TERRE HAUTE — Memories of floods more than 20 years ago in Calumet City, Ill., caused Dr. Dorene Hojnicki, director of the Vigo County Emergency Management Agency, to look at the sky with concern the night of June 6.
Rain had been coming down steadily since around 6 p.m. and Hojnicki, around 10 p.m., decided to contact her two deputies, J.D. Kesler and Keith Holbert, and put them on alert.
“I started thinking this could be a bad night,” Hojnicki said, remembering that Friday night. Around the same time she called Kesler and Holbert, Hojnicki started getting calls from the Vigo County Highway Department telling her some roads were flooded and being closed. “I kept thinking, when is this [rain] going to stop?” she said.
The first call for sandbags during the flood came late Friday night from a location on Oregon Church Road in southern Vigo County, Hojnicki said.
That was unusual. Calls for sandbags normally come from other areas of the county, such as Toad Hop or other places near the Wabash River, she said. She picked up the phone and called Kesler, the deputy director of planning for the EMA, instructing him to start delivering sandbags. Other calls for sandbags reached Hojnicki, and around 3 a.m., she called Holbert, the deputy director of operations, asking him to join Kesler.
The weather system that carried the June 6-7 storm is “amazing to watch on radar,” said Greg Bierly, director of the climatology lab at Indiana State University. “It just parks” over the area, he said.
The week before the flood, Vigo County and west-central Indiana already had experienced a lot of rainfall, said Al Shipe, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis. According to data provided by WSI Corp., southern Vigo County received more than 16 inches of rain from May 31 until 8 a.m. on June 7.
“That’s just a recipe for disaster,” Shipe said. “You don’t see that type of set up very often. It’s just like the movie ‘Perfect Storm.’ You’ve got to have everything in order.”
It was the rainfall in the week before the flood that really set the stage for the June 6-7 flash flooding, Shipe said.
Because of flooded roads near his home in West Terre Haute, it took Holbert an hour to reach Kesler in southern Vigo County. Once together, Kesler and Holbert kept in two-way radio contact with EMA director Hojnicki in the driving rain as they delivered sandbags.
“You couldn’t see anything,” Holbert said. In some areas roads were so flooded it was hard to tell where they were, he said. Even U.S. 41 was covered with several inches of water. “It was an experience I don’t want to soon revisit,” he said.
Around 5 a.m., Holbert and Kesler called Hojnicki to report they were having trouble getting to the places where they were needed due to flooded roads. Hojnicki radioed for them to report to her southern Vigo County home, where she was monitoring emergency radio traffic, receiving phone calls and watching the radar. The three would have a cup of coffee and regroup, she said.
When Holbert and Kesler arrived at Hojnicki’s home, they reported that the road into her subdivision was covered by several inches of water. “They said forget the coffee, you’re leaving the house and coming with us,” she said. It was time to open an Emergency Operations Center at the EMA office on South Fourth Street in Terre Haute.
Around this time, Hojnicki received a call from David Decker, the president of the Vigo County Commissioners. “I was just about to call you,” she said. It was time to declare a state of emergency in Vigo County.
It was dark and still raining hard as Angie Doan traveled to work at the Vigo County 911 dispatch office around 5:30 a.m. Saturday, June 7. Doan lives in Terre Haute, so she didn’t know how bad things were becoming outside the city limits in parts of Vigo County.
The 911 emergency lines “just exploded” early that morning, Doan said. The calls were coming in so fast that dispatchers were having trouble answering them all. Some calls rolled over to ISU’s public safety department, she said. Despite more than eight years of experience as a 911 dispatcher, this was a first for Doan and her colleagues. “You couldn’t answer [the calls] fast enough. I have never experienced anything like that.”
People were dialing 911 to report water entering their homes, Doan said. One motorist in West Terre Haute reported his car was filling with water. She advised him to back out, but he couldn’t because the car had stalled. Eventually he scrambled to safety, but his vehicle literally floated away, she said.
“I’ve never seen our lines lit up that much for that long,” Doan said. Many callers were frightened, she said. Doan worked overtime that day, as did other dispatchers. Calls missed the first time were returned as soon as possible, she said. By chance, a very experienced crew was working the 911 office that morning. “We were lucky,” she said.
When Hojnicki called central dispatch to tell them of the state of emergency, all the dispatchers were extremely busy; however, one dispatcher, Jeanene Elder, made time to work out the wording of the emergency notification message that would soon be delivered to around 100,000 Vigo County homes over the county’s automated telephone messaging system. She wrote out her script and recorded the emergency message.
“With the phones ringing so much in the background, [writing the message] was kind of hard,” Elder said. Still, after just one fumbled take, Elder made the recording and the system, which can call up to 60,000 telephone numbers per hour, was activated. Elder went back to answering 911 calls. It would be nearly eight hours before any dispatcher could even get up to leave the room, Doan said.
The EMA dispatched the first rescue boat Saturday morning before sunrise to the village of Toad Hop in West Terre Haute, Holbert said. Later that morning crews performed rescues in other areas of the county, including lower Allendale, where rooftop rescues were necessary.
“That water was moving,” Hojnicki said. Water rescues are difficult enough, but these were being performed in moving water in the driving rain and in the dark, she said. “It’s a very difficult thing,” Hojnicki said. When floodwater covers roads, rescuers lose their landmarks, she noted.
Because of high water, some key emergency responders had trouble getting to the Emergency Operations Center at the EMA office, Hojnicki said. Honey Creek Fire Department Chief Tom High was taking information and giving instructions from his home; Jeff Fox, chief of the Riley Fire Department, was trying to keep his fire station from flooding and was calling on the Indiana Fire Chiefs Association for back up; and Chief James Holbert of Sugar Creek Fire and Rescue had his hands full with water rescue operations that started before sunrise, Hojnicki said.
