FALMOUTH, Ky. — They come to take a look at the river's edge because they have come to take nothing for granted.

        The people of this Pendleton County city have learned much from the Licking River, which on Wednesday afternoon reached flood stage of 28 feet, having risen 4.5 feet in six hours.

Jim McCulley (left) and Richard Baker of the Public Works Department in Newport move a barrier farther back from rising waters on Wednesday. (Steven M. Herppich photo) | ZOOM |

        Mostly dry-sky forecasts for today have eased concern somewhat. Still ...

        Throughout the Tristate, people in flood-prone areas kept an eye on the water and an ear to the weather forecast. In Sharonville, which took an especially hard hit in July floods last year, business owners along Mosteller Road watched the forecast and the rain and remembered their losses.

        “How bad can you be hurt without cutting your throat?” asked Ralph Brewer, vice president of Kenworth of Cincinnati, a truck-sales company at 11155 Mosteller Road, whose business suffered heavy flood damage — 11 $100,000 trucks were ruined — in July's torrents.

        In Falmouth, “It's a mental thing with everybody,” said Betty Bell, 62, a 28-year Falmouth resident who came to the Shoemakertown Bridge to check the river level.

        Throughout Wednesday, drivers on the Shoemakertown bridge, also known as the blue bridge, that spans the Licking stopped or slowed down to check the flood gauge.

        The chocolate-brown river was fast-moving and began creeping up its banks, a sight that still unsettles in a community in which five were killed and hundreds left homeless in the Flood of '97.

        The first signs of the 1997 deluge started with flooding in Adams County, Ohio.

        On Wednesday morning, Adams County, with several roads impassable because of Ohio River tributary stream flooding, canceled school.

        In Falmouth, schools were open but Wednesday was watchful.

        “It's worse than last night,” Ms. Bell said as she returned to her car after checking the river.

        “You have some people who are prone to do that,” said City Hall clerk Ramona Williams of the vigilance about the river. “And I don't mean that in a mean way. But I think we're at a point now, since '97, people have a lot more infor mation. So I don't sense panic.”

        There was no run on store provisions, though Kim Utz, clerk at the Wells Market on Main Street, summed it up this way: “The thing is, you never know.”

        The river in '97 rose to a startling 23 feet over flood level, sending a 12-foot wall of water to swallow 70 percent of this town of 2,700 people.

        In '97, amateur radio operator Greg Seibert, 46, was among the volunteers. Much of the town's emergency communications system was disabled by floodwater and electricity loss. His survived.

        “A whole lot of time it was dealing with next of kin,” he recalled. “It was a good feeling to be able to scratch a name off the list, that they were found.”

        This year, the spring weather has saturated the ground with five straight days of rain in some parts.

        But “on Friday,” said assistant district chief Mike Griffin of the Louisville-based U.S. Geological Survey, which monitors river levels, “we were talking about drought.”

        The Licking is expected to crest at 35 feet this morning, according to the National Weather Service in Wilmington, Ohio.

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