Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511030042
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG EDWARDS AND SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A "Welcome Friends" wallpaper border covers the waterline left at The Gift Niche on Roanoke's City Market, but nothing can wipe the flood of 1985 from Victoria Taylor's mind. It was the day that she had one daughter stranded at a junior high school and another at an elementary school while her dream store was drowning.
Taylor and co-owners, Laura Duckworth, Marie Lovell and Vickie Mullins, opened the shop in 1982 in another market location. They had been at 101 Market Square nine months before the flood.
Between Sunday, Nov. 3 and Monday, Nov. 4, 1985, two storm systems, including the remnants of Hurricane Juan, stalled over Roanoke and dumped nearly 7 inches of rain in 24 hours. By then it had already been raining for five days, and the ground and streams were unable to take any more.
The water had nowhere to go but into homes and factories. In a surprise to modern-day Roanokers, water even funneled into the downtown, rising as high as 5 feet into some stores.
The water reached about 31/2 feet at The Gift Niche, not quite to the bottom of the Christmas tree that the owners had decorated the day before. But when the water receded, it acted like a vacuum and sucked the tree display right off the table.
Christmas trinkets and afghans lay sodden and muddy alongside it.
A "flood sale" drew friends who brought food to the merchants "almost like we'd had a death in the family," Taylor said.
The Gift Niche was cleaned up and back in business within two weeks, but it took until spring, Good Friday, for the owners to get approval for a $14,000 Small Business Administration loan to offset the losses.
In Virginia, the flooding stretched from eastern Montgomery County to Rockingham County and Richmond in the watersheds of the Roanoke, James and Shenandoah rivers. It claimed 10 lives in the Roanoke Valley and 22 across the state. The death toll in neighboring West Virginia was even greater.
In Roanoke alone, the damage to businesses and industrial plants and equipment was estimated at nearly $83 million. Across Virginia the damage to homes, businesses and public property was valued at $753 million.
Probably the hardest hit in the Roanoke Valley was the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics plant on Plantation Road, then owned by Eli Lilly & Co. and now by Unilever PLC. In the final accounting, damage at Elizabeth Arden amounted to more than $30 million.
The waters of Tinker Creek rose above desktop level in Arden's offices and to 8 1/2 feet in the plant's lower area on Monday afternoon.
Nine hundred truckloads of waste were hauled from the plant following the flood, including about half of the company's cosmetics inventory. The company flew in 35 electricians from Lilly's Indianapolis headquarters to help rehabilitate water-soaked motors.
The plant was out of operation for about two months.
The water rose rapidly, and within half an hour the plant's parking lot was blocked, recalled Grover Ayers, manager of project engineering.
A few employee cars were lost, but no one was injured.
An airborne rescue
It was about three miles down Tinker Creek at an Orange Avenue grocery store and gas station operated by state Del. Vic Thomas that one of the most dramatic rescues of that Monday took place.
Unknown to Thomas, an old steel bridge about a mile up the creek had broken loose and washed down against the concrete bridge across Orange Avenue. For 2 1/2 hours more debris and water built up behind the bridge, until all at once it gave way like someone pulling the plug in a drain.
Inside his store on the south side of the road, Thomas saw a wall of water moving toward him. Four people out front, including a man who had been carrying a small boy on his shoulders, scrambled onto a soft-drink cooler and onto the roof of the store. Thomas and two others inside struggled out a side door in water up to their chests.
Thomas was unable to save anything from the store.
"All this happened in seconds," he recalled. "All I'd had to do was reach to get a box or open a [cash] register or anything like that, and I'd have wound up in Smith Mountain Lake."
Thomas and the two people with him stood on a wrought iron railing and were pulled to the roof. Nearby on Orange Avenue, a Roanoke city police officer who was watching the drama develop screamed into his radio for a helicopter.
A helicopter, carrying a WDBJ-TV photographer, snatched four of the people off the roof and dropped them about a mile west at the Days Inn motel. It returned and, as the photographer captured the scene on tape, hovered above the building to load Thomas and the others.
"The helicopter went up in the air about 50 feet," Thomas recalled. "He turned to get a picture of the building, and it was gone."
Thomas - whose store had never flooded since it was opened in 1923 by his father - lost everything but the free-standing "E.J. Thomas Market" sign.
"I had every kind of insurance I could buy, but was told I wasn't eligible for flood insurance. They said I wasn't in the flood plain," he recalled.
Thomas, his employees and customers weren't the only people snatched from the hungry waters by helicopters that Monday. Across the valley, the choppers of Carilion Health System's Life-Guard 10, the U.S. Coast Guard and Summit Helicopters Inc. of Daleville rescued hundreds.
