A relentless stretch of severe weather continued to hammer the Midwest on Friday, extending what has become a six-day assault on communities still reeling from catastrophic flooding. Indiana and Ohio bore the brunt of the latest rounds, with swollen rivers, overwhelmed infrastructure and thousands of displaced residents defining a crisis that shows no immediate signs of letting up.
The storms follow a deadly derecho that tore through the region earlier in the week, an unusually powerful and long-lasting windstorm that set the stage for the flooding disaster now unfolding across multiple states. More than 300,000 homes and businesses remained without electricity across the Midwest and Ohio Valley heading into Friday, with one northern Indiana utility reporting its most widespread outage in company history.
How bad the flooding has become in Indiana
Indiana has absorbed some of the most extreme rainfall totals of the event, with parts of the state recording what meteorologists describe as a one-in-one-thousand-year precipitation event. That kind of rainfall overwhelmed rivers, drainage systems and emergency response capacity simultaneously.
The White River in Anderson crested above 24 feet, a level not seen in more than a century, sending water several feet deep into residential and commercial areas across the city’s northern sections. Authorities launched evacuation orders in Anderson and nearby Muncie, where conditions deteriorated to the point that rescuers were navigating flooded streets by motorized boat. The Whitewater River at Brookville also rose rapidly to moderate flood stage, prompting downstream evacuation warnings in parts of Harrison, Ohio…