It started to rain on Thursday night, Sept. 20, 1979. It rained all Friday morning the way it does in the fall sometimes. It stopped for a few hours Friday afternoon. When it started up again at 5 p.m. it came in torrents.
And then the bottom fell out.
In the 50 minutes before 11 p.m. that night two inches of rain fell across Surry County and the Virginia counties of Carroll, and Patrick. Hundreds of millions of gallons of water barreled down the ridges, filling streams and rivers. The resulting deluge thundered toward Mount Airy as second shift was in full swing at the town’s factories.
Factories such L.S. Starrett Company where Bobby Billings and Ken Ahrens had no idea it had been raining so hard until they looked outside during their 11 o’clock break to see Riverside Drive under water. They alerted their coworkers and everyone moved their cars to higher ground or brought them inside the building.
In moments several inches of water was several feet of water. By the time the five men inside the building had climbed the ladder to the roof, the water inside was over their heads.
“I think we all said a prayer,” Ahrens told a Mount Airy News reporter the next day. “At least I know I did.”
Standing on the roof in the driving rain, the men realized their situation was even worse than they imagined. Propane gas tanks had broken loose from the Exxon LP Gas Service next door and were floating through the flood waters. The stench of the escaping gas was so strong they covered their faces with their shirts to be able to breathe.
As each lightning strike illuminated the night the men watched unsuspecting drivers crest the hill just north of the building drive into the water forcing them to abandon their vehicles. They yelled warnings not to strike a match or smoke for fear of causing the tanks to explode. Billings told a reporter one of his coworkers quipped, “I knew I should have gone to church on Sunday.”
The men were rescued about 3 a.m. when an emergency services in a boat arrived. By that hour the current was so swift the rescue was even more dangerous.
Wilmer Sink, night watchman at Renfro Hosiery Mills, helped several workers to their cars about midnight and went inside to call company owners only to discover the water had risen to trap him. He spent the night in the building’s rafters listening to shelves and furniture bang around below him.
Employees at Proctor-Silex, located on the other side of town in the bottom lands along Lovill’s Creek, were four hours into their shift when it became apparent they needed to leave. They formed a human chain to get people through the dangerous current.
Local papers were filled with such harrowing tales for the following weeks as well as reports of destruction: 75 cars at Collin’s Chevrolet (then where Creekside Cinema is now) washed away before they could be moved; lumber and appliances scattered from Lowe’s Hardware (then where Becky’s Glass is today); building supplies at John S. Clark Construction and Regan Roofing (across the Ararat River from Riverside Park) left strewn along the flat lands for hundreds of yards; Riverside Park itself “had been reduced to a muddy memory. Nothing seemed salvageable.”
Lovill’s Creek and the Ararat River had “roared out of [their] banks and demolished everything in [their] path from the Cross Creek Golf Course to” the intersection of Rockford and US-52.
Thankfully, miraculously, no one lost their lives but the property damage and crop loss across the county totaled more than $40 million in Surry. President Jimmy Carter declared both Surry and Patrick counties disaster areas, releasing state and federal assistance to residents and businesses.
But, as I think is true in many communities across America, people worked together to survive the night, clean up afterward, and get back to homes and work.
As Mayor Maynard Beamer wrote in the Mount Airy News that week, “The crisis we have encountered brought forth the best of us and summoned the best in us.”
Source: https://www.mtairynews.com