Around 8 a.m. June 7, Ian Comstock, a senior geography and climate student at ISU, was getting soaked as he took the rain water measurement at the university’s weather observation station. Most mornings the measurements are taken quickly. On this morning, because of the volume of water in the rain gauge, the operation required about three times more work than normal, he said.
The 4.59 inches of rain measured by Comstock was the most recorded in a 24-hour period at the university since 1973, ISU climate lab data shows. Added to the rain that fell during the following 24-hours, the ISU station measured 5 inches of rain June 6-8.
Rainfall readings were even higher in other parts of Vigo County. According to WSI Corp., 12-16 inches of rain fell in southeastern Vigo County in the 24-hours before 8 a.m. June 7. The rest of southern Vigo County received between 8 and 12 inches, WSI data shows.
According to National Weather Service data, Terre Haute’s June 6-7 rainfall measured 6.83 inches. A typical month in the Midwest sees between 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 inches of rain, Bierly noted.
“I knew things were going to be bad for Vigo County,” the National Weather Service’s Shipe said. But some areas of the state experienced even more rain, he noted. On June 6-7, a weather station near Brazil recorded 7.5 inches of rain, according to National Weather Service data. Farther east, 8.8 inches were measured in Martinsville in Morgan County and nearly 10 inches were recorded in Spencer in Owen County, according to the National Weather Service.
By later Saturday, the Vigo County Emergency Operation Center was the central command center for all emergency operations in the county. That first day, information and questions were coming into the emergency command center so quickly “it was like trying to drink from a fire hose,” Hojnicki said.
Soon, representatives of law enforcement, fire, health, the Red Cross and others all were working out of the EOC. Hojnicki’s first priority was to evacuate nursing homes and find other hospitals and nursing homes that could take evacuees, she said. Soon, emergency responders also realized wells were being flooded, so emergency supplies of drinking water would be needed. Hojnicki put in a call with the state EOC for enough water for 25,000 people for three days. Water was supplied by Wal-Mart, Pepsi, Miller Brewing and Anheuser-Busch, she said.
Meanwhile, water rescues continued in the county until shortly before sunset Saturday night.
As the week continued, emergency responders in the EOC worked 16- to 18-hour shifts, Hojnicki said, adding that she and other emergency responders barely ate while on duty. The EOC operated 24-hours per day for an entire week after the flood. Hojnicki didn’t get her first normal night’s sleep until the following Saturday, she said.
Many emergency responders worked just as much outside the center. One bit of luck was that it was a National Guard weekend, so National Guardsmen were in town who normally wouldn’t have been, she said. Among other things, the Guard teamed up with the Indiana State Police to prevent looting in the flood’s aftermath, Hojnicki said.
In addition, several church and other volunteer groups, such as the Red Cross, Operation Blessings, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Lutheran Church and the Southern Baptist Kitchen, all provided vital services, Hojnicki said.
“The response community did a phenomenal job,” Hojnicki said. Since the 9-11 attacks in 2001, emergency responders had been working together across disciplines and across county lines, she noted. Most of the area’s emergency responders now know each other and have worked together in the past in mock emergency exercises, she said. “That training paid off,” Hojnicki said.
It is still not clear how many Vigo County residents had their homes lost or damaged by the flooding; however, more than 3,000 households eventually applied to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for help. There were no reported fatalities.
“I still worry,” Hojnicki said when asked when she stopped worrying about the weather. Still, thanks to the June flood, the EMA and other area emergency response teams in the area are better prepared for the next emergency, she said. “We learned a lot. There were some questions we couldn’t answer for people. There were some stutter-steps, but I don’t think we did too bad.”
Arthur Foulkes can be reached at (812) 231-4232 or arthur.foulkes@tribstar.com.
Raw Video: Greek Rioting Ahead of Austerity Vote
Pop Music Superstar Whitney Houston Dies at 48
Greece Passes New Austerity Deal Amid Rioting
Coroner: Houston Autopsy Results Weeks Away
Raw Video: Whitney Houston's Last Performance
Reaction to Houston's Death at Clive Davis Party
Whitney Houston's Church Mourns Her Passing
Raw Video: Child Rescued After Kosovo Avalanche
Police: Houston Found Dead in Her Hotel Room
Severe Cold Wreaks Havoc in China
Fans 'Speechless' Over Houston's Death
Fuel Removal Under Way on Capsized Italian Ship
79 Turtles Seized at Shanghai Airport
Snow Strands Italian Towns
Video of M.I.A's Obscene Halftime Gesture
Paul Suffers Narrow Loss to Romney in Maine
Palin Brings Anti-Washington Message to CPAC
Stocks Fall Sharply As Greek Deal Is Held Up
Recording Superstar Whitney Houston Dead at 48
Raw Video: Italy's Mount Etna Bursts Into Life
'Rumor Has It' Adele's Rolling in the Grammys
Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson after the Pebble Beach Pro Am-2/12
Exclusive Video: Bobbi Kristina Leaving Hospital
2012 Grammys: Rihanna
Raw Video: Aurora Borealis As Seen From Space
2012 Grammys: Taylor Swift
Exclusive Video - Whitney's Bodybag
FUEL TV: Punk Payback Gym tips
Whitney's Final Days - EXCLUSIVE
Romney Tops Santorum in CPAC Straw Poll
First glimpse of Blue Ivy Carter
Angry Dad Shoots Teens Laptop
Peek inside Barbie's closet
Absolute Lin-sanity
Madonna's Daughter Shaves Head
5 Killed in Wrong-way Crash on I-10 in La.
Test on Comforter in Powell Unit Shows Blood
Hero Driver Saves Kids From Burning Bus
