Although it’s too late to hope for that part. Hermine is falling apart over our heads, and it’s been all rain, all day long, with more predicted for tonight and tomorrow. A very heavy squall line hit about 7:30, and a few minutes ago, as I came home from the grocery, I saw that Waller Creek was out of its banks and over the roadways, and Austin PD units parked with their lights on to warn cars away from the flooding.
It was enough to give me a flashback to the night of May 24, 1981, when I was caught in the Memorial Day flood.
At the time, I lived in a tiny “efficiency” apartment at the corner of 45th Street and Speedway, maybe twenty-five yards from the creek bed (and four blocks from where I live today). The weather had been wet for several days before that Sunday, and it saturated the ground. That afternoon the sun came out, but everything was horribly hot and muggy. A friend of mine came in from Nacogdoches to spend the weekend, and a mutual friend of ours also came over from East Austin to visit that evening. A little before dark, the thunderstorm that had been threatening all day turned loose, and we got rain of a sort that I’ve only seen once or twice in my life. Official weather records count ten inches of rain in four hours; other sources say more than twelve inches fell.
We heard and commented on how heavy the rain was, but didn’t realize just how bad it had gotten until one of us looked out the window and saw water over the concrete walk—not standing, but moving water, and it looked to be coming up. We all began at once to pile my floor-level stuff onto furniture, high shelves, and other taller things, because we had no idea how serious it might get. (That effort saved my record collection and part of my books and magazines from being ruined.)
Meanwhile, the rain kept falling and the creek kept rising. We decided we’d be best off to get up to the second floor of the building while we could, and I started to open the door. Fortunately, Liz from Nacogdoches stopped me and pointed out that the water, which by now was coming in around the door, was only an inch or two deep inside the apartment but more than a foot deep outside and I really didn’t want to let in all that water. I took her point, so we climbed out the apartment’s one window and dropped into knee-deep flood. My building, and the apartments next to it, created a kind of backwater where we were, so we didn’t have to fight the current as well to get to the stairs.
We climbed up, and found seven or eight other people up there as well—some residents, others people who’d pulled into our parking lot to try to get out of the spreading pool. Someone brought out a jug of wine and some plastic cups, and we passed them round as we stood on the walkway. Strangely, the storm didn’t have much wind with it, so we were all able to stay dry as we watched the flood happen. An Austin PD officer parked his patrol car earlier at the intersection with lights on as a barricade, but the rising water floated it so it bobbed across the intersection until it fetched up against a light-pole guy wire, lights still going.
The rain let up an hour or so later, and a couple of hours after that the water went down enough that our local friend was able to get his car out and go home. The apartment was, of course, uninhabitable with mud and wet, so Liz and I spent the night on the couches at the Canterbury Association, since I still had keys (after my term as an officer was over, the chaplain never asked me for them back). The landlord had to rip out and replace all the carpet and most of the furniture, so I camped out for a week or so at Canterbury until repairs were done.
At that, I got off lightly. Shoal Creek, a couple of miles away, went on a rampage and crested at twenty-one feet over flood stage downtown. Its normal flow is about twelve cubic feet (90 gallons) per minute; at the peak of the flood, it was estimated at more than 802,000 cubic feet (6,000,000 gallons) per minute. Thirteen people died in the flood, eleven of them motorists who drove into low-water crossings without realizing the force and volume of the water. The final damage was calculated at $36,000,000—and that’s in thirty-year-old dollars.
As soon as I got in the door and dropped the groceries, I called M and drove her out to see Waller Creek from a safe vantage point. It shook her to see that much water in a creek she normally knows as a trickle.
