By WILLIAM HAMMANN
Capital News Service
WESTERNPORT, Maryland– As floods ripped through parts of Western Maryland 13 months ago, cars floated down streets, sewer lines were torn open and people couldn’t get into their own homes.
Allegany County’s Department of Public Works started working on repairs the next day.
“We couldn’t just leave it and wait,” said Adam Patterson, the department’s director.
Now, Allegany County is reckoning with the flood’s financial fallout – a cleanup bill of more than $8 million paid for with the county’s reserves and capital funds.
The Trump administration denied Maryland’s federal disaster aid request. And while the state government approved $12 million for future flood mitigation efforts, that money can’t be used to reimburse the county for the work it’s already done.
That raises the concern about what future emergencies could mean for rural counties with limited resources. Now, Allegany County – historically one of the state’s poorest and most flood-prone – faces an uncertain future, said State Sen. Mike McKay, a Republican who represents the region.
“The people I represent in Allegany County don’t have a lot of extra nickels and dimes or pennies in their pocket to pay more in their property taxes,” the county’s primary source of funds, McKay said. “There actually is probably going to be some cuts to services that the residents rely on, and so it’s gonna be very tough for the county commissioners going forward the next couple of years.”
FEMA funds denied
Weeks after Georges Creek, a Potomac River tributary, overflowed its banks last May, staff of the Federal Emergency Management Agency evaluated Allegany County’s flood damage. Meanwhile, local engineers toiled to get people access to their homes and their utilities up and running.
Two months passed before Patterson learned there wouldn’t be any help from the federal government. At the time of Maryland’s appeal, FEMA had validated roughly $33.7 million in damages – almost three times the state’s threshold to qualify for federal assistance.
On the same day President Donald Trump first denied declaring an emergency for Maryland, he boasted on Truth Social about granting the aid to Republican-controlled West Virginia, saying, “It is my Great Honor to grant $11.7 Million Dollars to the beautiful State of West Virginia.”
Though Republicans in Western Maryland control most county and state seats and their voters largely supported Trump in his three presidential campaigns, their loyalty wasn’t enough to sway the president to help a red region of a blue state.
Democratic Rep. April McLain Delaney, who represents Western Maryland in Congress, said in a statement after the appeal’s denial: “I have long maintained that politics should play no role in the distribution of FEMA funds and emergency resources, which must be awarded by law based on preset qualifying levels of damage—irrespective of zip code or political affiliation.”
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, McLain Delaney and other federal lawmakers sent letters to the president to appeal the decision, and McKay said he reached out to Vice President JD Vance, “somebody who had a history of dealing with Appalachia.”
“I was actually teed up to receive a phone call the day that the appeal was denied,” McKay said, recalling organizing the talk with a White House staffer. “Unfortunately, that phone call didn’t come through, and then we found out that we had been denied.”
Those denials were “gut punches that I thought were unnecessary,” said McKay. He added that he still hopes to negotiate for help, but more than a year after the floods, “that light’s dimming in the tunnel.”
A budget burden
The denial came amid a national discourse on disaster funding spurred by the FEMA Review Council, created via executive order at the start of Trump’s second term. In its final report last month, the council recommended streamlining existing FEMA grant programs and raising the thresholds for federal disaster declarations.
In response to the council’s final report issued last month, Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman wrote that the council’s recommendations could drive up insurance premiums and leave at-risk regions like Western Maryland more vulnerable. Under the council’s timeline, states wouldn’t have enough time to build the costly infrastructure needed to adapt, she added.
She pointed to Western Maryland’s flooding to illustrate the stakes of streamlinging FEMA. Without federal assistance, Allegany County covered more than $8 million in repairs by using reserved capital project funds and its unreserved fund balance, according to County Administrator Jason M. Bennett.
While the county avoided borrowing in the short term, Bennett said tapping into those reserves could force Allegany to borrow later to restore funding for projects that had already been budgeted before the flood.
This January, Moore pledged $12 million of the state budget for flood recovery efforts in the region, but the county’s cash was already spent.
“Somewhere around Christmastime in 2025, 90% of the work is done,” Patterson said, adding that the price tag came from more than 200 projects completed by the county as of January.
The $12 million in aid that was approved in the state’s upcoming budget is reserved for future projects, meaning none can go to reimbursing what the county has already spent, McKay said.
