FRANKFORT, Ky. (LEX 18) — Walking down the spiral staircase of the Franklin County Courthouse currently leads to an undesirable sight: dirty, smelly floodwater.
It's a situation that was never supposed to happen.
When the Franklin County Courthouse was renovated and expanded, architects designed it with flood prevention in mind. However, the relentless flooding in Frankfort proved too powerful this time, inundating the building and reaching several feet inside.
"It wasn't supposed to flood," said Judge Thomas Wingate. "The architect said it wouldn't and it did."
"Saturday night, about 4 o'clock, we all got a call from our building director who said it's going to be about three or four feet," Wingate added. "Ended up being about five feet."
The most affected area was the Clerk’s Office, home to important court files.
As floodwaters rose, judges, lawyers, courthouse and judicial employees, family members and others all sprang into action, tirelessly working for hours to save thousands of documents at risk of being ruined.
"We worked till 1 o'clock (in the) morning moving files - thousands of files," said Wingate. "And then Sunday morning, we came back in at 6, water was already coming in. We did what we could."
"We had about 30 people," he added. "It was totally a group effort."
Using a flashlight to light the way, Judge Kathy Mangeot showed LEX 18 the hallways, closets, and courtrooms full of saved files.
"We probably moved 10,000 plus files and didn't get them all," said Mangeot. "We did our best. We did our absolute best and tried to prioritize which ones should be moved. But it got a little crazy."
"Water was coming in under the elevator shafts. It was really kind of scary. We got to the point where I said 'I'm not getting on that elevator again," she added. "And we were shoving these big carts of files on one floor, shooting them up to the other floor, and had people unloading once they reached the second floor. We did that forever, trying to move what we could. It was crazy."
Wingate believes they saved about 85% of the files. He explains that they had to stop when the situation became too dangerous.
"I was afraid people would get electrocuted," said Wingate.
"I just started yelling saying 'We've got to get out of here before we get electrocuted'," he added.
Wingate and Mangeot believe the files that were destroyed can be remade, but it will be a "daunting task" for the Clerk.
Electronic files, which Mangeot admits she was not previously a huge fan of, will help as well.
"I hadn't been a huge proponent of electronic filing and I'm a 1000% behind electronic filing moving forward," she said. "It was unbelievable the amount of manpower it took to move those files."
The courthouse will likely not be operational for a while. On Wednesday, a lot of water still remained in the building.
"You can kind of smell almost like a petroleum smell," said Wingate. "That's from the hydraulics of the elevators and stuff."
"We've got a lot of internet, electronic stuff that got wet," he added. "We all run on technology, so, that's a big deal."
"The problem was, even yesterday morning as the river was receding, we were still rising here because it was all of the storm sewer water," added Mangeot. "It was just gushing in from all the storm sewer drains. So, even as the water from the river was going down, we were still bubbling up in here."
The hope is to get court back in session soon, but it'll need to take place somewhere else.
"We hope to be operating criminal circuit court next Friday in an undisclosed location," said Wingate. "After that, it's sort of day to day."
