Janet Shirley Howell's Flood Story

The day the Teton dam broke, Ard and I had gone to Lagoon Amusement Park. We were totally unaware that the dam had broken until we got back to Salt Lake and got word from Stretch. Mom and dad were in Salt Lake for Chris’s baby blessing. I remember we went to church at Stretch’s ward long enough for Chris to be blessed, then we all got up and left to head for Idaho. If I remember right, we traveled up to Idaho in a three-car caravan, with mom and dad leading the way. We had to detour east up through Lava Hot Springs, Victor, Driggs and almost to Ashton because of road closures resulting from the flood waters before we could get down to Neal and Cathie’s place to spend the night.








The next morning we got up and headed down to mom and dad’s place. We had to walk in from the north until we got to their place. I was shocked at the devastation. Railroad tracks were ripped up and standing on their sides like a picket fence, trees had been flattened, fences were swept away. Mom and dad had a big steel building in their backyard and the east side of it was caved in and the door on the west was pretty much ripped off.





Mom and dad had a parrot named Mrs. Bird that Neal and Stretch had sent home from their missions in Brazil. How that bird survived the flood, I’ll never know, other than she was in a cage high enough that the water didn’t reach her. If memory serves me, Scott had waded in earlier in the day and retrieved her and taken her to a safe place.

When we went in the house there was a water line in the living room showing how deep water had gotten inside. There was mud and straw from the neighbor’s barnyard inside the house.
We all went to work trying to salvage what we could. We shoveled mud until the guys were able to rip the carpet up from the floor and haul it outside. (Notice the water line on the TV, also Jenna's baby picture is on top of the TV. This was where Scott had written in the mud the day before, "Scott was here, I have the parrot.")

Sometime mid-morning, I remember the guys coming inside the house to tell the womenfolk not to look out the kitchen window to the west. Well, of course, the first thing we did was go look out the window. Some poor man had drowned in the flood and his body was just below the surface of the water near the garden. Somehow word was transmitted to the authorities and a helicopter was dispatched to transport the victim. I remember the guys struggling through the mud, carrying the man out to the road where he could be picked up. (The photo at left came out in a Utah paper. It was recognized by Stretch's mother-in-law, who saved it for us. It shows the men carrying the victim.)








I remember Mom cobbling lunch together and we sat out in the front yard on kitchen chairs eating our lunch. (The photo at left shows everyone eating lunch on kitchen chairs lined up on the sidewalk in about six inches of water. Dad is sitting in the recliner at the end of the sidewalk. This was shortly before the victim was retrieved.)







(The photo at left shows the refrigerator which had tipped over on its back during the flood. Mom had opened the door, which had been water-tight, and made sandwiches out of what was left inside. What resourcefulness!)

We then went back to work until it was getting dark, then waded back out to Neal and Cathie’s place. Not a soul complained about the hard work, but our work pales in comparison to mom and dad’s courage when facing the destruction of their home and valuables. How they kept their composure, I’ll never know. Material things can be replaced, but so many photos, keepsakes and other things were ruined.

There were many stories that circulated after the flood, but one of the funny ones was about Pig Evans, a man who lived near Sugar City. The story was that when the flood warning went out, he rounded his pigs up into his trailer house and when the flood hit, they floated away together. Truth or fiction, I don’t know.


At some point following the flood, the government brought in trailers for the people who had lost their homes in the flood. Mom and dad moved into one of these trailers. It was nicknamed "The HUD Hut." When the road alongside mom and dad’s place became passable, it turned into a thoroughfare and the dust from that road was unbelievable. Mom and dad lived in the Hud Hut until their new home was completed in the Wilford area.

(The first photo below shows the HUD Hut which was provided by the government after the flood. Notice how well things had been cleaned up. The photo below shows the ever-present dust the filled the skies during the following months.)