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Assessing the damage in Frederick County

Worst flooding since 1976
Posted at 5:31 PM, May 18, 2018
and last updated 2018-05-18 17:31:58-04

A break in the rain gave workers at the YMCA on North Market Street in Frederick a chance to clear buildings of the soaked furniture and to attack the flooding and potential for mold that remain.
    
There lingers a fear that the damage may be far from over.

"With more rain coming over this weekend, we spent a lot of time today repositioning sandbags at what we considered the critical points, cleaning up all the loose debris so once again it doesn't block our drainage system and we did discover that we had some flooding in some other buildings on this property so we did a lot of cleaning up," said YMCA CEO & President Chris Colville.
    
Helping in that effort---two dozen navy recruiters from across the state who heard about the victims' plight.

"We got word that there was flooding here in the Frederick area,” said James Lawson of Catonsville, “So me and my shipmates---we got together and we did some community service helping out the Y---moving things around in the YMCA and throwing a lot of the garbage away that was damaged by the flood."
    
At the Emergency Operations Center, workers looked on as the flooding subsided, and after 75 rescues in a 24-hour period earlier this week, it allowed them to take stock of just how fortunate they came out of this disaster.

"We were very, very fortunate those 75 persons that we picked out of the water---anyone of those could have resulted in a fatality so we can't say often enough, 'Never drive through standing water', even if you only think it's several inches deep,” said Frederick County Emergency Management Director Jack Markey, “In some cases, people found out that the road was no longer where the road would normally be.  There was water there, but there was no longer a road there."

Initial forecasts suggested this area could receive another four inches of rain overnight, but it was spared when that rain stayed off to the east.