A Life-Guard 10 helicopter took Roger Letchford and his co-workers from the roof of Roanoke Ice & Cold Storage on Wasena Avenue.
"I remember I was sorry I didn't get out earlier," said Letchford, 39, who was the plant's chief engineer at the time and is now its manager.
Workers at the plant had suspected that water might get into its basement that day so they were moving things out. The next thing they knew the Roanoke River had jumped the railroad tracks and surrounded the building with 5 feet of water.
A friend of Letchford's tried to get a boat into the plant, but the water was so swift he couldn't. With the elevators knocked out, the plant's workers called 911 and made their way five stories up a fire escape to the roof. The helicopter dropped them off in a nearby park.
Several trailer loads of food that had been stored in the plant's basement were lost. And because of waterlogged electrical equipment, the plant was down about 10 days and had to buy dry ice to keep the food that survived the flood frozen.
Workers who stayed in other businesses to wage a losing battle with floodwaters had to make their harrowing escapes on their own. Robert Greenway, who was at the Moore's Lumber and Building Supply store on Reserve Avenue, climbed a steel link fence topped with barbed wire to make his getaway.
Greenway, now 47 and an operations manager at the Moore's store on Franklin Road, remembers that workers stayed in the store as long as they could to move merchandise off the floor and try to save computer equipment. But eventually rushing water from the direction of Victory Stadium and from the city's stormwater drainage system forced them out.
Greenway and his co-workers made their way through waist-deep water in the back parking lot. They used some barrels that came floating by to make steps to get over the fence and onto the railroad tracks, which they followed to safety.
After they left, the water rose almost to the store's ceiling and moved around heavy stacks of 4x4 lumber. Much of the lumber in the store's yard floated away, and when the water receded it was left in the middle of Jefferson Street at Roanoke City Mills or farther down the river.
The value of the store's lost inventory was estimated at $1 million.
A good test of how much the flood slowed the local economy was the drop in the amount of checks cleared by Roanoke Valley banks during the week of Nov. 3-9, 1985. The banks handled about $55 million in checks, which was $123 million less than what cleared a week before the flood and $145 million less than cleared in the first week of the previous November.
Among the Roanoke Valley businesses suffering flood damage were Appalachian Power, Pitzer Transfer and Storage, Automotive Fasteners, Tultex, Graham-White Manufacturing Co., Richardson-Wayland Electric Corp., Vinton Weaving (now Precision Fabrics Group Inc.), Contracting Enterprises Inc., Custom Wood Products, Advance Auto Stores and Rusco Window Co. Inc. And that's just a partial list.
The Roanoke Industrial Center in Southeast Roanoke and the Blue Ridge Park for Industry off Lee Highway were flooded. Workers at the Napa Auto Parts building in the Blue Ridge Park escaped Monday afternoon by busting a hole in a second-floor wall with sledgehammers and stepping off onto the roofs of delivery trucks, where they were rescued by boat.
Norfolk Southern Corp. had approximately $10 million in damage, much of it at its locomotive repair shop east of downtown, where 5 feet of water inundated electric motors and shut the shops down for a couple of weeks. At NS' mechanical department's office building nearby on Shenandoah Avenue, the water broke through the glass front doors and flooded the basement, where the department's files, including some historically valuable ones related to NS steam locomotives, were stored.
Outside the Roanoke Valley, the nightmare continued. Along the James River and its tributary, the Maury, businesses in towns like Eagle Rock, Buchanan, Glasgow and Lynchburg were inundated or destroyed. Fifteen-foot floodwaters covered the Owens-Illinois paper mill at Big Island in Bedford County, puncturing chlorine tanks and forcing the evacuation of 200 people. When Georgia-Pacific, now the mill's owner, recently expanded, the addition was built on fill dirt designed to place it above the worst possible flood expected to occur in the next 100 years.
Farmers in 36 flood-stricken counties in Virginia suffered losses estimated at $35 million. Botetourt County farmers had losses of $4.5 million, most of it in ruined farmland. Rockbridge County farmers had losses of $2.7 million.
Deceptive waters
The way the water acted in Roanoke that Monday fooled everyone.
In downtown, water flooded the streets in the early afternoon and then receded. It came back later with a vengeance.
Merchant Khang Dao Allen, who four years before had escaped from Vietnam in a boat and spent many days on the ocean, said Nov. 4, 1985, was a day like none other in her life.
"It went so fast," she said.
Allen, owner of the Asian-French Cafe, was one of 19 food vendors who a month before had opened a food court in the renovated City Market Building on Market Square.
The building had been constructed in 1922 and previously housed a meat market on its first floor while sports events were held in a third-floor auditorium. It was remodeled at a cost of $1.5 million to give the historic City Market a focal point, and the food court was to give a festival atmosphere in the hopes of drawing tourists as well as more local business to the area.
