Gold lives matter

In the midst of bleak, sad, devastating news from local to national and global levels, I bring you this piece of refreshing, hopeful, uplifting news.

As you may know from local newscasts, Frederick County took the brunt of the recent rainstorms, getting inundated and pummeled with inches and inches of rain in a short period of time, resulting in devastating damage, including buckled and washed-away roads, collapsed bridges and countless homes, businesses and government buildings taking on significant amounts of water. Public transportation was interrupted, first responders were kept busy attempting to assist people trapped in dangerous situations and local journalists risked life and limb to bring those stories to the public.

The City of Frederick is the proud home of an extremely innovative flood control system, the design and construction of which was spurred by a devastating flood in 1976 that pretty much destroyed the downtown district.

The ahead-of-its-time system created an underground system of conduits that control and contain Carroll Creek, a natural body of water. It was the waters of Carroll Creek that took Frederick to its knees in 1976.

To make this functional but rather ugly system more palatable, elected leaders at the time pitched the idea of a linear park, complete with a “fake” creek atop the flood control system that would run the length of it and would, when completed, be a model open space that would also attract economic development along its sides.

This past week, the system got quite the workout. As it was designed to do, the flood control system deposited much of the flood waters into Baker Park. The current mayor was quoted as saying something along the lines of “the fact that Baker Park is flooded is good because that means downtown Frederick is not flooded.”

I give you all this background because I realize that few of my Baltimore friends would be that familiar with the Carroll Creek project. But while the city was saved and Baker Park will dry out, there were thousands of victims of the success of the flood control system — gold fish were washed from the park’s Culler Lake, where they became stranded in huge puddles that would eventually dry up, leaving the fish high and dry as well.

Understandably, rescuing fish is not a high priority when lives and property need to be protected. Frederick residents were encouraged to go to Baker Park with buckets and nets and rescue fish for release in their own backyard ponds.

It did my heart good to see the many social media posts with photos and videos of families delicately making their way through murky puddles and squishy stands of soggy grass, gently picking up fish and placing them in life-saving buckets of water.

It’s a very small, seemingly insignificant positive thing to come out of a storm that will probably end up costing tens of millions of dollars, but definitely something to wrap our hearts around.

Children search for fish swept out of Culler lake and into an adjacent section of Baker Park two days after floodwater poured into the lake from Carroll Creek. City officials encouraged the public to catch and adopt the invasive species of fish rather than placing them back in the lake or creek. Photo by Graham Cullen