High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Miami Conservancy District is a river management agency operating in Southwest Ohio to control flooding of the Great Miami River and its tributaries. It was organized in 1914 following the catastrophic flood of the Great Miami River in March 1913, which hit Dayton, Ohio, particularly hard, known as the Great Dayton Flood of 1913. Designed by Arthur Ernest Morgan, the Miami Conservancy District built levees, straightened the river channel throughout the Miami Valley, and built five dry dams on various tributaries to control flooding. The district and its projects are unusual in that they were funded almost entirely by local tax initiatives, unlike similar projects elsewhere which were funded by the federal government and coordinated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The 1913 flood has been ascribed in part to the 1912 eruption of Mount Katmai and its daughter volcano Novarupta in Alaska. In one of the greatest recorded volcanic events, Novarupta emitted enough fine ash into the atmospheric to block sunlight and cool the climate of the Northern Hemisphere that winter.