Like everybody, Allen said she had not anticipated the indoor flooding although she could see the water rising in the street.
But as water swirled into the building, Allen called her son Truc, 11, who was home alone in Southwest Roanoke, and learned the home's basement was already flooded.
"He said he'd gone down and tried to save some fortune cookies and bags of rice, but it was all wet," Allen recalled recently. She told him to sit tight upstairs and wait, and then she went to get her car to go home.
The car had been swept away by the water, so Allen walked home. It took her four hours, but Truc was safe.
Her downtown business was wiped out. Allen threw out 16 trash bags of ruined food.
"The Health Department wouldn't even let us keep a can that had just touched the water," she said. ``But, I said: `I can't just open one month and leave.'''
Local businesses got about $20 million in loans from the Small Business Administration.
Allen borrowed $6,500 at 4 percent to restock and resupply her food stall. After she reopened, she expanded rapidly, buying a second food stall and eventually adding a sit-down restaurant in the building.
She sent off her last $59 payment on an SBA loan in October.
Lawyer Robert Szathmary, who in 1985 owned an art gallery on the market, was turned down for a loan, but reopened on his own.
"The weird thing is that after the flood, it was like the plague had hit downtown. The shoppers didn't come back very quickly," he said.
Discussion of the flood also makes Szathmary's voice change.
In that lull between the first and second floods into downtown, he and his wife, Alyce, returned from a trip visiting relatives in New Jersey and drove their rental car straight to his gallery downtown.
Szathmary swears it was only 10 minutes before the water poured in at 122 E. Campbell Ave., across the street from the block that now includes the popular Mill Mountain Coffee & Tea. Alyce Szathmary had to be rescued by boat from a second-story window.
When Robert, who is about 5-foot-5, went into the water to try to save some African and pre-Columbian art, the water came up to his nose.
He also lost the first car he ever owned, a white 1968 Mustang, because he had left it with a gallery worker. At the peak of the flood, water covered all but a couple of inches of the vehicle. The rental car was lost, too, but it was insured.
In retrospect, Szathmary views the flood experience as positive.
"It is good to know that man is not the sole force," he said.
The strength of the water was amazing, said Steve Davis, marketing director for Grand Piano & Furniture Co. Inc. It tossed sofas around like beachballs in Grand's two downtown stores and in its warehouse in Salem, which also flooded.
The Grand Exchange Store, on the corner of Campbell and Williamson Road where Twist & Turns now is, was the most heavily damaged Grand store. However, the store at Campbell and First, which also housed corporate offices, was damaged with water that came in several feet deep. About 40 employees linked arms to cross Campbell Avenue and seek safety at the No. 1 Fire Station.
When Davis, who is 6-foot-4, stepped off the curb, the water came to his waist. To add insult to injury, all of the people who went into the water had to take tetanus shots.
Grand had "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in losses at the two stores and the warehouse, Davis said.
Preparing for repeat
A decade after the flood, a much-talked-about flood control project for the Roanoke Valley is years away, but businesses that survived the flood have taken steps of their own to prepare for the next one.
At the Gift Niche, where the women are still paying their SBA loan, they have a flood plan in place.
First of all, they now stock sandbags. And they have devised a schedule for "pickup," a list of which items to save first.
Some suppliers are faster than others at sending replacements, so the first to be rescued are items from the ones who aren't so prompt, Taylor said.
If the women are out of town, their husbands know the routine.
Since 1985, they have packed up at least three times, and Taylor still can't discuss the experience without getting upset.
Elizabeth Arden worked with Norfolk Southern to widen the opening in a trestle that crosses the creek below the Arden plant to prevent water from backing up. The company keeps the creekbanks along its property clear of debris, and has sown them in grass. The company now watches the creek on its closed-circuit television security system, Ayers said.
Inside the plant, Arden has included floods in its evacuation planning. Also, some critical equipment has been raised above flood level and other equipment has been moved to the company's distribution center in the Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology. The company's finished goods are all kept at the distribution center as well, Ayers said.
At Roanoke Ice & Cold Storage, the basement is no longer used to store food, Roger Letchford said. And when the water gets over the low-water bridge and railroad tracks, the company starts preparing for the worst. He's been nervous a couple of times since the flood, Letchford said. "Used to, it never bothered me," he said.
Vic Thomas rebuilt his store on the same Orange Avenue location without federal or state disaster relief by borrowing on his life insurance policies, he said.
The new store, which opened in March 1986, is on a little higher ground than the old one.
"I spent $21,000 bringing it up 29 inches," Thomas said. And now he even has flood insurance.
"Oh, sure, I'm in the flood plain," he remarked wryly.
by CNB