Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (49 page)

1963

Sam Bundy, the American Indian, who it's believed saved as many as 160 lives and possibly more, lived a long life, and deservedly so, although his later years weren't his finest. When he was in his middle-aged years, he was hit by a car crossing the street in Fort Wayne, and his injuries were severe. In his later years, he was walking with two canes. He needed a walker, but he wasn't able to afford one, nor, apparently, could his family, and he became house-bound. In 1963, when the
Plain Dealer,
the paper for Wabash, Indiana, did a story on the octogenarian, Bundy's granddaughter's husband told the reporter: “He would appreciate hearing from any old friends. He's dying from loneliness.”

Bundy passed away the following year.

1975

Arthur Ernest Morgan, the architect of the Miami Valley Conservancy, the man who built dams that protect much of Ohio as well as Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, preventing an incalculable number of flood deaths in later years, appears to have been rewarded with his own life. He was around for a long time, writing books, consulting in Finland on postwar reconstruction and in India as a member of a national universities commission and on a hydroelectric concept in West Africa.

Morgan was active up until the end when he finally breathed his last. He was ninety-seven years old.

1983

In April of this year, Charles Adams, Jr., Dayton's iconic living symbol of the 1913 flood, asked Jim Rozelle, then the Chief Engineer of the
Miami Conservancy District, “How many times would water have been at Third and Main Streets in Dayton, if the five dams had not been built?”

Rozelle checked his records and concluded that without Morgan's dams, there would have been seven more floods, on some sort of par with the flood of 1913: 1924, 1929, 1933, 1937, 1952, 1959, and 1963. He added that if the dams hadn't existed, there would have been minor flood damage 1,200 times.

2005

On August 23, 2005, Hurricane Katrina lumbered ashore and made landfall in southeast Louisiana, becoming one of the deadliest storms in history, and the deadliest hurricane since 1928 when 4,078 people were killed. That hurricane had devastated the Leeward Islands, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas, but it really put a stiletto into the heart of Florida, after a storm surge from Lake Okeechobee flooded the dike surrounding the lake. Just as a lake was created on April 28, 1913, in the Tensas and Concord parishes of Louisiana, Lake Okeechobee flooded an area covering hundreds of square miles. That incident alone was responsible for 2,500 of the 4,078 deaths.

Hurricane Katrina's death toll was fewer, but still brutal (at least 1,833), and at first glance it seemed as if Louisiana and Mississippi had come out of the destruction without too much difficulty. But 238 people in Mississippi were soon known to be dead, and 67 more people were never found and thus officially listed as missing, and vast amounts of property from buildings to bridges were destroyed. Louisiana was in similar straits, but it was the state's largest city, New Orleans, that memorably played out like a disaster movie turned real-life. The surge from the storm caused water to spill over the levees in fifty-three different places, ultimately putting eighty percent of the city underwater.

Just as in 1913, and countless other floods throughout time, families and individuals were fleeing for their second floors and roofs. Thousands of people who had taken refuge from Hurricane Katrina at the Louisiana Superdome, a sports and exhibition arena, found themselves stuck on what had become an island.

But what was particularly galling and surprising for the victims, the nation, and the world that watched the catastrophe unfold on cable
news networks was how powerless city, state, and federal officials appeared during the rescue efforts. For instance, at the Superdome, which had been designated as a shelter, there were enough MREs (meals, ready to eat) to feed 15,000 people for three days—but 26,000 people had shown up. Nobody had thought to have any water purification equipment on hand, or antibiotics or doctors to prescribe them. The toilet situation was less than ideal. All of that said, the mayor of New Orleans had warned people that they should consider the Superdome as a shelter of last resort and that they should bring their own supplies.

Still, people expected better. Fair or not, it seemed unreal that in 2005, with all of modern technology at one's disposal and after everything everyone should have learned about dealing with disasters, that a hurricane and its resulting flooding could make the government appear so spavined, to borrow newsman Ben Hecht's phrasing.

