Ellicott City, founded in 1772, is part of the Main Street Maryland network. Diners were trapped on the second floor of restaurants on lower Main, and Tersiguel’s French Country Restaurant, on upper Main, lost much of its wine cellar and equipment in the basement. The water damaged buildings all along Main Street and reached a maximum depth of more than six feet toward the east end. In one video posted by a resident on YouTube, amid the steady flow of water rolling down Main Street, a powerful rush of water shoots out the front windows of Caplan’s Department Store. The Tiber Branch, which captures both the Hudson and the New Cut Branches before dumping into the Patapsco, hit its peak velocity toward lower Main, strong enough to break through the back side of some of the buildings. Water jumped the banks of the Hudson Branch uphill and flowed down Main Street, flooding most of the buildings and sweeping around 200 cars downstream, with some ending up in the Patapsco River, according to reports in the Baltimore Sun. On the night of July 30, 2016, a storm rolled in and sat directly on top of Ellicott City, dropping 6.5 inches of rain in the watershed in just three hours. 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. After two rare storms inundate Ellicott City, Maryland, the town tries to sort through what can be saved.
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