Flooded Again

The folks at Bowers Beach had to deal with flooding again. Perhaps that is a price you pay when living in paradise. Reports are that everyone is OK, though I’m sure there was plenty of damage and muck to clean up.

I’ve written about this before, so if you’ve already heard this story, I apologize. But, when it rains and brings flooding in November, I am taken back to the image of a school almost washed away in the mountains of West Virginia in 1985. At that time I worked in the Central Office, but just a few years before I had been principal at Marlinton Elementary. The main building was in the flood plain. We knew that and tolerated the occasional heavy rain that pooled in the road and leaked muddy water under the door sills.

In 1978 we built a new elementary school on 3 feet of fill to get it well above the 100 year flood line. What we didn’t know was that in a few years, we would find out what a 500 year flood would be like. That means the kind of high water that may come around once every 500 years.

After moving school buses and district vehicles to higher ground, we all went to bed that night, knowing there was more water in the streets than ever and fearing for the safety of those we knew lived in its direct path. When your whole town is built in the flood plain of a significant river that is fed by high wall mountain streams, flood water can come in like a tidal wave.

I was up at daylight and glad to see the high water mark in my neighborhood stopped at the corner, 3 doors down. I was the first on the scene at school. Wearing my fishing waders I didn’t have to wait for the water to totally subside. I found that the water had reached around 8 feet in the old main building and 5 feet in the new school.

It is amazing how the water, with no doors or windows open, managed to reach the same level inside the buildings as outside. Equally amazing was the amount of mud that came with it. When the flood subsided, each classroom looked like the bottom of a peanut butter milk shake. Furniture was churned and scattered with books and other materials and all was covered in 3 - 6 inches of stinky brown muck.

Across the street sat the modest home of my friend Arch, a retired high school teacher and football coach and his wife Trudy, a kindergarten aide. Siding was missing from the house and the back deck was gone. The water line was two feet above the top of the front door. I knocked, assuming that they had left for high ground the night before and was surprised to have them both come to the door. We hooted and hollered and hugged just to see that they were OK.

They told me that as the water entered their house quickly. There was no time to wade out, so they got a step ladder and moved through the small square hatch that gave access to their tiny attic. You couldn’t help but laugh when Arch described how hunger took over good sense in the middle of the night, causing him to strip naked and swim in the icy pool that was their kitchen in order to recover a pot roast that Trudy had protected by stowing it on top of the fridge.

Thank God there were no lives lost in Marlinton that time. We learned through that flood that it’s just stuff. Stuff can be hosed off with a fire hose and re-used or thrown away and replaced. We were cleaned up and back in school in a week. We learned that people will show up from hundreds of miles away to help. We learned to appreciate that a community and its spirit could never be dampened by a little rain.