Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON – Business owners in historic Ellicott City have a big decision to make – whether to rebuild after their businesses were destroyed by flooding for the second time in two years.
Howard County Executive Allan Kittleman said the harsh reality is there’s no guarantee that if business owners rebuild now, another flood won’t destroy their businesses again in the future.
“We’re gonna have some different options that we’re gonna be looking at and different ideas because this is a game changer in many ways, 2016 was too, but to have two of these in two years is a real game changer, and we’ve gotta figure out what’s the best way to move forward,” Kittleman told reporters Thursday.
It took Michele Tersiguel more than three months to rebuild Tersiguel’s French County Restaurant after it was destroyed by flooding in 2016, but he said the decision for him to rebuild after this week’s floods was an easy one to make. Tersiguel’s parents opened the restaurant on Main Street 40 years ago in a location farther down the street.
“It’s part of us,” Tersiguel said of the restaurant.
The morning after Sunday’s floods, Tersiguel told WMAL he had already hired a contractor to start making repairs whenever it is safe to do so.
As she surveyed the damage Monday morning Julia Sanger said she wasn’t sure she wanted to reopen her business Park Ridge Trading Company, which she started about two months before the 2016 flooding.
That time said she used the positive energy of her neighbors to help rebuild – a process which took about six months.
“We really were riding the sense of feeling like we’d come back bigger and better and stronger and more united, and, you know, now I just don’t know what it looks like going forward,” Sanger said.
County council member Jonathan Weinstein is telling business owners the same thing he told them in 2016: there’s no guarantee the area won’t flood again, so they have to do what’s best for themselves, their families and their businesses.
Kittleman said the county is taking measures to mitigate future flood damage, but he stressed that mitigate does not mean eliminate.
Weinstein said it’s too soon to tell how many business owners will decide to rebuild, but the county will do whatever it can to support those who do and those who can’t.
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