Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511030112
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
RUBY EDWARDS draws a blank when you ask how many floods she's been through.
"Oh, Lord," she says. "I would say at least 10."
1978, 1985, 1989, 1994, she eventually can name them all. Just last summer, Peters Creek rolled across the littered field at the end of Meadowbrook Road Northwest and chased her from home again.
"It's ruint my furnace I don't know how many times," she said. "I've lost three sets of washers and dryers, and I don't have one now." She won't invest in another set because of her flood-prone neighborhood. She goes to a coin laundry instead.
At 70, and with only a small disability pension to cover loans for recovery from past floods, Edwards is stuck at 1904 Meadowbrook Road.
She's still paying for damage from the 1985 flood - for new wiring, a new furnace, new furniture and a car to replace the 1983 Nissan wrecked by floodwaters. The 1985 flood alone did $17,000 worth of damage at her house.
Somebody offered Edwards $25,000 for it last year. She turned them down. After she paid off her loans, she said, she'd have nothing left.
She moved into the little house 20 years ago with her husband, a retired railroad engineer. He died six weeks later. She's gone through all the floods alone.
The city has cleaned flood debris and widened parts of Peters Creek, but is still negotiating with Roanoke County on the location of upstream retention ponds. Even when it's all done, there are no guarantees against a 100-year flood like the one 10 years ago.
With two sump pumps in her basement, Ruby Edwards waits for the next one.
"I told them, the next time I'm going to worry so much I'll have a heart attack," she said she's told city employees. "They don't do nothing. But they sure will send me a tax ticket."
Norma Pawlowski of 364 Arbor Ave. S.E. watched the flood of 1985 rip deeply cemented clothesline poles right out of the ground, and she doesn't want to see it again.
After two or three days of rain, she eyes the Roanoke River, just around the corner from her house, with apprehension.
Her house is on high enough ground that she and her husband, Casey, didn't have it so bad in 1985. Their basement flooded, they had a foot or more of water on the first floor, and they lost Pierre, a toy poodle, and two kittens in the basement.
But neighbors on lower ground lost more stuff, and the Pawlowskis, in one of the bigger brick homes on the quiet street, are taking their chances.
Norma Pawlowski can tell a harrowing story about how she and a dozen other workers at the former American Balance plant in Southeast Roanoke were lifted out of there by helicopter during the flood of 1985.
"It's something to tell your grandkids about," she said, "and hope it don't ever happen again."
Flood evacuation's still on the agenda for tenant meetings at Salem's large Willow River apartment complex.
Manager Jamie Hays says Salem's emergency coordinator tries to come every year or so. New tenants need to know about the floods of 1978, 1985 and 1992.
Ten years ago, hundreds of tenants in the complex along the Roanoke River at Electric Road and Apperson Drive lost everything but their lives - cars, clothes, furniture, family photo albums.
The federal government paid for $2 million in flood repairs so that more tenants could take their places. Then Willow River was hit with another flood in 1992. Once again the apartments were cleaned up and rerented.
People still live in the particularly vulnerable ground-level apartments.
Bonnie Tate and her roommates know the chances they're taking by living there. Tate lives with two other women, a baby and a dog in an apartment at 1609 Lancing Dr.
When the river rose in heavy rains a few months ago, Tate and the others headed for higher ground. There was no flood after all, but she said, "I couldn't get the pictures out fast enough."
Ramey's Mobile Home Park in Salem is another Roanoke Valley spot where people keep on living in spite of floods.
The park was built along Mason Creek near Electric Road and the Salem Turnpike 42 years ago. Much of the big park never floods, but the street right along the creek does often.
Trailers closest to the creek floated away like tugboats in 1985, and things could be getting worse, not better.
Manager Mary Janey said the creek rose in January and again in June this year, and it ripped the underskirting of several mobile homes. Park owners spent $2,800 per trailer to build 6-foot columns - 3 feet above ground, 3 feet below - in hopes they could raise the creekside trailers beyond the reach of floodwaters.
Nevertheless, Janey said, the city of Salem has forbidden her to place any new tenants along the creek. She said park owners will contest the decision.
Janey blames the flooding on development by other businesses along the creek.
Pat Counts, Salem's deputy coordinator for emergency services, agreed that the increase in concrete and pavement in that part of the city is a major factor. "There's no place for the water to go," he said.
The water rises far too often for Brenda Bandy. She's seen it above her knees in her yard this year. Her new next-door neighbor pulled her trailer out as soon as she heard the flood stories.
"This place ain't worth living in," said Bandy. She and her husband, Bill, daughter Billie, 10, and son Clayton, 7, want to leave, but it costs too much to rent a new lot and move their trailer.
When tenants complained recently, she said, "The owners said if they didn't like it here, to move out. There's people in here who work hard and don't have the money to move out."
by CNB