Figures

1,000

More than 1,000 people were flooded out of their homes after heavy rain that swamped communities across the American Midwest sent Ohio’s rivers spilling over their banks, the governor said. The storm’s death toll also rose when three people were electrocuted by lightning at a bus stop. In one Ohio county alone, more than 700 homes were severely damaged or destroyed by flooding. Findlay, Ohio’s firefighters and a volunteer armada navigated boats and canoes through streets waist-deep in water in their northwest Ohio town, plucking neighbors and their pets from porches. Every downtown street and many neighborhoods were under water as the Blanchard River topped seven feet above flood stage, its highest level since a 1913 flood. AP

$1.2 million

A jury in North Platte, Neb., awarded $1.2 million to a former student who says he was sexually abused by a teacher already accused of molesting other students. The former student, who is now 25 and identified only as John Doe in the lawsuit, said he was sexually assaulted in 1993 by the teacher, Michael Kluck, but told no one of the assault. In 2003, the Elwood Public School District, its insurance company and a guidance counselor pressured the former student into signing a form to keep him from suing, even after the teacher confessed to the assault, according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in North Platte. The school district, guidance counselor David Blessing and the Allied Insurance Co. were defendants in the lawsuit. After leaving Elwood, Kluck was hired as a teacher in La Porte, Texas, where he later pleaded guilty to molesting a junior high student. He died of a heart attack in 2000. AP

13

An Ohio woman accused of setting her neighbors’ homes on fire because she was upset with their behavior and loud music was sentenced to four years in prison. Johanna Morrison has mental health problems and didn’t understand the downside to what she was doing, said her attorney, James Gentile. Fire investigators believe Morrison is responsible for as many as 13 fires in her neighborhood from April 2006 until she was arrested in October. No one was injured but some homes were damaged so severely that they had to be abandoned.

Topics Flood Ohio