2 Years After Flood's Wreckage, Lake Needwood Is Flourishing

Disaster Coverage Introduced Newcomers to Secluded Spot

If there were ever to be a Wild Girl of Lake Needwood, Melissa Bonds would be a good candidate.

The tanned and skinny 22-year-old has lived most of her life along the shores of the 75-acre lake in the center of Rock Creek Regional Park, growing up in a house on the park boundary. She spent the bulk of every summer exploring its banks, boating its waters, scratching the mosquito bites of a thousand Needwood days.

She got her first job as a dock hand, worked her way up to boathouse manager and now, as a college senior majoring in park management, has every hope of turning her beloved girlhood waters into an adult career.

So when the lake was devastated by a massive flood in June 2006, Bonds took it hard.

"I felt like my entire childhood was underwater," she said of the inundation that demolished the boathouse, damaged the Needwood dam and forced the evacuation of 2,000 residents downstream from the lake. With the water level 22 feet above normal, Bonds and her park colleagues had to be taken out by boat, floating over a submerged bridge and along the park's entry road. "It was like being in a hurricane," she said. "The lampposts were underwater."

Two years later, the lake is finally back to normal. Last month, the final construction vehicles left, and managers reopened the last section of trail that had been put off-limits by the flood and the subsequent $3.8 million repair of the earthen dam. The boathouse and boat-rental program reopened for the 2007 season, but Bonds said only recently have significant numbers of visitors returned to the park's docks, trails and picnic shelters.

"Finally people are coming back," said Bonds, looking out over an aluminum pier where a group of elderly men and a teenage boy were flicking baited hooks into the water. (Their take for part of a day's fishing last week: 18 crappies and bluegills and a lone catfish.) "It's been twice as busy this year, which is great."

Nearby, a couple ate from plastic foam boxes at a picnic table under tulip trees, and the sounds of a volleyball game floated over the water from a sandy court near the boat moorings. Two bicyclists pulled on gloves in the parking lot next to the dam, getting ready to set out on the paved trail that leads 13.5 miles along Rock Creek to the D.C. line and on to the Potomac River.

No one seemed disturbed by the soft rain that shivered the mirrored clouds on the surface of the lake. Compared with the deluge that disrupted lake life for two straight summers, a light sprinkle goes unremarked.

"I think the floods actually helped this place a lot," said Bonds, ticking off some of the improvements that she and park staff members have been working on: the new-and-improved boathouse, a bigger snack bar with healthier offerings, upgraded boating equipment.

But the biggest benefit might have been to introduce the lake to people who were unaware of the remarkably secluded natural enclave less than five miles from downtown Rockville.

"I'm always surprised when people say they have never heard of this place," Bonds said. "But we've been having people ride all the way up from D.C. who said they didn't know it was here before they saw it on the news."

For neighborhoods along the Rock Creek flood plain, the most important improvement was the major strengthening of the earthen dam designed to keep Lake Needwood from roaring downstream. More than 2,000 residents, mostly in the Aspen Hill area, had to leave their homes in 2006, when engineers detected ominous leaks in the dam's base. The dam held, and since then workers have injected concrete into the fractured rock below the structure and upgraded the water release and monitoring systems. Project managers have said the repairs were successful.

A faint shift in the color of the grass still marks the high-water line on the side of the dam, which forms an immense green wall at one end of the lake. At the top of a cement tower high above the spillway, a picnic table remains where the flood deposited it two years ago (engineers use it as a worktable now, Bonds said). Otherwise, not many scars remain from the worst disaster to hit the lake since Hurricane Agnes similarly flooded it in 1972, also in June.

"I think it's changed for the better," said Ernest Roane, 69, a longtime lake visitor who was fishing on a recent afternoon with a group of neighbors from Silver Spring. He pondered the unlighted cigar he'd been chewing as he scanned the view. "The flood flushed away a lot of branches and trash. The shores look better than ever. It's greener."

Roane pointed out an elderly couple, walking carefully along the shore path on each other's arm. He said he had noticed more senior citizen groups enjoying the cool setting in recent weeks. "People were staying away, but now everything seems like it's back to normal."

That's good news for Bonds, who will be leaving in a few weeks for her final year at Frostburg State University and at least part of a season away from her lake. "I'll find some kind of project to do here over the winter," she said. "I love this place."