Fall Foliage and the ‘37 Flood

Tweet

This week I went out for a foliage drive along the banks of the Ohio River. That took me to a quaint little town called West Point, a small town with more historical markers than people! Seriously! There are markers all over town about Lewis and Clark’s time in the town, the story of nearby Fort Duffield (which I’ve chronicled before in a visit there), the L&N Railroad, and even a visit by Abraham Lincoln’s father. One of the most telling markers in town requires you to look up — way up — to see. Thankfully, as I was looking at the leaves it was easy to spot. The marker is at the very top of a light pole. There are other signs on the pole, showing how deep the water was at that point in Veterans Park (which is on the Ohio River, next to confluence of the Ohio and Salt rivers) over the years with the various floods. At the “bottom” of the list, “worst flood” wise, is the most recent catastrophic flood in the area, March 1-2, 1997. I remember that one quite well (given that it’s the only one on the list I was actually alive for ): fifteen inches of rain fell in one day. All those people who bought SUVs for the ‘94 snowstorm were wishing they had submarines then. If you look at the pole, with the markers with the years written on them showing the water level’s apex during that year’s flood, you’ll think the worst flood was 1945. Unless you look all the way up the pole. There you’ll see the marker for the high-water mark for 1937. There are markers all over the city showing the cresting point of the ‘37 flood. It is Louisville’s “benchmark” for natural disasters. As you can see, the leaves are changing quite nicely around here. I hope and pray that high water mark never does, nor does another marker get added to that sad and quiet tribute to the downside of living on the river.