Flooding at Beaverdam Run, Cockeysville
Why is it that people who buy 4-wheel drive SUVs think their cars are amphibious? Jeanne's rains flooded York Road yesterday afternoon at Beaverdam Run in Cockeysville, and Sun photog Gene Sweeney snapped a front-page picture of this knucklehead driving through the bumper-deep water in a silver Jeep. After driving past barriers, I should add. Driving through flooded streets is the most common way of killing yourself in hurricanes and their aftermath. It takes an astonishingly small amount of water to float a car and wash it - and you- into oblivion. Find another route and live to complain about it.
Speaking of Beaverdam Run, the USGS techies were out there on the York Road bridge this morning checking their stream gauges. The instruments reported that the creek rose 8 feet in yesterday's rains. The flow meters in the water jumped from 23 cubic feet per second at 1 p.m. to a 5 p.m. peak of 1,640 cf/s. That's still far short of the record of 3,360 cf/s set on July 1, 1984. Wonder whether our knucklehead would have driven through that.
Comments
July 1, 1984. The underpass was still in place. Is that the time some knucklehead lost his life in the "tunnel"? No Commando cars then; he managed to do it in a conventional car.
GHoffmanner
Posted by: George Hoffmanner | September 30, 2004 12:51 PM
The Sun's crack librarians couldn't find a story on a death in the old Cockeysville underpass in 1984. But Bill Bentley, who had a shop nearby for many years, told Sun reporter Bob Erlandson in 1992 that at least three people had drowned in there over the years. The 265-foot, two-lane tunnel was also a bottleneck. Trucks taller than 14 feet couldn't get through. The Northern Central RR stopped using the track in 1972 after Hurricane Agnes washed out an upstream bridge. Taxpayers spent $8 million to get rid of it in 1991.
Posted by: Frank Roylance | September 30, 2004 5:28 PM
To George Hoffmanner. This in response to your 2004 comment about the 1972 hurricane that flooded the Cockeysville underpass. You and the professionals who didn't close the underpass are the only knuckleheads. ART, THE PERSON YOU WANTED TO JOKE ABOUT, THE PERSON WHO DIED IN THE UNDERPASS, WAS A MARRIED FATHER OF SEVERAL YOUNG CHILDREN. As he entered the tunnel, he drove through water that was not visible as he entered it. If you recall, the road in the tunnel sloped downward to allow trucks to pass through it. Art could not see that the tunnel was flooding. Once he drove into the underpass, his car was lifted by the high water. He could not turn back. The water carried his car to the north side of the tunnel and drew him into the river that had flooded over its banks. He tried to escape his car, but it had automatic windows and the engine was, of course, no longer running. He kicked his foot through one of the closed windows to escape, but the car took on water and he drowned. A brave neighbor and a diver (J. Cooper) rescued his remains from the river.
It was a tragedy.
Later, my mother, who was a local business owner, told me that she had offered to bring him to our home to wait out the storm, but he wanted to get home to his family. It was an accident.
Everyone in Cockeysville used York Road and thus the tunnel all of the time. No one was ever warned that it would flood.
FIND LESS SERIOUS SUBJECTS TO JOKE ABOUT.
Posted by: Rebecca | September 5, 2008 11:48 PM