As Hurricane Ike huffs and puffs westward to Texas, Maryland heaves one more sigh of relief in a nervous season of late-summer storms. We dodged Gustav, we dodged Hanna, we dodged Ike. But we didn’t dodge Isabel. It’s five years ago this week since Isabel blew in here and drowned everything in her path.
Remember?
Five years ago, if you made your way to Baltimore’s Fells Point, it resembled Venice with a miserable hangover. The floodwaters lapped at the Broadway Market. People floated along Thames Street in rowboats and kayaks. Basements across the neighborhood were flooded, and so were floors along what had previous been street level and were now part of the harbor.
Remember?
Five years ago, if you went to Annapolis and looked for that dockside statue of Alex Haley, all you saw was the top of his head. At the Hard Bean Coffee & Book Sellers, on Market Place, they had black lettering halfway up the floor, just past the pastry shelves: “Isabel Was Here,” it said. On nearby Dock Street, a sign outside Armadillo’s exclaimed, “Don’t Give Up the Ship.”
Remember?
Five years ago, at Water’s Edge Road in Dundalk, you had diminutive Crystal Isaacs pulling up debris from her flooded basement and handing it to Ed Goff, who hauled away truckloads of ruined stuff. Goff, a beefy guy retired from Bethlehem Steel, was 55. Isaacs was 85. Everybody survived as best they could.
Remember?
Across Maryland, more than a million people lost power from Isabel’s powerful heaving. Hundreds of public buildings were damaged or destroyed. Thousands of homes were flooded and battered across Millers Island, Edgemere, North Point, Bowleys Quarters and Turner Station. Hundreds had to be rescued. Damage was estimated at nearly $1 billion. The entire state was declared a disaster area.
It might have been worse. But it could have been better.
An old friend, the late Bob Blatchley, took me out to Bowley’s Quarters in eastern Baltimore County, to Bay Drive where his sister, the late Kathleen Bell, lived with her family. All along that street, everybody’s worldly possessions were scattered in everybody else’s yards: not only personal items, like clothing and family photos, but furniture and front doors and oil tanks and air conditioners and porches. The waters of the Chesapeake Bay and Middle River had torn through a stone abutment and just kept going.
“I’m lucky,” Bell said. “Nobody died. All we lost is stuff.”
But houses all along the water were condemned, and families had to find somewhere else to live until everything could be rebuilt. And, for some, that took a long time.
At Back River Neck Road, in eastern Baltimore County, there were hundreds of hurricane victims lined up at a makeshift relief center in the storm’s aftermath. They all had the same question: What do we do now? Where do we stay? Is there some agency that will help us? Are we covered by insurance?
The questions would be asked for long months as the various bureaucracies stumbled and bumbled in ways that only hinted at the catastrophe to come with Hurricane Katrina.
In Maryland, a lot of angry fingers were pointed at Alfred Redmer, who was the state’s insurance commissioner when Isabel hit. He was accused of being too cozy with the big insurance companies, accused of politicizing the job. State Senate President Thomas V. (Mike) Miller called for his resignation. House Speaker Michael Busch and Baltimore County Exec Jim Smith had harsh words.
Six months after the hurricane, faced with hundreds of families who still hadn’t returned to their homes, Redmer finally delivered families’ complaints to the head of the National Flood Insurance Program, and admitted, “I’m just sorry I didn’t call him a month earlier.”
(Ironically, Redmer now gears up for a run for the state Senate from Maryland’s District 7, which includes Middle River and other waterfront areas.)
So it’s five years later, and every time we hear a name attached to a heavy wind and rain, a lot of us remember Isabel.
There’s still an image, in Bowley’s Quarters, of Kathleen Bell walking along the ruins of her home. Debris was everywhere. Outside, abandoned cars lay in ditches. Inside, there were water marks along walls. A few doors away, she had neighbors, 92-year-old Nancy Mack and her ailing son, who’d been rescued as they curled on a sofa with the floodwaters rising in their home. Now the weather service was calling for more rain.
“Well,” said Kathleen Bell, “what else can it do to us?”
