North County residents learned the hard way that remnants of a tropical storm can cause much more flooding than a hurricane.
According to Gunpowder River expert Theaux Le Gardeur, the river rose nearly two-thirds of a foot after Hurricane Irene passed through and 9.46 feet after Tropical Storm Lee.
Le Gardeur, who owns Backwater Angler, a fly-fishing shop in Hereford and heads up the nonprofit Gunpowder Riverkeeper advocacy group, used information from the U.S. Geological Survey to compare the two storms.
He tracked water velocity, which is listed as cubic feet per second.
"One cfs indicates that every second, a cubic foot of water approximately the size of a basketball is passing a location like a bridge," said Le Gardeur, who used a river gauge located at Falls Road, in Parkton.
After Irene, the river flow was 264 cfs, or 1,974 gallons per second. With Lee, it was 3,387 cfs, or 26,479 gallons per second, Le Gardeur said.
"Luckily, rivers and wild fish are resilient," he said.
North County residents and businesses got a brutal lesson in the power of that fast-moving water.
In Sparks, about 20 rolls of heavy plastic that line landfills floated from a storage yard at Hallaton Inc. on Sept. 7. Each roll weighs 3,000 pounds, is 23 feet long and is 2 1/2 feet in diameter.
The rolls floated across Sparks Road, through the parking lot for Bike & Hike Trail, over a wooden fence and ended up in the woods.
Hallaton employees and their families spent the next two days hauling the plastic liners out of the woods where front-end loaders picked them up and brought them back to the storage yard.
They also cleaned up the environmental service business that had 4 feet of water in its first floor.
"We moved things upstairs for Hurricane Irene, but then brought everything back down," said Todd Harman, president. "We thought the worst was over."
Hallaton has been in Sparks for five years, in a former creamery that was renovated and enlarged.
Across the road, volunteers and Department of Natural Resources personnel emptied the Sparks Nature Center of rugs, cabinets, shelves, books and displays that were muddy and wet.
The Nature Center is housed in the former Sparks State Bank building. A recently painted mural depicting life in and on the Gunpowder was not damaged, but many of the taxidermy animals displayed under the mural were under water.
The sight of debris piled high at the one-lane Sparks Road bridge was repeated at many North County bridges.
So many of them flooded on Sept. 7 that school bus drivers taking students home purposely left some students at school rather than take them on dangerous roads and bridges.
"Student safety is most important and our drivers know their roads so well that the safest thing was to have the buses not even try some roads, but have the parents pick up the students," said Ron Prettyman, general manager at Whitcraft Bus Co., which runs 25 school buses.
Some Hereford High School and Hereford Middle School students were dropped off at their siblings' elementary schools where they waited for parents.
At Prettyboy Elementary School, about 20 students went to the library, did their homework and watched videos, said Principal Sue Truesdell. She stayed until 5:45 p.m. when the last student was picked up.
"After a hurricane and then a flood, it will be nice just to have a normal week of school," she said.