Back on flood watch
A tornado stings in Cedarville, but for most of the state the fear is rising water after days of rain
LaRUE, Ohio — As the rain poured down on Wednesday night, Louise Severns lay awake in her bed, too anxious about flooding to sleep.
By 6:30 yesterday morning, she’d had enough. Severns was in her car and driving to the Scioto River to see how high the water had risen.
When you’ve been flooded out of your home twice in the past five years, you do that kind of thing.
“It’s an iffy situation here,” she said yesterday. And when it rains
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and storms as it has this week, Severns and her neighbors worry.
The massive storm system that swept across Ohio on Wednesday hasn’t flooded LaRue yet, and forecasters think the Marion County village — about 50 miles northwest of Columbus — probably will be OK this time.
The system did produce an F-3 tornado in Greene County in southwestern Ohio, leveling several buildings there but mercifully hurting no one.
The winds and heavy rain did less damage in central Ohio, washing out walking paths, turning fields and parks into swamps and leaving people wondering what’s next.
In LaRue, where storms in December brought the Scioto River to higher than 14 feet when it floods at 11 feet, people are a little nervous.
Severns, 76, lives in the Kiwanis Village complex for folks older than 55, not far from the river and directly in the floodplain.
The river swelled into the complex in December, causing damage that crews were still working to repair yesterday. Because of that water, Severns had to stay with her family for more than three months.
The worst of Wednesday’s supercell storm — a storm that brings a rotating updraft — spawned the tornado that brought winds of up to 145 mph to Greene County, tearing off roofs and roping trees and silos into piles of debris.
Fire crews rescued seven people from the basement of a house that was flattened near Cedarville, about 50 miles southwest of Columbus. Everyone in that family walked out of the basement unscathed.
“You watch it on television, and you see them on television all the time,” Cedarville Police Chief Chris Gillaugh said of tornadoes. “But to see it and actually know that it’s destroying places and things, you have a whole other respect for it.”
That F-3 tornado (on a scale in which an F-5 tornado is the most severe) blew out windows, destroyed fences and outbuildings and toppled a trailer along its path, according to the National Weather Service.
The weather drama followed a soggy week with localized flooding under bridges and in fields.
At Antrim Lake in Franklin County, people were taking pictures of deep gullies cut by rain into a popular walking path.
Flood watches remained in effect across much of eastern and northern Ohio yesterday.
Areas under a flash-flood watch included Coshocton, Guernsey and Muskingum counties. Flood watches also covered counties in southeastern and northern Ohio.
A flood watch was to remain in place through tonight in northeastern Ohio, National Weather Service meteorologist Frank Kieltyka said.
Flooded roads were reported in Marion in north-central Ohio, and several communities in southern and central Ohio reported hail.
The high waters also caused yet another delay in returning Ohio’s historic sternwheel towboat to the Ohio River Museum in Marietta.
The W.P. Snyder, the nation’s only remaining steam-powered sternwheel towboat, had been moored in Marietta at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers for about a week after undergoing repairs.