The Flood of '26

This is normally the time of the week when I complain about how little I was able to operate over the previous week, blaming band conditions, the weather, family activities, or just my occasionally punishing local noise.

I have zero complaints that my antenna remained unplugged almost all of last week. While it may have been a little annoying that another week of the summer passed with me barely operating, that’s exactly what that is, an annoyance.

We had storms nearly every day from Tuesday through Saturday. Just to our east and northeast, storms dropped torrential rains over the same areas for hours at a time. Where we accumulated about five inches of rain over the week, several communities got over a foot of rain. Not snow, rain.

This led to flooding not seen in central Indiana in over 100 years. We are lucky; our house is on a high patch of land, and uphill from the nearest bend in the overwhelmed White River. Houses just a mile from us had over four feet of water in their ground levels last Saturday. Another mile south entire neighborhoods were evacuated in an attempt to keep people safe. A few miles to our north two roads were completely washed away, one of which was a bridge that will likely take years to rebuild. There are concerns that the main system carrying raw sewage to a treatment plant in the suburb of Carmel may fail due to the flooding.

I’ve lived through many floods in my life in multiple states. I’ve never seen anything like what happened here last week. Again, we were incredibly fortunate. Our power went out for a couple hours after the first derecho storm last Tuesday. Our water pressure was low for a bit on Saturday. We did not have to flee to a shelter, or scramble to get our valuables into a safe, dry location before water filled our home.

The sun is finally out, with only a couple chances of rain in the next 10 days. Hopefully that gives the people most affected by the storms a chance to begin cleaning up and putting their lives back together.