you guys for helping us sort through it today.

>> Always happy.

>> It's been one year since flood waters reaching 48ft swept through Buffalo Trace Distillery in Frankfort.

The historic distillery sits right on the Kentucky River and has robust flood plans in place.

But employees say the flood still rose higher and further than expected.

Now, one year later, they say visitors would be hard pressed to see any lasting effects from the flood.

>> So we saw the flood levels reach over 48ft, which was the second highest ever in history.

Kentucky River is what brought raw materials into the distillery.

You know, they've been distilling on the site since the 1700s.

So that's how they brought goods in here.

And it's also how we shipped our finished product out for trading.

So without the Kentucky River, we wouldn't be here at all.

But it was a known risk.

So we did lots of preparations for it.

There's an extensive flood plan which involves, you know, moving electronics out, relocating pumps, shutting things down to prepare for those waters.

But those waters just exceeded all of our expectations.

And we're levels that none of us here had ever seen before.

So we had water forces come in and move tanks off their foundations, right?

And so that had to be reset and then repairing and replacing electronics.

But at that same time, we were also preparing for the next flood.

So instead of just putting things back in their same place, we found opportunities to relocate or find more efficiencies or, you know, just be safer and preparing for that next flood event that is inevitably going to happen.

We had not only our 900 team members here at Buffalo Trace, but a team of 200 outside folks helping us as well.

Experts and cleanup and recovery team members as well.

So we had our entire distillery helping us out, plus the outside experts.

And then the community was so supportive as well.

A lot of our cleanup, not only here but everywhere, was lots of mud.

So that water of course, brought in a lot and then pulled back out and left a lot of mud with it.

So we also found some fish in some places as well.

So the river brought in some unique species of fish.

We were able to work with Kentucky State and actually do a lot of recovery efforts for the fish, where they were able to study them and put them back in the water as well.

The good thing is, while we did see a little bit of water in some of the warehouses, a lot of our aging inventory, it was not impacted.

Within a week, we had been able to resume bottling in certain areas, and then just a little bit more than a week after we were able to welcome visitors back.

While we won't see maybe much, that's permanent damage, we do like to commemorate it.

So throughout a few spots, we've marked where those flood levels were.

You can still see the watermark from 2025 and then the 1978 below that, and then 1937.

And more of our more recent ones are much lower than that.

So it just brings an interesting perspective of we would have been completely underwater in this space.

You know, the Frankfort community is so important to us.

We feel so connected to it.

They were so supportive throughout the process.

We wanted to bring visitors back because the tourism here is such an important part of what happens in Frankfurt, so that they could visit the local restaurants and shops and be in downtown and participate in Frankfurt.

So really, our urgency to open back up was to make sure tourism was coming back to Frankfurt and just helping that entire economy.

I think about being a year out.

I mean, resilience is what comes to mind for me, not just for Buffalo Trace as a distillery, but our 900 team members, the community, the support that we saw here.

We really do take a moment to reflect on the past, but we're focused on the future and what we have coming this summer.

>> After the flood caused damage to the distillery's historic clubhouse, the cleanup process turned into turned into construction on a new permanent café, the John G. Carlisle Cafe