Wabash River Rising Near Bluffton, NWS Issues Flood Watch

The Wabash River climbed to 12.3 feet near Bluffton on Monday, pushing the National Weather Service to issue a flood watch for a corridor of upper Wabash communities stretching from Linn Grove through Bluffton and downstream to Wabash and Logansport.

The NWS forecast a crest near 12.5 feet by Monday afternoon before the river begins pulling back, with gauge readings projected to fall below flood stage by early Thursday morning. Both the NOAA river gauge BLFI3 and USGS monitoring station 03323000, a station with recorded data extending back to 1904, are tracking the rise at Bluffton. The NWS classified the expected flooding as minor.

That classification carries weight when measured against the river's worst recorded performance at Bluffton. On the morning of March 23, 1913, the Wabash stood at a routine 2.5 feet. Four days later, on March 27, it had exploded to a then-record crest of 20 feet, a rise of 17.5 feet that remains the benchmark against which every subsequent flood at Bluffton is measured. The current 12.5-foot forecast peak, while above flood stage, falls well short of that catastrophic ceiling.

The Wabash drains from its headwaters in Ohio westward across Indiana before emptying into the Ohio River at the Indiana-Illinois border, and Wells County sits squarely in the upper basin, directly in the path of the river's fluctuations. Bluffton, the county seat with a population of roughly 10,467, anchors a county of approximately 28,180 residents who have lived alongside the Wabash's seasonal cycles for generations.

More than a century of continuous gauge data from the USGS station now gives emergency managers a longer historical baseline for anticipating how quickly and how high the river can move. The current event window is narrow: a peak expected Monday afternoon and a return below flood stage by Thursday morning, with Linn Grove upstream and the larger cities of Wabash and Logansport downstream all falling within the NWS watch area until the river recedes.