Wheeling: Celebrating 250 Years
ABOVE: The March 19, 1936 flood edition of the Wheeling News-Register shows the city’s plight. BELOW: Left, Main Street in Wheeling during the 1907 flood. Right, St. Luke’s Episcopal Church during the 1907 flood.
WET, From Page 26 Years later, the Pike Island Locks and Dam were built a few miles up river to facilitate water traffic while also maintaining better control on the level of water flow during different seasons. The locks opened in November 1963 and the dam was completed two years later, replacing Locks and Dams 10 and 11, manually operated old-style wooden wicket structures built in the early 20th century, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. The river in Wheeling never again reached 50 feet, although it got close in 1964 and 1972.
The worst flooding in the past four decades occurred when the remnants of Hurricane Ivan roared up from the Gulf of Mexico and drenched the region Sept. 17, 2004. The Ohio River in Wheeling reached 47.5 feet two days later, and there was significant damage to homes and businesses near the waterfront. But that still paled in comparison to previous floods, according to one Wheeling Island resident who said he had witnessed 10 floods in more than 60 years living on Virginia Street, including the 1942 flood that crested at 52 feet. “This is a footwasher compared to that,” he told the Sunday News-Register the day after Ivan struck.
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Supplement To The SUNDAY NEWS-REGISTER - Wheeling, W.Va. - Sunday, June 30, 2019 - 27