Flooding Sends Town Heading for Hills

The coffee urn is dry, the griddle is cool and the day’s last diner has left the Corner Cafe. Patricia Cox sweeps the floor and turns out the lights. There is no dinner crowd.

Outside, drizzle settles from a gray sky as afternoon fades into dusk. A pickup truck glides north up Main Street, past the dark windows of empty shops, and disappears into the mist. The town is silent.

“This is pretty much a ghost town now. No cars on the streets, nothing. I hate to see it, I do,” said Cox, 18.

Probably by the end of the year, the cafe will be gone too. It will join the other downtown businesses and scores of residents forced by recurrent flooding to move to higher ground.

“People just know now that when it rains three or four days or rains really heavy, it’s going to flood. It’s that simple,” Cox said.

Three normally sedate creeks merge nearby to form the Little Blue River. They had been little more than gentle brooks since the town was first platted in 1839. But in 1979, they rose from their banks and left much of downtown and nearby houses ceiling-deep in water.

When heavy storms in the summer of 1990 caused several flash floods, the English Town Council asked for federal and state assistance to move the heart of the town to higher ground, a mile to the northeast.

“We held town meetings and it was pretty much the consensus of the community that we had to do something. You can’t just sit here and watch your town dying,” said Curtis Benham, a businessman who doubles as chief of the volunteer fire department.

Since 1990, floods have forced at least six evacuations in this town of 650 people. Benham says man is mostly to blame. New roads and other changes to the terrain dam up rainwater that once rushed into the Patoka River, he said. But storms have been more frequent and severe in recent years.

“In ‘79, we had 13 inches of rain in a matter of hours,” he said. “And so far in the ‘90s, we haven’t had normal rains. We’ve had downpours.”

The three-member council voted unanimously in August, 1990, to condemn more than 100 structures in the flood plain, including about 70 houses. The vote--which affected about 75% of the town--cleared the way for the federal government to buy the buildings, raze them and restore the land as pasture.

The Green Lantern Tavern and Mike’s Carry-Out liquor store were among the earliest businesses to relocate on a hilltop along Indiana 64, about 45 miles west of Louisville, Ky. Benham’s insurance office and the town bank are among many planning to join them soon.

“I feel like a lonely petunia in an onion patch,” said Stella Hall, who named her liquor store after her son. “I can’t wait for the others to get up here. You’ll see a whole lot of work up here by the end of the summer.”

She used her flood insurance settlement, some of her own money and took a government-backed, low-interest loan and built a metal building at a corner where the main entrance to the new town will be.

Despite the floods, W. T. Beasley, 93, wants to stay in the clapboard house that has been his home since 1931.

“It got up to about 4 1/2 feet in here in the big flood, and it got in here about 1 or 2 inches once since then,” said Beasley, who retired as a high school physics and math teacher in 1968.

Beasley does not like to talk about what has happened to his town in the 60 years he has lived there.

“This town would seem to hum with life. There were three or four groceries at one time. There were movie theaters, a place for stage shows. We had wonderful passenger trains with three or four trips a day to Louisville,” he said.

“You can’t imagine that now, can you?”