Last week’s storm basically relocated our patio about 40 feet or so to the north. Well, not the patio — concrete doesn’t blow away all that easily. But outdoor tables and chairs and even a gas grill do, settling into our neighbor’s backyard. A small end-table that sat between our two swivel rockers, however, is simply gone.
Apparently, living on Bluffton’s northeast side, we caught the brunt of the pop-up surprise. I’d checked radar shortly before 5 p.m. Only a small cell appeared, projected to track between Bluffton and Ossian. So I headed out to Timber Ridge Golf Course for a scheduled 5:30 league match. By the time I pulled into the parking lot it was raining pretty hard. It only got worse.
I heard one story of a group on Green Valley Golf Course, watching the radar and believing they’d be OK. They weren’t. One of our neighbors reported their rain gauge caught two inches in about 15 minutes. Another neighbor’s rain gauge didn’t survive.
The worst part for us was our glass-top patio table. The table frame survived but the glass exploded into at least a bajillion pieces on its journey north. It had to be amusing to someone to see me spending Fathers Day afternoon vacuuming our grass (and our neighbors’) with our shop vac. Second worst: the price of gas grills. Inflation sucks.
There is some irony here. Only a few days before that storm, I was alerted to an anniversary coming up. It will be 20 years ago, come early July, that Bluffton experienced its second-worst flood in recorded history. The Flood of ’03.
Doug Sundling had reached out, inquiring if our archives of photos go back that far. He’s working with the Wells County Public Library on putting an exhibit together. Turns out we have many pictures but we’re missing some. We’re still looking.
So, last week’s storm can serve as a bit of an introduction. We’ll have much more on Doug’s project at the library in the coming week or so, along with some 20-year perspectives on the significant events and impacts of that truly historic week in July 2003.
In retrospect, it actually started with a strong thunderstorm during the evening of June 30 that dropped 2.5 inches of rain — it earned a two-paragraph mention in the July 1 N-B. There were a couple more leading up to the “big one” on the 4th of July — not all that dissimilar to last week’s single entree. They didn’t come out of nowhere like this one and they were more wide-spread. The city fireworks were postponed (the “first time ever,” Jim Barbieri wrote). Sunday evening, just as re-launch time approached, so did another very serious storm cell. Mayor Ted Ellis gave the orders to shoot them off quickly. Quite a show, but very brief.
The Wabash River rose something like 11 feet in 24 hours. Rain totals for the period varied across town; the highest we became aware of was more than 18 inches. Volunteers and the members of our local National Guard post filled and put to use an estimated quarter-million sandbags — possibly more. Then-Congressman Mike Pence made an official visit. Bluffton, Indiana, came to the attention of FEMA — the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which is something we’d all rather avoid.
But I am getting ahead of myself. There’s more interesting stuff than that to recall and review. It’s on the weather radar. Stay tuned.
miller@news-banner.com
