POWERGRAMS

27 The old downtown, which in 2016 joined the Alabama Main Street program, backs up to the park, as most businesses stand within easy walking distance. "The Kelly" art gallery is nearby. The Elmore County Museum is steps away. Just across a second street stands the 1932 Elmore County Courthouse, which will soon boast a $2.75 million, 11,000-square-foot expansion. Wetumpkans may head to Coaches Corner or Grumpy Dog or Smokin' S Bar-B-Que for lunch, then move down Company Street for dinner at Our Place Café. Locals have been reading The Wetumpka Herald for 119 years. The Main Street program is headed by Jenny Stubbs, who left her hometown for 15 years before returning in 2010 with her husband, Troy, who heads the Elmore County Commission. She notes that downtown has "maintained its charm but not its vivacity" but the overall look and appeal will be changing quickly as the streets are made more pedestrian-friendly with improved parking and increased greenspace. "It's really exciting what we're doing. It will change our community for the better and make us even more close- knit," Stubbs says. "Wetumpka is unique. We're moving forward on capitalizing on all of these unique aspects of our town." Highlights on the west side of town across the river include the Museum of Black History, the Alabama River Region Arts Center, Fain Park – with a playground, riverwalk and senior citizen center – and the Wetumpka Sports Complex featuring sports fields and fishing ponds that draw people from across the region. Just outside of town are Alabama Power's Jordan and Bouldin dams, generating a total of 325,000 kilowatts of clean energy. The two facilities have a 6,807-acre reservoir that provides recreation for thousands of visitors annually. Space Oddity One hundred and twenty-six years ago, Alabama's state geologist found that the foothills of the Appalachians bordering Wetumpka were "structurally disturbed." Seventy-eight years later, another geologist noted the dramatically bent rock layers and other odd features, eventually theorizing that the "mountains" of Elmore County were actually a "star wound." Tony Neathery's scientific paper was met with widespread skepticism, but David King in 2002 revealed findings of an Auburn University team investigation, shocking the world some 85 million years after the really big shocker. "This place is the center of Alabama's greatest natural disaster," King says of the 5-mile-wide, now semi-circular remnant of a 1,100-foot-diameter meteor. King is the top authority on one of the world's best preserved marine impact craters. It is a "marine" crater because scientists believe when it struck during the days of dinosaurs, Wetumpka was 100 feet underwater near the shoreline of the current Gulf of Mexico that covered more than half of Alabama. "It's our Disney World," says Marilee Tankersley, a retired educator who leads tours of the crater. "People are coming from all over the world to see it." King believes the asteroid vaporized as it blasted 1,000 feet into the ground beneath the prehistoric ocean with 175,000 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb in World War II. Flash-fires would have disintegrated everything for 3,000 square miles, including modern-day Montgomery, Auburn, Clanton and some of Birmingham. A shock wave flattened the middle of today's Alabama and Georgia, killing most animal life and blinding all survivors. If it happened now, King estimates 400,000 people would die in the resulting blast, hurricane, flooding, fires and magnitude 9 earthquake. In addition to deep core drillings that contained traces of the meteorite, researchers found bedrock on the crater surface that should be thousands of feet beneath the earth. Cliffs have layers of sediment that were moved in seconds from one side of the crater to the other by a tsunami wave that caused a portion of the southern wall to collapse. Blocks of bedrock the size of houses Old downtown being revived. Sign marks the "Cliffs" (above). Slanted rock wall behind CVS. Miniature chapel in Gold Star Park is a popular spot for photos.

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