Entire books have been written about Hurricane Katrina and the federal, state, and local mismanagement of the disaster, and so it's probably not worth rehashing at length here, but in a nutshell, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was verbally eviscerated for moving far too slowly in getting supplies to the flood victims. President George W. Bush was roundly criticized for his role in Hurricane Katrina, from remaining on his vacation after it was clear New Orleans was facing a dire and unusual threat to its existence to him standing in front of news cameras and telling FEMA's director, Michael Brown, “Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.”

Brown wasn't considered by many to be doing a heck of a job, and when it came out that he had almost no experience in emergency management, Bush, who had appointed him, received even more criticism.

In many ways, what the hurricane victims went through was similar to what happened in so many disasters before it, particularly with the Great Flood of 1913. For a long stretch of time, everyone was on his or her own. Three million people in New Orleans were without electricity, and like thousands and possibly millions of Americans
in 1913, many of those people were without food or clean drinking water. Scores of people who had remained in New Orleans began looting, some of them because they wanted to steal TVs, jewelry, and whatnot, but many people simply wanted to avoid starving to death. As with the floods in 1913 and the floods of 2005, if you were poor and black, odds were, you were at a disadvantage. In 1913, you may have lived on some cheap property in a flood plain; in New Orleans, many of the flood victims were impoverished African-Americans, too. They ignored warnings to flee the city not because they wanted to stay but because they couldn't afford to go. It takes money to gas up the car or pay for bus fare and find a hotel. That help was slow to arrive brought charges of racism or at least a slam on a social class—people were quick to suggest that if it had been a city full of white rich people, aid would have been much faster to arrive. The flood victims in New Orleans suffered many indignities, although at least nobody was asked to spend some time being a human sandbag.

Then and now, misinformation abounded. While there were many instances of violence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many of the reports of carjackings, murder, thievery and rape turned out to be wild, completely untrue stories undoubtedly born of panic.

In 1913, President Woodrow Wilson considered traveling to Ohio to see the damage and destruction firsthand, but he ultimately didn't, and it's unlikely anyone thought less of him for not traveling from Washington, D.C. to Ohio. Air travel for the president was out of the question—Franklin Roosevelt would be the first president in office to fly, although Theodore Roosevelt had, after his term, flown in 1910—and train travel, even for a president, took some serious time. But by the time 2005 had rolled around, it would have been unthinkable for President Bush, or any president, not to visit the flood-besieged region. As technology, travel, and life have modernized, so have the public's expectations of what kind of help they should receive. That may be a reasonable assessment, but human nature, no matter what the year, doesn't change.

Looking at a flood through that prism, it doesn't really matter what age or era you live in. Unless mankind ever learns to harness and control nature, if you're stranded on your rooftop, staring down at water that truly looks as if it wants to come up and get you, you will never be in a good place.

2011

As the centennial of the 1913 flood approached, Charles Otterbein Adams, Jr., who was ultimately saved by someone shouting out a window that there was a baby in the river, almost lived to see it.

He was ninety-nine years old when he passed on. The retired electrical engineer died of what he believed killed his sister and almost killed him shortly after the flood: pneumonia. If at some point in his last remaining hours, he realized pneumonia was going to bring him down, he wasn't surprised. He had had trouble with his bronchial tubes his entire life.

Adams obviously remembered none of his adventures in 1913, but always had a keen interest in history and must have felt supreme gratitude toward his parents, neighbors, and strangers for keeping him and his sister alive. Throughout his years, especially after he retired, he frequently gave lectures about the flood, sharing his and his family's stories not because, he said, that it was all that important people knew about him, but because he felt it was important people remembered the flood and its place in history.

