On my right, behind a row of boarded-up storefronts, I could hear the Tiber Branch rushing along parallel to Main Street. Walking downhill into lower Main, where the street is narrower, the air temperature dropped and the shadows darkened. When I visited at the beginning of February, the sun was out and it was warm enough to leave my jacket in the car. Rainwater flows downhill, east toward the river, and in Ellicott City, there’s nothing farther downhill than lower Main Street, the historic center of the town. On the north side, old stone buildings are backed up to a hill made of granite bedrock. On the south side of lower Main Street, a series of mill buildings is packed alongside and astride the Tiber Branch, one of the watershed’s three main tributaries to the Patapsco. The terrain surrounding the town is steep. The Tiber-Hudson watershed, in Howard County, Maryland, drains three-and-a-half square miles of mostly developed land in and around Ellicott City, a historic mill town founded in 1772 on the banks of the Patapsco River. By Jared Brey The Hudson Bend portion of the plan was meant to provide development opportunities as well as flood mitigation and new public space. Unfortunately for Ellicott City, the weather forecast for the weekend calls for more rain.After two rare storms inundate Ellicott City, Maryland, the town tries to sort through what can be saved. In addition, the county received a $1 million grant last month from the federal Emergency Management Agency for flood mitigation efforts related to the 2016 storm. The earliest projects would involve a water retention facility on Hudson Branch and another retention facility. Phillip Nichols, Howard County’s assistant chief administrative officer, says that based on those recommendations and a new analysis of Sunday’s storm, the county should be able to implement a mitigation program within a year. The study, part of an $84 million watershed master plan, recommended that the county create storage ponds throughout the flood zone to hold water, underground pipe farms and storage vaults to draw water away and store it and stabilizing and expanding stream banks to slow the flow of water as well. "When there is heavy rain fall, it is always going to funnel through that point of town." It sits in the valley of the upper Western Branch of the Patapsco River close to the mouths of four of that river’s tributaries-Tiber Branch, Hudson Branch, Autumn Hill Branch and New Cut Branch.Ī February 2018 report from the Army Corps of Engineers says the location "at the convergence of these waterways, the topography, and stormwater runoff contribute to significant flood events within Ellicott City and particularly the historic district."Ĭhris Brooks, a senior water resources engineer with McCormick Taylor, the firm that did a hydrologic study for Howard County after the 2016 flood, says the lower Main Street section of town "has a lot of things working against it to keep high and dry."Īnd the fact that there are "bedrock hills that rise very steeply right off of Main Street," doesn’t help either, he added. It’s not hard to see why Ellicott City is so vulnerable to flooding. In this century, the town flooded after Tropical Storm Lee in September 2011 and after what was then called a once in a thousand years storm two years ago. That one dropped 10 to 14 inches of rain on already soaked lands and caused major flooding from North Carolina to New York State and killed seven people in the Patapsco Valley. There were eight floods in the 20 th century, including the flash flood of 1952 that sent an 8-foot wall of water roaring down Main Street and the flood caused by Tropical Storm Agnes in June of 1972. And then there was the flood of 1868 that killed 43 people and destroyed 14 homes. In fact, the first grist mill, built by James Hood in 1766, was destroyed a mere two years later by one of the earliest recorded floods. Ellicott City has had a long history of floods. The flood that ripped through Ellicott City last Sunday, destroying homes and businesses and claiming one life was devastating. Credit Howard County This map of the Tiber Branch Watershed shows how the streams affect Ellicott City
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