After the tragic events in Arkansas last week, it is interesting to note that two of America’s worst flash flooding disasters occurred on this date, the first in 1903 and the second in 1990.
On June 14, 1903, a late afternoon cloudburst over the Willow Creek watershed led to a 40 feet wall of water and debris which swept away a third of the buildings in Heppner, Oregon. A total of two hundred and thirty six people, nearly twenty percent of the town’s population, died as large part of town was swept away in flash flood. Whole families were killed in the flood, including the family of the weather observer. The residents of the town of 1,400 had virtually no warning. A large thunderstorm began raining on the canyon South of Heppner just after 5 p.m. Rain fell over a ten square mile area over the canyon, but the rock walls could not absorb the rainfall, and it funneled straight toward the bustling town. The flood crest arrived just fifteen minutes after the rain started in the town, but additional disasters were averted downstream in the towns of Ione and Lexington by telephoning warnings and horseback riders. This event is the most deadly natural disaster in Oregon history.
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. 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 three to four inches of rain in just seventy five minutes on the waterlogged ground, resulting in immediate runoff. The runoff developed into a fifteen to twenty foot high wall of water 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. The Shadyside Flood was the most deadly and destructive flash flood in at least ten years in the United States, nearly as destructive as the Big Thompson Canyon Flood in Colorado in 1976.
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