After the waters: thirty years of arguing about the walls

1982 — present

The argument's frame: The flood fights that were not lawsuits were budget fights, and they ran for thirty years after the great flood of March 1982 — the flood that followed a winter of 81.2 inches of snow, the most since 1911, and put the Maumee within sight of the 1913 record. (The two floods' exact crests print differently in the city's own records — the Repetitive Loss Plan gives 1982 at 25.73 feet against 1913's 26.1, while the History Center's record gives 26.93 feet against a 1913 record of 27.1 — a difference of datums and gauges; the order, 1913 first and 1982 second, is undisputed.) What the city and the Army Corps of Engineers built in answer was roughly ten miles of levees and floodwalls, some hidden in plain sight as floodgates, a widening of the Maumee channel credited with lowering the hundred-year crest by about 1.3 feet, and three decades of buying out flood-prone houses one at a time. The system is built to the hundred-year standard, and the county surveyor's caution stands in the record beside the engineering: a true record-breaker remains physically possible. The rivers record owns the engineering; the controversies ledger notes only that every mile of it was argued over, in the open, for a generation — and that the argument, like the river, is not finished.

Sources:

1. The rivers record, The Three Rivers — the crest figures and their conflict, the levee and floodwall system, the channel widening and the buyout program.
2. WANE retrospective on the flood-control works — the ten miles of levees and floodwalls and the floodgates hidden in plain sight.