Remember when … South County had its most recent flood?
By PENNY FLETCHER
I wonder how many people remember the flood I mentioned in last week’s column? Obviously, a few, as I was “corrected” on the year by two different people who said Hurricane Elena happened in different years from the one I mentioned, but as it turns out, 1985 is correct.
It seems strange to me how many people contact me on Facebook with questions about things like that instead of in a direct e-mail; also, how they ask that I not use their name.
So again, I am putting it out there to those who follow this column to please e-mail me at penny@observernews.net with your recollections of times gone by, and I hope you allow me to use your names. That way others in town will follow suit and get the idea that this column is “your” column as much as mine.
I’ve been told about so many things that happened in South County prior to January 1980 when I moved here from Bradenton, but I want your accounts to be recalled firsthand whenever possible.
Okay, back to the flood that I mentioned last week.
Because my late husband and two of my sons were in the commercial fishing business, we had boats in several sizes tied to a dock behind our home on River Drive in Ruskin.
Aug. 30, 1985, Hurricane Elena made a sudden turn to the east while about 200 miles southeast of where the Mississippi River enters the Gulf of Mexico. For the next two days, the storm moved closer and closer to the Florida coast and then stalled offshore near Cedar Key, which is about 90 miles north of the Tampa Bay area.
For two days and two long nights it sat right there, churning the gulf and bay waters as a Category 2 hurricane. Then it became so erratic and moved around the gulf causing hurricane warnings to be issued from Sarasota to Grand Island, La., and about 1.5 million people, including more than 300,000 in Tampa Bay, were evacuated.
Some in South County were evacuated twice in two days. I know this, because we helped evacuate a few of them.
The first day of the warnings, I put our photo albums and other irreplaceable things into our cars and got gassed up while my late husband, sons and the men who worked on the boats tied the boats off the dock by anchoring all four corners of each. This way, the boats may rock and even turn over, but the chances of them being broken to bits against docks (or each other) was slim.
We lived at the very end of River Drive, and although homes several miles from the river were flooded, water came about six feet from our rear doors but never entered the house.
Of course, there was no way we could know this wouldn’t happen, so we packed our things and prepared our home to be flooded.
Because of the boats, we stayed as the water behind our home crept closer. Then in the middle of the night on Aug. 30, law enforcement — both sheriff’s deputies on land and Marine Patrol officers on water — woke us with evacuation orders by shouting through bullhorns over and over as they moved through the area.
First, we moved the cars to a friend’s house in town, which was away from the water, but the next day we were all told to leave there as well.
By then, we had picked up other family members who lived on Shell Point Road E., because the inland rivers and lakes had also begun to flood.
Strangely, a small side road right near River Drive was completely dry, as was the tip of our road, which included three mobile homes besides ours. Several of us returned in a work truck, and two of our smaller boats were brought to where they could be boarded, which was just a few feet from our back door.
Sure that this was the last time I would see our living room and kitchen again, I walked through the combined room and got into one of the boats with my late husband. I remember riding down U.S. 41 in a net fishing “strike boat” (which simply means it has a flat bottom and an unusually fast motor because it is equipped to catch schools of fish) and picking up some people who wanted to go to higher ground.
As it turned out, the area along First Street S.W. where some of our family members lived turned out to be the safest place, and the only one from which we were not evacuated.
The sight of 10-foot high water through the middle of Ruskin as we boated down what was (under us) U.S. 41 is something I will never forget.
Finally, during the late afternoon of Sept. 1, Elena once again turned west. It finally went ashore at Biloxi, Miss., on Labor Day, Sept. 2, as a Category 3, causing four deaths and $125 million in damage.
Sometime I would like to hear what others in the evacuation zones of South County did during what turned out to be a hurricane that never hit us, but caused more damage than several storms that did.
