THE Flood

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Flooding is inevitable. We have floods here in Kentucky every year. It’s a fact of life living near a river, even with well-controlling modern marvels like flood walls and levees. Everywhere that’s had floods has “the big one,” or one they simply call THE flood. Here in Louisville, that’s the 1937 Ohio River flood. There are signs around town that indicate where the high-water mark for that flood reached (including one across the street from Churchill Downs). In Dayton, it was the 1913 flood. Part of the space at the Dayton Historical Park is devoted to remembering the worst natural disaster in Ohio’s history. While the entire state was affected (it’s said, and not overstated, that the entire state flooded), Dayton bore the brunt of the disaster. Located around three tributaries of the Great Miami River — the Mad River, the Stillwater River, and Wolf Creek — Dayton had plenty of waterfront. And, they thought, a good levee system to hold back flood waters. In normal times, that would have been true; however, the flood of 1913 was one of those “hundred-year floods” that “experts” simply do not take into consideration when planning for flood protection. After all, how many times is it going to rain eleven inches in a 36-hour period? On March 25, 1913, Dayton found out. The entrance to the building that houses the flood museum has a very simple yet telling explanation of the magnitude of the flood of 1913. A blue line surrounds the building near its roof, with an informational sign saying THAT is the high-water mark for the flood. Inside there are numerous photos, re-created displays (if you want to get a slight feeling of fear, spend a few minutes in the room that’s made to look like an attic, with the sound of rain the only thing you can hear in the room), and oral histories from survivors that detail the disaster. Things included are reconstructed flatboats, which NCR (National Cash Register, one of Dayton’s biggest and longest-lasting companies) built in haste to try to help evacuate people; a photo of the NCR building with its whistle highlighted (the thing that sounded the alarm to the city because it could be heard citywide) as well as a recreation of it; and a locomotive engine from Barney & Smith Car Company (no relation to Smith-Barney the investors), a train car manufacturer that was in dire straits (not the band ) before the flood and doomed to close afterward. The total death toll for the entire state for the March 1913 flood was 426. Of those, 360 perished in Dayton. A sad time in Dayton history that is well preserved in this fascinating museum. PHOTO COLLAGE: *A photo on the wall of people escaping the flood water by crawling along the telephone wires (those are telephone, not electrical) *More photos on display showing the scope of the disaster, with the wall painted the color of a muddy, angry river *The outside of the flood museum, with the blue line near the top indicating how high the water was during the apex of the flood *A map showing how far out of the banks various creeks and rivers got in 1913