Torrential rain in 2018 gives Hagerstown wettest September on record and fifth highest annual precipitation

Parker Bandy has been growing frustrated and having trouble getting a good night's sleep as he wages his war.

The battle has been against this year's unrelenting rain, which took aim at Bandy's basement along Artillery Drive home off Sharpsburg Pike, south of Hagerstown.

With the region's water table at unusually high levels, Bandy has watched water surge through his sump pump and through the walls of his basement.

Bandy has had up to 30 inches of water in his house, which forced him and his wife to purchase two more water pumps. One is a six-horsepower gasoline model that pumps 165 gallons per minute.

The pump runs 24/7. Bandy and his wife work in "shifts" to fill the machine's gas tank every hour, just so they can stay ahead of the water.

"We're praying hard for a drought. This has been awful," said Bandy, who has been particularly hard hit in recent weeks.

The weather patterns in the Tri-State area this year will be ones to remember, with pounding rains that seemed to be as frequent as the sunshine.

Communities have been flooded and roads battered. Homeowners like Bandy have been scrambling, dealing with surging water in basements, at levels that, in some cases, have never been seen before.

As of Thursday, the total amount of precipitation in Hagerstown for this year stood at 51.59 inches, the fifth highest amount of annual precipitation in the city since records began in 1898, according to Hagerstown weather observer Greg Keefer's website at i4weather.net.

There's still more than two months left in the year.

The highest amount of annual precipitation for Hagerstown was recorded in 1996, with 76.66 inches, Keefer's website says.

Hagerstown also logged its fourth wettest summer on record this year with 19.77 inches of rain, according to Keefer. The summer includes June, July and August. 

The wettest summer was in 1996, when there was 24.80 inches of rain, according to Keefer.

Washington County farmers are among the victims this year.

Growers who couldn't get into fields to cut hay because of rain risked seeing the crop get too old and lose its quality, said Jeff Semler, a local educator specializing in agriculture and natural resources for University of Maryland Extension.

Farmers who cut hay but couldn't get back out to bale it because of rain watched it turn to useless mulch, he said.

Hardly any of the wheat grown in Maryland this year has been fit for milling or human consumption, local agricultural experts said. Some wheat kernels did not develop — sometimes referred to as "tombstones" — because of disease that spread due to excessive moisture or other factors, Semler said.

Some corn grown in the county isn't looking good. There is so much moisture, kernels are sprouting on the cob, according to growers and agriculture officials.

Brian Forsythe said he is seeing the same thing with soybeans.

Beans are meant to be harvested when they are dry, but they are sprouting on the plant in the excessive wet conditions, said Forsythe, who is on the board of directors of Washington County Farm Bureau.

Apples are being affected by rot, he said.

"My grandfather said he has not seen this in his lifetime," Forsythe said.

Not only is corn sprouting, but kernels are starting to rot and mold is growing between kernels, said Jeremiah Weddle, who farms about 2,800 acres stretching from Funkstown and extending toward Boonsboro, Keedysville, Sharpsburg and Shepherdstown, W.Va.

That causes concerns about toxins ending up in livestock feed, said Weddle, who farms corn, soybeans, wheat, grass hay and dairy cattle.

Weddle said keeping livestock has been a "nightmare" because pens are always wet. Feed is always getting soaked, animals are being shut in more and pastures are torn up.

But Weddle said he doesn't want the public to feel sorry for farmers. He said he still loves farming and is committed to getting through this year.

What's the answer?

"We're all trying to figure that out," said Weddle, a member of the Washington County Planning Commission.

Flooding 

Among the sobering realities this year was 10.53 inches of rain that fell in the Sharpsburg area in mid-May. Firefighters rushed to the southern end of the county to help homeowners as water surged into their homes.

There was a landslide on Sandy Hook Road. A plugged culvert was left standing under 30 feet of water on Chestnut Grove Road.

Rain kept June wet in the early and mid to late part of the month. July's rainfall included 2.44 inches on July 21.

If anyone had visions last month of the region drying out as fall approached, Mother Nature had other plans.

Keefer's website said 2.79 inches of rain fell in Hagerstown on Sept. 7 and 1.27 inches of rain was recorded Sept. 8. The soaking month was capped off with 2.86 inches on Sept. 9.

