Staff photo by REID SILVERMAN
Chris Bologna of Hollywood donated his time to help clear downed trees around the county following Hurricane Irene last month, including this stop in California to help open roads along Wildewood Parkway.
While most residents of Southern Maryland were hunkered down during Hurricane Irene on the weekend of Aug. 27, some were out with their volunteer fire departments to help others or were on their essential jobs, unable to do anything about the damage to their own homes.
During Hurricane Irene, two poplar trees came down on the home of Ron Rennick in Port Republic. He lost a 20-foot-by-20-foot section of wall upstairs and a corner of the house, which allowed the rain to come in soaking all the way down to the basement.
His home in Port Republic was declared uninhabitable. He sent his dogs to a kennel and had to find shelter for himself and his wife.
“Trying to find a hotel room was a real treat and dealing with the insurance company was a real treat,” he said.
His employer, Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, needed him on the job to help in the electrical restoration but allowed him to get his affairs in order before coming back to work.
Rennick is the safety testing and inspection coordinator for SMECO and was a lineman for 23 years. He worked with a crew from Florida on shifts 17 hours long for three days straight after Irene.
“I was lucky ’cause the other guys were out three days ahead of me,” he said.
He couldn’t thank the visiting crew enough.
“I hope we have the opportunity to return the favor if Florida gets knocked around,” he said.
It took SMECO six days to get the system back up and fully running.
“There is nothing that makes you feel better than to impact people’s lives. It’s a very gratifying job,” he said, and no one got hurt during the restoration.
Rennick and his wife stayed at a hotel for eight days until they restored the first floor of their house enough to be livable. Now he’s waiting on his insurance company for the rest of the needed repairs.
Rennick has lived in Calvert County for 26 years and he’s ridden out other major storms like Isabel and the 1994 ice storm.
“This last storm changed my mind,” he said. He’s going to clear out for the next one, he said.
“It was a long night in the basement of the house,” he said, during Irene.
Darlene Mund was one of several dispatchers who worked a 12-hour shift at the St. Mary’s County Emergency Operations Center during Irene.
While she was at work, falling trees destroyed her detached garage, “and we lost part of our roof” from the high winds, at her home in the Chesapeake Ranch Estates in southern Calvert County.
What she didn’t know was that the 5.8 earthquake that hit on Aug. 23 had cracked her home’s foundation. The rains from Irene flooded her basement with 6 to 8 inches of water, she said.
Mund had to work for the next four days after Irene. When she had the free time, she went around her neighborhood with a wheelbarrow to try to collect possessions that were blown away. With a flooded basement and partially removed roof, “it was really hard dealing with that stuff because you gotta go back to work,” she said.
She said some homes in her neighborhood were split in half by fallen trees.
“Our three-block radius got hit really, really hard. It’s just by the grace of God nobody was killed,” she said.
Her insurance paid for the roof repair but not the flooding, which the insurance company said was caused by a “movement of the earth,” she said.
Mund has worked at the St. Mary’s 911 center since 2005 and did the same work in Washington state before. She’s experienced earthquakes before.
“This was the very first hurricane I’ve encountered. It was nothing like I thought it would be,” she said.
In public safety, “everybody focuses completely on public welfare,” said William Stephens, director of the Charles County Department of Emergency Services. “Only after do they get an opportunity to focus on their family’s needs,” he said.
Two volunteer members of the Cobb Island Volunteer Fire Department in southern Charles County had trees come down on their garages while they were on duty during Irene. One of those two had a vehicle destroyed as well, said David Stine, assistant chief at Cobb Island.
Firefighters who didn’t live on Cobb Island had no choice but to stay the night that weekend as Cobb Island Road “had three large oak trees come across the main road,” Stine said.
So members stayed the night, using generator power.
“We all planned on it more or less,” he said.
Stine suffered no damage to his own property, but he promptly cleared his land of all large trees that could threaten in the future. He’s been in the tree-clearing business for 12 years.