“That was disappointing, but expected, honestly,” said Patterson, who added that he’s waiting to learn how that money can be spent and how he can access the funds.
“I’ve heard nothing yet,” he said. “Realistically, if we’re able to get anything to construction this year, we’ll be very lucky.”
A troubled region
Patterson said the largely rural county’s hardships go beyond damage from floodwaters.
“I don’t think most people understand the different challenges that we have here,” he said. “Not only the weather … Just the people’s lifestyles and quality of life they have, it’s different. The jobs and income that these people have and being able to take care of their homes – how do they recover from something like this?”
Allegany County residents have been asking that question even before the flood. The region needed to recover from a long saga of economic decline rooted in the departure of large manufacturers that once employed many residents.
The 1980s saw a wave of such losses, from textile manufacturing to tire production and the end of a historic glassmaking industry.
The closing of the Versa paper mill in nearby Luke in 2019 and the 867 union jobs that left with it was the “last chapter” in that story, McKay said.
“A lot of people took a hit, and are probably still struggling,” said Westernport resident Kim Miller, whose father and husband both worked at the paper mill.
Three of her sons have left the region, and she urges them not to return, because “there’s nothing here, really,” she said.
Westernport’s struggles
Miller’s long-time home, a town of about 1,800 and a microcosm of the county’s economic hardship, was hit especially hard by the floods.
A childcare provider in Westernport, Miller was watching three children in her home that day.
Miller said that from her porch, she saw cars floating down the street just over the railroad tracks a block away from her home. “If you go up on the railroad tracks, we could see the water in the windows of [houses],” she said.
One of Miller’s sons picked her and the kids up for them to stay at his house. Miller remembers flood waters nearly engulfing the car before they made it to safety further up the hill.
Meanwhile, another child whom Miller cared for, named Layla, was one of 200 people, mostly children, rescued by boat from the two-story Westernport Elementary School.
After the flood, Layla and her classmates attended classes in facilities at Frostburg State University to finish the school year.
They returned to the elementary school last fall, going to class from the second floor up while the first floor, which had been totally flooded, was being repaired and renovated. Teachers and students finally moved back into the renovated first floor at the end of March.
Rebuilding the Westernport Library, which also sustained heavy damage in the flood, has been an even longer journey.
Flood insurance didn’t cover the damage to the building’s foundation, which increased costs and complicated plans to rebuild, according to Lisa McKenney, executive director of the Allegany County Library System. Of the $12 million in flood aid approved in the state’s upcoming budget, $1 million is meant for the library, and McKenney said she is actively seeking other grants and donations.
“It is my hope that we can do so in a new location that will never flood so that the people of Westernport will have a library for generations to come,” McKenney said.
In the meantime, a temporary location just up the street was established in November 2025, ensuring the town has access to basic library services, but it doesn’t have everything.
Miller said she hopes a new library will restore access to resources that were once available before the flood, like computers and the internet. People who need those services don’t go to the temporary location.
“They’re going over to Piedmont because they got a [federal] grant,” she said of the West Virginia town just across the creek. “They have a whole room full of computers for kids.”
Prone to flooding
The future of the library and of Westernport hinges on more than just funding. The original library sits on land designated by FEMA as prone to flooding roughly every 30 years. That was proved true when the floods came last May, 29 years after the town’s previous major flood.
“It is going to flood again,” said McKay. “It’s just simple geography.”
That reality shapes nearly every decision about recovery and reconstruction.
Patterson’s office sought to buy out several homes that were perpetually prone to flooding, to little avail.
“They need to be willing to leave,” he said. “And a lot of people, they don’t want to leave. This is all they’ve ever known.”
He recalled offering a buyout to an 80-year-old widow whose basement, for the whole summer, was filled with water. “She was on board, and then she wasn’t,” he said. “She was like, this is where my husband and I lived for a very long time. This is where I want to be.”
With many residents choosing to stay, the region faces the challenge of preparing for future flooding. McKay wants to see a number of measures from the General Assembly to fund maintenance, infrastructure improvements and an ample emergency fund for responding to future disasters.
That’s because the denial of federal aid to Allegany County may be the onset of a bleak precedent, both for counties across Maryland and for other blue states across the country.
But to Miller, that just doesn’t seem fair.
“It’s heartbreaking they pick who they help and who they don’t. That’s not fair,” she said. “We’re all citizens of the United States, of Maryland. Everybody should get the help that they ask for – not some denied, some yes.”
