THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 1, 1995 TAG: 9507010458
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CRIGLERSVILLE, VA. LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
Doris Frisbie's four children shoveled muck from the side of a flood-soaked ridge near this Madison County hamlet Friday, searching for signs of their mother.
They found none.
Nor did they find many traces of the big, lodgelike home in which the Portsmouth native lived with her husband, Herbert, before the building was swallowed up by mud and rocks and swept down the mountain Tuesday.
Rescue crews suspended their third day's search for the 64-year-old grandmother about 3 p.m., chased away by another in a string of storms that has dumped buckets of rain and catastrophic damage on the washboard terrain east of the Blue Ridge.
Family members remained behind, scouring a slope wiped so clean of landmarks that just finding where the house stood was difficult.
``It doesn't even look like the same place,'' said Rebecca Tucker, the couple's daughter. ``It's like every rock on the mountain came down on my parents' house.
``They found my mother's clothing and my father's clothing a mile and a half away. One of the cars is a mile from the house, and it's as flat as a pancake. The mattress from my mother's bed is in a field a mile away.''
Six people have been killed and two others are missing in flood waters spawned by eight days of nearly continuous rain, stretching north and south along the Blue Ridge Mountains.
During a tour of the hard-hit Madison County area, Gov. George Allen announced a $23 million state assistance package for the flood victims. The governor also said he would ask the White House to declare a 10-county area a national disaster area.
Herbert Frisbie, 70, was napping at home when the rain came Tuesday morning. It made torrents of the yard-wide mountain streams that lace the county's hogbacks and hollows. Many streams jumped their banks, uprooting trees and erasing roads and turning the ground to pudding.
About 11 a.m., Doris Frisbie woke her husband and suggested he move some equipment into the house from a waterlogged shed in the yard. Shirtless, he threw on a raincoat and boots and walked outside. A few yards from the house he heard a terrible sound.
It was the mountainside collapsing. The metal shed and the Frisbies' trucks slid downhill and slammed into the house. Behind them came a wall of mud and rock. The house - built on steel pilings and blessed with expansive windows overlooking the surrounding woods - bent in two.
Doris Frisbie, hobbled by knee surgery, was still inside. Unable to reach a door, Herbert climbed onto the roof and began pulling away shingles. Water swept him off and tossed him down the ridge. He struggled back up. It overwhelmed him again. He climbed back up. A third time it knocked him off the house. Exhausted, he could not fight it.
``He's beat up all over and cut up all over,'' Rebecca said. ``He just didn't have any strength left in him. He's 70 years old.''
When he regained his footing down the mountain, her father looked back to the house. It was still standing, Rebecca said. He struck off in search of help, reached a neighbor's place, and at some point in the late morning or early afternoon was told that Doris had been rescued. With that news, he caught a ride to the county's evacuation center at Madison High School.
By the time he returned, after learning that Doris had been confused with another woman and had not been brought down the mountain, the house was gone. In its place, a few pieces of debris lay smashed among tremendous piles of rock. Two new streams burbled past the homesite, one of them 15 feet deep and 20 feet wide.
``It looked like a bomb went off,'' Rebecca said. ``There's trees up there that five people couldn't put their arms around, completely stripped of bark. They found one dog. She was buried, still alive - the only thing sticking out of the ground were her eyes and her nose, and we dug her out.''
Family members began the search immediately, moving rocks and mud by hand and with shovels. Rescue squads were slow to join in, Rebecca said: They assumed Doris Frisbie was dead. ``This is a very small town,'' she said. ``They're just not set up for this sort of thing.''
Two rescue patrols and a dog team were on the scene Friday, but progress on the search was hampered by the continued use of hand tools. MEMO: Donations to assist the Frisbies - who have been told their house was
not covered by flood insurance - can be made to the Criglersville relief
fund at Crestar Bank.
ILLUSTRATION: Color photos by Paul Aiken, Staff
Cindy Fincham and her nephew, Michael Slaughter, check the remains
of her father's house in Kinderhook, Va., near Shenandoah National
Park on the Greene and Madison county line.
Rescue crews leave Criglersville, Va., after suspending their search
for Portsmouth native Doris Frisbie, 64, because of the threat of
another storm.
KEYWORDS: FLOOD RAINFALL DISASTER RELIEF by CNB