ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, September 13, 1996 TAG: 9609130131
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: CRIGLERSVILLE
SOURCE: Associated Press
Six days after a muddy tide swept through his home, Herbert Frisbie has little energy to deal with his buckled floorboards, sodden walls and an inch or more of dank mud in the dining room.
``I've cleaned up a little bit, but the mud's like gumbo,'' Frisbie said Thursday.
Rainwater from Hurricane Fran overflowed the Robinson River near Frisbie's 100-year-old house in Madison County last Friday. The flood carried a tide of mud and sticks into the home's first level and ruined the pump house that supplies him with water.
And it renewed the pain of a year ago, when Frisbie's wife, Doris, died in a mudslide spawned by flooding from the same river. The couple's retirement home washed down a mountainside about two miles from Criglersville. Doris Frisbie, 64, could not get out of the house in time.
Frisbie, 72, had stepped out of the house briefly. He watched helplessly as the home he built 18 years earlier was swallowed.
``You can't even tell where it was now,'' he said as he sat in his kitchen Thursday. ``There's just boulders the size of this table where the house was.''
Frisbie and his dog, Dinky, who also survived last year's flood, fled for higher ground as the floodwaters rose Friday.
``I was very fatalistic about it. If the river's coming, it's coming,'' he said.
The flooding caused more than $286 million in damage statewide. Clarke, Nelson and Rockbridge counties and the city of Martinsville were added Thursday to the list of localities eligible for federal disaster relief to individuals. The state Department of Health closed about 20 miles of the Rappahannock River to shellfishing because of pollution from the flooding.
At Madison County's Criglersville Elementary School, employees and volunteers spent two days getting rid of several inches of muddy water that ruined classroom carpets, Principal Wordell Davis said.
Open doors and windows at the school Thursday could not dispel the dank river smell.
Mud so thick a fire hose could not dislodge it remains on the playground behind the school.
During the cleanup, volunteers found a nest of copperhead snakes that washed down the river and lodged amid the playground equipment, Davis said.
The school reopened Tuesday, and most of the 110 students have made it to class this week, he said.
Chain saws whined and a front-end loader rumbled and spit in the soggy mud next to Frisbie's house as his neighbor tried to restore order to a once-trim yard.
On the neighbor's porch, two empty bottles of Clorox stood next to a broom and a pair of high rubber boots.
Frisbie moved in above an old store last October, and began renovating the building as a home. Some of the work was destroyed by the flood, and stacks of building materials washed away.
``Anything that would float went away,'' he said.
LENGTH: Medium: 62 linesby CNB