Falmouth, KY

After the Flood

Debbie Dennie knew there was going to be trouble. She figured the waters of the Licking River swirling around Falmouth, Ky., might very well rise above the previous high mark of 1964, when about an inch of brown, muddy fluid covered the floor of the town’s newspaper office, the Falmouth Outlook.

And she was right. On that Sunday—March 2, 1997—about 2,400 residents of the Pendleton County community were forced to evacuate their homes in the worst flooding of Falmouth’s history.

“You looked around the day after, and there just was no Falmouth left,” says Dennie, publisher of the Outlook and a member of the town’s disaster relief committee.

The flooding occurred in areas of Kentucky along the Ohio River and in Ohio towns, including Cincinnati. The region was hit with some of the most intense rains in memory, causing several deaths and leaving thousands homeless—some for good.

While it rained and as the river kept rising, Falmouth residents such as Joey Reynolds helped save many of the town’s residents from disaster.

“Joey got his fishing boat out that night, and he rescued people from rooftops or from little (eddies) formed by the water around homes,” Dennie says. Another resident, Mike Bruin, used his track hoe to pull a family away from their truck before it was swept downstream.

“There were no end of stories of the heroics of those two days,” Dennie says. “But the rains and flooding were just the beginning for us.”

Indeed, after the waters finally receded, Falmouth residents returned to find their dreams shattered, their homes either torn away in the torrential waters of the Licking, or completely destroyed by mud and the action of the water inside their clapboard houses. Weather service officials estimated the force of the flooding river rushed at more than 100,000 cubic feet of water per second right through the center of town, throwing cars and trucks around with the force of hurricane winds.

“We tried to get everything up in our office higher than the water would be,” Dennie recalls. “We saved a lot of our equipment, and we thought we’d be okay. But you just can’t imagine the damage that floodwater can do. It was like the inside of the office was a big washing machine, the water just splashing everywhere over everything.”

And although the floodwaters temporarily claimed the offices of the Falmouth Outlook, Dennie and her dedicated staff got that week’s paper out—albeit two days late—with the help of their printer in Cynthiana, Ky.

Dennie says when she came back to Falmouth right after the flood to assess the damage, she figured nobody would come back.

“The devastation was total,” she says.

But the residents did come back. In fact, she says, except for a handful of people who were just too discouraged, most folks just rolled up their sleeves and started the massive cleanup.

“At least 90 percent of the residents didn’t have flood insurance, but they rebuilt, somehow, anyway,” she says.

City leaders such as Mayor Max Goldberg and councilman Anthony Strong toured the devastated town in the flood’s aftermath, trying to determine how best to proceed at rebuilding the community. They formed what they called a “vision team” to help determine what course of action to take in helping individual families rebuild.

Town meetings were held, where representatives from national disaster relief organizations and Kentucky development districts offered residents advice on how to obtain emergency money.

And the volunteers came.

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” Dennie says. “There had to have been hundreds, thousands of people who came from all over the country to help us clean up. People would take vacations and come down and clean out the mud and gunk and inside the houses. They brought food, clothing, medicine. They brought a sense of wanting to help,” she says. “It was really wonderful.

“We learned that no matter how bad things are, as long as you have people to help you out, you can get through anything.”

Today, a drive through Falmouth will show a town rebuilt, in many cases from the ground up. While telltale signs of the flood of ’97 exist, such as water lines on some of the downtown buildings, there also is evidence of the labors of the rebirth. Nearly every house in town has a new coat of paint.

And, despite the troubles, most of the business owners opened their doors again. Russ Conrad, owner of Conrad Hardware and Furniture, spent nearly $500,000 getting his store back in operation.

“We were committed to this community, no matter what,” he says. “We’re a hardy bunch of people down here in Falmouth. Not much can scare us off. Not even a flood.”

Freelance writer Dennis O’Connor helped cover the flood of 1997 for the Kentucky Enquirer.

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