By Paul Minnis, The Republic
pminnis@therepublic.com
The storm that struck the Columbus area June 3 dumped 3 inches of rain, spawned tornadoes and damaged about 100 homes. Two days later, it indirectly caused the worst flood in Bartholomew County history.
Through early June, Bartholomew County already had received more rain than in all but three of the last 107 years.
The tornado-producing weather drifted out of the area June 4 but created a boundary over Indiana when its air cooled, said Al Shipe, a hydrologist with National Weather Service in Indianapolis.
The next storm behind it was slowed by the previous weather pattern so much that it unleashed within two days about a foot of rain in some areas. Without that tornado-producing weather, the subsequent storm would have moved through the area much more quickly.
Columbus received nearly 3.5 inches of rain on June 6 and 7, about 50 percent more than the city usually gets for the whole month. Hope and Shelbyville got slightly less rain in two days than the towns usually get all June. Franklin got more.
And just upriver from Columbus, Edinburgh was inundated with nearly 11 inches of rain, about four inches more than Columbus received on March 25, 1913, in what became known as The Great Flood of 1913.
Shipe said the June 6 and 7 storm by itself would have flooded areas of Bartholomew County, but the fourth-wettest year on record - even before the June 4 storm - already had saturated the ground and created bulging water bodies.
"Haw Creek was already at 10 feet and flooding," Shipe said. "When that monster rain hit, it didn't have anywhere to go but right on top of everything else."
The water rose so high so quickly in parts of Columbus, some people had about 20 minutes to evacuate.
East Fork of White River crested at 18.61 feet, eclipsing the 17.9-foot record set in 1913, said Scott Morlock of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Flat Rock River hit 19.83 feet, the highest stage NWS recorded since it began tracking the river in 1968.
Rain water rolled off irrigated farm fields in Flat Rock Township and into about 15 regulated drains that flowed south to Haw Creek, where devastation was the worst in the county.
Tom Finke, Bartholomew County's head of hydrology for legal drains, said the natural and man-made drains collected water over a 4-mile area and funneled it to a 1- to 1½-mile area when it entered Haw Creek.
Water washed over fields along Road 700N and 600N from the Little Tough, Big Tough and Chambers drains.
Flooding at Prince's Lakes in Johnson County did not contribute to flooding in Columbus, said Phil Bloom, Department of Natural Resources' director of communications.
Some people raised concerns that water flowed into the Driftwood Valley Watershed.
Bloom said the Prince's Lake dam was damaged heavily but did not break or release water, passing it instead to its watershed.
In Hope, flooding damaged roads and overran Schaefer Lake dam so much that some people thought the dam had broken.
The rivers and streams swelled so much after the June 6 and 7 storm that many areas outside the flood plain fl ooded, too.
Shipe said about a half a year's worth of rain, about 30 to 35 inches, has fallen in Bartholomew County in the last four weeks.