Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 25, 1995 TAG: 9506260115
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: GOSHEN LENGTH: Medium
After the raging waters came the mud, the debris and the work.
Along Main Street in the Rockbridge County town of Goshen, the front doors of the Mill Creek Cafe and The Jolly Shoppe were flung wide open Saturday afternoon. A little air and some good ol' elbow grease helped to sop up the silt that Mill Creek had brought into their shops.
Without the rains, the creek is calm.
"It doesn't look like it can hurt a fly," said Dudley Brill, owner of the Mill Creek Cafe.
But as downpours drenched the Maury River and its tributaries Thursday and Friday, the creek peaked, overflowing onto the Main Street bridge, ripping up the parking lot of the Goshen Volunteer Fire Department and flooding businesses.
Throughout Rockbridge County, large pools of water covered low-lying fields. Receding creeks left rocks and torn vegetation along the roads.
The floods dampened few spirits, though. In the lush countryside where cows often share a road with motorists, nature is respected, not scorned. And floods are compared to the great ones of 1969 and 1985.
"A lot of them have already been through it," Brill said of his Goshen neighbors, some of whom came to help him clean up. The overflowing creek did about $30,000 of damage to Brill's cafe and tanning salon. Brill has known worse. In 1985, floodwaters made the place look more like a lake than a town.
"It's an act of nature," he said. "You take it as it comes."
A couple of miles down the road in Bells Valley, Marvin Stuples was clearing his front lawn, or what was left of it. The swollen creek across the street had risen, carrying boulders and dead trees into his yard.
Stuples' son and his son's family replanted trees and hoed the dirt. Nearby, a wad of tobacco pinched between his cheek and gum, Stuples surveyed his waterlogged garden.
"I had a beautiful garden back here," he said, sweeping his hand across an area now underwater. "I had 37 tomato plants. My cucumbers were up, I had little cucumbers. Everything's gone. ... You'll never raise anything now; it's getting up the first of July. Them potatoes up there might do me some good."
He built his house in 1969. The flood that year never touched it. But Thursday night, the creek edged dangerously close. As he prepared for bed, the water lapped his front lawn. So Stuples took a flashlight and waited.
His neighbor, Vickie Kerry, and her mother, Doris Kelso, were scrambling to save the furniture in Kerry's home near midnight. As the water roared through the doorways and into the house, the two escaped through a kitchen window.
"It was coming behind the house so swift I didn't know if it would take us or not," Kelso said. They were able to make it up the hill to Kelso's brick home.
At 1:30 a.m. Friday, the water reached Stuples' porch. By dawn, it had begun to recede, but not before it had moved his toolshed and carried some of his tools to a neighbor's house downstream.
"It came up fast and it went down fast," Stuples said.
Highway workers maneuvered dump trucks and bulldozers Saturday along many of Goshen's roads, where shoulders dropped steeply and broken pavement clogged some streams.
Portions of roads such as Virginia 640 in Bath County, Virginia 631 in Rockbridge County and Virginia 600 in Augusta County will remain impassable for some time, said Byron Coburn, district construction engineer with the Virginia Department of Transportation.
But the majority of the roads in Rockbridge County were expected to be repaired by Saturday night, including Virginia 39, which runs through Goshen Pass and was closed part of Saturday for repairs.
As the sun broke through for a moment, residents took stock of what was left and what needed to be done. In the past decade, there have been three major floods, and each has been different, said Timmy Alphin of the Goshen First Aid Crew.
But none has caused a death, he said. The flood of 1995 was the closest the city came to seeing any of its citizens swept away by water. Some mobile-home residents were evacuated from their roofs as a raging Mill Creek roared around them.
Most were pragmatic about Mother Nature's torrential rains.
"Water is a terrible force, but there's nothing you can do about it," Stuples said. "You have to let it take its course."
by CNB