Back to My Old Ways, Like 2022

    I'm old enough to have experienced many flooding events.  Fortunately, most of them have just been close calls or minor inconveniences.  However, there have been three pretty much disastrous floods that I have lived through.  The first one, that I can remember anyway, was in the spring of 1984, probably late April or early May based on what I can remember about it.  It was a Monday, and I was charged with bringing in a bunch of cupcakes for a class sale.  The house flooded.  I was out of school for a week and a day.  The sale was on the first day back, which I missed.  I honestly thought they would have delayed it.  It took weeks for the house to be cleaned up before I could move back in.  I personally didn't lose too much, but it was still hurtful.  The second flood was in June of 2003, a Tuesday.  This time, a lost so much more.  Pretty much every memory and keepsake from my childhood.  It ultimately cost the house as well.  While the house was cleaned up, we decided not to move back in.  We were keeping some things that did survive there while waiting to buy a new place to put them in.  Unfortunately, someone, probably a disgruntled neighbor, had the house condemned and it had to be torn down.  Most of the things being kept there had to be thrown out, even when they should have been saved, but there was nowhere to store them.  The most recent flood was just last year, July 2022.  Fortunately, the rental place where I currently stay is safe from flooding in all but the most extreme cases, but that doesn't mean there weren't' any consequences. It started on Wednesday night, eleven.  A line of storms were racing down Floyd county.  They had already triggered some flood notifications to the north.  However, they looked like they were moving so fast in my direction that I didn't think twice about going to bed.  I went to sleep to the sound of thunder and moderate rain.  I woke up about one that morning, and I wasn't sure why.  I would later learn that there had been a blip in the electricity and a beep had gone off on something when it came back on a second later. I went back to sleep. No thunder and just light rain, if any.  I woke up again at 3:30 or so.  The power had gone out, although it wasn't really raining at the time.  Phone calls to the power company went without much of an answer.  I looked outside as best I could.  Water was rushing down the street, which isn't that unusual as this happens even during fairly light rain.  I couldn't see much else or how bad it was.  I tried to go back to bed to sleep, but it was no use.  Not only did a neighbor have a generator going to provide power, but the last line of storms came rushing through.  There was moderate to heavy rain and near constant thunder and lightning for over an hour.  I ultimately got up around six when there was finally enough light to see.  The street and parking lot were covered in mud, although there wasn't any real rush of water any more.  The creek, little more than a big drainage ditch across from my place at this part of its course, may have gone over its bank.  There was no way to know exactly.  My car was safe, though.  Just some mud partway up the tires, barely an inch or so.  I tried my mother's cell to see if I could get any information, but there wasn't enough bars in the area to get anything.  About an hour or so later, we got out to start cleaning up the sidewalk, when we met up with others who did have information.  Many places had gotten hit hard by flooding.  A tree had fallen on some power lines, that is what caused the initial power outage.  The electricity was cut off an hour or so later to prevent more problems.  Multiple mudslides and near bridge collapses were also reported.  At this point, I knew I had to get to Pikeville to check up on my store.  We waited until ten to set out, to make sure any major road problems were cleared.  I saw much of the damages as I drove out.  I even saw how the spot where my house had been devastated.  More slides and downed branches as I drove up to Abner mountain.  Suddenly, I saw something in the road.  It was an old barbecue grill and a toy baby carriage on either side of a break in the road that went about halfway.  I drove further to the top of the hill, avoiding the worst of the debris, when I saw someone parked at the top.  I stopped and found out from the driver that a delivery truck for a 'certain' discount chain had gotten stuck again, about an hour previously.  I decided to park at the top, staying about an hour with nothing happening.  The other driver left after about ten minutes.  I decided to take the long way around, as I didn't want to wait on the top of Abner any more, again without enough cell service to go online.  I starting driving north, surveying the same washouts and debris, until I hit Price.  There were major mudslides, still moving, washing across the road.  Just before I hit McDowell, the road was flooded and impassible.  I had to turn the car around and head back home.  I almost went via Big Mud, but I was afraid that it would be just as bad. (I may have been wrong.  I had to go that way barely a week later due to another wreck, and it looked like it had barely been effected.  Definitely not as bad as other places.). It was about noon by the time I got home.  My mother started calling people she knew in the road department to find anything out.  Nothing about the wreck, but plenty about how hard Whitesburg and Letcher county were hit.  By that time, the water tanks had run dry, even though they lasted over twenty-four hours during the Easter outage of 2020. (No power to the pumps and no back up generators, yet.) We decided to try again at one.  We passed the power crew on the way out of town.  When we got to Melvin, we noticed a road enforcement vehicle leading the truck and the wrecker off the mountain, meaning the road was finally clear after four hours.  The Pike side of Abner was a little clearer than the Floyd side, until the bottom.  A tree had come down, blocking the road and a crew had just finished taking down the 'road closed' signs.  At least that explained the long wait.  About halfway down Indian Creek, there was another break in the road, almost the entire lane this time.  The crew was getting ready to put up more signs just as we drove past.  The rest of the way better.  All through to Robinson Creek, there was hardly any debris and none of the slides I had seen elsewhere.  Even the creeks didn't seem to have gotten up that high.  By the time I hit Pikeville, you couldn't even tell there had been any rain.  The store was safe, at least after this storm.  I was finally able to eat something warm and go online to tell people I was safe.  I also got to see posts of all of the flooding.  It was even worse than I had imagined.  We stayed at the store for a few hours before heading back home.  We passed the power company leaving as we drove in.  They did the least amount of work they could do involving the tree as they could considering it was on private property, abandoned but private.  When I finally got to see the news, I found out what happened.  The storms that had been going south when I went to bed had started to train west to east approximately after they passed Price, explaining why Mud Creek and Pikeville had been spared.  The south tip of Floyd county had been hit hard, as well as points south.  I lucked out this time, just a very muddy car that was pretty much cleaned up after a huge downpour a week or so later and a few spots on my clothes.  If this cycle repeats itself, then the next bad flood for that area would be around August of 2041, a weekend.  Maybe early September.  All I can say for certain is that I will not be there for it.  I will have definitely moved to somewhere safer by then.