Water flowed ‘like Niagara Falls’

After hearing steady rain fall throughout the night, starting at 1 a.m. Aug. 12, Hagerstown councilor Donnie Benedict began preparing to protect his Turnpike Road home later that morning.

With a tractor and loader, he made berms to go around what he calls a “barndominium.”

Around 12:30 p.m., Benedict went inside to eat lunch and relax, thinking the berms were successful. In 50 years at the property, it had been prone to smaller floods, with water creeping toward the back of the barn, but never that much.

But around 1:30 p.m., water began coming into the home, so Benedict turned off power and determined prevention had evolved to cleanup.

When knowing water was coming, his family put furniture up on counters and tables in the downstairs living room, thinking water might reach 5 or 6 inches, not predicting the surge would be 4 to 5 feet.

Fortunately, after earlier debate, his family had moved their horses about an hour before the flooding started. While the animals are safe, all their hay, feed and tack were lost.

Benedict said water came across Indiana 38 “like Niagara Falls.” He now has boulders the size of car hoods in his yard, and the drainage ditch is full of gravel from the highway.

Until the flooding, Hagerstown’s farmers market used Benedict’s 100-foot by 100-foot gravel lot, but the market is being moved to 500 West Event Center, 500 W. Main St. in Hagerstown, while Benedict’s property is repaired.

Benedict is grateful for community help in putting down gravel and aggregate and fixing his driveway. A connection also offered a surprise loan of a dump trailer and skid loader, which offered great savings.

More than 25 people came to help Benedict with cleanup, some of whom he didn’t know, and friends provided food and beverages.

Benedict said accepting and admitting assistance is needed can be challenging since he’s someone who’s helped other people in crisis for decades.

In addition to his long career with Richmond Police Department, Benedict served on the town’s volunteer fire department for nearly 40 years and was an emergency medical technician for Culberson for about 25 years.

Since retiring, Benedict has been renovating the interior of the home over the past 2 ½ years. Installation of only three or four trim boards remained before he felt it would be complete.

All that work went to waste in just a few hours.

However, with help from a professional restoration company, Benedict’s home is now drying out with fans and industrial dehumidifiers, and he feels ahead of many others in the cleanup process.

Benedict said he expects he’ll eventually get a chance to pay all that help forward.

However, it seems he’s already begun doing so, such as loaning a generator to someone when he no longer needed it, and volunteering to clean Nettle Creek Hardware when he had reached a stopping point on his own property.

Benedict said he was surprised how many local youth were helping at the store, and he appreciated their focus. He enjoyed working alongside them, saying they were “as kind and polite as you’d ever want to meet.”