Getting the city out of the river

FINDLAY — For nearly two-decades Hancock County community leaders have been working to get the city of Findlay and the surrounding area out of the river. Steve Wilson, project manager and liaison between the Maumee Watershed Conservancy District and Hancock County looks back at the last 20 years of flood mitigation efforts. Hancock County signed a memorandum of understanding with MWCD in 2016, which authorizes the district to identify and address opportunities for flood risk reduction. Currently, local leaders are working towards a river flood basin on Eagle Creek, just south of Findlay, that it hopes will hold enough stormwater to reduce floodwater on Findlay's Main Street by 1.5 feet during a 100-year storm. The basin, planned to be between 600 to 800 acres, is expected to cost $75 million to construct and will be dry most of the time. Wilson said officials are still awaiting final approval of a $24 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, The grant was conditionally approved in 2024, but final authorization has been stalled for months by a government shutdown late last year. He said he believes final approval paperwork is on someone's desk at FEMA's Chicago office, waiting to be signed for the grant to be finalized. "We're ready to go," Wilson said. "The plans are done, the permits are done, the property is bought. We just need the grant in hand. FEMA won't let you bid a project until funding is official." Once funding is released construction of the Eagle Creek basin will take approximately two years. Remaining benching work downtown is expected to take six months and the NFS bridge will take 18 months. Wilson said he hopes the entire system will be finished by early 2028. "I thought everything would be done by 2022," he said. "But that's how things go." Since the 1990s, Hancock County has been dealing with an increasing frequency of flooding events, according to a hancockcountyflooding.com webpage. The worst flood on record occurred in March of 1913 with a river crest at 18.5 feet. More recently, the summer of 2007 saw a major flooding event with a crest of 18.43 feet. Some have said this flooding event scarred the community and reinforced the need for proper mitigation efforts. Reports of Findlay's flooding made national headlines as emergency response personnel traveled the streets in boats, rescuing residents from their homes. Continuous monitoring data collected by the United States Geographical Survey on the river just northwest of Findlay shows a crest of almost 12.5 feet just two weeks ago. The USGS classifies a crest over 12 feet to be moderate flooding with major flooding beginning at 14 feet. Normally, collected data ranges between one to two feet. The flood stage at the Findlay monitoring station is 11 feet. The push for flood control began in 2006, when Findlay and Ottawa jointly asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to study flooding along the Blanchard River following a string of damaging floods repeatedly inundated homes, businesses and major roads. In addition to the major flooding events in 1913 and 2007, other flooding events include June 1981 (17.43 ft), July 2017 (16.53 ft), February 2008 (16.5 ft) and March 2011 (16.42 ft). The 2007 flood paralyzed the county. "You couldn't drive anywhere," Wilson said. "People couldn't get to work. The economic impact was huge and hard to quantify." Since 2007, the city and county have purchased 185 properties along the river, most in the floodway, to reduce the cost of the damage to businesses and homes. When the Corps finally revealed a plan in 2014, after running out of federal funding, it recommended an $80 million diversion channel around Findlay that would have required 20 new bridges. This was not the news the community was looking for. Both residents and local leaders opposed the plan and questioned if the investment would be worthwhile. After the Corps' abandoned the plan, the county turned to MWCD which hired Stantec, an engineering firm, to review the Corps' work. Stantec recommended a different approach that included "benching" the riverbanks to increase floodplain capacity, removing an obsolete dam near Liberty St. replacing a Norfolk Southern Railroad Bridge with a newer version that will reduce bottlenecking during floods and building a large flood-retention basin near Eagle Creek, just south of Findlay. A joint press release from MWCD, the county and Findlay in late March said they signed a work agreement with Norfolk Southern Railway that will allow the bidding process to start on the new bridge project. The current bridge, which is over 100 years old, straddles the Blanchard River just west of Cory Street and downtown Findlay. The 150-foot span of the bridge will be replaced with a new bridge with a span of 300 feet. The release states the change will lower the water level downtown by 6 inches during a 100-year flooding event. Findlay's geography has always made flood control difficult. The Blanchard River drops only one foot per mile through the city, creating a broad, flat floodplain with no natural valley for a traditional dam. "We're 100 years behind the rest of the state," Wilson said. "But the technology finally caught up with us. Now we can solve the problem." Even so, it's hard to eliminate flooding completely. "This reduces the risk. It doesn't eliminate it," he said. "You could still get a 10,000-year flood; but we'll be in a much better place than we were in 2007."