Swamped

Pregnant woman saved from raging floodwaters

Wednesday, June 28, 2006

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by Andrew P. Moisan

Staff Writer

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Brian Lewis⁄The Gazette

A Ride On bus turns from Montrose Road onto a deluged Seven Locks Road during the Monday afternoon rush hour. In a single day, the region swung from one of the driest Junes on record to one of the wettest. The National Weather Service predicts more rain over the next two days.

Several people, including a woman nine months pregnant, were plucked from vehicles in Gaithersburg this week after being stranded in floodwaters as unusually fierce rainstorms pelted the area.

The rescue, in the 19600 block of Zion Road, occurred about 10 p.m. Sunday when seven people were caught in three vehicles that had been inundated by two to three feet of floodwater, county fire and rescue authorities said.

All seven, found by about a dozen rescuers huddled in two of the vehicles — a pick-up truck and a van — were ferried to higher ground by two rescue boats, said Capt. Oscar Garcia of the county fire and rescue service.

The age of the pregnant woman was unknown Tuesday, but Garcia said she and the other six victims, though apparently uninjured, declined further medical assessment by doctors.

‘‘Basically we assessed her on the scene,” Garcia said of the pregnant woman. ‘‘She said she was scared and didn’t want to go to the hospital.”

Emergency workers continued grappling with weather-related emergencies in the Gaithersburg area Monday, when rescuers responded to the 11200 block of Game Preserve Road for a report that a man had driven his car into floodwater and was trapped.

A swift-water rescue team arrived about 3:10 p.m. and used ropes and flotation devices to pull the man, whose age was unknown Tuesday, from the car. He, too, escaped injury, rescuers found after plucking him from the car about 20 minutes after arriving.

‘‘At one point he was embarrassed,” Garcia said. ‘‘But he did not require any medical attention after that.”

From 7 a.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Tuesday, the Gaithersburg area received 7.63 inches of rain, according to National Weather Service data.

While the region has been drenched, cloudless skies are not imminent.

A chance of thunderstorms continues throughout the week, but dropping to 50 percent Wednesday, then dropping to 30 percent through Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.

Before the thunderstorms began this weekend, the region had been experiencing drought-like conditions, on pace to be the fifth-driest on record, said Andy Woodcock, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

Other experts say that such a sudden turn of events isn’t unheard of.

‘‘Often times we see droughts end with floods,” said WRC News Channel 4 meteorologist Bob Ryan, who has been at the station since 1980. ‘‘Sometimes nature balances things out in a short amount of time.”

The rain was caused by an unusual weather pattern with very warm tropical air filled with moisture for miles above coupled with a slow moving front, Ryan said.

Pepco crews were working 16-hour days to repair power lines and crews from other utilities were coming in to help, he said. By about noon Tuesday, Pepco still had about 4,300 customers without power.

At least 200 and as many as 1,000 customers were without power in the Gaithersburg area Tuesday, with several crews working nearby, according to company outage maps.

In Montgomery Village, Lake Whetstone had felt the touch of the torrential downpours, but damages were mild.

‘‘The water level has risen a little bit but nothing is overflowing,” said Scott Gole, assistant director of the Montgomery Village Foundation’s Department of Recreation and Parks.

Cleanup crews from the foundation spent Monday afternoon and early Tuesday clearing off debris from the grate that keeps trash from clogging the drainage system of the lake, which is a 40-year-old storm water management pond handling overflow from Gaithersburg and the Village.

County police in the Sixth District, which covers the Gaithersburg and Montgomery Village areas, said Monday that officers had also been busy with weather-related incidents.

‘‘It’s pretty bad,” Sixth District Commander Christina B. Faass said Monday. ‘‘It’s keeping officers very busy and there have been a lot of accidents.”

But Faass said that, as far as they were concerned, the Sixth District had not been hit nearly as hard as the Germantown area, whose rural roads made it more prone to flood-related troubles.

With saturated ground starting to give way and trees starting to fall, firefighters at Germantown Volunteer Fire Department’s Station 29 had run several calls for down wires by lunchtime Tuesday.

The first of the incidents occurred in Germantown at about 7 p.m. Sunday.

A woman was driving on Davis Mill Road near Brink Road when her car was suddenly engulfed in rushing water, according to Garcia, the fire and rescue spokesman.

