Published: June 11, 2008 10:26 pm            

MARK BENNETT: As Indiana floods go, ’13 remains the unluckiest number

TERRE HAUTE — When all your belongings are piled in a soggy heap outside the front door, statistics and history mean little.

Still, as flood waters made their unwanted invasion into the lives of Wabash Valley residents last weekend, that year kept coming up — 1913. The phrase “the worst since 1913” has been heard and written repeatedly from the moment flooding began Saturday morning. Even amid the current disarray, human nature causes people to wonder how a catastrophe 95 years ago could exceed this one.

As Indiana floods go, ’13 remains the unluckiest number.

“If you can imagine all of those towns that got hammered this time, and then make that statewide, that’s 1913,” said Don Arvin, a surface water specialist for the U.S. Geological Survey in Indiana.

At 1 p.m. March 27, 1913, the Wabash River crested above 31 feet. Though river stages in some Indiana communities, such as Elnora along the White River, topped records set in 1913, the Wabash at Terre Haute did not. It hit 25.1 feet last Sunday.

That’s no consolation to folks whose homes, cars, family pictures, computers, furniture got damaged or destroyed by flash flooding on Saturday and Sunday. Some roads and bridges leading to their homes crumbled or collapsed. The swift waters displaced people from Toad Hop to Prairieton. As the flooding receded Monday, people returned to their dwellings in the International Village apartments, and Oakridge Park, Marywood, Prairie Park and Prairie Village subdivisions, finding their clothes, beds, carpets, chairs and couches soaked. Sump pumps and Shop-Vacs whirred. Sweat poured down cheeks from 90-degree heat as people who’ve never considered themselves “victims” dragged ruined possessions into the front yard. Tempers frayed. Tears fell.

Lives were disrupted, but thankfully none were lost.

That wasn’t the case in 1913.

A powerful Easter Sunday tornado preceded that epic flood, killing 17 people in Terre Haute and destroying more than 300 structures. The next day, rains left the Wabash rising at an amazing 2 inches per hour. Flooding stretched seven miles on both sides of the river, from Attica to Mount Carmel, Ill. Terre Haute and its surrounding communities were hit hardest.

All but 700 of West Terre Haute’s 6,000 residents fled to higher ground. A boat operator drew a gun on Sheriff Denny Shea after the lawman ordered the man to lend his boats for a rescue effort, but eventually relented. In Terre Haute, houses in Maywood Terrace, southeast of Collett Park, floated off their foundations. Boats plucked elderly couples stranded by rising waters. In rural Vigo County, crops washed away, coal mines were rendered useless, and railroad tracks, bridges and levees swept off, according to a book by the Terre Haute Publishing Co. By the time the Wabash hit 31 feet on Thursday, March 27, gas and electricity plants were filling with water and closed down.

“Terre Haute is rapidly becoming shut off from the world,” wrote the Terre Haute newspapers.

As danger, chaos and isolation rose along with the water, four people died in the Vigo County flood.

The damage estimates of the flooding ranged, in 1913 prices, from $1 million to $2 million. Adjusted for inflation, those $1-million costs would be $21 million today, while $2 million would jump to $42 million.

It was “the most dreadful week in Vigo County history,” wrote local historian Mike McCormick.

A 1913-caliber flood, with a 31-foot river stage, today would extensively flood Terre Haute’s business district from Wabash Avenue to Interstate 70, flooding along Lost Creek would threaten homes and businesses on the city’s north side, and the village of Dresser would be destroyed, according to a USGS analysis. At 30 feet, sandbagging would be necessary around the Water Treatment Plant.

At a peak of 25 feet, this June flood caused plenty of problems, though. Municipal Terre Haute, on higher ground, fared better than outlying areas, said Dr. Dorene Hojnicki, director of the Vigo County Emergency Management Agency. Creeks and streams filled quickly. Waters spilled over levee banks, and a few broke, including the Greenfield levee in southern Vigo County.

“It was like pouring water into a funnel so fast that it couldn’t keep up,” Hojnicki explained. “This was the flash floods that you always hear about but never seem to happen. This was a perfect storm.”

The result, according to Hojnicki’s rough estimate, was flooding that affected 25,000 people to varying degrees.

A U.S. Army Corps of Engineers crew made an aerial inspection of the Terre Haute area Wednesday. “There’s a few agricultural levees that have given way, and there’s some agricultural lands that are flooded,” said Ron Elliott, chief of public affairs for the Army Corps. “But from what we can see, there’s no major devastation, which is good.”

On Tuesday, Ball State University economist Michael Hicks estimated statewide damages at $126 million, using a statistical formula developed to predict costs of Mississippi River floods in 1993. That prediction, he said, could be altered by uncertain agricultural losses, as well as expenses that average folks, without flood insurance, will absorb.

“There’s enormous damages to people’s property that they’re going to take care of themselves,” said Hicks, who directs Ball State’s Bureau of Business Research.

Crews scouring, repairing and rebuilding soaked floors, drywall and fixtures in entire apartment buildings will undoubtedly see that estimate as too low. So will officials charged with the expensive task of shoring up collapsed roads and bridges.

On Wednesday, Hojnicki said damage calculations are “an ongoing assessment. I have no numbers. I wish I did.”

The one certain statistic is that no one in the Wabash Valley, thank God, lost a life or suffered a serious injury.

A network of municipal and volunteer agencies “responded superbly,” Hojnicki said. Also, levees and watershed structures developed in the aftermath of the 1913 flood lessened the impact of nearly 7 inches of rain that fell Friday on the already drenched Wabash Valley, said Roger Setters, chief of the Army Corps’ regional flood risk management technical center.

“I can only imagine what some of the flood heights would have been had we not added that system” in the years after the 1913 disaster, Setters said.

Fortunately, 1913 comparisons can still be left to the imagination.



Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

        

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