When the Creek Rose

The Republican's surviving issues from 1883 stop in April, so the paper's original report of the June flood is lost. In June 1903 the editor ran a “Twenty Years Ago” column reprinting it, and the story leads off with Arthur Marshall, who “was looking for his pants Monday. He lost them in Sunday's flood.”

The rest of the column is not funny. Rain came down so hard that “probably more water fell in this vicinity than ever before.” Water ran through the streets carrying boxes and barrels. At five o'clock Sunday morning people living on the low ground on both sides of the creek woke to find the water rising. The iron bridge on Randolph Street went three feet under, and it stayed put only because someone had chained it to the trees on the bank.

Henry Hogget tried to ride his horse out to the Randolph bridge, and the horse went off the high grade. Hogget couldn't swim. He caught hold of a small tree and hung on until men in a boat got to him, “but only in the nick of time, for in a moment afterwards the oil house of P. S. Barnes came floating down and struck the tree to which he had been clinging and buried it beneath the angry waters.”

The flood also produced the first relief drive in the record. Mrs. Gray and Mrs. Sewell Reed, whose homes on the bottoms filled with water, received about $50 raised by subscription. The same pattern shows up in nearly every flood that follows: the water comes, the town pitches in, and someone takes up a collection.

For the next half century the creek flooded every few years, and the Republican reported each one in a few lines. In June 1917 more than five inches of rain sent the creek out of its banks, “the highest it has been for a long time.” The headline was cheerful anyway: Big Rains Visit This Section and Helps Make Big Potato Crop. In 1919 a “semi-cloud-burst” washed out the bridge near the Wm. Ash place on Commercial Street.

In September 1921 the creek covered the federal highway at Union, and the teamsters there earned about $500 hauling stranded cars through the flood with horse teams at a dollar a car. After dark they raised the price, and the paper reported that “there was not one traveler who thought the price unfair.”

Two years later, on September 28, 1923, a cloudburst hit Louisville, a few miles north on Mill Creek, and killed a dozen people. Weeping Water read the news closely, and Louisville never forgot it. When storms came in later years, people along Railroad Avenue there moved to high ground, “fearing a repetition of the big flood.”

In March 1929 heavy snow melted fast, and an ice gorge formed below the Nehawka bridge. The creek “reached the highest stage ever seen by the residents of Nehawka.” Water rose to the lower seats of the ballpark grandstand, V. P. Sheldon's big red barn ended up on an island, and country children who had made it to school were put up overnight by town families. The paper said the high water “was a real curiosity to everyone who saw it.”

August 1932: Dr. Hansen

Six or seven inches of rain fell on the night of August 11, 1932. In Weeping Water the pump house flooded, and the town was without water until the following Tuesday. That Sunday night a gasoline pump at the Dowler garage caught fire, and “citizens' hearts sank, because each one knew that the water supply had run out.” The volunteer firemen put it out with chemical extinguishers.

Nehawka lost its doctor. Dr. Douglas E. Hansen was called to the Nelson Berger home early Friday morning. He found four feet of water running over the fill south of town, so he borrowed a horse and tried to ford. The horse slipped off the grade and both went into the current. Rescue parties searched a stream that had spread half a mile wide, and they found his body that afternoon, about 100 feet from where he went in. The Republican remembered him as a man who “came to Weeping Water often to play golf and mix with the boys,” and in 1987 a Journal history of Nehawka was still telling the story.

In June 1935, the week after floods on the Republican River killed more than a hundred people in western Nebraska, the creek ran “a roaring torrent” and came close to the top of its banks, but it did not go over.

June of 1947 was wet all month. The creek flooded on June 4, flooded again a week later, and on June 18 Cass County “experienced floods on Weeping Water Creek yesterday for the third consecutive Wednesday.” Trains stopped running between Nehawka and Union. The Swedetown bridge went out, and some officials said the county should pay to replace it.

Then on Sunday, June 22, 4.12 inches fell on town while cloudbursts upstream near Wabash, Elmwood and Eagle sent their water down the creek as well. The Republican called it “the worst flood in the history of Weeping Water.” J. I. Corley, who had lived in town for 65 years, said he had never seen the creek so high. It knocked out the municipal water plant for the third time that month, and it left the channel through the middle of town ten feet wider than before.

On June 4 the water had carried off a Keckler Oil Co. storage tank, which came to rest against the old power house. James P. Howland waded in up to his hips and lashed it to the railroad tracks, and Richard Keckler, in swim trunks, helped. On the 22nd the tank broke loose again and floated down to the west bridge. All afternoon it beat against the bridge as the water rose and fell. Radio stations reported on it, and so many people came to watch that a special bus ran from Louisville.