By the time she was able to call 911 from her cell phone, the water was up to the windows of her two-door sedan and rising.

She was still on the phone talking to a dispatcher when county police Officer Nick Augustine and fire Capt. Carl Mauney arrived.

‘‘When I got up close to her vehicle, the current was stronger,” Mauney said. ‘‘The time frame was too short to determine if the water was rising or receding.”

The car was stuck on a bridge and he was concerned that it might roll off into the creek below, so Mauney waded over to the car and asked the woman to roll down the window on the passenger side of the car and climb out. He and Augustine helped get her to higher ground.

Storm conditions continuing to rage Monday brought not only more rain but also vivid lightning, which posed different hazards.

At about 4 p.m. Monday, firefighters were called to a house on Wild Hunt Drive in Damascus for a ‘‘probable lightning strike,” Garcia said.

The cable boxes were knocked off the wall and the electricity was out, leading firefighters to suspect a lightning strike. But this family was lucky; there was no fire.

But it wasn’t only cars and houses that strained under the weight of the powerful storm; farmers are facing their own complications.

Michael Jamison said the corn and soybeans at his family’s Poolesville farm will benefit from the deluges, and that the turf the farm grows will be exceptionally green.

But the wheat won’t fare as well because of all the moisture that arrived at a critical time in the seed process.

‘‘The humidity and the moisture is allowing that seed to grow in the head,” Jamison said. ‘‘If you went to harvest it, you couldn’t store it in the grain bin because it would begin to rot.”

Wade Butler of Butler’s Orchard in Germantown on Tuesday afternoon said he’s recorded 8.5 inches of rain on his farm since Thursday. While he said the rain was needed, sometimes rain that falls so fast isn’t able to be used well by the growing plants.

Still, other areas of the county faired better.

City workers in the greater Rockville area have been busy cleaning storm water drains of fallen debris, but for the most part the city has been spared, Rockville Director of Public Works Craig Simoneau said.

Many city activities were postponed due to the weather, but City Hall and some other public facilities remained open.

In Derwood, Aspen Hill and other nearby communities, only minor inconveniences were reported.

The boathouse at Lake Needwood in Rock Creel Regional Park is flooded and will be closed until further notice.

Although the rain did not wreak the havoc in Olney that it did in other areas of the county, the Sandy Spring Volunteer Fire Department stayed busy responding to an unusually high number of calls over the past few days.

The two Sandy Spring stations responded to 46 calls for service related to the storm from Sunday afternoon through Monday afternoon, four times the norm.

Three days of record-setting downpours throughout the Washington, D.C., area left communities across Montgomery County in a soggy state of disarray.

A relentless series of thunderstorms began late Saturday night and continued on into Tuesday, keeping emergency workers busy responding to a huge number of water rescues, vehicle crashes and house fires.

There were many chaotic scenes throughout the county, where flood waters covered low-lying roads and runoff from the storms filled basements. Residents braced on Tuesday for another round of heavy showers, hoping that the latest round of rain would be more forgiving.

Officials were still tallying the storm’s damage as they prepared for another downpour on Tuesday. Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service Capt. Oscar Garcia estimated that at least 50 vehicles were stranded in standing water from 7 p.m. to midnight on Sunday. At one point, Garcia said, rescue workers responded to at least 30 vehicles in a single hour.

‘‘This storm did not discriminate,” Garcia said. ‘‘We were from Laytonsville to Damascus, Gaithersburg to Germantown, Sligo and Wayne Avenue, Beach Drive and Connecticut Avenue, you name it. It did not matter.”

The chance of thunderstorms continues throughout the week, but dropping to 50 percent today, then dropping to 30 percent through Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.

On Sunday night in Chevy Chase, the county’s Swift Water Rescue Team removed 30 people attending a bachelor party at the Candy Cane City Recreation Center on Meadowbrook Lane. Partygoers had to be evacuated by rescue boats when the building became surrounded on all sides by 4 feet of water. The rescue teams responded to the incident at about 10 p.m., using three boats to rescue the stranded partygoers.

Lightning strikes also set four homes ablaze in Bethesda, Glen Echo and the Hillandale area of Silver Spring. Lightning struck the roofs of each home, igniting fires in the attic. The fires occurring between 7 p.m. and midnight were located at 5109 Randall Lane in Glen Echo, Oaklawn Court in Hillandale, and 7615 Persimmon Tree lane and 6312 Rockhurst, both in Bethesda. In each incident, residents of the home evacuated before firefighters arrived and no one was injured, Garcia said.

