This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of Louisville Magazine.
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Illustration by Kendall Regan
Last April 3, at about 3 a.m., Ryan Calvert and his wife woke to the sound of rain hitting their single-story home in the Whispering Hills neighborhood south of GE’s Appliance Park. “After I noticed the flooding in my backyard, it took about 35 minutes (for the water) to get into the house,” he says. “I put some stuff up higher, woke the kids up, got the pets, got our cars out. I walked through the water to beat on my neighbor’s door and wake her up, let her know what was going on. I shut off the electricity, went to my mom’s, and then I called my insurance company.”
Soon enough, two feet of floodwater had crept into the house, soaking walls, floors, beds and, painfully, the antique furniture that once belonged to his grandmother. The worst part? Calvert and his wife had just finished redoing everything after a 2013 flood. The brand-new kitchen cabinets, wood floors, bathroom tile and A/C unit? All that’s inside now is the ceiling and some drywall. When I talk to Calvert nine months later, he and his wife are still living with his mother. “In the past two years,” he says, “I’ve only lived in my house for a total of a year.”
The 30-year-old does water-damage restoration for a living and has traveled throughout the country drying out soggy buildings, wet from leaky pipes, broken washing machines and floods. (He was able to dry out the antique furniture before it warped and plans to restore it.) He bought the house in 2007, knowing it was in the floodplain, but says that, to his knowledge, the house had not flooded before. After the April 3 storm, he gutted his house for the second time — insurance assessed three-quarters of it damaged — and waited for the Metropolitan Sewer District, which monitors and maintains storm sewers and manages floodplain development, to issue a permit to allow him to raise the house above the floodplain. Instead, MSD offered a buyout for $42,400 — the $92,500 property value minus the cost of damages that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood-insurance program covered. Calvert took it. “I don’t feel like having to worry about having to repair again,” he says. “But I still owe the bank $5,000, which is fun.”
Calvert is one of thousands whose homes were damaged by the record April rain, which dumped eight inches in less than 12 hours in some parts. The so-called “100-year flood” has a 1 percent chance of happening on any given year. Its flow rate, which indicates the levels that rivers and streams can reach in normally dry areas, is mapped out to show the floodplain, which includes parts of Germantown, St. Matthews, some East End neighborhoods and a large swath of south Louisville. More than 12,000 structures — Calvert’s house included — are in these areas. Structures in this zone that are backed by a federally regulated institution (i.e., a mortgage) are required to have flood insurance, which FEMA funds. Louisville joined this federal floodplain-mapping program in 1978. Many people living in the floodplain already fully owned their home and have never been required to get flood insurance, which can cost more than $2,000 a year for a $100,000 house — three to four times more than regular home insurance.
Appropriately named councilwoman Madonna Flood, whose district includes Okolona and Calvert’s neighborhood, says that her part of town used to be underwater in the 1800s. When GE’s Appliance Park opened in the early 1950s, developers came in, dug out some drainage ditches and deemed the land OK for subdivisions.
Following the April storm, the mayor pulled together a flood-mitigation work group to figure out what to do about homes that repeatedly flood. Dozens of homeowners in the floodplain applied for permits with MSD to fix their homes after receiving relief checks from FEMA, but MSD denied them and issued stop-work orders on those who had neglected to get permits. That’s because a 2006 city ordinance, which MSD enforces through building permits, says that repairs to damage over a 10-year period are limited to 50 percent of a structure’s value. If repairs exceed the 50-percent mark, the structure must be raised above the floodplain (jacked up and propped with a taller foundation or stilts) or get razed. Raise or raze. Since 1997, MSD has offered buyouts to the owners of severely or repetitively damaged properties. If FEMA sends $60,000 on a $100,000 home, for example, MSD would write a check for $40,000. For places without flood insurance, such as those not in the floodplain, MSD has a larger financial burden.
The 2006 ordinance had good intentions. Since the early ’90s, Jefferson County has climbed toward the top of FEMA’s community rating system (CRS), which rewards cities for flood-mitigation work that, in turn, reduces FEMA’s need to bail people out. Louisville started out in 1991 with a Class 9 rating, granting a five-percent reduction in FEMA insurance premiums. This past October we moved up from Class 4 to Class 3, equaling a 35-percent reduction in premiums, saving the city’s roughly 5,000 policyholders close to $2 million annually, according to MSD. The agency worried that loosening the ordinance’s restrictions would lower our CRS class. But the work group changed the wording from “repairs to damage” to “substantial improvements” for the 10-year period, which didn’t affect the class rating, much to the relief of some of the homeowners holding their FEMA money, wondering why they couldn’t just fix their homes.
The work group, consisting of MSD officials and Metro Council members, including Flood, offered buyouts to the 19 homeowners known to have suffered damages that amounted to more than 50 percent of their home’s value from the April storm alone. MSD came up with a $1.5 million pot from which they could pay the homeowners the remainder of their home value after the FEMA insurance-claim payout. Seventeen homeowners took the offer.
