Teton Flood Story - By Scott Shirley

I had been working for Safeway in Idaho Falls and had requested and received a transfer to the Rexburg store. We were living in Idaho Falls and Jan was expecting our second child (Jeff), yet we decided to go ahead and move before the baby came. It was June 3, 1976. As we were driving north to Rexburg on our adventure, I remember thinking that life was going to change. I had no idea. (Note: Here are the "Flood Babies, Allison, Brian, Chris, Jeff, Amber and Jenna.)

We unloaded our things at our ground-floor apartment on main street in Sugar City, and spent the night with Jan's folks. The following morning, June 4, Jan went into labor. We went back down to Idaho Falls hospital, which was located near the temple, and were blessed with healthy baby boy, Jeff. We were so excited. I spent the day with Jan and Jeff, then went back to Kinghorn's. Jenna was 14 months old. The future was looking good.

The following morning was Saturday, June 5. I left Jenna with Grandma K and went to the apartment to get some things unpacked. I remember having a distinct feeling that I should just leave everything and go back to Kinghorn's. I tried to ignore the feeling, but it persisted, so I drove two blocks south back to Jenna and Grandma. As soon as I drove in the driveway Grandma K came out and told me the dam had broken. My thoughts went back to the floods of '62, so naturally I expected no more than a foot of water.

Earlier that morning, seepage was noticed on the north flank of the dam. It seems the water was leaking into the rock on the north side, gone around the grouted curtain of cement pumped into it, and was coming out on the west side. They brought some bulldozers to fill the hole, but the pressure on the other side was too much. Two dozers fell into the hole, later to be found a great distance downstream.

The water on the reservoir side had been rising at about three feet per day. This was a new dam that had never been filled. As it turned out, the spillway at the top never got a chance to be used. The photos here were taken by a lady who worked with my mother at the Forest Service. She gave Mom a complete set.

I hurried down to main street to see what people were saying and what was the plan. I remember thinking that things were going to change and wondered what would happen. Dorothy and I decided that we should stay together, so we left her car there, grabbed Jenna and headed for Brent's. We met Jean and the kids there and decided to ride together up to Rexburg Hill. We found a place in front of Lincoln Elementary. Dorothy and Jean stayed there with the kids while I walked north where I heard they needed help sandbagging the river bridge. When I got there I was told to go back up on the hill. They said that with the amount of water coming all the sandbags in the world would be of no use. I walked back up the hill wondering why I was not inspired enough to stay just one more day in Idaho Falls. As I sat on the hill with Baby Jenna and no diaper bag, bottle, or blankets, watching homes float away, I realized I was homeless. At the same time I was grateful that we had been spared. The wave came in from the north east direction. Huge columns of dust were being kicked up in front of the wave. At first we thought it was smoke. I thought there was no way Neal's house could be saved.

Dorothy and I were offered a place to stay at John and Shirleen Magleby's house. We were able to get some milk for Jenna. There was no way to call anywhere because phones were down. I walked to the National Guard station and talked to a State Trooper, telling him I needed to get word to Jan in the hospital that we were OK. He talked to some people and then made a radio call to Idaho Falls.

Jan had been sleeping that morning. When she awoke she was told the dam had broken. She turned on the TV. Reports were that hundreds were presumed dead, Teton and Sugar City were gone, and that Rexburg had been destroyed. When she got word from me she thought, "Scott would tell me that even if things were not good."

I looked out over the valley from Rexburg Hill with binoculars. As the sun was about to go down I could begin to see a few roads emerge as the waters receded. There were a few blinking rescue lights, but soon there were no lights at all to the north. It was surreal how dark and quiet things were.

I walked in the dark to the Manwaring Center to see what any news might be. As I walked across campus the screw in my glasses that kept the lens in place came out and my lens fell to the ground. What next! I entered the Manwaring and someone asked me what I might need. When I told him that I needed a paper clip he was puzzled. I used it to wire my glasses together so that I could see.

I went back to Magleby's who had prepared us a place in their basement. Grandma K suggested we have a prayer. I was wondering how I was going to get through the night with Jenna and no diaper bag and no binky. I thought I knew Grandma K, but I learned more about her through her heart-felt prayer than I had in all the time I had been associated with her. It was a prayer in which she genuinely talked to her Father in Heaven, pleading for help and protection for her family. I felt privileged to have heard such a prayer. When she finished, we settled down in bed. I held Jenna close to me. She had never gone a night without a pacifier, but that night was her first. We were blessed with peace in a most unpeaceful situation.

The following morning, Sunday, word came that we were to meet in the Hart Gymnasium. On the way there I saw Nile Shirley, my cousin. We were both concerned about Uncle Les. We found out later he had been in the tub when water crashed his house. He spent the night in a wet house with no electricity listening to distressed animals stuck in a tree.

