Findlay, OH Flooding - The End is Near??

These images are about a week old, but (surprise, surprise!) access was down for a bit, and then I was distracted by some other things for a couple of days.

According to the First Evangelical Lutheran Church (Evangelical Lutherans? Who Knew!?) - Then End was apparently near......this sign was up the day before the Great Flood of August 2007. These photos were taken the day after, Wednesday, August 22, 2007, in Findlay, OH.


This was my backyard on the morning of Tuesday, August 21st, after the night of rain - about 9 inches. I was slightly worried. As you can tell, my neighbor's yard, to the East, is a bit higher and drains into mine. The water came up to my crawl space (a first), but I didn't get too much water in there. I started the day pretty upset at the water in my yard, because the 4 or so previous floods in town, all purported to be worst than the last (and I haven't been here 2 years yet), yeilded more water accumulation in my back yard. I was worried that this would be a growing trend in my yard, and what I could do - besides adding dirt - to amend the problem. The maple tree roots would be so prolific that adding drain lines would be difficult; adding dirt may force water into the crawl space or under the house, so some sort of sighting would be required to ensure it ran to one side of the property and then along the property line to the curb, so not to flood the neighbor's yard, etc etc. Then I heard it was 9 inches or so of rain - so, that made the impact a little softer, I guess. A never-before-amount of rain. And with plants in full glory, roots were able to suck much of that up. In fact by noon, much of the water in my yard had been absorbed.

But, the next day, the rain that fell in surrounding areas drained into our area, flooding our rivers, creeks, and drainages. This is a shot of the Blanchard River at Main street. Note the people driving over the bridge, as the water level of the river - over flood stage - is at the bottom of the bridge:

Finally, our offices were flooded, along with hundreds of homes in the area. The offices are still coming online a week later. Many homes are not. Why homes here are built with basements I'm not sure - only a hundred years ago, this was called the Great Black Swamp, and the water table is relatively high for a midwest/northern region. The few people I knew here with a basement, prior to moving here, said not to buy a home with a basement - they all had horror stories of basements whose sump pumps had failed, whose walls had seeped, where mildew provided a constant presence. So I purchased a home with a crawl space. To me, basement = place where everything goes down in horror movies.

The good news is that while many people were affected, I believe only one fatality occurred, and bulldozers have been making their way through town picking up debris piles on multiple daily runs. The local response and cleanup effort has been commendable. Here, two years after Katrina, I'm quite amazed at the difference. Findlay is up and running - albeit we didn't lose all aspects of infrastructure - some areas of town were not impacted, the mall was operational the day after the flood, we didn't lose power or services, etc. It's not a one-to-one comparison. But seeing New Orleans and many of its neighborhoods in the conditions that they remain in, after Katrina, and the state of cleanup that Findlay is in not quite one week later, provides stark contrast as to the level of involvement and engagement of community and civic leaders. And to be fair, both could be considered to be flavors of the good-old-boy network, to varying degrees. The differences with which both were able to enable response, however, is glaring.