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WAYNE DEEL / The Roanoke Times
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Rescuers pull Eleanor Witt, a Tultex employee, from the floodwaters of Mason Creek in Salem.
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By S.D. HARRINGTON
THE ROANOKE TIMES, 11/5/1995
For emergency crews, Mother Nature couldn't have picked a worse day than Nov. 4, 1985, to engulf the Roanoke Valley in water.
Most career firefighters in the city were attending funerals for two fellow Roanoke firefighters who had been killed in a hit-and-run accident the weekend before. Roanoke County and Salem crews stood in for the Roanoke firefighters, and volunteer firefighters took off work to fill the empty spots in those localities.
Salem firefighter Eddie Hite, one of those working in Roanoke, watched as one of the funeral processions passed the fire station. Only about six cars were in it.
"I knew something was wrong, then," said Hite, now captain of the Salem Rescue Squad. Many more colleagues than that were expected at the funeral.
Hite's instincts proved right, as the waters started rising much quicker than the dispatchers could summon emergency crews.
But through the eyes of Tommy Fuqua, Roanoke County's emergency services coordinator, having so many volunteers already on duty proved beneficial.
City firefighters were pulled away from the funerals and back to their posts. Roanoke County and Salem personnel then returned to their jurisdictions, and volunteers were already there, Fuqua said.
Virginia Tech and Blacksburg emergency crews were also summoned.
Howard Weikle, the Salem Rescue Squad captain during the flood, said he still has tapes from Salem's dispatch center.
"If you listen to that tape and don't have the willies, you ain't human," he said.
Firefighters were forced to ignore fires and focus their attention on saving lives.
"We had to prioritize life first and property second," Fuqua said.
Rescue workers had to dodge debris being tossed around by torrential waters - debris as large as 55-gallon drums and cars, Salem squad member Joe Cunningham said.
Helicopter pilots, from Roanoke Memorial Hospital's Life-Guard 10 to television choppers, were breaking all the rules to pull people off rooftops.
In Salem, Lt. Reginald Grey said mobile homes were being pushed around "like matchbox toys." He and Officer J.C. Blomberg responded to a call that an elderly lady was trapped in her mobile home at Salem Village. The officers rode to the scene in a bulldozer. They had no trouble getting there, but then the bulldozer gave in to the rising water and stalled.
As Grey and Blomberg rescued the woman and escorted her from the area, she told them that a friend was trapped in a trailer behind hers. Up to that point the water had been fairly calm, Grey said. But just beyond that first trailer, the water would have swept them away.
Grey and Blomberg climbed on the roof of the first trailer and spotted the elderly woman across the torrent. The only way to rescue her, they thought, was by air, so they sent for a helicopter.
But the downbeat of the helicopter's propellers nearly blew the men off the roof of the trailer, and they had to signal it away.
Grey grabbed a rope from the bulldozer, and the officers pulled the woman through the water to safety.
For the two years after the flood, Grey said, he received Christmas cards from one of the women.
"We really accomplished something," Grey said of the numerous rescues made that day.
Fuqua said he had no idea how many lives were saved when floods ravaged the Roanoke Valley in 1985.
"There were too many to keep track of," he said.
But, he said, just as many lessons were learned that day as well.
Now, most rescue squads in the valley train some members in swift-water rescue, he said.
The flood also accelerated an effort to form a valley emergency services coordinator association, which includes the four emergency services coordinators in the Roanoke Valley, Fuqua said.
"There were things we were working on at the time, but [the flood] brought to light that we needed to step up our efforts," he said.
The flood was a good example of how the valley can band together during major disasters, he added.
Said Fuqua: "... The potential for a lot of deaths was really there."
Lucky to be alive
Joe Cunningham says he doesn't consider himself a hero of the Flood of '85.
"No, just lucky," he said. That's because if Mason Creek had had its way, this Salem Rescue Squad volunteer wouldn't be around today to tell the story he's retold dozens of times.
Cunningham was all but confirmed dead for about five hours that Monday afternoon after fellow crew member Kevin Turner watched helplessly as the creek's raging current swept Cunningham away.
Cunningham and other squad members had been responding to a call at Tultex's Roanoke Fashions plant on Kessler Mill Road near Mason Creek, where about 60 employees were trapped inside. The plant had nearly been turned into an island by the once-tiny creek.
Two of the squad members, Richie Bolton and Robert Wilcox, tried to reach the plant by boat, but its motor was no match for the water. The boat was hurled into a telephone pole, then it spun out of control.
Cunningham went after them on foot with only a rope to keep him from being swept into the heart of the creek's rage.
The rope was little help. He lost his footing and the water engulfed him, sending him 50 to 100 feet down the creek. He tried to grab a fire hydrant along the way, but couldn't hang on. Then he was swept toward a truck, which was weighted down by its cargo, and he locked his hands onto the grill.
Turner went after Cunningham.
"I was screaming for Kevin, God and everyone else to come get me out of there," Cunningham said recently.
Something - possibly a log - temporarily pinned his legs against the truck's chassis. Then the floodwater sucked him under the truck with such force that his hands were cut up trying to hold onto the grill.
He held onto the rope, but it stopped him only briefly. The rope came loose and the water pulled Cunningham the rest of the way under the vehicle, then he cleared the truck and was able to get air. Cunningham said that if he had been better at tying knots he could have been trapped under the truck which was covered in water to its chassis.
Just before Cunningham went under the truck, he had caught a glimpse of Turner coming after him.
"The last thing I saw was the current getting to him and him go under," Cunningham said.
After being swept about 100 yards downstream, Cunningham managed to grab a small tree. He climbed out of the water and fastened himself to a fork in the tree with his belt.
All he could do was wait for the water to recede. He watched a helicopter crew rescue the Tultex employees from the roof of the building.
He said he couldn't help but wonder how he would explain to the families of the other three crew members why he wasn't able to save them.
Meanwhile, Salem Police Chief Harry Haskins announced that one of the squad members had been lost in the flood. Cunningham's wife listened to the police scanner and heard that her husband was missing.
Nearly five hours later, when the waters had receded about 4 feet, Cunningham came out of the tree and climbed up the muddy banks of Mason Creek. The temperature was dropping, and he knew if he waited any longer hypothermia would get him before the creek did.
The first person to spot him was a meter reader and former rescue squad member, Dale DeWease.
"Dale grabbed me and hollered, 'You're alive!'" Cunningham said. "The first thing I asked him was, 'How many did we lose?'"
Bolton, Wilcox and Turner were all rescued from the creek that day, but Bolton and Turner didn't want to talk about the flood during a recent roundtable discussion with squad members.
Cunningham says the praise should be reserved for those who kept at the job, believing they had lost three and possibly four crew members.
"That makes them the real heroes of the day," he said
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