The weekend rescues in Pickaway and Hocking counties (along with the evacuation of the massive Lost Lands festival in Thornville) were the latest events in a season that has been rewriting Ohio’s flash flood records since July.
Through Sept. 21, the National Weather Service has issued 60 flash flood warnings for Ohio this September. The previous September high, in a warning archive that runs back to 2005, was 11, set in 2020.
The counts come from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet at Iowa State University, which keeps the weather service’s warning records, and were pulled Sept. 21. No September in that archive had reached a dozen warnings before this one.
September isn’t the worst month however. We lived through 88 warnings in August, the busiest month in the archive by a wide margin. July had 60. Before this year the busiest month on record was July 2013, with 54, and three months of 2026 have now gone past it. The state’s total for the year sits at 259. The old yearly high was 130, from 2017. 2025 came in at 115.
| Month | 2026 warnings | Prior high for that month (2005-2025) | Year of prior high |
| January | 0 | 2 | 2006 |
| February | 4 | 5 | 2011 |
| March | 3 | 19 | 2020 |
| April | 12 | 13 | 2011 |
| May | 15 | 36 | 2011 |
| June | 17 | 53 | 2019 |
| July | 60 | 54 | 2013 |
| August | 88 | 31 | 2007 |
| September (through Sept. 21) | 60 | 11 | 2020 |
| Year to date | 259 | 130 | 2017 |
The first half of the year was quiet, in comparison. January through June each finished under that month’s prior high. Then July, August and September each cleared the old single-month mark.
This past weekend is still being cleaned up. Flood warnings were still in effect Monday morning for Athens, Jackson, Morgan, Muskingum, Noble and Vinton counties, and the Vinton County Sheriff’s Office dropped its Level 3 road emergency to Level 2 with water still across some roads. The county’s emergency management agency said the southeast corner of Pickaway County took the worst of it. The assistant chief of the Laurelville volunteer fire department told NBC4 his crews pulled somewhere between 85 and 100 people out of first- and second-story rooms, and the evacuation order there lifted around 10 a.m. Sunday. In Hocking County, the shelter at Hocking Hills Elementary School helped 40 people before closing about 2:15 p.m. Sunday. No injuries or deaths were reported.
