Although the Great Flood of 1913 caused extensive damage to the City of Hamilton, the weather event that caused it had a profound impact on the rest of the nation.

Science writer Trudy E. Bell, a science writer from Cleveland who has written several articles and a book about the 1913 flood, presented “Ohio’s Greatest Disaster: The 1913 Flood in Hamilton and Beyond” on Tuesday night in Parrish Auditorium as the first event in the official 100th anniversary commemoration period.

During the talk, Bell outlined the scope of the storm’s impact, including tornadoes that killed 109 people in Omaha, Neb., on Easter Sunday, March 23.

“In Chillicothe, the river scoured the streets eight feet deep, causing buildings to collapse,” she said. “Akron dynamited its locks, ending Ohio’s canal era.”

The damage in Ohio alone amounted to $300 million at the time, which Bell said translates to $6.5 billion in today’s dollars.

Over 20,200 homes were destroyed, another 35,500 damaged, afflicting 1.25 million Ohioans out of a population of 4.75 million. The damage was more widespread than the 1906 San Francisco earthquakes and cost more lives than the Great Chicago Fire in 1871.

This kind of destruction occurred in 15 states, Bell said. It disrupted the stock exchange because communications between New York and Chicago had to be routed through Canada. Many railroads were out of commission until August.

Bell said that she started to wonder why, with such widespread damage, that it was being referred to as “the Great Dayton Flood,” and attributed that to the efforts of three men: John H. Patterson, the founder of NCR; James M. Cox, publisher of the Dayton Daily News and Governor of Ohio at the time of the disaster; and Arthur E. Morgan, the engineer who headed up the effort to make sure a calamity like this would never occur again.

Even though Patterson had been indicted on felony charges in federal court the previous year for unethical business practices, he had the foresight to put his NCR factories on a hill, which he immediately turned into a relief station, ordering his employees to start building boats to rescue people and soup to feed them.

He also had a cameraman follow him around everywhere and made a point of personally going out in a boat to rescue two women and a child while the cameraman.

“Dayton was the New Orleans of the 1913 flood,” Bell said, “one of the worst-hit areas, but not absolutely the worst. Indianapolis had been hit much worse.”

Bell noted that Rotary International, then only eight years old, found “it’s humanitarian mission” as a result of the flood, raising $5 million in 2013 dollars for relief.

A typhoid outbreak in Albany, N.Y., resulting from the flood helped convince the nation of the value of chlorinating drinking water.

Other national legacies from the flood include the founding of Cleveland’s Community Chest, which became the United Way and the creation of the Emergency Broadcast System.

Patterson’s convictions were overturned in appeals and he was welcomed back to Dayton in a ticker tape parade, and his co-convicted vice president Thomas Watson left NCR to form the company that would become IBM. Cox went on to run for President of the United States with Franklin Delano Roosevelt as his running mate, but lost to Herbert Hoover.

And after setting up the Miami Conservancy District, which is estimated to have stopped some 1,500 potential floods in the last 100 years, Watson went on to be the first head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, appointed by FDR.