The Great Flood of 1913 and the Dry Dams That Followed
Near Dayton, Ohio
On March twenty-first, nineteen thirteen, a storm system stalled over the Ohio Valley and began dropping rain on ground already soaked from a wet winter. Over three days, between eight and eleven inches of rain fell across the Great Miami River watershed. The rivers rose faster than anyone could evacuate. The levees gave way. Downtown Dayton filled with water to a depth of twenty feet.
More than three hundred sixty people died. About sixty-five thousand were displaced. Over twenty thousand buildings were destroyed or damaged. The property loss was estimated at one hundred million dollars, which in nineteen thirteen was a staggering sum.
The city's response became a model for disaster management and flood engineering that still shapes how Americans think about watersheds. Within weeks of the flood, community leaders hired a young engineer named Arthur Morgan to design a permanent solution. Morgan's answer was counterintuitive: do not build walls to contain the water. Build dry dams upstream to store it temporarily.
Morgan designed five retaining structures along the rivers feeding into Dayton: at Englewood, Germantown, Huffman, Lockington, and Taylorsville. These were not conventional dams holding permanent lakes. They were earthen and concrete structures with large outlets that allowed rivers to flow normally during ordinary weather. In a flood, gates slow the flow and the valleys behind the dams fill temporarily with water that would otherwise devastate the city below. Between floods, the land behind them is used for farming and recreation.
The Ohio Conservancy Law of nineteen fourteen authorized the Miami Conservancy District to build and maintain the system. Construction ran from nineteen eighteen to nineteen twenty-two. Since completion, the system has prevented flooding more than fifteen hundred times. Dayton has not experienced a major flood since. The dry dams are invisible to most people. That is exactly the point.