It didn't. “The tank struck with a heavy thud, the bridge groaned and swayed,” and the crowd stayed until dark. By midnight the city reservoir was empty. On Monday water came into town in tin cans, and bottled drinks sold out.

Heavy rain started late on May 8, 1950, and centered on the headwaters of Salt Creek, the Little Nemaha and Weeping Water Creek. Across southeast Nebraska the storm killed 23 people. In Weeping Water, the water peaked during the night. By Tuesday morning the east bridge into the business district was gone. The homes of Chub Rector and Lee Straton were “completely demolished and very few of their furnishings were recovered.” Neighbors held a shower for Mrs. Straton to replace what she had lost.

The library's archive has no issue for May 11, 1950, the week of the flood. Nobody now knows whether the paper missed that week or the copy was simply lost. The next issue, on May 18, ran ten pages, with an aerial photograph from Nell Munkres and a staff photo of what was left of the east bridge. In the USGS's report on the flood, the gage observer at Union noted that his house had been destroyed and that readings for May 8 were lost.

Governor Val Peterson declared Cass County an emergency area. At a meeting at the Lincoln airport, Gen. Lewis A. Pick, chief of the Army Engineers, was surprised to learn that several bridges damaged in 1947 had never been repaired, and he said that “at least two-thirds of the damage from last week's flood could have been eliminated” if earlier Missouri Valley plans had been adopted.

Flood chicks and gasoline fish

People also found things to laugh about. The Norris Hatchery thanked customers for “the wonderful response … on our FLOOD SPECIAL chicks” and kept the special prices for the rest of the season. Forty years later the Journal's anniversary column recalled two more details from that week: milk was sold in half-gallon cartons in Weeping Water for the first time, and

That summer the Parker Construction Co. laid a new water main under the creek and salvaged girders and planks from the wrecked Swedetown and east bridges to build footbridges. In 1951 Henry Friesel, Albert Jacobsen and Rasmus Lauritzen built the swinging footbridge at the end of East P Street with city funds, so Swedetown children could walk to school. Friesel, who lived in Swedetown, looked after it for decades.

Within weeks of the 1950 flood, the Weeping Water Community Club voted to lobby the county commissioners about the lost bridges. In January 1951 more than 150 farmers, businessmen and housewives organized the Cass-Weeping Water Creek Watersheds Association. The idea was to “hold the water on the land where it falls.” That meant terraces, contour farming and grassed waterways first, then small flood-storage dams on the tributaries, and larger dams downstream. There were already 1,600 miles of terraces in the watershed.

A cloudburst in May 1954 made the case for them. Earl Puls, northwest of Manley, got water as high as in 1950, but the terraced part of his farm came through, and the Soil Conservation Service said the rain proved “conservation's worth.”

Getting the dams built took much longer than anyone expected. In September 1982 the Republican printed the history as a timeline under the headline Watershed History Has Been One Of Floods, Project Delays:

• 1951Watershed association formed.
• 1954, 1964, 1965More floods. A steering committee collects damage reports from landowners.
• 1966–67Application for federal planning help sent to the Soil Conservation Service.
• 1969Weeping Water Creek Watershed Conservancy District formed.
• 1972Nebraska replaces 155 small districts with 24 Natural Resources Districts; the creek falls under the Lower Platte South NRD.
• 1973–75The project ranks 20th on the state priority list, then 6th, but only the top five go forward.
• 1975The city adopts floodplain rules to qualify for federal flood insurance.
• 1979 & 1981The Bureau of Reclamation, then the SCS, find the project “not feasible for funding.”
• 1982, 1983, 1984Three floods in three years. The NRD hires an Omaha firm (HDR) to draw up a plan.
• Nov. 1984The NRD adopts “Plan A”: 58 reservoirs at $7.9 million, projected to cut average annual flood damage by 55.6%.
• 1987The NRD and the city split the cost of straightening a curve in the creek between the two bridges and lining the banks with riprap.
• 1989–90The state approves 75% funding for 20 dams costing $5.2 million, the first comprehensive watershed project in Nebraska built without a federal program.
• 1992–2000Nineteen dams built on the tributaries. Average annual flood damage is projected to fall by nearly 38%.
• 2024The NRD helps fund design of a Weeping Water Creek Stabilization and Realignment Project, where the channel has shifted north into City Park.

The plan had its critics. Bill Whipple of Union had been pushing for flood protection since 1950, and he argued that the watershed should be split into fifteen or so small districts with small structures. A Lincoln board member objected that the dams would return “only 50 cents for every dollar spent.” Buzz Brown, writing to the editor after the creek flooded yet again in 1987, said what many people felt:

Did the dams work? They drain only part of the watershed and were designed to reduce flooding, not to end it. The worst recorded flood, in 1993, came while they were still being built, and in 2010 the creek rose to 48,200 cfs at Union. Since 2010, every annual peak has stayed below 12,000 cfs.

