The Hocking River, on its 102 mile journey from its headwaters just northwest of Lancaster, before spilling into the Ohio River at Hocking Port passes right through Athens.

Since the city's earliest days, seasonal flooding has been a part of life.

In March 1907, the river rose to its highest level ever recorded, nearly reaching 27 feet.

Devastating floods would wreak havoc on Athens throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1964, things finally came to a head.

Ohio University was experiencing unprecedented growth.

The first wave struck just after World War Two, when record numbers of veterans took advantage of the GI Bill.

After a slight dip, enrollment skyrocketed when baby boomers came of age.

The university needed to handle this influx of new students.

Built on a hill and running out of space.

The most viable option was to expand into the floodplain of the Hocking River.

The university began by building East Green in the 1940s and fifties.

As the baby boomers entered college South and West Green quickly followed.

Anticipation of flooding is evident in their design, with the first level of most buildings unoccupied or dedicated to parking and storage.

Elevated footpaths connect buildings with West Green constructed around an elevated square.

This expansion into the floodplain placed the Hocking River more squarely through the university's core.

The timing could not have been worse.

The 1960s saw three of the top eight worst floods in Athens history.

It began in March of 1963, when the river reached 23.1 feet.

Just one year later, in March of 1964, the river crested to 24.18 feet.

It was this flood that prompted President Lyndon B Johnson to accompany Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes and conduct an aerial survey of the area.

Attempts to tame the Hocking had been suggested before this, but with so much of Ohio University now in the floodplain, there were greater public safety concerns as well as increased financial interests to do something to mitigate damages from future flooding.

In 1965, Congress responded by authorizing the construction of the Athens Local Protection Project.

Before the project could even begin, Athens would be struck by one more devastating flood.

In May of 1968 floodwaters reached 24.65 feet, the second highest level ever recorded.

Damages from spring flooding were now averaging close to $1 million, all but affirming the need to allocate resources to address this problem.

The solution was to shorten, straighten and widen roughly five miles of the Hocking River.

This process of channelization would move water as quickly as possible through Athens.

When rivers flood, things like bends, boulders and trees can create friction and slow water down.

By removing these obstacles and overall widening the banks and deepening a river, water finds less resistance and won't back up as easily and cause flooding.

This was the logic applied to the Athens Local Protection Project, which began construction in March 1969 and cost approximately $10 million.

Over the next two and a half years crews worked tirelessly to reroute and channelize the Hocking River.

Design and construction of the project was overseen by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, who worked in close cooperation with a local entity, the Hocking Conservancy District.

The new channel would begin just below the dam at White's Mill and extend downstream to the State Route 50 Bridge.

The river would be shortened by about 1400 feet and its bottom width would be increased from 100 feet to 215 feet.

The project was completed on September 8th, 1971.

Upon completion., maintenance and management of the river was turned over to the Hocking Conservancy District HCD follows strict guidelines from an operations and maintenance manual the Corps of Engineers created in the early 1970s.

This primarily involves mowing and dredging growth along the river must be controlled, especially the prevention of woody plants.

Trees increase friction by creating barriers that can trap other objects during a flood, which slows down the flow of water.

This is a major reason the banks of the Hocking River through Athens are primarily lined with grass, as this keeps the channel smooth and allows water to move through the area more quickly.

Sandbars, which were already beginning to form while the project was still under construction and occur most frequently around bends can also increase friction as they create a convenient area in which rivers can drop their loads things like sand, gravel and logs, which makes dredging to remove sediment, buildup an ongoing necessity.

If not maintained in this manner.

Funding can be lost.

Additionally, any changes to the channel require approval from the Army Corps of Engineers.

Channelizing the river helped spur massive development in and around Athens.

On the upstream end of the channel near White's Mill are health care facilities and athletic fields on the campus of Ohio University, where the river once ran.

Now sits Baker Center and Emeriti Park further out on East State Street, once home to the OU airfield, is now a hub of retail and big box stores.

This specific area being further downstream experiences flooding more frequently than the upstream areas of the channel.

A misconception with projects like this is that they safeguard against all future flooding.

They don't.

They are designed to prevent damages from flooding.

In fact, seven of the top 20 highest recorded floods in Athens history have occurred after the project was completed.

That said, as of 2010, the Corps of Engineers estimates the project has prevented over $180 million in damages.

From that perspective, the project has been successful.

With over 50 years of hindsight, though, that is no longer the only measuring stick.

When the Corps of Engineers set out to tame the Hocking, channelizing and damming rivers was a common and quite popular approach to river management.

Halfway through construction of the Athens Local Protection Project in December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency came into existence.

And the way we think about our domination of Mother Nature began to change.

Flooding Needed to be addressed.

It just happened to be addressed at a time when regard for environmental and ecological impacts were not top of mind.

This is before a lot of the scientific and environmental themes that we hear about a lot today had really been fully fleshed out.

These are engineers that are putting this together.

They're not ecologists.

They're really concerned just with flood potential.

And so they're just looking at this as how fast can we move this water through this channel out of town?

And so it doesn't accumulate and cause any kind of devastating floods.

Jasmine Facun knows the Hocking River well, not content with its current state.

She researched what a partial restoration of its riparian corridor might look like, hoping to find some way to ecologically benefit the channel through Athens.

She presented her findings in 2020 as part of her Master's thesis.

My research was really focused on is there anything practical that we can do that would improve the ecology of the river?

There's not a whole lot that we can do about the actual channelization of the river.

It's very unlikely that the Army Corps is going to come back and unchannelize our river.

Some members of the community have asked, Can we put trees back in?

Can we just let it keep growing up?

And what I found was it's very unlikely that they will allow large trees to grow right there in the channel.

So I was looking at, is there something that we can do to benefit this area?

And so what I came up with was pollinators.

My thinking was, if we can allow flowers to grow, that's something that we can manage that.

We can still mow when we need to.

But that can be a boon to the ecology of the river.

Right here we're looking at an area that hasn't been mown probably in a year or two.

When I did my research, I was comparing areas like this to areas adjacent to this that were mown and looking at how pollinators were using the different types of habitat.

What I was looking to see was, would it be possible to allow some areas along the channelized portion of the Hocking River to grow more than management has typically allowed for without jeopardizing the flood protection that the channel provides to the city and to the university?

You know, okay, we cant allow trees to grow here but can we allow anything to grow here?

Can we maybe let some things establish and live here so that it can be beneficial to the wildlife that also shares this area?

These natural spaces do affect people.

They affect people's health and their well-being.

And connecting people to their natural spaces is really important.

I think that a lot of people just kind of see it and see a ditch in the ground and that's that.

But we have this amazing asset that we kind of overlook because it's not pretty, but it was pretty at one time and it still could be.

Progress is all about taking the lessons of the past and doing better.

So I would hope that now that we know better, we will do better.

Spurring interest around it will really help spur an actual project.

A couple of years ago, Paul Logue, who used to be the Athens City Planner, had started to.

He had taken up this project and the Athens Sustainability Commission, which I was a part of, had taken this project on as well, and started to look at, you know, what can we do?

Can we do anything?

And Paul Logue had invited the Army Corps here, and there was a big tour of the area, and those talks were starting again.

Unfortunately, Paul passed away.

So we really need a hero like that to get behind this project and just take it on and say, you know, it's been 50 some years.

Let's see what we can do.

We are so smart.

We can figure this out.

We just need to have the willpower to do it.