It is worth remembering. The Great Flood of 1913 was a devastating correction, a rap on society's collective knuckles that we underestimate and ignore mother nature at our own peril, possibly a useful lesson going forward for civilizations concerned about melting ice caps and global warming stirring up extreme storms such as those that have hit the East Coast in recent years, including Hurricane Irene in 2011 and what became known as Superstorm Sandy in 2012. But if the Great Flood of 1913 caused a lot of hopelessness, it also offers much hope, too. That tens of thousands of people didn't die in the floods is because families stuck together, neighbors helped neighbors, and strangers instinctively risked their own lives to help strangers. People looked out for each other when it mattered most. Human nature tends not to change over the years, which is why it's nice to think that if another flood comparable to 1913's occurred again, people would rally and rise to the occasion, even if it might be hard to imagine such camaraderie with our community when so many of us now hang out with friends and neighbors on Facebook instead of drinking lemonade with them on our front porches.

But Charles Adams, Jr., would probably tell anyone today that it doesn't matter how you stay connected with your community as long as you are connected, because for a guy who thought a lot about the past, the 99-year-old flood survivor embraced the future. When Charles Adams was admitted into the hospital for his final visit, he asked the nurses for a computer.

Notes and Research and Acknowledgments

I knew I was getting somewhere with my research when I found myself dreaming about nearly drowning.

In what goes down as the most unpleasant nightmare I've so far had, one night—or maybe it was early morning—I found myself behind the wheel of my car, skidding off a rain-splattered road and careering into a roaring creek. That's when I looked behind me and saw my youngest daughter, her seat belt still on and waist-deep in river water and screaming for my help. I woke up instantly, shaking and terrified and trying to figure out if I would have been able to rescue her or not.

It didn't occur to me until much later that it might be a good sign that I was making considerable progress in researching and writing my book.

At the end of other nonfiction narratives, I always read other “notes and research” sections with envy. I learn how authors and historians traveled to the ends of the earth, retracing every step and path that real-life characters in their books once traversed.

I'm not so fortunate. Even though I always am working, writing for news wire services like Reuters and random publications like the Huffington Post and
CNNMoney.com
, the cash flow of a freelance writer is often a bit unpredictable. Instead of sharing details of how I
spared no expense in traveling to the ends of the earth to collect data for my book, I'm telling you about some weird dream I had.

Still, because so much of the Great Flood of 1913 occurred so close to where I live, and in Middletown, Ohio, the town I grew up in, I was able to visit quite a few communities in the area that were affected by the flood and stand in areas I knew had once been underwater, getting a sense of the power and reach of a flooded river. That idea really came across as I neared the end of writing this book, on one summer day in 2012, when I traveled out to Mentor, Kentucky with my parents and daughters to see a house that had been on the edge of the Ohio River's flooding during 1913. My great-grandmother, Lillian Williams, who passed away before I was born, took the photo of the house, or at least it found its way into her scrapbook. We were able to find the house, which is still standing, and then drive as far as we could toward the river, which appears to have been about a three-mile distance.

But mostly during my research, I combed through newspapers, many of them online at
NewspaperArchive.com
, and many of them not, still on microfilm, and so I spent many evenings and weekends at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, which has been a trusted research refuge for me during the writing of this book and earlier ones. I also trekked up to Columbus, Ohio, to its impressive Columbus Metropolitan Library, and found a treasure trove of information about the city's role in the flood. I, of course, on a number of occasions, went to the Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, Ohio, about an hour's drive from my house, and burrowed into their local history room and pored over microfilm of their city papers.

And, you know, before I forget, I should say thanks to Nancy Horlacher, a local history specialist at the Dayton Metro Library. She steered many of the photos in this book to me, and she was invaluable in helping me make the most of my research time at the Dayton library. She was terrific.

I also found some great material at the Clark County Public Library in Springfield, Ohio, and at my hometown at the MidPointe Library in Middletown, Ohio. I used to go to the MidPointe Library when it was just known as the Middletown Public Library, and I have many fond memories from studying there in middle and high school.