Md. city’s $1.3M flood plan won’t stop stormwater damage, critics say

Byrne Kelly, a landscape architect, lives in a suburban Maryland neighborhood called Hell’s Bottom. To the casual visitor, there’s not much hellish about it. Kelly lives near $1 million homes in shady Takoma Park, a Maryland city on the D.C. border that is less known for its demons than for its grocery co-ops, bluegrass aficionados and Little Free Libraries. Elevation-wise, however, the land on which Kelly’s studio sits can’t get much lower. Hell’s Bottom is at the convergence of three Sligo Creek tributaries, making it prone to heavy flooding. Since he moved into the neighborhood in 1987, Kelly said, he’s had to bail out his basement three times and has suffered losses of more than $40,000.