Flood of 2008

We had some pretty good rain the beginning of the second week of March. Water levels in lakes and rivers in our area began to rise and by Friday were well into flood stage. On the IPFW campus there is one building, the Student Union that has a floor elevation in the lowest level that is lower than the highest recorded flood stage by 27" which it happened in 1982. Therefore, it could flood 27" deep if the river ever floods that deep again. This time we were "lucky" it only flooded 4" deep in the basement/ground floor of the Student Union. Offices, food service areas, conference rooms and storage rooms, all sustained damage.

The river started to retreat on Saturday morning. We had cleanup crews come in and do some initial work to get rid of the water and mud. By Monday we started to remove lots of soaked, muddy carpet, and are in the process of removing the bottom 18" of drywall to let the inside of the walls, dry out and to get to a level on the drywall where it was not soaked with water. It will take about a month to get everything back to something like normal.

At our place on Kuhn lake we also had flooding. Back in 1982 we also had a spectacular flood which was about as High as I had ever seen the water get. This flood came up to about the same level and took a lot longer to recede. As a mater of fact as of the writing of this the water is still higher that it usually is when there is a "normal" spring flood.

Several years ago, when we had one of those "normal" floods the folks that owned this place got tired of having 8" of water inside the house, so that summer they hire my dad to raise the house up three concrete block high. With this flood they had water in the crawl space, but their floors were not wet.

These two places are the ones at the end of our lane closest to the lake. When I took these pictures the water level was still rising. The house on the left eventually had 10-12" of water in it. The one on the right just had the floors redone last summer because the floor joist rotted and got the floors wet in a normal flood and this time there was probably 2-4" of water on top of the new floors. They will probably sell out this summer. Both of these places have been bought and sold at least 5 times since we have lived there. Note that the stack of pier sections in the picutre on the right is sitting on ground that is normally 2' above the water level. The lowest pier section on the stack is about 18" below water level now.