The initial lack of preparedness on the part of the city and MSD following the high-volume April shower seemed more like what you might expect if we’d had an earthquake. But Louisville has had its share of floods. Major deluges in the late 1800s and early 1900s didn’t prepare the city for what would come seven years into the Great Depression. In January 1937 — 79 years ago this month — when Louisville and nearby river cities endured weeks of rain, the Ohio River swelled to 30 feet above the flood stage and swallowed up 70 percent of the city.
Compared with other cities along the river, Louisville was hit the hardest. Thousands took refuge in what was then considered the suburbs, many finding a temporary home at Churchill Downs. Gurneys with bodies waiting to be embalmed waded in floodwater. Fish were reportedly swimming in the Brown Hotel lobby. The flood was responsible for 90 deaths and more than $54 million in financial losses (some $900 million when adjusted for inflation), according to the "Encyclopedia of Louisville." In some regards, life kept on. The Louisville Orchestra launched during the disaster. The University of Louisville planned its centennial celebration, which it would pull off in the wake of repairs in March. The city managed to clean up nicely for Derby Day.
Two decades later, after another, less destructive river flood in 1945, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a levee system that reaches three feet above the ’37 level. In 1997, 60 years after the Great Flood had people yelling “Send a boat!,” surrounding cities got hit with as much as 12 inches of rain. Louisville got more than seven inches and the river rose 16 feet above flood level, though nowhere near the ’37 mark. I remember a classmate riding in a canoe to the bus stop near River Road. According to Metro Louisville’s 2016 hazard-mitigation plan, tornado damage since 1960 has cost the city $15 million; flood damage since that date has cost more than $208 million. (Notice that the flood figure does not include the ’37 flood, and the tornado figure does include the infamous ’74 tornado.)
MSD didn’t take over Louisville’s stormwater management until 1985, when the agency inherited issues that its officials are still working on today, such as the combined stormwater and sanitation system that’s underneath many of the neighborhoods inside I-264. James Parrott, who recently took over as MSD’s executive director, grew up on a farm in Lebanon, Kentucky. “I was involved with drainage and water as a young boy,” he says. “One of the responsibilities I had on the farm was to make sure the fields could be drained in order to put out certain crops. When you tilled those fields, water would go into a pond and ultimately spill over into a creek or something like that.” He took the MSD position after working for 20 years in Cincinnati, also a river town. MSD’s responsibility is a lot broader, he says, and Louisville is flatter and more prone to pooling water and localized flooding.
Recent floods, such as the two Calvert and his family endured, are reminders that you don’t have to be near the river to get flooded. It can flood almost anywhere in town if it rains enough. And climate-change studies indicate this will become a more common headache. In Louisville, 2015 was among the 10 wettest years on record. Nine out of the 10 wettest years have occurred since 1950. Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization that reports on climate science, cites studies published in the journal Nature indicating that extreme rain events are becoming more common because of warmer temperatures from the greenhouse gases in the air — “in part,” the Climate Central website says, “because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture that can be wrung out by storm systems.” MSD has even funded climate-change research through the national environmental and engineering consulting firm CH2M Hill. Right now, the threshold for a 100-year storm is about 6.2 inches of rain in a 24-hour period. “That’s a lot of rain,” says David Johnson, stormwater services director at MSD. Studies show that that number is going to go up to possibly eight-and-a-half to nine inches in a 24-hour period. “Anything over three inches — once we get up to that, that’s when we start getting a little concerned,” Johnson says. “We flooded in July. We had a pump station on the Ohio River running in July. That’s unbelievable to us. We usually get a pop-up thunderstorm and we can usually handle those. We got hammered.” While much of the climate-change evidence doesn’t indicate a greater risk of major river flooding, I ask Johnson if it’s possible to flood above the flood wall. “Absolutely,” he says.
An Okolona native, councilwoman Flood says that past dry projects, including a quarry at South Park and Blue Lick roads built in 2003, have “worked like a charm” to alleviate flooding in the area, but that the April storm was not a fair assessment. “NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) said not a drainage system built anywhere in the world would have helped,” she says. “The ground was saturated from snow, it’s more water than we usually get, it’s gotta go somewhere, so it went into the houses. I’ve never flooded in the 20 years I’ve lived in my house and my basement flooded six inches deep. And I live in the highest point in my neighborhood.” The 53-year-old says she happened to be home the morning of the storm to make soup for her church — it was Good Friday. “I had to go downstairs to get a stock pot and I stepped in something in the storage room and freaked out,” she says. “My son’s a veteran — you know the military, they’re always prepared. He came up with the idea to go to Home Depot and get 60-pound bags of sand and a bilge pump to stay ahead of the water that was coming in. Whatever works! The decontamination company later said, ‘Do you care if we steal this idea?’ Had I not taken off work that morning to make soup and gone down in the basement, I don’t know what I would’ve done.” Though she’s not in the floodplain, she had elected to have flood insurance. “I’m one of the most over-insured people,” she says. “I even have earthquake insurance.” Even so, her elevation meant that her insurance only covered the $5,000 it took to decontaminate the house. She’s since spent close to $15,000 out of pocket on everything else — furniture, flooring, small appliances, her grandkids’ toys. She’ll replace other items, such as luggage and clothing, as she needs them. Because of her elevation, she did not have a sump pump to send water away from her basement, but after the flood she paid to put one in. “I’m not taking any chances,” she says.
