Franklinton Floodwall dedicated, March 16, 2004
Editor’s note
Each Sunday, The Dispatch features a page from this week in history to celebrate the newspaper’s 150 years of publication, with a little update on what’s happened since.
Columbus has had a love-hate relationship with the Scioto River.
Today, beautiful parks along its banks are home to visitors and assorted festivals.
In 1959, however, it was the source of destruction.
Flooding statewide that year resulted in the deaths of 16 people — though none in Columbus — and forced 49,000 to evacuate their homes.
Across the state, up to 6 inches of rain fell on frozen ground, washing swollen streams and rivers over their banks and causing the worst flooding in Ohio since the big flood of 1913.
Columbus was the worst hit of Ohio’s major cities. Some streets in the city were under 3 feet of water, 100 homes were badly damaged and 3,200 people were evacuated to Red Cross shelters.
In response, Columbus spent $134 million on the Franklinton Floodwall, which was designed to keep floodwaters from a swollen Scioto damaging the neighborhood.
The floodwall opened this week in 2004, but only in recent years has the neighborhood west of Downtown begun to reemerge as a bustling artists area.
On March 4, 2008, the Scioto River was about 19.5 feet deep by 5 p.m. — 4.5 feet below flood stage — near Downtown, a rise of 8 feet in 24 hours. By then, city workers had closed five Franklinton Floodwall sewer gates to keep river water from backing up storm-water sewer pipes.
Crews, however, did not erect floodwall gates across any city streets.