The MCD flood protection system on the Great Miami River and its tributaries, was awarded the 1922 Engineering Record’s distinguished “Project of the Year,” an honor shared with international design feats like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.
MCD dams have also been designated a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.
Tom Rentschler, a life-long Hamilton resident, retired banker and former state legislator, spoke of his 29 years on the Miami Conservancy District board last week at Miami University Hamilton, part of an on-going series of lectures, forums and exhibitions commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Great Flood.
“When the Conservancy was first conceived, some considered it a flood prevention system,” he said. “But only Mother Nature can do that, so it’s considered a flood protection system.”
Every community in the watershed understood the fact that something needed to be done to provide this protection, but the development of the Miami Conservancy was fraught with bickering and in-fighting, and a lot of people became “instant experts” on engineering.
“But we got our feet wet, so we knew it was very important,” Rentschler said. “After the civic leaders came to a general agreement that there had to be a regional watershed plan, civic leaders in Dayton raised $2 million to hire people who could deal with the problem.”
They hired Arthur Morgan, a engineer working on the levees of the Mississippi River, to head up the effort. Rentschler’s great-uncle Gordon Rentschler, a local industrialist, served on the first MCD board, the first of five Rentschlers to hold that distinction.
“After a budget had been created by Arthur Morgan’s engineers, they decided that $35 million would be needed and that they would sell bonds for a 30-year period,” Rentschler said, and his uncle Gordon was among the contingent that went to New York City to sell the bonds to National City Bank, for which he later became president.
The bonds, which would have amounted to over $500 million in today’s dollars, were retired in 1949.
“The Conservancy District has been then and still is today funded only by those who benefit,” Rentschler said.
The Miami Conservancy District’s budget is currently divided among three areas of activity. It spent $4.6 million in 2011 for flood protection and maintenance of the dams and levees, just under $1 million for aquifer preservation, and just under $500,000 for river corridor improvements. Each of these areas of operation are individually funded, and the funds are not interchanged.
MCD funding comes from assessments paid by property owners who receive benefits from services provided by Miami Conservancy District. The funding mechanism is provided for in the Ohio Revised Code and are set up so that those properties that receive the most direct benefit pay a higher rate than those with lesser or only ancillary benefit.
There are 44,000 pieces of property in the district, and are evaluated individually on the amount of water that covered it during the 1913 flood, and the assessment is based on that benefit.
According to information provided by the Butler County Auditor’s Office, a house on Hamilton’s West Side, for instance, that had not been flooded would pay a $2 annual assessment for flood protection. Even though the home wasn’t in an area directly affected by the flood, the assessment is based on the idea that not having another flood would still be a “secondary benefit” because there would be no interruption in city services, for example.
A similar house on Village Street in Hamilton’s German Village, one of the area’s hit hardest by the 1913 flood, however, might pay $58 for the flood protection assessment.
The Fitton Center for Creative Arts, located along the riverfront, pays the highest individual property assessment in the city of Hamilton with an annual Conservancy bill of $8,725.
Hamilton residents pay a total of $154,610 to the Conservancy for flood protection. Middletown residents pay $92.934. The rest of Butler County contributes $149,727.
The Miami Conservancy District was ground-breaking on a number of levels, including being the first governmental entity to overlay a variety of counties, townships, villages and cities.
The engineering innovations included the invention of “dry” dams — there are five of them on the Great Miami tributaries — which were constructed with permanent openings in their walls, sized to allow the passage of no more water than the river channel downstream could safely carry away.
In normal conditions, the river flows through the dam unimpeded; after heavy rains, excess water automatically backs up in the retarding basins behind the dams, released over time. The dams also are designed with no moving parts and require no human intervention to work.
The model of using dry dams to retain water in times of extreme rainfall combined with levees has been replicated all over the country, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, which Morgan later ran, and in many parts of the world.
Morgan was the first to use “hydraulic jump,” an engineering technique that uses obstacles at the base of each dam’s opening to slow the water down so as to not cause erosion and other damage downstream.
One or more of the dams have retained water 1,700 times in the last 100 years, which means that 1,700 times, some place didn’t get flooded, Rentschler said.
“In 1959, we had the biggest rain since 1913,” he said. “If the conservancy hadn’t been founded, the water in downtown Hamilton would have been 5-to-10 feet deep,” Rentschler said. “So it’s pretty amazing that it didn’t happen.”
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