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The river's record crest. No crest has ever been measured on Osceola's own reach — The Land's honest negative stands, and Baugo Creek has no peak-flow record at all: its only federal station, USGS 04101080, is a miscellaneous-measurement site in Elkhart County with three approved low-flow measurements in 1988 and nothing else. Upstream, the St. Joseph River at Elkhart (USGS 04101000) shows: March 8, 1908, a peak of 26,000 cubic feet per second with no gage height recorded; March 21, 1982, 27.91 feet and 18,600 cubic feet per second, an event the federal flood report rates at about a fifty-year recurrence on this river; and February 22, 2018, 28.53 feet and 21,100 cubic feet per second — the highest gage height in the station's peak file as read. Downstream, the river's record crest at South Bend came in the same February 2018 flood: 12.7 feet on February 22, described in the city's own flood study proceedings as a five-hundred-year, 0.2-percent-annual-chance level, with 25,300 cubic feet per second passing at the Niles gage. On Penn ground itself the only surveyed flood numbers remain the creek's federal flood-insurance profile — the one-percent-annual-chance water surface on Baugo Creek at +719 feet near the confluence, rising to +726 feet near the Elkhart County line — and the historic-flooding table that would settle a Penn crest is the named gap the Land leg already carries (FEMA Flood Insurance Study table; IDNR and county high-water records; the Osceola/Mishawaka press for March 1908, March 1982 and February 2018). The Palm Sunday outbreak and the tornado pair.The county's later pair is smaller and closer: on the evening of June 23, 2019, a rare low-topped supercell produced two tornadoes on South Bend's southeast side — an EF2 that tracked two miles through the Gulivoire Park area, 250 yards wide, ending three miles west-southwest of Mishawaka at Penn's doorstep without crossing into the township in the survey record, and a much weaker companion immediately before it; no deaths or injuries. The single-tornado member of the set in the county record is of the older file: September 9, 1985, when a tornado on South Bend's northwest side damaged sixteen houses and four businesses with no injuries, in the contemporary Notre Dame Observer account. The benchmark blizzard.The set's summary for this ground: the river's records are measured a few miles away and inferred across the frontage, the tornadoes have so far run south and west of the township, and the one weather disaster that has covered Osceola whole, without remainder, is the snow.
Sources: USGS peak-streamflow file, station 04101000, St. Joseph River at Elkhart (1908, 1982 and 2018 peaks as read); City of South Bend flood-study proceedings, August 20, 2018 (the 12.7-foot record crest; the 500-year rating; Niles flow 25,300 cfs). This build's The Land (the Penn negative; station 04101080; the FEMA creek profile; the named-gap settlers). National Weather Service Northern Indiana damage survey, June 23–25, 2019 (the South Bend tornado pair); Notre Dame Observer