walk away from my home,” said Woodruff. She shares a historic home on Main Street with her 11-year-old son, and watched the last two floods from her second-story window. The first flood was on July 30, 2016, the second occurred on May 27.Ĭounty officials have been studying for several years ways to minimize swift flowing flood waters that have caused millions of dollars in damage to roads, utilities, and buildings, the closing of several businesses, and the loss of three lives in 2016 and one in May.īeth Woodruff sleeps with life preservers and helmets under her bed. It’ll just become a ghost town.”Įllicott City experienced two, rare thousand-year rain storms over a 22-month span, according to the National Weather Service. “If this flood mitigation plan does not go forward, I worry that we’ll lose the town completely. “I really believe this is the way we can save our town,” Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman told Capital News Service. The design includes the expansion of a stream channel that would lower flooding from 12 feet in some areas of the Historic District to four to six feet. WTOP’s Jamie Forzato contributed to this report from Ellicott City.The county is proposing razing 19 buildings in total. State and county officials as well as nonprofits offering resources will be available at the Ellicott City 50+ Center at 9411 Frederick Road in Ellicott City from 4:30 p.m. Howard County officials said they would hold an information session Monday night for residents and business owners affected by the flooding. State and local officials estimate a full recovery will last months and cost millions of dollars. You could barely tell some of them were even still cars.” He later learned the woman was OK, he said.Īfter the rain slowed, and he returned to the street, Haverly said the few cars left there “looked like there were mangled” or “like cars that you picked up from a wrecking yard to put into a movie set. At one point, he and other restaurant patrons tried unsuccessfully to help pull a woman from her car, he said. He said he saw cars floating past the restaurant’s windows. By the time we were upstairs, it was like 5 or 6 feet of water in the street, and it just kept getting higher and higher.” “Before we knew it, like, there was water coming in through the kitchen, and it started to rush in to the bottom floor of the restaurant,” he said. At one point, the whole building, just a few hundred feet from the banks of the Patapsco River, shook “because the water was hitting the supports,” he said. That’s when a normal downpour turned dangerous. Waverly and his girlfriend were visiting Ellicott City Saturday for a birthday dinner at Portalli’s, an Italian restaurant at 8805 Main St., he said. It wasn’t yet, but officials told him it might be among another batch of vehicles that would be dropped off later in the day. 7 will be towed to a contracted storage facility at the owner’s expense, according to police.īrian Haverly, of North Potomac, was waiting in the high school parking lot Monday morning to see if his black Mustang was among the recovered vehicles. “If an owner does not have ID due to the nature of the disaster, police will attempt to verify ownership through a series of questions and other methods,” Howard County police said in a Facebook post.Ĭars not claimed by 8 p.m. Owners should bring identification to retrieve their vehicles, police said. Vehicle owners can also call 41 to check if their car was towed. Owners will be not be charged for the towing. Owners of vehicles that were towed after the flooding can pick them up at the Centennial High School parking lot from 8 a.m. By the end of the day, crews were still working to remove about 50 vehicles from the Main Street area, police said. More than 180 cars had been towed from downtown Ellicott City by Monday morning, according to a Facebook posting from the Howard County Police Department. WASHINGTON - Emergency crews in Ellicott City, Maryland, continued the cleanup Monday from a devastating flash flood this weekend that tore through the city’s historic Main Street, damaging buildings, sweeping away vehicles and killing two people.įor many residents and visitors, the first step to getting to normal included a visit to Ellicott City’s Centennial High School where scores of cars caught up in the weekend torrent were towed by Howard County road crews. Business & Finance Click to expand menu.
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