Civil engineer, 103, worked to fix Village Creek

Richard Woodruff bridge.jpg

In 2010, at 97, Richard Woodruff was busy as technical director of the Village Creek Society, looking for solutions to flooding.

(AL.com File/Linda Stelter)

Richard S. Woodruff lived in Mountain Brook, but he devoted much of his retirement to cleaning up Village Creek and making Ensley a better place.

Woodruff, a civil engineer who retired from Alabama Power Co. in 1978 after a career focused on building dams, turned his attention to flooding problems on Village Creek, the 44-mile waterway that stretches from its source near Huffman High School westward to the Black Warrior River.

He became the technical director and resident engineer for the Village Creek Society and devoted much of his retirement to helping alleviate flooding on Village Creek.

Woodruff died on April 23. He was 103.

"When he retired, his love of civil engineering never stopped," said John Meehan, who worked as a volunteer alongside Woodruff for the Village Creek Society.

"He came up with plans. He worked hard. He proposed a walking trail that's now coming to fruition."

Mable B. Anderson, executive director of the Village Creek Society, said Woodruff was "tenacious" and woke up every morning "thinking about Village Creek" and "gets it done."

Flooding along the creek has for decades vexed residents threatened by the rising waters that follow heavy rain. Hundreds of families and some busi-
nesses in a flood-prone section of the creek from Ensley to near Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport have been relocated since the late 1980s.

Woodruff said he had been reading about flooding on Village Creek for 50 years.

''I wondered why in the world Village Creek made news and they did nothing about it,'' he said.
His curiosity, and his background with Alabama Power Company in hydrology - the study of water and its movement - led to his eventual involvement with the Village Creek Society. ''I felt I wanted to help the city do something about the flooding,'' he said.
In his years of studying its waters, Woodruff said he traveled its length and crossed every bridge over the creek.
Three measures would prevent flooding in Ensley, he said: replacing the Avenue F bridge over Village Creek, relocating under the creek a 3-foot round sewer pipe that runs alongside the bridge and building a Gabion retaining wall along both sides of the creek between Avenue F and Avenue W.
The Avenue F bridge sits on piers, and those posts trap trees, tree limbs and litter, as does the sewer pipe. As trash and debris collect and the water gets high, flow is impeded, which causes flooding. A single-span bridge without piers and an underground sewer pipe would alleviate flooding, he said.
Woodruff drew up plans for the Gabion wall, which he said would improve the stability of the creek banks and stabilize water flow in that area. That's yet to be built for lack of funding.
The society has applied for $3.5 million in federal stimulus funds to pay for a new bridge and the Gabion wall. It has also applied for $4.8 million in federal funding to relocate the sewer pipe. Woodruff worked with Birmingham city and Alabama Department of Transportation officials on plans for a greenway trail along the creek between Avenue F and Avenue W. These plans also call for a park in Ensley with an outdoor classroom and other amenities, such as a picnic area. It would be built on 75 acres cleared of houses due to the Village Creek relocation.

Woodruff described his career in civil engineering as the fulfillment of a childhood dream. He said he always wanted to be a civil engineer and hoped to study civil engineering at Cornell University.
After graduating from high school in 1931 in Binghamton, N.Y., he didn't have the money for Cornell, which charged $400 a semester. So he joined other recent high school graduates who took an extra year of classes at the high school, such as advanced math.
One of his friends passed around a college catalog from the University of Ala-
bama. Three things caught his eye: the civil engineering courses were very similar to Cornell University's; the dean of engineering was a Cornell civil engineering graduate and tuition was about $88 a semester for out-of-state students.
''I thought, 'Thabt sounds good to me,''' he said.

He and three Binghamton friends also accepted at Alabama arrived at the Capstone in the fall of 1932 following a three-day trip in a Ford Roadster. His education at Alabama led to a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1937 and two weeks after graduation, a job with Alabama Power.
He worked for the power company for a total of 36 years, with a two-year break during World War II when he worked on modifying B24 bombers for Bechtel McComb Aircraft Corp. in Birmingham. He'd tried to join the Navy but was rejected because at about 135 pounds, he was underweight by 20 pounds.
''They told me to eat bananas and chocolate milkshakes,'' he said. ''I knew there was no way I was going to gain 20 pounds.''
After he retired from Southern Company Services, he worked as a hydroelectric consultant at Hendon Engineering Associates for 20 years. He volunteered with the Village Creek Society for the last 16 years of his life.

Woodruff and his late wife, Gwendolyn, from Selma, raised two sons, Michael and Richard L. Woodruff.

He was an active member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, a professional organization he joined in college. He also enjoyed stamp collecting, a hobby he picked up as a teenager, and for years kept a boat on Guntersville Lake. But Village Creek turned out to be one of his favorite places.

"He didn't live in Ensley, but his heart was out there," Meehan said.