Recalling '57 flood

First, a confession: I was out of town for the big flood of 2011.
The waters had receded by the time I got back into town. But I’ve read the stories, looked at the high water marks, and inspected the basement at the newspaper office.
I’m also now old enough that I qualify as one of those codgers whose opinions are sought for comparison to past natural disasters.
So, as someone who has pretty vivid memories of the big flood of 1957 (and as I recall another pretty big flood of 1959), how do I think this latest round of high water measures up? Was the flood of 2011 worse than the flood of 1957?
No. And in some ways, yes.
Mostly, it was just different, as all natural disasters have their ways of being different.
From a high water standpoint, the recent floodwaters in Portland didn’t reach the ’57 level. They were somewhere between six and 18 inches lower this time around.
I base that on the newspaper building’s basement. This time around, we had maybe a few gallons of water come in through the windows. In 1957, the river was high enough that it flowed in through the windows and filled the basement.
Folks at city hall tell similar stories of higher watermarks on the walls from the ’57 mess.
But the 2011 version was faster and — from all accounts — scarier. The river rose more quickly. And it kept rising quickly even when folks expected the water to start going down. They also went down much more quickly, reflecting a level of volatility that wasn’t there in 1957. (The river did another quick up-and-down the Saturday after the 2011 flood, putting lots of people on edge.)
The 1957 flood came in about the third week of a wet June and affected a much larger chunk of the county. Ground was saturated. Rivers and streams rose quickly enough to claim the life of a farmer who had gone out to try to rescue his livestock.
And then it stayed high.
My recollection is that the flood was in place for a matter of days. It was possible to travel by boat or canoe all the way from West North Street to West Water Street, mostly through flooded backyards.
And it stank.
The Salamonie was one dirty river in those days before the Clean Water Act. Septic tanks, cesspools, and city sewers drained into it.
Combined sewers backed up, sending a toxic mix of household sewage and river water into the streets.
Where, of course, kids played in it.
In my neighborhood, the mucky water over one particular catch basin was nearly three feet deep. For a couple of hot June days, that was our swimming hole.
It’s a wonder that none of us ended up in the hospital.
The river was dredged about 1960 by the Army Corps of Engineers in a project that would have environmentalists howling. Where there had been a pretty typical Indiana stream, there was now essentially a ditch. Trees were removed from the banks. Wildlife habitat was lost. The path was straightened.
It wasn’t much to look at, but soon it started to smell better.
Stricter environmental standards and recognition that you never truly solve a problem by sending it downstream to the next guy made a huge difference. That work is still going on, as the city’s effort to end combined sewer overflows attests.
The river is by all accounts vastly cleaner and healthier than it was 50 years ago.
Just the same, I wouldn’t recommend swimming in the floodwaters.[[In-content Ad]]