For the past few years, the messy-haired celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has been traveling the country with his show “24 Hours To Hell And Back” to “save” failing restaurants. In his show’s first-ever two-hour special episode, he’s taking on an entire town: Ellicott City, Maryland, which was devastated by flooding in 2016 and 2018.

The two-hour “Save Our Town” episode will air on May 12. Fox is marketing it as the show’s “biggest makeover challenge to date,” which is saying something, because Ramsay once saved a Korean restaurant in Arkansas from a chef who didn’t know how to cook Korean food.

“I’m going to save an entire town,” Ramsay declares in the trailer.

Ramsay’s crew renovated three downtown businesses for the episode: Little Market Cafe, Jaxon Edwin Social House (a barbershop/game room/eatery), and a merger of the Phoenix Emporium and Ellicott Mills Brewing Company called Phoenix Upper Main. All three are currently only open for carryout due to the pandemic.

The Shoemaker Country home goods store also got an exterior renovation by celebrity designer Nate Berkus.

“24 Hours” episodes typically involve Ramsay going undercover in some way. For the special, he said he pretended to be a historian in order to explore the town undetected.

Founded in 1772, Ellicott City sits in a valley near two offshoots of the Patapsco River, about 35 miles north of D.C. and 10 miles from Baltimore. In 2016, a “thousand-year storm” dropped 30 days’ worth of rain in just two hours and forced nearly a hundred of the town’s businesses to shut down. Two people were killed.

Two years later, a second flood again sent waves of water crashing through the town’s historic storefronts and carried cars down the length of Main Street. A Maryland Army National Guardsman drowned.

Both times, it took millions of dollars and more than a year of work to rebuild.

Ellicott City’s plight has been on Ramsay’s mind ever since he opened a restaurant in Baltimore in 2017. “I’ve never taken anything for granted, but shutting restaurants down through no fault of their own, due to climate [and] weather, it’s really hard to stomach especially when they’re that good,” he told the Baltimore Sun after filming wrapped in late February.