“What was most devastating to me was standing in the rain, and speaking to the kitchen staff and realizing they were all out of jobs now.” “We have insurance,” said Susan Nestadt, 62, who with her brother runs a family foundation that supports social justice causes. But even that night, Susan Nestadt says, she was keenly aware they were not the real victims of the storm. The Federal Hill residents fled Portalli's with other customers from the restaurant's third floor to higher ground. Susan and Gerald Nestadt learned recently that their new car, which replaced one they lost in a Fells Point flood earlier in the year, was found in the river. Crews have been working to retrieve about 200 cars that were carried away, some into the Patapsco, as their owners search the lot of Centennial High School, where many of them were towed. Indeed, two buildings on the 8100 block are on the verge of collapse and will have to be demolished. “I didn't realize how much damage there was until I saw it in the daytime,” said Bob McCanley, 59, who was evacuated that night and returned briefly on Thursday to his apartment above a store on the 8200 block of Main Street. Last week, Howard County officials began escorting business owners and residents into the area to get a first-hand look at their properties and retrieve some belongings, but are not hazarding a guess when they might be able to return. “It smashed through the floor, smashing everything away,” said Zubrick, who toured the damage two days after the flood and came away “humbled” by the level of devastation.Ī section of the hardest-hit area remains off-limits to all but those working to assess the damage. Shops and restaurants that line Main were swamped and flooded as water rushed down the street and rose underneath it - the Tiber, usually just an inch or two of water running through a reinforced channel below some of the buildings, swelled during the storm, Zubrick said. In less than two hours, the river rose 14 feet above its normal flow, he said. The most intense rain fell over an area upstream of the Patapsco River, Zubrick said, and three channels combined to propel the water toward it: two tributaries, the Hudson and the Tiber, as well as Main Street itself. A confluence of meteorological and geographical factors turned this hard summer rain into a destructive torrent. The two were swept away by raging waters that coursed through Ellicott City's historic district when 6 1/2 inches of rain fell in about two hours. The family and friends of Joseph Anthony Blevins, 38, head of the University of Baltimore's financial aid office, will gather for his funeral on Monday. Jessica Lynn Watsula, a 35-year-old mother who lived in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, had gone to Portalli's in Ellicott City that night with three women for a girls' night out. The weather scientists have a term for this real-life confirmation of their meteorological data. “Toward 7:30, 8 o'clock,” he said, “the whole area blew up.”Īs Zubrick and his fellow meteorologists watched this mayhem at the atmospheric level on multiple screens in their Sterling, Virginia, offices, they also began seeing videos on social media and getting reports from trained weather spotters in Ellicott City. A number of weather conditions had been brewing, combining in such a way that the clouds unleashed a veritable deluge on the low-lying town. Unlike hurricanes or winter storms, flash floods don't give much warning, and it's difficult to pinpoint where they might strike hardest, Zubrick said. They didn't know that the weather service had issued a flash flood warning for much of Central Maryland about 12 minutes earlier. It was raining when they pulled into a parking lot off Main Street at about 7:30 p.m., and they sat in the car to wait out what they expected to be a short downpour. With a roll of her eyes, she agreed to stop in the city's historic district. He and his girlfriend, Heather Owens, had left a matinee at a movie theater in Laurel and were heading home to Windsor Mill. Joe Blevins wanted to join the hunt in an area reportedly filled with the virtual creatures - Main Street in Ellicott City. “We also had instability in the atmosphere that favored thunderstorms.”Īs meteorologists monitored radar screens and forecasting models, the weekend was well underway with farmers' markets, errands and “Pokémon Go.” “The air mass over the region was laden with a lot of moisture, which is fairly typical for this time of year,” said Steve Zubrick, science and operations officer for the National Weather Service's Baltimore-Washington office. In the clouds and on the ground, Saturday, July 30, began unremarkably for a summer day in the Mid-Atlantic.
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