Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 30, 1995 TAG: 9506300087
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A dented wheelbarrow, a beat-up riding lawnmower that looked like it had been in a head-on collision, a metal shed bashed into shreds - all had surged down a stream and come to an abrupt stop at the side of the bridge.
It's normally an insignificant creek running parallel to Garden City Boulevard, "too small to have a name" even, city worker Timothy Brown said. Wednesday night, though, it managed to jump its banks and lap at the front porches of houses usually 200 feet away.
Wendell Taylor was extracting his patio furniture Thursday from the mangled shreds of his neighbor's chain-link fence, its holes stuffed with grass, mud and assorted yard items.
"That's your bush," Taylor said to his neighbor, pointing at a clump of leaves lying in his yard.
Taylor and Cecil Orick, who lives next door on Garden City Boulevard, spent Wednesday night elsewhere because their houses had flooded. When they returned Thursday morning, they were unprepared for what they saw.
The first floor of Orick's house is high off the ground. But it wasn't high enough to escape the water that roared through, leaving mud caked on carpets and floors.
Boyd and Kim Clement had more than rug damage; they lost the house they rent. The roof on their brick ranch, at the corner of Rose Avenue and Garden City Boulevard, shifted, the foundation cracked, and the whole brick facade toppled onto the front lawn, baring the house down to its tar paper.
A back window on the one-story house was blown in by rushing water, and the sides of the house had cracks running through the mortar. Bricks bulged out, and a hole was visible at the top of the eaves.
The owners of the rental property speculated that the house, on top of having the creek rush through it, may have been hit by lightning as well.
It was in the front lawn of this damaged house that the neighborhood's unsecured possessions came to rest. City crews worked Thursday to clear the road and bridge of debris, and people hurried to pick up their belongings before the odds and ends got thrown into the back of a dump truck.
The water apparently ripped through a TV repair shop upstream, littering the stream bed with soggy television sets for blocks. It also took great bites out of the pavement on the boulevard and crumpled several small bridges over the creek, making the area the worst-hit in Roanoke.
Despite the damage to his house and a car that was probably a total loss, Taylor was most concerned about his 2-year-old springer spaniel, Lindsay.
The dog was in the basement while Taylor worked his evening shift Wednesday, and he couldn't make it home to let her out. Lindsay managed to escape from the basement as the floodwaters rushed in. A friend found her floating in the front yard and put her inside.
"If I lost my dog, that's my life," Taylor said, walking the black-and-white pup across a squishy lawn.
While some of their neighbors couldn't make it past blocked roads to get home, Brenda Dillon and her family couldn't leave. They live a field, a road, and a good-size yard away from the creek, yet the water found its way up to their front porch.
Dillon, her daughter and their children tried to leave Garden City on Wednesday night, but were turned back by city workers because of road conditions. Then their car died. A neighbor pushed their car home with his truck, and they spent the night looking out the second-floor windows at the temporary river in their front yard.
The chain-link fence around Dillon's yard was flattened where the water folded the posts like pipe cleaners.
Next-door neighbor Bessie Arnold said the damage was worse than in the 1985 flood, an assessment with which most people in Garden City agreed. City officials said most of the estimated $710,000 in flood damage to private property was in Garden City.
After days and days of rain, the ground just couldn't absorb any more water when the creek jumped its banks.
"The ground was just so wet," Orick summed it up, "when it hit it was like `sploosh.' ''
by CNB