On March 2, 2012 an F-3 tornado ravaged the small community of Frenchburg in Menifee County Kentucky claiming the lives of 3 victims, destroying many homes and businesses, and shredding the trees of Broke Leg Falls Park into mere toothpicks, effectively changing the natural landscape of the area forever.
Just a month earlier, on February 5th, I was fortunate enough to be driving down a strip of KY State Highway 460 that I usually would never had been on, but we decided to detour off the Bert T. Combs Mountain Parkway for the scenery. In hindsight, I’m so glad we did.
As we were moseying through Menifee County enjoying the view on our Sunday drive, the sign on the side of the road caught our attention, so we turned around to take a gander at Broke Leg Falls.
We were impressed with the accommodations there. The gazebo and picnic tables looked so nice and new, the park was very clean, the signage telling of the park's history was informative, and the stairs and decking were all in great working order. Come to find out, the county had just completed all those renovations the previous fall, only 5 months before the tornado struck.
"It was the worst one," said Lola Thomas, executive director of the Frenchburg-Menifee County Chamber of Commerce.
"We had put in a campsite, grills and, you know, made it a place where someone could go for a picnic or a day's outing," Thomas said. Nestled in the Daniel Boone National Forest and including fingers of Cave Run Lake, Menifee County doesn't have many attractions, "but we do have nature," she said.
Lexington Herald Leader
With no preconception of what we should expect to find, as we aren’t from the area, it was breathtaking at first glance. A little ways down the path, it forks to the left and right. To the left is the upper section of the stream and there are two small falls there.
To the right the path descends down a long flight of stairs to the big fall, once you get down there you realize why it's called Broke Leg Falls. Local folklore says that the name came from an ox falling and breaking it's leg - but as the sign says, there are many rumors as to the reasoning of the naming of the falls.
The path leads around behind the actual waterfall, underneath the cliff edge, which was really cool. The water in the bottom pool was gorgeous, almost emerald. My images barely do it justice, but I was unfortunately only armed with my phone camera (in 2012!) and am no real photographer to begin with.
This area is unique because the waterfall flows across a slab of sandstone which is less prone to water erosion than the limestone that is typical in this area of KY.
After the tornado struck I remember hearing on the local news that the county was trying to raise money for cleanup. The gorge itself is shaped like a 3 sided bowl, with the only open side facing away from where the road is, no vehicle could access it. So, in order to get some of the larger trees out of the bottom of the bowl it would require hoisting them out with the use of helicopters, which is undoubtedly costly. I never did hear how they went about the cleanup effort, and I wasn't able to find any additional information online.
I went back to the falls in August or September that year to see what progress had been made in the cleanup. It looked terrible from the parking lot, like the tornado must've got stuck down in the gorge and just sat there churning everything up and spitting it out the top like a blender with no lid. The area with the picnic table was completely destroyed and covered with twisted trees which we had to climb through like an obstacle course.
Once we got through the jungle of shredded trees to the trail-head things had been cleaned up somewhat. The wooden stairs, which lead down to the concrete stairs (pictured below) were still missing some pieces, and the gorge looked so barren without most of it's majestic trees. The little drawbridge had been destroyed, and the landscape upstream must've been drastically altered because the flow was significantly less, barely trickling. We didn't go down the path all the way because it looked so bad. I did not get any images this trip, or if I did, they somehow got lost.
My next trip wasn't until August of 2014, 2.5 years after the tornado. It was much better than before, but still nothing like it's old self. The flow of water was a lot more than my first post-tornado visit, but as you can see below it was significantly less than the flow before the tragedy.
In the image above you can see the concrete stairs to the right and also the little trail behind the falls.