“It was an exhausting time for me,” he said. He began preparing for Irene on the Monday before it hit and then between Friday morning and Sunday morning, “I had about an hour’s worth of sleep,” he said.
Then the calls for tree removal poured in. About 200 messages came in during the first four days.
“I was overwhelmed and we’re still getting cleared-up trees today,” Stine said.
At the firehouse, “I’m putting in limited time.”
It’s been a rough time for Cobb Island’s fire department lately. A member drowned in the Wicomico River last month, Hurricane Irene hit, then Tropical Storm Lee, and then, on Tuesday, a member was in a serious car accident, Stine said.
During the worst of Hurricane Irene, the St. Mary’s County Emergency Operations Center entered into a Code Blue. From 11 p.m. Saturday night to about 3:30 a.m. Sunday morning on Aug. 28, no first responders were dispatched for any reason.
It was too risky to send anyone out. Large trees, many of them oak, were toppling down onto houses and roadways.
“It was too dangerous for our volunteers to be out,” said Bob Kelly, director of the St. Mary’s County Department of Public Safety.
At that point people in St. Mary’s were literally on their own, he said, without the network of emergency help that normally protects them.
Wind gusts reached 73 mph at Cobb Island, 63 mph at Cove Point and 56 mph at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, according to the National Weather Service office in Sterling, Va.
More than 11 inches of rain fell in Leonardtown and more than 13 inches at Cove Point. Waldorf recorded almost 7 inches.
Shelters were opened in all three Southern Maryland counties for Irene, and more than 180 people used shelters in Calvert and St. Mary’s each.
More than 40 people visited a shelter in Charles County. Before Hurricane Irene, “nobody has ever come to a shelter since I’ve been here,” Stephens said.
About 67 homes were destroyed in St. Mary’s, according to a county assessment. In Calvert, 61 homes suffered major damage and 30 were considered destroyed, said Jacqueline Vaughan, director of the Calvert County Department of Public Safety.
Charles County escaped Hurricane Irene with less damage and lighter rain but then took the brunt of the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee on Sept. 7 and 8, when more than 15 inches of additional rain came down.
There were no reported fatalities in Southern Maryland and one reported injury in Calvert County from a person hurt while cutting up tree debris, Vaughan said.
“A person’s life is much more important than a building,” Stephens said.
“It was widespread. We had homes from Chesapeake Beach to Solomons Island that were damaged,” Vaughan said.
SMECO experienced the highest number of outages ever and the most amount of damage to its system since its inception in 1937.
Early that Sunday morning, Aug. 28, 108,809 SMECO customers were out of power, out of about 152,000 customers. That is 72 percent of its customers.
In St. Mary’s County, almost 43,000 customers were out of electricity out of about 48,000 (88 percent) at the height of the storm, said Thomas Dennison, government and public relations manager for SMECO.
By Friday, Sept. 2, all SMECO customers were restored, said Kenneth Capps, chief operating officer. He said of Irene, “This is a different storm than I’ve ever seen in my 30 years with SMECO.”
“It was unusual for us,” Vaughan said. “We didn’t have the surge we were expecting on the bay side.”
Tropical Storm Isabel in September 2003 brought a 6-foot storm surge into the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Isabel’s damaging winds took down about 90 SMECO poles, Capps said. Irene brought down more than 300 poles.
During Tropical Storm Lee, more than 50 roads were closed or impassable in Charles County. The road at Cliffton Drive on the Potomac was washed out twice. Route 234 over Allens Fresh was washed away and a car was driven into it.
The Maryland State Highway Administration said a temporary bridge there should be open by mid-November. The design of a new bridge is under way, which will cost about $3 million, and should be complete by late next year.
In coordinating with the National Weather Service about Tropical Storm Lee, “nobody was talking about the rainfall rates we received here,” Stephens said.
“I’ve seen monsoons where it didn’t rain like that,” he said.
jbabcock@somdnews.com