Recent rain calls to mind Atlanta flood of 1998
The rain fell aplenty last week, but not enough to extinguish memories of the 1998 deluge in Atlanta. It happened exactly 20 years ago this coming May.
On one morning, 11 inches of rain fell within an hour or two, and business men and women in the small shopping center that today houses Allstate Insurance and Dr. Robert Sanders’ dental office fled a flood swamp heading upward toward 5 feet on the measuring stick.
Cheri Elder, then an assistant with dentist Steve Karbowski, remembers being loaded onto a personal watercraft and handpushed out of her office and across the waters. Her rescuers were Bo Hammonds, Gary Price and Bill House.
“I couldn’t swim,” she said.
And even if she could have, it was going to be a tribulation because Kenneth Hoote, next door at Allstate, remembers the water was filled with bunches of floating fire ants that even clung to him as he got away.
And Hoote had to have help, too.
“I was trapped inside,” he said. “Water was running too fast outside and coming up high on the wall. I thought the wall might cave in. It took three men pulling the door from the outside and me pushing from the inside to open that glass door. And after that, there was no closing it.”
Hooten had hurriedly began putting papers and computers on top of the file cabinets as water was rising. Then, water quickly rose over desktops and headed toward those file cabinets.
Outside, cars were floating and being twirled around in the parking lot. One came to rest halfway on top of another.
The water had come from the creek that runs from the west side of First Baptist Church across East Hiram, past the parking lot, under East Main Street and behind Brookshire’s to Thomas Street. From there, it went past the wood factory and to the city’s sanitation station where it met up with Black Bayou.
It’s a floodplain that had flooded at least two other times in the memory of Assistant Fire Chief Ricky Draper.
“But not like this. This was all so fast. Even the firemen at the old location of the building on East Hiram had their cars parked there flooded. They were out of calls and couldn’t get back when the water went inside and over the cabinets of the station, too,” Draper said.
Back at Allstate Insurance, owner Patty Hooten was “lucky” to have been at home. It seems she had company. Plenty of it.
“We had a houseful of relatives. The next night was graduation and our son was graduating from high school and our daughter from junior high,” Patty said.
The children would still graduate, but the Hooten house became more crowded as all tables and floors were used to dry papers from the office.
”We lost so much of everything in the office, but we got the very most important papers home and did our best to dry them,” Patty said.
It would take the Hootens several months to get the office restored. That’s also why they and others can see a little bit of unusual construction in their work space.
“All the walls had a water line where the water rose to. That all to be taken out and rebuilt. So that’s where you see the wooden trim lines today. It all had to come out because there’s no way of treating and removing black mold that would have resulted. We knew that,” Kenneth Hooten said.
The Hootens can recall the event with smiles today. But not then. Still, it has given them such a better understanding of other
I was trapped inside (the Allstate insurance business). Water was running too fast outside and coming up high on the wall. I thought the wall might cave in. It took three men pulling the door from the outside and me pushing from the inside to open that glass door. And after that, there was no closing it.”
—Kenneth Hoote
flood victims.
“We had a place to go home to,” Kenneth said. “What if it had been like families of hurricane flooding today? Their houses would be gone, and they have no place to go.”
Kenneth said he’ll always remember Dr. Steve Karbowski.
“The doctor just waded and swam the water out to his car and got up on top of it and sat there. He wouldn’t leave. That’s what he said and I believe that’s what he did.”
The water held in its elevated stage only about an hour or so and then receded about as quickly as it had arrived.
This area in town is just a low place, Draper said. On previous occasions of flooding, the city’s huge trash collector at the area had floated and then moved downward to clog against the street’s underneath drain, blocking it and causing backup.
Draper said he also believes that beavers building dams downstream had caused backup, and an effort was made to unclog those dams so that water build-up no longer occurs.
But, for the most part, it was simply 11 inches of rain in a short period, he said.
Here’s one last memory from Kenneth Hooten:
“I knew there was a lot of rain, but when I looked out the office window, I saw cars coming up over the curbs. I wondered why people would be moving their cars like that, so I picked up the telephone to make a call,” he said.
Before he could dial, water started pouring into the whole office, he said.
“Our insurance supervisor had heard about the possible flooding in the area and had a few minutes earlier driven by our office. He found everything was all right and so went on to Longview. When he looked on television there, he saw our whole office area flooded. We had made the national weather news.”