Residents demand action as second round of flooding hits Frederick

May 17--When Beth McKew and her wife, Denise Amann, went to sleep Wednesday night, they were confident that the worst of the flooding from the previous night's storm was behind them.

"By about 8 or 9 yesterday morning we could walk back into the basement and we started to assess the damage, like, what can we salvage and what is beyond repair," McKew said, explaining how, through hard work and constant pumping, the couple had drained about 30 inches of standing water from the basement of their home in the 900 block of Motter Avenue.

Relying on their experience recovering from close to 44 inches of flooding in September 2015, McKew and Amann scheduled appointments with an insurance claims adjuster and a restoration company for Thursday, eager to move on.

"And then we wake up today at 3 a.m. to this," Amann said, gesturing toward the fresh flood of murky green water filling their basement and the rear stairwell to their home.

Even worse, while Tuesday's water spilled into the basement from the flooded alley behind the block, the source of Thursday's water was a toilet in the basement itself, Amann said.

By 9 a.m., the water line had reached 23 inches, drawing nearly level with the line of grime and dirt left by Tuesday's flood. The claim adjusters arrived, but gave the couple much the same advice as the firefighters they had called when Amann was first awoken by the gurgling toilet hours earlier.

"The firemen said, 'You can't do anything, it's an infrastructure problem,'" McKew said with a shrug. "The city's infrastructure just isn't up to the task."

City residents were asked to restrict their water use in order to ease the strain on the city's wastewater treatment plant, according to a city press release issued Wednesday night.

That release referenced the storm system and its subsequent water woes as "historic" flooding, but many residents dealing with a second round of flooding Thursday morning took issue with that designation, pointing to the devastating flooding that struck downtown Frederick in 2015.

"If this is the new pattern, then we have to start looking at how the system needs to be adjusted to handle that," said Wayne Rhoades, who also lives in the 900 block of Motter Avenue.

Rhoades described watching knee-deep water flowing down Ninth Street and into the alleyway behind his home on Tuesday, bypassing overflowing storm drains on the way into basements up and down the block. The same thing happened in 2015, highlighting a problem that needs to be fixed.

Rhoades' home sustained $50,000 in damage in 2015, while McKew and Amann's sustained about $25,000, most of which was covered by each household's respective insurance companies.

That said, insurance rates rose and now, as claim adjusters visited the block for the second time in less than three years, many residents are now worried that they could be dropped.

"Many of us accepted it the first time as, you know, well, maybe it's a one-in-a-million fluke," McKew said, her voice trailing off as she watched the water slowly rise in the back stairwell of her home.

"But now you're just scared when it rains," her wife said. "And, I mean, we love Frederick, but we've been contemplating leaving because, well, we don't want to do this every two years."

For Rhoades, who already made plans to move and will close on his new home later this summer, the situation was even more pressing.

"We're in that time crunch. We go to close on our new house in August, but we still have to list this [house] as, well, it's not really in a flood plain, but we're still dealing with these infrastructure problems and, if nothing gets done, as nice as Frederick is, who is going to want to move here?"

Follow Jeremy Arias on Twitter: @Jarias_Prime

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