A Town Spared

With the mandatory evacuation ordered in Houston and more rain coming, it was a long night. The last thing I wanted to see was the town flooded out and given that Ace Telephone is headquartered there, phone service across two counties could be affected. As it was, the Internet was already out and they are the main provider in the area. Being thoroughly modern, I get most of my information off of the Internet these days and the National Weather Service serves as my home page. With no net, there was no way to watch the radar returns on demand.

No matter, I'll watch the Weather Channel, they must be covering things here. Nothing but Hurricane Dean with a few mentions of flooding in Minnesota. It was clear that the old media wasn't keeping up due to their dwelling on the flashy prospects of hurricane damage. Information from local sources was haphazard due to the amount of damage done throughout the area and in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Then there was the Sunday effect, things slow down around here on Sundays, it isn't a big city market.

So information was limited. Mainly, it was text scrolling at the bottom of the screen that gave any idea of what was going on, it seemed as if every road and highway was damaged or closed. There were two deaths in Houston County now, one around Mound Prairie, the other by Spring Grove. Phone calls to and from friends revealed water standing high South of Caledonia and massive road damage North of Houston. I heard about Church members cut off by their driveway simply ceasing to exist.

It was a long night and the next morning at least brought back the Internet. The Root River had come within half a foot of topping the levee at Houston, but the levee held and the water was going down. Friends in Hokah weren't reachable until they called later in the day, they were cut off from every direction and had a beach where their lawn used to be.

My father and I decided to head out and see if anything could be done to help in Houston and promptly ran into a traffic jam of people trying to return home. A humvee with Army National Guard troops was blocking the way into town and questioning everyone returning. Realizing we wouldn't be allowed in, we instead decided to take HWY 16 to Hokah and find out how bad travel was going to be.

A Town Under Threat

It isn't often you get stopped in traffic by a helicopter landing in front of you, but that was the strange situation we found ourselves in Sunday afternoon. With water on the way from Rushford, I'd prodded the rest into going back home before roads closed. Sure enough, the flashers on one of Houston County's newest patrol cars could be seen just entering the outskirts of town. As we slowed to a halt, I heard the helicopter and our family friend said "Look, a news helicopter." I let him know that it was a military helicopter, a UH-60 Blackhawk to be precise and that this meant trouble.

The Blackhawk circled briefly and then went behind us, only to return directly overhead. The van rocked in the downwash of the main rotors and I hurriedly got my camera out.

The helicopter ever so slowly slid down to a landing behind the sheriff's car and we got out of the van for a better look.


I only saw Army personnel get off the UH-60 and I suspected that they had been surveying the levee, or possibly performing search and rescue. It was some time before they took off again and they flew over the levee toward Rushford.



Traffic slowly picked up and we headed home, a sense of urgency and gloom had become the order of the day. I turned on the TV and saw that a mandatory evacuation of Houston had been ordered.

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A Town Drowned - Photos, Part 2

All Photos by Randy Roland

A Town Drowned - Photos, Part 1

All photos by Randy Roland

This fawn panicked and ran into the water just after the picture was taken. It was swept downstream, most likely to its death.

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A Town Drowned Part Three

Photos by Patrick Boone

The first thing I noticed coming into Rushford was this sign, with a pile of snowmobiling signs piled against it. The field it is next to is likely ruined and the house on the outskirts of town had water up another level of bricks earlier in the morning. I was growing more somber with each flooded corn or soy field we passed between Houston and Rushford, the crops that had looked to be exceptional this year were now dying. We parked just before the bridge and walked over it, trees were going by under it along with other debris headed for Houston.




The sound of diesal engines filled the air, farmers had arrived with tractors to run pumps, feverishly trying to pump the water trapped between two levees.


People were gathered, some were tourists who were lost, others just thought it would be fun to see a disaster. The locals had a different attitude, one of shock and loss. A grim sense of humor was the only response to the situation for some of them. Also, a sense of helplessness could be felt as nature's fury is so much bigger than we are.

Only a week before, I'd been in Rushford for unhappy reasons, as we'd hit a deer with our 2005 Subaru Outback and had limped into town. The car took major damage and had to be left at the Kwik Trip parking lot to be towed later. Little did we know what would happen a week later.


This is what a doe will do to a car traveling 55 MPH.



The parking lot on Sunday.

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A Town Drowned Part Two

Photos by Patrick Boone

After going back home, a friend called, excited by the prospect of seeing some flooding. He wanted to come out to our place in the country and then go see Rushford. The attitude rubbed me the wrong way, but I wanted to check Rushford out because what happens at the Root River there always comes downstream to Houston. My concern about the town and the fields between won out over being irked at the friend, so the three of us set out for Rushford in the afternoon.

The water was no higher in the Yucatan valley than before, in fact it was visibly going down. There was too much crop damage for my liking and I wondered how things were in Houston proper. Our friend wanted to go North on HWY 76 and didn't really believe it would be blocked. Seeing is believing and so we went there. The bridge goes over the river and I wanted to see how the levee was holding, knowing that Rushford's had failed to save that town.


The Civil Air Patrol was manning the barricades and while the others looked at the swollen river, I talked to the man who was explaining things to drivers. Overhearing him telling people that a volunteer evacuation was under way "for the moment", I asked,"Was the surge here yet?" His reply was less than comforting, "There are 48 inches of water coming this way!"

I rounded up the other two and it took several miles of driving to get them to understand that an evacuation was imminent. We needed to get to Rushford, ASAP.

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A Town Drowned

After getting the note from my dad, I began checking the news on TV and found out that roads all across the area were closed and that damage was widespread. A phone call from a friend in La Crescent brought news that they were only able to go to La Crosse, HWY 61 was closed by a landslide to the North and HWY 16 was closed to the South. The National Guard had arrived as well and a civil emergency had been declared by Governor Tim Pawlenty. Also, they wouldn't be able to make it down to Caledonia to help tear down the fair booth.

It is about this time during an emergency where I start to go stir crazy, frustrated with ill health and limitations of what I can do to help. So I waited until my dad returned and cursed the Net for being out locally. When he and our neighbor Randy returned, I found out just how bad things were.

Rushford was under up to ten feet of water in the downtown.

Photo by Randy Roland

People had been awakened at around 3:00 AM by water entering their basements and by town sirens going off. One woman had to wade through chest high water on her first floor, only to find her front door blocked by a pickup that had been washed against it. My dad witnessed rescuers chopping a hole in the roof of a house to get another woman out. Cars, trucks, and belongings had all been swept away in the initial torrent of water that crested over a levee in the North part of Rushford. The creek there had flooded quickly and the levee that protects the town from the Root River to the South had trapped the water in town.

Photo by Randy Roland

That's when I knew we had to get moving and get that booth torn down, before more weather hit and before more roads closed. The trip back to Caledonia showed a couple of more minor mudslides since when I'd been there and when we arrived, everyone was taking down their booths. The mood was somber and the lady in the next booth was actually from North of Rushford and didn't know the extent of the damage. I filled her in on what I'd heard and we discussed the known fatalities at the time, four people in Winona County. Everyone scattered for home, a truly grim way to end the festivities of a county fair.
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