As HoCo headed to normalcy this morning, signs of the
disruptions caused by Friday nights “super derecho” storm were still evident.
The Dunkin Donuts on Montgomery Road in Ellicott
City was open for coffee but had no donuts for dunkin’. The store
lost power on Friday and didn’t get it back until late yesterday making it one
of the storms losers.
The winners were mostly next door in Columbia . Overall Columbia
appears to have fared much better than Ellicott City .
Yesterday I took Mama Wordbones to visit Wegmans for the first time and it
seemed as if half of HoCo was in the store. One of the employees by the sushi
bar told me that the store never lost power and that they'd been "crushed" all weekend.
It was a different story on Main Street in Ellicott
City . Instead of the usual summer weekend crowds the historic
district was largely empty as shops closed due to lack of power. When I drove
through the old mill town on Saturday morning, restaurants were scrambling to preserve
their perishables. I spotted this crew moving food from Tersiguel's to a
refrigerated truck while a generator droned in front of Scoop Ahh Dee Doo.
As Ian Shapira wrote in this story in The Washington Post,
“Natural disasters have a natural way of doing this. They mysteriously
transform some people into the haves and the people next door into have-nots.”
In this particular storm, it appears that Columbia was the haves, and EC was the have-nots.
