In Midwest Flood, Misery Is Now the Yardstick of a River

A river is not gauged easily, not when slate-gray clouds slant down rain for days, holler creeks spill over and stream banks dissolve like wet powder. Pity the unfortunate town that straddles two immeasurable rivers. Pity West Point.

Among all the river towns in Kentucky and Indiana that retreated Wednesday from the rising tide of the rain-swollen Ohio, West Point found there was no place to flee: At its back lapped the sullen brown waters of the overflowing Salt River. A gloomy day of rain began to back up the gorged Salt and other Kentucky tributaries even as the choppy brown Ohio neared its crest--a day that promised to be a turning point but ended up only worsening the devastation from weeklong floods that have scoured this Midwestern river basin like a rush of lava.

On the shrinking patch of high ground between the Ohio and the Salt, the few West Pointers who refused to evacuate told each other about the river crest forecasts they had gleaned Wednesday morning from local locks, from the Weather Service, from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. None of the numbers and forecasts mattered. Every hour, it seemed, they were being revised. The only certainty was that the water was rising and no one knew when or where it would stop.

“Hey, Chief!” innkeeper Pete Bond called to the town’s police chief as he eyed the water lapping near his 157-year-old bed-and-breakfast. “What’s the word?”

“Water,” Chief Carlos Cintron said glumly.

The Ohio rose highest Wednesday near Louisville, where even hastily installed concrete floodgates were not enough to prevent the city’s riverside park system from being submerged. Army Corps of Engineers river gauges recorded a watermark of more than 13 feet above flood stage--which is expected to hold until a final crest Friday.

Farther south, Kentucky tributaries that surged out of their banks earlier in the week had begun to show signs of subsiding overnight. But along the spilling Salt and Rolling Fork rivers, emergency officials cautioned that the latest storm--which dropped between 2 and 3 inches in central Kentucky near Bowling Green--could bring new hazards from swift flood waters that have killed at least 51 people and caused $232 million in property losses in Kentucky alone.

In Shepherdsville, where streets had metamorphosed into canals and 500 homes lay in slopping water, 430 residents who spent the week napping on high school gym floors and bumming cigarettes from one another seized eagerly on any rumor that they might go home--even to waterlogged houses. Larry Wadkins, a millwright dispossessed with his family since the Salt drove them out of their river house Sunday night, bugged Red Cross workers at the Bullitt High School shelter for a “solid date. I want to know the minute we can get back there.”

“Nobody’s told us anything new,” said Betty Smith, a volunteer who sat behind a growing stack of slips, each with the name of a new refugee. “Soon as we know, you’ll know.”

The rivers came up last weekend, prodded by squalls that dumped 12 inches of rain on parts of Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio over two days. While some of the deaths attributed to the flooding came during the torrents, many others, said National Weather Service flood expert Mike Callahan, were due to “wrong moves.” One flood victim died tubing in flood waters. Another drowned while kayaking. Several dozen deaths occurred as victims tried to drive through ferocious currents--some succumbing to the rivers’ freezing temperatures, Callahan said.

Some hilly communities have become instant islands. At Wolf Creek, on the Indiana border, 50 residents have been holed up for several days, cut off by the bloated Ohio. Meade County Sheriff Joe Greer said there was no worry because a veteran river man, Benny Curl, was among them. Curl “knows the currents,” Greer said. “If you say someone fell in here, he can tell you where the body will appear. They take care of their own in Wolf Creek.”

The flooding was especially disastrous along Kentucky’s interior rivers, because few of the towns had any levees or earth berms to act as protection. When the Salt reared up on Shepherdsville, it came at the town directly, cutting off streets at random, ignoring only the highest ground.

A more extensive levee system lines both the Indiana and Kentucky sides of the Ohio. But unlike the earth walls that snake for hundreds of miles along the Mississippi River from New Orleans north to the lush bottom lands of western Illinois, the Ohio levee system is as gapped as a child’s mouth.

Levee-walled towns like Tell City, farther west on the Ohio, have so far been spared from the river’s rolling power. But successive rain days and high water have begun to undermine the earthen berms. On Wednesday afternoon, Callahan warned that Tell City’s flood wall “is starting to leak. All we can hope is that the river comes down before the wall does.”

When one town locks out the river with a new flood wall, as Louisville managed to do earlier in the week, the swelling river simply vents its stolid fury on the next town downstream.

That was what West Point’s remaining 60 residents worried about when they went to bed late Tuesday. The next morning, they discovered what Chief Cintron and other bleary-eyed emergency workers already learned over a sleepless vigil. There were new miseries to contend with, another day of rain and a stubborn river--the Salt--rearing up behind them.

For little West Point, which has suffered its floods without levees or providence for 150 years, Wednesday was par for the course.

“We’re not connected enough to rate protection,” said Mayor Rube Yelvington, a white-bearded eminence who wearily coordinated with soldiers, police and emergency crews who now outnumber the townspeople left from an evacuated population of 1,200. “The only good thing about not having a levee is that we can visit the river. ‘Course, now the river’s visiting us.”

All morning, the Salt River crept up the sloping parking lot of the Citgo Food Mart, where clerk Linda Steele held fort, eventually forcing her to shut off her gas pumps. A forlorn knot of flooded-out residents kept her company. One of them, Mike Zink, 30, a hod carrier whose riverfront trailer was now submerged in fetid water and silt, has been hanging out, off and on, inside the Citgo for two days. “I got most of my stuff out, but what’s left is ruined,” he said, scratching his beard dejectedly. “Ain’t nothing else to do here but wait.”

On the other side of town, the Ohio River waterline was at Pete Bond’s Ditto House Inn, and next door, near the yellow clapboard house where Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, the fiery Union war hero, lived before moving south to burn his way through Georgia.

The river’s tendrils were curling toward the town’s old red brick City Hall, where Yelvington aimed to stay put. Hardin County Emergency Services Director Saundra Bradsher wanted him to authorize an order compelling the town’s last residents to leave, but the mayor was balking.

“She wants me to kick everybody out,” Yelvington muttered, “but I’m not gonna do it. We’ll know when it’s time to go.”

The die-hards stuck it out Wednesday night. But the converging rivers washed over the old mayor’s defiance.

“They’re packing up at City Hall tonight,” laughed a neighbor, Carl Hall, who had river water in his front lawn but was in no hurry to vacate. “Guess they’re not as tough as the rest of us.”

Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago contributed to this story.