Forget It Jake, It's Baltimore

The BaltimoreBrew, Tired of stormwater lapping at their front door, Baltimore residents join an environmental lawsuit

Visiting with next-door neighbors Pamela Luallen-Williams and Mary Jackson is like finding the multimedia mother lode of data on urban flooding in Baltimore.

The women can produce photos and videos of their block of 35th Street, just off Hillen Road, showing how it looks when heavy rains transform the roadway into a raging river, with water surging over car door handles.

They’ve got years of emails with city officials, who shrugged off these events as “an act of god,” and correspondence with insurance companies, who told them that because they’re not in a flood zone, it wasn’t “a flood.”

What’s more, they’ve got vivid descriptions of what it’s like when the water rapidly rises, engulfing and damaging their parked cars, trucks and, once, the front yard fence when a floating car drifted into it.

“How about that time when Mary’s son had to rescue you from your truck?” Luallen-Williams said to her husband, Warren Williams. “They had to throw you a rope!”

“Yes, I had to get out through the window, and I don’t know how I fit,” recalled Williams, reminding his wife of some of the other rescues, like the time emergency crews had to pluck the driver and passengers out of a submerged MTA bus.

One more thing these women say they have:

Evidence of how stormwater flooding is becoming more frequent and severe in their Ednor Gardens-Lakeside neighborhood, which sits on top of Tiffany Run, an underground stream.

“We had water in the street going back decades,” said Luallen-Williams, whose family acquired the property in 1970.

“But,” she stresses, “it never came up to your front door.”

That began to happen in 1998. Floodwaters have since crept closer to their houses to the point where now, a bad storm will not only fill the basement with water, but on occasion reach up to the first floor as well.

“This,” Luallen-Williams said, standing in her living room and pointing down, “is the new floor we had to put in.”

A freezer, a washer, a dryer, a television, her furnace, clothing and other possessions have been ruined by the overflows of water and, they are sorry to say, by sewage.

“We’ve had poop,” she said grimly, adding that people living on nearby streets, like Alameda Circle, have also begun experiencing more flooding and backups lately. “It’s definitely getting worse.”

Unlike tidal flooding and storm tides, storm water flooding is entirely a problem of a municipal government, a failing of planning adequate drainage, and/or allowing changes in the existing drainage in such a way that increases it's impact.