Fact Check: Did a Kentucky Restaurant Successfully Stave Off Flood by Filling Building with Fresh Water?
It was a noble — no, noble and ingenious — attempt to stave off flooding by a restaurant. But did it work?
Amid all the flooding in Kentucky this month, you may have seen Andrew Masterson making the rounds. He’s the owner of the Captain’s Quarters Riverside Grille in Prospect, Kentucky, who was trying to keep his restaurant from being flooded by the Ohio River cresting.
His solution, according to a viral video? Instead of getting the muddy waters that spilled over the banks of the Ohio into his establishment, fill it up with clean water before.
In the video, Masterson said that he had managed to get the restaurant flooded by first turning off the electricity and then filling it up with the faucets, sinks, and even a well pump.
With the move, he managed to get about six feet of clean water into the place.
“We remove all of our electrical panels and just about anything that we can,” he said in a video posted Sunday.
“It just keeps the muddy water out. It makes the clean up much, much easier. Now it doesn’t always work if we get a broken window,” Masterson continued.
“It just keeps it calm. And what little dirty water does get in here, it just kind of settles to the ground.”
“The video has provided levity in a moment of anxiety and sadness across the Commonwealth,” the Lexington Herald Leader noted in a Wednesday report about the video.
“Four people have died from injuries related to flooding from unprecedented levels of rain, including 9-year-old Gabriel Andrews in Frankfort, who was swept away while traveling to his school bus stop on a dark morning.”
The genius proposal to keep the silty water out quickly spread on social media and was hailed as a “1000 IQ move” by some.
1000 IQ move from this restaurant owner.
His business was going to get flooded by murky river water so he decides to flood it with regular fresh water to prevent the murky water from entering pic.twitter.com/CYe3rrQ7Xx
— Dudes Posting Their W’s (@DudespostingWs) April 10, 2025
Props to Captain’s Quarters!!!
Full video on a riverside restaurant staple and how they protect the place during floods. https://t.co/zYlSaz5ywY pic.twitter.com/GznEwScRDO
— Mark Blankenbaker (@UofLSheriff50) April 6, 2025
The questions: Is it real, and did it end up working in the long run?
The answer to the first is decidedly yes. The answer to the second, alas, is no — although it worked for a while.
In a further update published on Thursday, Masterson revealed that the flood crested at 37 feet, with 11 feet of water inside the restaurant. It reached the second floor offices, and the well water system is out of commission.
“We lost gas a couple of days ago, … so we couldn’t run our generator, couldn’t run our pumps,” Masterson said. “But it wouldn’t have done any good anyway.”
“Definitely the river water overcame our clean water idea, and we kind of suspected it would,” he continued. “But it was a noble try.”
Masterson said that, in addition to being flooded by the Ohio River waters, he’d also lost an air conditioning unit he’d just installed last year, which they had tried to save by putting it on floats.
“Again, another noble try, but ended up being all for nothing,” he said. “Got a little bit higher inside than we had expected, especially up in our office.
“We thought we had gotten everything up off the ground, but at the end of the day, in the rush that we were in to get things out, we missed some items.”
He thanked people for their rooting interest, though: “We appreciate everybody reaching out, and all the comments of support and the like.
“We love the support from our community. We will most definitely be back,” Masterson said, adding, “We’ve got some work to do.”
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