The Flood Plain Ordinance

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Many of the community’s drainage and local flooding problems stemmed from two centuries of uncontrolled and poorly controlled development. In too many instances, buildings and entire subdivisions were built with little regard for drainage, leaving the buyers with a heritage of problems that would multiply as the community grew. In the worst cases, subdivisions were built on former swampland that had been drained for farming — land that could never drain quickly enough to avoid surface flooding in heavy rains.

Over the years, efforts had been made to correct the situation through planning and zoning rules, with mixed success.

The problem was not unique to Louisville; many older communities suffered from the same lack of foresight. To help deal with the problems, the Federal Emergency Management Agency — which helps local communities during natural disasters such as floods — set up the national flood insurance program for communities that would take action to restrict development in floodplains.

In Jefferson County, Fiscal Court turned to MSD to recommend an ordinance and to administer the local program; the ordinance was passed in 1991. Using the LOJIC computerized mapping and information system, MSD refined the maps the federal agency had prepared. And in 1994, the community became the first in the nation to develop its own flood insurance rate maps under the federal program. MSD’s actions also qualified the community for lower flood insurance rates.

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Maintaining and operating the Ohio River flood protection system became MSD's responsibility with the drainage program.  A training program was established immediately to give employees experience in all the operations necessary to protect the community from flooding.  Here, an MSD crew installs the closure in the floodwall at Tenth Street — the closure that had precipitated a crisis in the 1964 flood when crews weren't able to install it in time.  This training would pay off in March 1997, when the system functioned almost perfectly in the seventh-worst Ohio River flood in history.
MSD Photo by Martin E. Biemer

The Floodwall

In 1988, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completed the southwestern Jefferson County floodwall — a major extension of the floodwall of the 1950s — and turned it over to MSD for operation and maintenance.

In 1991, MSD agreed to extend the floodwall in downtown Louisville to protect the Presbyterian Church headquarters, being developed on the old Belknap Hardware property. The extension and the associated pumping station cost nearly $3 million.

When the extension was completed, the floodwall was 29 miles long, protecting about 110 square miles from the type of flooding that devastated the community in 1937. It included 15 pumping stations, designed to pump stormwater from the community into the river when the river level is high.

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The solution for providing MSD sanitary sewer service to much of northeastern Jefferson County involved constructing a pair of "force mains" to carry wastewater from pumping stations to the trunk lines leading to the Morris Forman plant.  In many places, the force mains had to follow the contours of the land. Crews work on the mains where they emerge after crossing under Beargrass Creek.
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The mains are being laid atop the closed Edith Avenue landfill, which occupied the space originally planned for the north county treatment plant.
MSD Photos by Martin E. Biemer

Flood Study Areas

Over the years, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had done several studies of flooding in the community, including the study after the 1937 flood. In the mid-1970s, a special study of the Beargrass Creek basin recommended a dry-bed reservoir on the South Fork near Houston Acres to relieve flooding downstream; the reservoir would hold water during heavy rains, then release it slowly afterward. Jefferson County built this reservoir as part of a major drainage program in the late 1970s.

In 1989, a new study of the Pond Creek basin was authorized; MSD joined with the Corps in conducting it. In 1994, the study proposed $16.4 million in flood-control work, and in 1996, Congress appropriated the first $1.5 million to start detailed design.

A feasibility study of the South Fork of Beargrass Creek was started in 1994, one of the early steps toward a major new program. The South Fork still had many problems during heavy rains, despite the improvements brought by the dry-bed reservoir.

And in 1994, a reconnaissance study of southwest Louisville was begun. This was the first preliminary step in an area served by combined storm and sanitary sewers and drained by several small streams.

MSD History continued - Sanitary Sewer Expansion