{"id":11447109,"date":"2025-05-15T17:36:42","date_gmt":"2025-05-15T21:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/?p=11447109"},"modified":"2025-05-16T00:04:57","modified_gmt":"2025-05-16T04:04:57","slug":"its-a-disaster-workers-begin-long-recovery-in-wake-of-westernport-flood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.baltimoresun.com\/2025\/05\/15\/its-a-disaster-workers-begin-long-recovery-in-wake-of-westernport-flood\/","title":{"rendered":"‘It’s a disaster’: After Westernport flood, workers begin long recovery"},"content":{"rendered":"

WESTERNPORT \u2014 Forty-eight hours after a freak downpour left this remote town in Allegany County in westernmost Maryland deluged under more water than it had seen in its streets in 29 years, volunteer firefighters, restoration experts and ordinary townspeople were at work on a still-soggy Main Street.<\/p>\n

Wielding hoses, they flushed remaining layers of mud into the sewers as they struggled to wrap their minds around what happened and what the future holds.<\/p>\n

Longtime resident Bob Hannon stood on a curb on Main Street, surveying the damage, when he spotted Allegany County Commissioner Dave Caporale touring the mud-strewn downtown with Maryland State Delegate and House Minority Leader Jason Buckel.<\/p>\n

Hannon has lived more than 40 years on a lane just above downtown. He watched Tuesday, aghast, as the town of fewer than 2,000 \u2014 a hamlet surrounded on all four sides by steep Appalachian hills, a sort of geological bowl \u2014 filled up several feet high.<\/p>\n

“If the brush and trees in the creek had been cut out a long time ago, this might not have happened,” he told the commissioner. “This is a disaster.”<\/p>\n

A storm that hit the area Monday night and Tuesday morning left the ground between Westernport and Lonaconing, a town 10 miles to the north, fully saturated. When a downpour centered above Westernport fell much of Tuesday afternoon, the sudden overflow from nearby George’s Creek inundated homes and businesses, flooded Westernport Elementary School well up into its first floor, and forced an emergency evacuation of about 150 students and 50 adults by way of 15 boat trips, all within a span of three hours.<\/p>\n

Amid an emergency no one saw coming, volunteers from nearby counties showed up with swiftboats to bring the children and their teachers to safety. And many have stayed, lending a hand to get Westernport back on its feet.<\/p>\n

Gov. Wes Moore, who visited the hardest-hit areas Thursday, applauded the efforts of local first responders, as well as those volunteers from surrounding towns and counties, thanking them for their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank you for how quick, thank you for responsive, thank you for how helpful you\u2019ve been to our people,\u2019 he said. “These moments are never easy and they\u2019re never simple. But … you never learn anything about anybody when times are easy.”<\/p>\n

He credited them with the fact that no one died in the Maryland floods, saying,\u00a0“that doesn\u2019t happen by accident.”<\/p>\n

The floodwaters had largely receded by Tuesday night, but mud was still deep in the streets. Members of the local volunteer fire department, Potomac Fire Company No. 2, joined with emergency workers from as far away as Montgomery and Harford counties in Maryland to keep hoses trained on the mud, guiding it into sewers whose lines they worked to keep clear.<\/p>\n

“We’ve been at this for the past two days,” said fire department Lt. Chase Aman as he stood under a baking sun in front of the company firehouse. The station was badly flooded Tuesday and vests were still hanging on a clothesline to dry. “We’re mostly looking at clearing out the mud that’s still here. It’s going to take some time.”<\/p>\n

All businesses in the downtown area were closed, including a Subway restaurant and a vape shop around the corner on Westernport Road, both of which were cordoned off with yellow tape. A noisy backhoe scooped up a few more wet loads and dumped them into a truck bed.<\/p>\n

Victor Licata of Finzel, a village in nearby Garrett County, took a break from helping to clear debris and repair water damage in the two shuttered buildings.<\/p>\n

He and Bel Air resident James Drake, technicians with Servicemaster by Elevate, a restoration service based in Forest Hill, were among the dozens in the street who had converged on Westernport to help.<\/p>\n

The sense of camaraderie impressed Licata.<\/p>\n

“It’s heartwarming to see the whole town pull together,” he said as a bulldozer roared by. “We’re just trying to give back in any way that we can to restore the city.”<\/p>\n

Half a mile to the southwest, some of the worst damage was evident at Westernport Elementary, which stands near the banks of the North Branch of the Potomac River. The building and its grounds still show signs of flooding.<\/p>\n

Cars passing by on Church Street veered wide around a pool of standing water. The school playground lay under 2 feet of mud, and a few hundred feet back from the school lay what looked like a lake.<\/p>\n

“That’s not a normal body of water; that was the parking lot,” said Buckel, as he gestured in its direction. Buckel calls Cumberland, half an hour northeast of Westernport, home. “That’s water that came over the creek, and there was nowhere for it to go. So it formed a lake.”<\/p>\n

A dozen or so cars were fender-deep in the water covering the parking lot. It had spilled in from the river so fast Tuesday that their owners \u2014 mostly teachers \u2014 had no time to save them from the flash flood.<\/p>\n

Water continued to pour Thursday from a pipe in the school wall, indicating there remains standing water inside.<\/p>\n

“Some of the children [evacuated from the elementary school] actually spent the night in one of the local schools up the road because they couldn’t get back to their home places,” Caporale said, pointing north up the road toward Lonaconing. “I’ve heard there was a SWAT vehicle from the city of Cumberland that helped some of the children get out from places where the water wasn’t as high. A lot of people pulled together to make it happen.”<\/p>\n