‘‘Two of the fires were going on at one time,” Garcia said. ‘‘Most of the fires were contained to attic area.”

Fire and Rescue officials attributed another round of house fires on Monday to lightning strikes, including one in the 8100 block of Coach Street in Potomac. A neighbor next door to the single-family home called 911 after hearing a loud bang at around 2 p.m., followed by the sound of a smoke detector. Fire and Rescue workers managed to contain the fire and there were no injuries.

Three Kensington men in a jeep helped a stranded elderly couple escape from their submerged car Sunday night after their car stalled in a flooded stretch of Kensington Parkway. David Zambrano and Ian Oppenheim, both 20, and Michael Donadio, 18, were riding in a jeep near the intersection of Kensington Parkway and Bexhill Drive where the flooded street became too deep to drive further. They were about to turn around when Donadio saw a Honda Accord nearby almost fully submerged with two people inside.

The three men waded into the flowing water and saw that an elderly couple was trapped inside the car and the water was rising. Zambrano dialed 911 on his cell phone.

‘‘The water was up to our chest at that point and the car was almost fully submerged,” Zambrano said. ‘‘They didn’t really know what was going on, and they didn’t really seem to know where they were. They didn’t say anything. It kind of seemed like they were in shock. Water had leaked into their car up to their knees. The doors were almost covered.”

Oppenheim wrenched open the door while Zambrano and Donadio helped the couple out of the car. The three men then escorted the couple to the top of the hill where an ambulance arrived almost immediately, Zambrano said.

In another incident on Sunday night, seven people in a van and a truck were evacuated from their vehicles that were stranded in standing water in the 19600 block of Zion Road in Laytonsville, Garcia said. The group, which included a pregnant woman, had abandoned their own cars after water had risen up to the windows and moved to a nearby van and truck that were in slightly higher ground.

‘‘I think a lot of people on the roads were taken by surprise,” Garcia said. ‘‘When it comes to driving in this type of weather, if you don’t have to go out, do not go out. If you see any standing or flowing water, do not attempt to drive through. It’s going to stall your car and you’re going to be stranded and it’s going to cause a bigger emergency.”

Some of the road closures on Tuesday included Kendale Road between Kentsdale and Bradley Boulevard, Kensington Parkway between West Bexhill Drive and Glenmoore Drive, and a portion of the 9400 block of Newbridge Drive.

As a second round of heavy rain arrived on Monday, the Swift Water Rescue Team deployed eight boats with four ‘‘strike teams” around the county in the Kensington, Germantown and Bethesda areas, Garcia said.

Water, mud and debris covered Route 29 Monday following the overflow of the nearby Northwest Branch. Some cars were stranded on the side of the road, a major commuter route. Police and the Maryland Department of Transportation shut the road down most of the day, only allowing access to the Citgo station from some of Route 29’s southbound lanes.

On Tuesday, Mike Dustin of Burnt Hill Citgo was happy the road had reopened and he was back to business as usual, though there were still signs of the previous days’ wreckage. Puddles formed in parts of the road and bits of debris lay near the road’s edge. Large black chunks of the driveway to Burnt Mills East Park had crumbled and broken, slipping down a small adjacent decline, and yellow tape kept pedestrians from straying too close.

‘‘I think this was worse than Agnes,” he said, adding that storm also occurred in late June. ‘‘There was more rain. We didn’t have the wind, which helped, but I think we had more rain with this storm.”

However, he added, Monday’s cleanup was quicker than the cleanup after Agnes — back then, Route 29 remained closed for about eight days after the dam in the Northwest Branch overflowed.

That was something to smile about. And one other good thing came out of the storm, he added. On Sunday, while the rain fell, his granddaughter was born.

Businesses took a hit from the road closure. Dustin had only sold 100 gallons of gas until the road reopened just after 5 p.m., and his volume was down by two-thirds.

Across the street from the Citgo, Choice Hotels International employees had to make their way to the offices in a roundabout way, said CHI spokesman David Peikin.

Instead of accessing the CHI headquarters from Colesville Road, employees had to use Lockwood Drive off of New Hampshire Avenue, he said, fighting through the traffic. Instead of getting off I-495 at Colesville Road, Peikin said he took the ‘‘scenic route,” weaving his way over to the headquarters from Randolph Road.

