On Oct. 30, floodwaters once again crept into Ryan Lamy’s store, Pip’s Street Dogs. The power had gone out, leaving his own pump system inoperable for about an hour. As a result, about a foot of water rose in the front of the establishment he had operated since 2006.
Lamy’s high-water response has become routine as an owner of a restaurant on Annapolis’ City Dock. His team raised smaller pieces of equipment on top of bread trays and put a door dam in place, but the water still came in through the walls and the floor without the pump functioning. Lamy was able to connect the pump to a nearby building with power via an extension cord, preventing any major damage, but he had to close for two days.
The water level, which could be the 11th-highest recorded in city history according to initial National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration measurements, was caused by strong winds, rain and the tide. Water completely covered the parking lot on Dock Street on Oct. 30, leaving cars half-submerged.
The City Dock Project broke ground in a ceremony Monday, with city officials promising to fix the very flooding hurting Lamy’s store and others along Dock Street. While Lamy said he is hopeful that the project can help save his store from the next major flooding event, some of his fellow business owners on Dock Street are concerned that the city’s big project won’t be done efficiently and could negatively affect their operations, even though the flood mitigation could save their buildings.
“We’re just sitting here waiting for the next big one, and if they weren’t going to do anything about it … I would definitely have to start looking for another location,” Lamy said Oct. 23.
Dock Street flooded. Multiple streets in downtown Annapolis and one in Eastport were closed Oct. 30 due to flooding in the area. (Katharine Wilson/Staff)
The $87 million project is set to include deployable flood barriers, a raised park and a new Maritime Welcome Center that will also house the harbormaster’s office. The project is designed to block rising water levels and flooding expected through 2060 and is set to take 30 months, weather permitting, to complete.
Annapolis experienced 120 flooding events in 2024, the most in a single year in the city’s history. This included two of the city’s top-10 highest water levels ever. In January 2024, Pip’s had 3.5 to 5 feet of water in the store, which meant Lamy needed to replace nearly everything.
The city installed pumps on City Dock about five years ago, but the pumps are unable to handle very high water levels. When water reaches about 4 feet above the average daily low tide, the water overwhelms the pumps, according to Kevin Simmons, the city’s emergency management director.
Within the past three years, Sveinn Storm, the owner of Storm Brothers Ice Cream Factory, said his store has flooded about 120 times. Since he opened his business in 1976, Storm said two floods have been so severe that afterward he had to replace nearly everything, from his equipment to his cabinets. He said the pumps the city installed aren’t working properly and has offered multiple times to pay to replace them.
Storm said he is glad that the flood mitigation part of the City Dock project is happening, but he’s not sure that it will actually come to fruition. He is concerned that the flood protection may not get done quickly because of the wide scale of the project, which includes the park and the Maritime Welcome Center, and what he considers a pattern of the city not being able to fully resolve other issues he cares about, such as missing sidewalk bricks.
“Will it even happen? At what point in time does everything come to a screeching halt because we can’t write the checks?” Storm said. “Let’s take care of the flood mitigation first.”
The project broke ground without the expected $32 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is being held in limbo by the federal agency. Outgoing Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley has said that the project can go forward without the funding by adjusting the project’s timeline and “value-engineering design elements.”
Sveinn Storm, owner of Storm Bros. Ice Cream Factory. (Paul W. Gillespie/Staff)
For the first phase of the project, a significant amount of parking was blocked off from Dock Street, which will be where the raised park is set to be built. The park, city officials said, will serve as a public gathering place, a method of blocking floodwaters and a means to cool rainwater before running into Ego Alley.
The blocked parking, Storm said, has already led to a loss of about 17.6% of his business.
The owners of the Blowfish Poké Hawaiian Grill location on Dock Street, a restaurant that opened in March, said they’re worried that there might be less foot traffic during construction. Their business doesn’t typically get flooded because the sidewalk slopes away from their building. Still, they do benefit from events bringing people to Dock Street, like the holiday market and others that will be relocated during construction.
Flooding mainly affects their business by street closures, which one of the location’s owners, Benjamin Cohen, said happens about once a month. Cohen said that, based on their limited experience so far, they have felt that the city hasn’t acted quickly enough to prepare businesses and deal with flooding.
“As long as [the City Dock project] does exactly what they say it’s going to do, and as long as it’s managed a proper way, I think it’s going to be a positive,” Philip Oxmen, the other owner of the Blowfish Poké location, said. “Right now, there’s a lot of negative impacts.”
Watermark, the company that operates the Harbor Queen and Raven, has had to re-dock its boats at the end of Prince George’s Street during construction, rather than at its normal location at the end of City Dock. While the business may lose some customers due to fewer people happening upon the sightseeing boats, Alex Knoll, Watermark’s director of sales & marketing, said the flood-prevention project is needed.
Although the main part of the business floats, Knoll said Watermark has, on occasion, had to lead people along that seawall to the dock. He said the city was able to relocate Watermark to a nearby location, which he was glad for.
“Long term, something has to be done, and the city is doing that,” Knoll said. “Let’s cross our fingers that it’s not a real long project, and that it does what it’s supposed to do.”
Have a news tip? Contact Katharine Wilson at kwilson@baltsun.com.