On Memorial Day 1962, 4.96 inches fell, the most in 24 hours since 1950. Two boys, Gary Wiles and Joe Ward, decided it was a good time to take a canoe down the creek. They put in at the Wiles farm three and a half miles west of town and got along fine until they tried to go over the dam west of the City Lakes. The canoe flipped. Joe grabbed a tree limb and got out. Gary rode the overturned canoe about a mile downstream, until Lloyd Lane, Jed Friesel and Leon Wendt lowered a rope from the footbridge near the Jim Doyle home and he got it over his shoulders as he passed under. The men said “it was all they could do to hold him.”

The creek flooded in 1964 and again in May 1965, and both times it came to the edge of the Tom Sorensen home on East Street, which comes up again later in this story. In July 1978 it topped its banks after heavy rains upstream. Water fourteen feet deep poured into the underground Kerford quarry. The new footbridge to the tennis courts had to be tied to a tree with rope. Youngsters tried to catch fish that were trapped on the tennis court, and gardeners went out in the dark to pull whatever vegetables they could save. In June 1980 it came “boiling over the dam just west of the City Park.” The photo caption added: “Every once in awhile, Mother Nature just has to let you know whose boss.”

Shortly after 4 a.m. on June 15, 1982, the 80-foot single-lane bridge on Randolph Street buckled and went into the creek, and the current carried it 140 yards downstream into the trees. Residents of Riverside Addition, which everyone called “Swedetown,” were warned to leave. The swinging footbridge their children used to walk to school was left a tangle of cable and debris. Volunteers worked through the night moving people and furniture. Maj. Gen. Edward Binder of the Nebraska National Guard flew into the Weeping Water airport by 7:30 that morning, and Weeping Water was the first community in the 31 affected counties to apply for emergency funds.

As the water went down, the paper reported, it left “a veritable paradise for fishermen, who had a field day hand-catching many carp and a scattering of catfish which were trapped between the rails of the Missouri Pacific railroad tracks.”

The creek flooded again in June 1983. Then on June 12, 1984, 7.42 inches of rain fell on Weeping Water in nine hours. The USGS measured 53,500 cfs at Union, second only to 1950 at the time. The town siren didn't work, so emergency vehicles drove the streets to wake people. About 25 people were evacuated, firemen from Avoca and Manley helped, and the water ran over both bridges from 4:30 to 6 a.m. The pedestrian approach to the west bridge washed away and the tennis courts were ruined. Mr. and Mrs. Chester Hopper served breakfast to the volunteers at the D & B Diner. Cass County's erosion damage was estimated at $10 million, and the NRD's manager said the proposed watershed project “would certainly have reduced the damages from this flood.”

Again in May 1987 the creek rose six and a half feet above flood stage. People sandbagged, and one rescue worker broke an arm doing it. Afterward a city employee was photographed shoveling ten inches of mud off the tennis courts.

By July 1993 the whole Midwest was flooding, and on July 23 it reached Weeping Water. About seven inches fell between midnight and 4 a.m. The creek rose three feet in an hour and crested at 23 feet just after dawn. Gospel Run backed up at the west end of Main Street, the fire hall basement filled with five feet of water, and the city shop was “ripped” and “twisted” while workers stood in three feet of water getting the snowplow out. The west bridge was closed from 1:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Part of Swedetown was evacuated.

South of the Beaver Lake area, a 150-year-old oak listed as a nationally registered tree fell onto Dale and Nancy Nutzman's farmhouse. The swinging bridge survived again, though both of its approaches were twisted. That October Dale Nielsen's crew rebuilt it, with Hank Friesel, one of its original builders, acting as “chief engineer.”

Afterward came FEMA, flood-insurance forms, and new county rules: a building in the floodway that suffered 50 percent damage had to be removed, and one in the floodplain had to be raised.

In June 1998 a photo of the flooded basketball courts ran under the caption Waterball anyone?, and the National Weather Service blamed El Niño. Heavy rain in June 1999 washed out a Union Pacific track at Union and closed Dewey Drive east of town.

The last big flood came on June 21, 2010, when the creek reached 48,200 cfs at Union, the fourth highest on record. The Lincoln Journal Star photographed families cleaning mud out of their basements, and one couple got out by swimming through a basement window. Since then the creek has stayed well below those levels. In 2024 the city and the NRD began designing a project to stabilize the channel along City Park, where it has been moving north into the park.

Today the Plattsmouth Journal's “Years Ago” columns retell the old floods. Families still talk about them, and the creek is usually back to its rustling.