‘‘Most employees were able to get in,” he said. ‘‘My department is up and functioning.”

At the TPC at Avenel, site of the PGA Tour’s Booz Allen Classic, the storm caused repeated suspensions in play throughout the weekend and Monday pushed the finish into Tuesday morning without spectators. Tournament Executive Director Bob Jeffrey estimated the cost of extending the tournament at about $20,000 to $25,000.

‘‘When you go an extra day,” Jeffrey said, ‘‘you have to get extra security, you have to pay the parking company back, all of our vendors...it’s from top to bottom, you have to take care of everything.”

The heavy rain also caused problems with on-site parking at the tournament, which expected to attract about 100,000 spectators.

‘‘There was a little bit of flooding,” Jeffrey said. ‘‘We had to have a couple people towed. But we made out pretty much OK because most people were gone by the time the really heavy rain came in.”

Elsewhere in the county, golf and many other activities were suspended as some park facilities had to close due to flooding, including Sligo Creek Parkway between Maple and New Hampshire avenues and the Rachel Carson trail near the Burnt Mills dam. On Tuesday morning, portions of Sligo Creek Parkway remained closed with large puddles visible from adjacent roads, roped off with yellow tape.

Flooding occurred in Wheaton Regional Park and Brookside Nature Center, and officials hoped the parks would reopen Tuesday after cleanup efforts.

Before the thunderstorms began this weekend, the region had been experiencing drought-like conditions, on pace to be the fifth driest on record, said Andy Woodcock, a National Weather Service meteorologist.

The rain pushed the total rain for the year to 22.2 inches, well above the normal of 19.16 inches. June went from being one of the driest ever recorded to one of the wettest in a single day, Woodcock said.

From 7 a.m. Friday to 7 a.m. Tuesday, Norbeck received 10.41 inches of rain, Potomac, 9.27 inches, Gaithersburg, 7.63 inches, Glenmont 10.88 inches, Colesville 11.29 inches, Kensington, 10.21 inches, Takoma Park 9.46 inches, according to the National Weather Service.

The National Weather Service issued a flood warning for Seneca Creek near Dawsonville. On the Potomac River, at Little Falls, the river is expected to crest at 9 to 11 feet on Thursday. Flood stage there is 10 feet. More thunderstorms were expected through Wednesday bringing additional rain.

By about noon Tuesday, Pepco still had about 4,300 customers without power.

With the ground heavily saturated, any additional storms could cause trees to topple because of their loose roots, said Pepco spokesman Bob Dobkin.

‘‘It won’t take much wind to bring them down and if that happens, we’re looking at a lot more outages,” he said. ‘‘It’s been a rough one.”

Staff Writers C. Benjamin Ford and Meredith Hooker contributed to this report.

Flash floods also left 30 people stranded at a bachelor’s party at the Candy Cane City Recreation Center on Meadowbrook Lane in Chevy Chase. A county swift-water rescue team evacuated them about 10 p.m. Sunday.

The National Weather Service issued a flood warning for Seneca Creek near Dawsonville. On the Potomac River, at Little Falls, the river is expected to crest at 8 to 10 feet on Thursday. Flood stage there is 10 feet. More thunderstorms were expected through Wednesday bringing additional rain.

Lightning strikes caught five houses ablaze in Glen Echo, Hillandale, Potomac and two in Bethesda. No one was injured.

The lightning forced Pepco workers repairing downed lines to take shelter frequently in their truck cabs.

‘‘You can’t be messing with electrical equipment during a lightning storm,” said Dobkin, the Pepco spokesman.

Lightning can hit a power line and travel for miles to hit a utility worker making a repair.

The storm easily broke long-held records.

The intensity of the rainfall exceeded that of hurricanes and tropical storms that have passed through the area, said Ryan, the WRC News Channel 4 meteorologist.

The rain, he said, broke the region’s previous record of 6.3 inches in a 24-hour period set on Aug. 23, 1933.

Staff Writers Sebastian Montes, Susan Singer-Bart, Melissa Chadwick, Titus Ledbetter, Tammy Murphy, Warren Parish, Liza Gutierrez, Terri Hogan, C. Benjamin Ford, Chris Williams and Margie Hyslop contributed to this report.