Arthur Morgan Ushers in the Era of Engineered Flood Control in the Wake of the 1913 Dayton Flood

Arthur Morgan was born in 1878, the son of a Minnesota surveyor who joined his father as a partner. At age 26 he wrote the Minnesota Water Control Code, adopted in 1905. He then gained national notoriety as the Supervising Drainage Engineer of the U.S. Department of Agriculture from 1907-10. In 1910 Morgan founded the Morgan Engineering Company in Memphis, strategically located halfway up the Mississippi River. The firm specialized in flood plain drainage and reclamation. In March 1913 record flooding along the Miami River devastated Dayton, Ohio, drowning more than 300 people. Dayton's citizens hired Morgan Engineering Co. to develop a plan of "fail-safe flood control." Morgan moved his firm to Dayton to carry out the work and thrust himself into the research, design, and construction of a resilient flood control system, involving the entire watershed of the Miami River, some 3,937 square miles. The Miami Conservancy District required legal pioneering to formulate the agency on a solid legal foundation that would withstand a flood of challenges from the affected communities. Morgan's experience with drainage legislation west of the Mississippi proved invaluable. Morgan decided to design for a flow 40 percent above that of 1913. He devised an innovative plan using normally dry flood control basins rather than storage reservoirs, to provide flood storage and meter the peak flows. Five "dry dams" would be the largest embankment dams in the country and were bereft of any moving parts, so that they would indeed be "fail-safe." Morgan presented his scheme to the public on October 3, 1916, and the project was constructed over the next six years, being essentially complete by the end of 1922. The Miami Conservancy District became a model for other urban centers across the United States, such as Los Angeles, San Diego, and Pueblo. The necessary legislation was so novel it faced 61 legal challenges—all the way to the Supreme Court.