In bad weather, Gaithersburg ‘dodged the bullet’

Little damage reported from rain, thunderstorms

Wednesday, July 5, 2006

by Andrew P. Moisan

Staff Writer

A barrage of heavy thunderstorms, unleashing yet another bout of rain and wind atop an already weather-weary area, did little damage over the weekend in the Gaithersburg area, authorities said.

County fire and rescue workers say they were ‘‘very limited in the number of calls” they received concerning Gaithersburg, Capt. Oscar Garcia said Monday. ‘‘We had some calls, but nothing to the extent that Wheaton had.”

The sudden punch of the storms downed trees and power lines throughout many of the communities swamped a week before by ferocious rainstorms, which left dozens stranded in floodwaters.

But even amid last week’s damp mayhem, which included a large-scale evacuation of communities near the swelling Lake Needwood, the Gaithersburg area came away relatively unscathed, authorities say.

‘‘We got off fairly light,” said Wally DeBord, the city public services director, adding that no road closures were necessary in the city. ‘‘We got a lot of rain, but it was over a period of time.”

As many as 250 Gaithersburg-area Pepco customers remained without power Monday, according to company outage maps — a stark contrast to nearby areas showing thousands still without service.

Of about 41 storm-related water-rescue calls countywide over several days of sogginess last week, about five were in the Gaithersburg area, Garcia, the county fire and rescue spokesman, said.

‘‘For the most part, they were self-rescued,” Garcia said, meaning the victims were able to pull themselves from their watery predicaments.

James Magruder, chief of the Gaithersburg-Washington Grove Volunteer Fire Department, reported no substantial increase in call volume, saying the area ‘‘kind of dodged the bullet this time.”

‘‘They were ready,” Magruder said of the department’s volunteers, who he added had extra emergency equipment in place in case things got really ugly. ‘‘But they never used it.”

The potentially deadly incidents that occurred in the area were few if at times dramatic in nature, with a woman nine months pregnant among seven people rescued from three vehicles stranded in floodwaters on Zion Road last Sunday night. The woman was not injured, nor were the other six.

The next day, rescuers plucked a man from his car after he drove into floodwaters on Game Preserve Road — a call on which Gaithersburg volunteer rescuers assisted — and he, too, was uninjured.

Gaithersburg-area police, though not directly taking on such incidents as water rescues and house fires due to lightning strikes, say they, too, were busy, but agreed with rescuers that the Gaithersburg area could have had it a lot worse.

‘‘We ended up responding to a large amount of calls for accidents and traffic issues,” said Lt. Marcus G. Jones, a deputy commander of the county police’s Sixth District, which covers the Gaithersburg and Montgomery Village areas.

‘‘We were busy,” Jones said, ‘‘but in reality, we weren’t overwhelmed.”