Weather charts across the Ohio Valley on the morning of June 14, 1990 did not portend the major flood disaster that would occur that evening in Shadyside, Ohio. The spring had been a wet one, and soil moisture levels were high, running 200% of normal. Lots of moisture was present in the low levels of the atmosphere over Ohio that morning, and the most significant weather features shown on the maps were a stationery front lying across the Midwest and an outflow boundary moving across Indiana from thunderstorms the night before.
The boundary would serve as a focusing mechanism for slow moving thunderstorms that would dump 3-4 inches of rain in just 75 minutes on the mountainous terrain of northeastern Ohio. The rain couldn’t sink into the waterlogged ground and immediately began to run off.
The National Weather Service issued a flash flood watch. The Shadyside Fire Department took to the streets using the loudspeakers to tell residents to move to higher ground.
The runoff developed into a fifteen to twenty foot high wall of water, mud and debris that swept down the narrow canyons of Wegee and Pipe Creek River near Shadyside, sweeping away buildings, bridges and cars. Twenty-six people died in the flash flood. Bodies were found as far as thirty miles downriver at the Hannibal Lock and Dam on the Ohio River. Eighty homes were destroyed and 250 damaged. The total monetary damage from the disaster was $8 million.
The National Weather Service said that it was a one in a thousand year flood.
The Shadyside Flood was the most deadly and destructive flash flood in thirteen years in the United States, since the Johnstown Flood of 1977. The Shadyside disaster was nearly as destructive as the Big Thompson Canyon Flood that occurred in Colorado in 1976.