All of the precipitation left Hagerstown with the wettest September on record, with 11.98 inches, according to Keefer's website. That broke the record of 11.45 inches set in 2003.

September was also the second wettest on record for any month, behind October 1976, when 12.36 inches of precipitation fell, the website said.

Among the places hard hit with flooding from the Sept. 9 rainfall were areas off Jefferson Boulevard and south of Hagerstown, along Artillery Drive and Garis Shop Road.

Jeff Kershner of Kershner's Water Pump Service said one customer, a woman on Garis Shop Road, had a sump pump that adequately served her house for years.

But her basement flooded following the Sept. 9 rain.

Kershner said a gas-powered pump and three electric pumps were installed in the woman's house to help her get a handle on the flooding. Then, Kershner said, he installed another electric pump in the woman's house "just to stay even" with water infiltrating her house.

"Even with all the hurricanes (over the years), there hasn't been the flooding that's occurring here now," he said.

Keefer said he thinks one reason people are saying the conditions are the worst they have seen is because this year's storms have been torrential.

The sound of Bandy's gas-powered pump echoed in his neighborhood Wednesday, along with pumps at his neighbor's house across the street. He estimates that about eight other homes in his neighborhood have been dealing with flooding.

Even though Bandy was pumping water 24 hours a day through mid-day Wednesday, the water table was so high, seven inches of water remained in his basement for much of September.

Bandy estimated it had dropped to about four inches by Wednesday.

Causes 

Keefer's website features a graph showing that average summer temperatures in Hagerstown have steadily risen since 1900. Keefer said he has noticed that nighttime low temperatures are increasing.

Hagerstown's five hottest summers on record have occurred since 1991. The hottest was in 2010, when the average temperature for the three-month period was 77.7 degrees, according to Keefer's website.

Keefer said he thinks the patterns are due to global warming, although he admits he used to think that all that talk was "made up."

"But I can definitely see it in my readings," he said.

Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, said the trends in the Tri-State area are the consequences of "human-caused climate change."

Warmer temperatures let the atmosphere hold a greater amount of moisture, which results in extreme rainfall, said Mann, who has written four books, including "The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening our Planet, Destroying our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy."

Fernando Miralles-Wilhelm, a professor at the University of Maryland, agrees that the patterns are due to global warming. He is chair of the university's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science and a professor in the department.

The department ranks as a top ten program in oceanography, atmospheric sciences and meteorology, according to the National Research Council.

Miralles-Wilhelm said higher temperatures are drawing more water vapor from the Earth's surface and dumping it in the form of prolonged rainfall. He used the analogy of a simmering tea kettle to illustrate the point.

As the water in the kettle gets hotter, the boiling bubbles become more rapid.

"These storms are essentially like those bubbles," Miralles-Wilhelm said.

Also, the amount of water on Earth is fixed, so when one region has excessive rainfall, another region is often losing water, he said.

Extreme summer weather events in recent years include a European heat wave in 2003, a Pakistan flood/Russian heatwave in 2010, the 2011 Texas drought and ongoing drought in California.

"You're going to see an increase in extremes," Miralles-Wilhlem said.

Ed Wells, a professor of environmental studies at Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa., cautioned against reading too much into weather extremes in a given year. He said there are a number of factors to consider this year, such as an El Nino effect that seems to be causing warmer temperatures.

But Wells said he believes global warming is a factor in the trends.

He said he takes a "precautionary approach" to global warming because not everything is understood about it.

"But we know enough that we should reduce use of fossil fuels," Wells said.

Asked if the National Weather Service had an official stance on this year's weather, an official in the department's communications office referred questions to a meteorologist with the NWS office in Sterling, Va.

Cody Ledbetter, a meteorologist with the NWS office in Sterling, said he doesn't connect any of this year's extreme weather with global warming. He said the events can be attributed to weather patterns that contributed to an abnormally wet summer.

Among the patterns were coastal low pressure systems coming up the East Coast in early summer and dropping moderate to heavy amounts of rain, Ledbetter said. Those systems typically occur in winter.

In response, Miralles-Wilhelm said it's important to "separate the signal from the noise."

The noise may be an isolated weather event that delivers any number of characteristics. But the signal is a long-term pattern showing global warming, Miralles-Wilhelm said.

"If you look at the record, it's clear," he said.