When I got to the gym, someone had made signs for each ward in front of individual sections of the seats. The organization was calm and precise. I believe it was at this meeting (maybe a week later at a separate one) that President Kimball came to speak. First, Idaho Governor Andrus spoke. Then, President Kimball spoke. As he began, I was amazed at the true leadership he showed in comparison to elected government officials. I knew I was listening to a true prophet. He told us that he would weep for us if he thought it would do any good. He told us not to wait for the government to step in, rather pitch in and clean up. We were also told to document with photos, then go to work. He told us to do no more than a day's work at a time and not run faster than we were able. We were to be wise and maintain our health.

After the meeting, I snagged a ride in the back of a pickup that was going into Sugar. We went west along the hill to the Sugar cemetery at the foot of the hill. The bridge had been partially destroyed. There was a report that one of the new graves had been uprooted.

Huge sections of pavement were missing. There were no fence posts and few power poles. Army helicopters circled the area. Cylindrical granaries, still attached to their concrete foundations could be seen out in the middle of fields. The grain fields with stalks about six inches long, had been combed as if by a huge brush, all laid flat and pointing which way the water had gone.

I arrived at what was left of our apartment. The water had been about five and a half feet deep, but had now left about a foot of mud and straw on the floor. My belongings were there, but nothing was of use, except for my guitar, which had been on the couch, floated up to the ceiling, and did not have a drop of water on it. That is the same guitar Brandon now has.

I walked across what had been Sugar and headed for Mom and Dad's. The railroad tracks had been washed out. The rails had been bent around one of Dalling's big trees. When I got to the house it was locked, so I broke a window in the back door. I expected to find the parrot, Mrs. Bird, dead, but she just looked at me. The water had risen to the bottom of her cage and then gone down. I surveyed the situation and then wrote in the deep mud on the floor in front of the TV, "Scott was here, I have the bird." As I walked back into Sugar with the bird, I got some strange looks from people. I told them the bird had seen the entire thing, but wasn't saying much about it.

The following day I came in again by bumming rides here and there. There were people standing in the road with arms around each other crying and sobbing over their losses. Destruction was everywhere and the situation was grim, at least until I approached Mom and Dad's house. Carpets were drying in bushes and trees, furniture was moved outside. Instead of gloom and despair I saw family members joking while they worked. When I walked inside the house Dad said, "I heard you were missing." I said, "Yes, missing everything I have." We had a good laugh. Mom was in the kitchen making sandwiches out of the refrigerator which had been tipped over by the rising water. Their examples of optimism and good humor have always been an example to me.

I spotted Neal's trailer to the southwest, about half a mile away and decided to see what condition it was in. After I left Dale and Neal found the body of Mr. McCrae, one of the victims. Dale waded out in the water to see what it was as Neal watched. They told Dad they had found a body. There had been so much good joking going on that Dad did not take them seriously, but looking at their faces he knew it was real. He walked out to the man, turned him over and cleaned off his face with the water that was still running by a few inches deep. They did not know if they would recognize the man or not. I later asked Dad how he could so casually clean the mud from a victim's face with such tender care. He said, "If it were your body, wouldn't you want someone to treat it with respect?" Years earlier he and Rod had helped pick up the remains of a man hit by a train. Such stories helped me years later when I was trying to help a child struck by a car in front of Lyman Elementary. I thought, "I can't do this." The stories of Dad came to mind with the words, "If Dad can do that, I can do this."

I spent long hours working at Safeway, getting all the overtime we wanted. Safeway gave me a thousand dollars and the union gave me another eight-hundred. I had nowhere to cash my paychecks, but with so much help from the church and other volunteers we were OK. I went to the distribution center and reluctantly admitted I needed some clothes. They gave me a pair of boots and a few other things. All I owned I was wearing.

Shortly after the flood I was finally able to go and get Jan and Jeff. It was so good to see her again. Jan, Jenna, Jeff and I were together for the first time, homeless, but not hopeless. Magleby's helped so much until we were able to get a vacant student apartment on campus and later got a government HUD Hut. It was so good to spend some time with our new baby, Jeff. With all the chaos, he was a mild mannered, well-behaved baby. Jenna, who had been rather active and driving us nuts with her constant jabbering, suddenly became the ad-hoc mother. I really think she was under the impression that we had Jeff just to give her something to play with. We lived in the trailer court on Fifth West for about a year, then bought our home from John Magleby, across the road from Uncle Sterling.

It is not the things that happen to us in life, rather what we do with them. Our difficulties do not define us, rather they reveal our character. I will always remember the character of my family members during this very difficult situation, especially the leadership of Mom and Dad. They did not blink or falter, even in the face of great hardship. The Teton Dam fell apart, but our family did not. Each of our family members has had to go through very difficult trials, but never alone. All because of the quiet, calm, and humerous examples of Ross and Margie Shirley.

(Note: For a full list of those who died in the Teton Flood, as well as other information and photos, click on the link below. http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~idfremon/flood.htm