Cataclysmic comparisons came quick and easy yesterday for business owners recovering from a torrent of water and mud that descended on a Lutherville shopping center.
"At its worst, it was like Niagara Falls," said Sheila Landers, manager of the Maytag Store in Yorkridge Shopping Center, part of which was slimed Saturday by a wall of cascading mud churned up by a broken water main on York Road.
Landers - who described the water as "nasty muddy" - and other business people on the shopping center's eastern perimeter were forced to plug their rear doorways with trash bags and whatever else came to hand in an effort to stop the treacly mess from seeping in. Some succeeded, some did not.
Yesterday, the task turned toward cleaning up, both inside some of the stores and in a parking lot behind them, where a Baltimore County Bureau of Utilities crew used bulldozers, excavators and a huge vacuum-cleaner truck to get rid of the mud, much of it now dried, caked and almost impenetrable in the heat.
On York Road, traffic near Ridgely Road was rerouted into single lanes in each direction as work proceeded on repairs to the 12-inch water main - completed at 3 a.m. yesterday - and to the other systems damaged by the rupture, such as storm drains and utility lines, as well as the road's surface. A black metal fence was also toppled by the grimy onslaught.
"That's the power of water," said Mark Green, an equipment operator on the county's utilities crew, as he shoveled mud away from a lamppost behind the shopping center. "This whole lot was covered in mud - the sloppy stuff."
By midmorning, Green said, at least 15 truckloads of mud, dirt and rocks had been hauled out of the parking lot. A considerable amount remained.
Inside Bruno's Hair Design, owner Greg Pitarra said that on Saturday he'd had to deal with a smaller problem, but a problem nonetheless. He borrowed from an employee's father a vacuum cleaner designed for scooping up water and went to work sucking up the mud seeping into the carpet at the back door. The machine, he said, wasn't really meant for that.
"I ruined it, so now I've got to buy him a new one," Pitarra said with a sigh. He also ruined about 50 white towels, now covered in mud, that he had placed against the door. Another of his employees, who also works as a plumber, tried using joint compound to seal the door, to no avail.
