(Anthony Castellano/The Gazette) - Businesses were submerged Sept. 8 on a section of Marlboro Pike in Upper Marlboro that was closed because of flooding.
Mike Kress watched the stream behind his Upper Marlboro auto repair shop begin to rise.
It crept up by inches at first, as heavy rains that were destined to flood parts of Prince George’s County began to fall on Sept. 7, so he went to bed. When Kress checked again, at 3 a.m., the water had risen several feet and was on its way to flooding his shop.
“In a 15-minute period of time, [the water] went up six inches,” he said. “So I had about 20 minutes to get all of the computers, customers’ cars and equipment out of harm’s way.”
By morning, Marlboro Tire was flooded by five feet of water. Kress expects that the damage will total at least $300,000.
He is among the residents and officials in Upper Marlboro — which, for a time, virtually was shut down by roads that looked more like rivers — who hope that flooding from heavy rain that fell from Sept. 7 to Sept. 9, and during Hurricane Irene, which occurred in late August, will prompt Prince George’s officials to fix the flooding problem that has plagued the area for years.
“A whole bunch of homes and businesses took a hit this time,” Kress said. “Maybe there will be a stronger sentiment this time that we need to get control of this situation.”
County Councilman Mel Franklin (D-Distict 9), who lives in Upper Marlboro, said he plans to organize a meeting with town commissioners and representatives from the county’s departments of Environmental Resources and Public Works and Transportation to determine how to solve or at least mitigate flooding in the town. Franklin said that the meeting had been scheduled for Sept. 19 at the County Administration Building.
He said flooding closed the Prince George’s County Administration Building from Sept. 8 through Sept. 12, after the ground floor was filled with knee-deep water.
“[The flooding] is . . . interfering with our doing the business of residents in the county,” Franklin said recently. “We have to figure out how to address this recurring flooding issue. We could see the flooding problem in southern Prince George’s get worse as the years go on [because of climate change].”
Barry Morton, an Upper Marlboro resident and president of the Marlborough Towne Community Association, said water crept into his and his neighbors’ back yards on Sept. 8 from School House Pond, which abuts their housing development.
Morton, who has advocated for better flood prevention and mitigation, said he doesn’t understand why nothing had been done, given that the town is the county seat of government.
“You just remodeled the whole bottom floor of the [County Administration Building], and now you’ve got three feet of water in there,” he said. “Now, are you going to do something?”
Richard Waters, an Upper Marlboro resident who retired from the county Department of Public Works and Transportation in 1990, said an answer might lie in measures that already are in place.
Local officials had been told in the past by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which built a flood-control system for the town in the 1960s, that there was nothing more that could be built to stop flooding.
Waters said that when the Army installed the flood-control system, it included two sluice gates in downtown Upper Marlboro — gate mechanisms that can redirect and regulate water levels in a river or creek — that he had operated when he worked for the county to keep waterways at manageable levels.
Department spokeswoman Susan Hubbard said in an e-mail that under department policy, the sluice gates remained open during Hurricane Irene and the storms of Sept. 7 through Sept. 9 to “provide interior drainage.” One gate is situated along the railroad tracks north of Marlboro Pike; the other is along Judges Drive, near Water Street
“There are designated flood plain areas in the Upper Marlboro area, and the locations of some of the affected businesses are in the flood plain,” Hubbard stated.
However, Waters said that opening and closing the gates at the right time could have allowed water to be more evenly distributed among the bodies of water in town, avoided completely the high waters on Marlboro Pike during Irene, and reduced last week’s flooding. By simply leaving the gates open, the department was not effectively using the sluice gates, Waters said.
Waters said when he was with the department, its policy was to keep the gates open for minor storms, and that it was his job to monitor streams during heavy storms and use the gates to redirect water flow if necessary.
The department needs to monitor and make better use of the sluice gates to mitigate flooding, Waters said.
“When it was raining, I would check every hour or so using measurement poles,” Waters said. “If the water got high in the main stream, I would close the gates, and if it had stopped raining, I would leave them closed until after the water goes down. I wouldn’t have let the water get that high in the first place.”
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