Indiana's flooded areas hit again by rainstorms

June 10, 2008 07:43 am

— INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — Mike Aldrich was covered in mud as he hauled furniture, appliances and mementoes out of his Franklin home, invaded by floodwaters that in some areas reached levels that hadn’t been touched in decades.
Cleaning up his home in the city of 20,000 people about 25 miles southeast of Indianapolis was only one worry facing Aldrich on Monday. The same heavy rains that caused weekend flooding in Franklin intruded into his workplace, Columbus Regional Hospital, shutting it down.
“I’m trying to keep a good attitude, that’s all you can do,” said Aldrich, 44. “I told my wife that one storm took away my job and my house.”
Across southern Indiana, residents started the long recovery from flooding caused by up to 11 inches of rain on Saturday. Two people were killed and thousands displaced.
Hours after President Bush declared nearly a third of Indiana’s counties disaster areas, Gov. Mitch Daniels canceled a trade mission to Japan so he could oversee the state’s effort to cope with the worst flooding in modern history.
And it wasn’t over.
A fresh line of thunderstorms moved through the state Monday afternoon, dumping as much as two inches or more of rain on already waterlogged areas and causing flash flooding in some areas. Areas south and west of Indianapolis were hardest hit, the National Weather Service said. All four lanes of U.S. 50 near the Daviess-Knox county line were reported flooded.
Weather service meteorologist John Hendrickson said the latest rain would likely raise river levels in southern Indiana as the water flowed downstream, making some rivers crest even higher than had been expected.
“Some areas, that could be critical,” he said.
One of those areas was Elnora, about 100 miles southwest of Indianapolis. The White River already was forecast to crest Tuesday at nearby Newberry near 29 feet, or 16 feet above flood stage.
Some 140 Marines from North Carolina in Indiana for training and about 200 Indiana National Guard troops helped local emergency agencies sandbag a levee at Elnora. Officials asked residents to evacuate voluntarily.
“We’re giving the residents an opportunity to dodge a bullet. It (flooding through town) could still happen,” said Paul Goss of Daviess County Emergency Management.
For thousands of others, it was too late to dodge.
State officials said they could not yet give a dollar estimate on the damage or the number of homes and businesses destroyed. About 300 people remained in shelters, down from more than 1,200 Sunday night, said Joe Wainscott, executive director of the Indiana Department of Homeland Security. He had no estimate on the number of people forced to abandon their homes.
By Monday morning, eight sites along rivers and streams in central and southern Indiana had eclipsed the flood levels set during the March 1913 deluge considered Indiana’s greatest flood in modern times, said Scott Morlock, a hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Indiana.
The destruction led Bush to order federal aid to supplement state and local funds to 29 counties. Rushing water breached dams and washed out portions of highways, some of which remained closed.
On Mill Creek in Morgan County, state conservation officers on Monday recovered the body of Mark Stroud, 44, of Coatesville, a boater who had been missing since Saturday, said Phil Bloom, a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. Stroud was the second person to die in the flooding.
For those who survived, the flooding perpetuated a span of more than a week of wild weather than also included damaging winds and tornadoes.
“I think the state may have seen individual instances in the past that were also terribly devastating but I don’t know that we’ve had a string of them in a short number of days quite the like of this. If we have my history isn’t good enough to tell you when,” Daniels said.

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