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The Virginia Museum of Transporation and its train exhibits were quickly under water as the Roanoke River flooded.
The museum chose to move downtown rather than clean up its site in the Wasena neighborhood.
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Flood of '85 lives on in the memories of those who survived
By BEN BEAGLE
THE ROANOKE TIMES, 11/5/1995
Doin For a long time, perhaps as long as they lived, many Roanoke Valley residents would remember the smell a flood leaves behind - a muddy, musty, cloying odor of ruin and decay that comes from water-destroyed homes, businesses, furniture, food and people. For a long time after the flood of Nov. 4-5, 1985, people who had been touched brutally by it would awaken at the sound of ordinary rain to fight panic and wonder if ruinous, killing water would come again.
Long after the fact, an erroneous television weather forecast of heavy rain left many of the flood's victims in panic.
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CINDY PINKSTON / The Roanoke Times
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Salem officials inspect the damage at Willow Ridge apartments. Residents were stunned at how quickly the water rose in their apartment complex.
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It's easy to understand panic when you put its causes in terms of mobile homes floating down Mason Creek in Salem like unwilling arks; of living on the bottom floor of the Willow River Apartments in Salem and losing everything to the Roanoke River; of sitting desolate and scared on the roof of your house, listening to the awful sounds chained dogs make when they drown.
There was a foreboding, an uneasiness in the way the rain fell hour after hour during those five dark, autumn days. And yet the flood that killed 10 people in the Roanoke Valley - most them by drowning - had a regional progression and suddenness to it that was surprising and thus disarming.
That is to say that about 9:30 a.m. Monday, Nov. 4, in Salem, people were being evacuated by helicopter from the roof of the Tultex plant because Mason Creek had become murderous. A woman who feared helicopters more than flood water was dragged through the water by a rescuer. A photographer immortalized her, clinging desperately to the rescuer.
That is to say that miles away in Northwest Roanoke, Helen Bland's wristwatch stopped at 12:30 p.m. as flood waters from normally minuscule Lick Run and other sources poured into her house on Shadeland Avenue. Poured in suddenly and submerged the television set and stung her legs with electric shocks as she and her husband, Charlie, waded through the instant ruin of their home and made it to the roof.
Although the Blands and others didn't understand it at the time, meteorologists later explained:
A gathering of rainstorms moving out of West Virginia was expected to leave about 2 inches in the Roanoke Valley.
But over Roanoke, these storms encountered the remains of Juan, a hurricane that hadn't really made a lot of headlines in Virginia. it rained. Six inches in a 24-hour period. Through Halloween. Through the last days of a political campaign that would end the way Democrats wanted it to. Among the images the flood would leave: rescue helicopters with rain sluicing off the rotor blades; the city of Roanoke on the first night, looking Venetian; the water deep across Williamson Road where Interstate 581 crosses on a bridge; fires isolated by water, the flames reflected artistically. Traffic lights were out in some parts of the valley that first night, and debris was on the roads. There was a fear of more rain. Instead, an ominous wind came up. But the leaves were too wet to be moved by it. There was the unforgettable television news footage of Vic Thomas, store owner and member of the House of Delegates, looking upward to rescuers with a quizzical look on his face as a helicopter hovered over his doomed store on Orange Avenue. Thomas and others would be lifted from the roof before Tinker Creek -- a rare, serene, urban trout stream in normal times -- swept the building away. Irony. As a legislator, Thomas had worked to make the creek a city attraction. Irony. It was this creek that had beguiled Annie Dillard with its small-scale depiction of life and death and serenity and caused her to win the Pulitzer Prize with "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." On Shadeland Avenue, an entire neighborhood would disappear. Today, the place where the houses stood - where the Blands climbed to the roof, where two women drowned across the street from each other - is now green space. Only the trees that gave the street its name are still there. It's eerie to see the handsome weeping willows there, as if they were mourning Shadeland.
At about the time the water was ruining Shadeland, 3-year-old Samantha Blankenship lost her cousin and grandmother as their car was swept away by Mason Creek in the Mason Cove section of Roanoke County. Samantha, wearing a yellow raincoat, was rescued from an island in the creek.
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The normally docile Roanoke River, which crested at a record 23 feet, left Victory Stadium and surrounding parks and businesses awash in a morass of muddy water and debris. Few remnants of the flood remain today.
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People continued to drown, and the Roanoke River ruined the dreams of people who were in new businesses in the revived Roanoke City Market.
The river inundated the Transportation Museum of Virginia, which then stood in Wasena Park - under the bridge, on the banks of the river. The river hit the museum so hard that train engines weighing tons moved. The museum would never return to the place on the river. Today, the Jupiter missile that some thought a dubious addition to a transportation museum celebrating railroading is the only reminder of the museum's existence along the river. Its nose cone still sticks above the Wasena bridge, although museum officials are giving thought to moving it. Somehow, it seems that the rocket should be recognized formally as a survivor of those two horrific days in November. It has not been so honored. Valley residents, perhaps to temper in their own minds the terrible loss of life and property welcomed stories of animals surviving. It helped somehow to hear that Helen and Charlie Bland of Shadeland had carried their dogs, Snoopy and Sally, to the roof with them; that Beth Smith left her teaching job to check on the two rabbits that belonged to her children and lugged a heavy hutch containing Whiskers and Babbit up the basement steps and saved them from drowning. Jean Holt, a resident of the often-flooded Willow River apartments in Salem, grabbed Bert, her blue-and-gray macaw, and drove away through high water. Later, she would find that the water had risen to the ceiling of her first-floor apartment. Later, donations of bird seed would be made to Bert. And there was an aging Labrador retriever in Eagle Rock that pulled its master to safety out of the rolling waters of Craig Creek. It was the worst flood the valley had ever seen. It was the rain and the creeks - small waterways that trickle unnoticed in normal times. These creeks were cut into the land after the ancient draining of prehistoric waters from the valley. They were here when the first settlers came. They had never been that wild and deadly before. At least in recorded time. At least before asphalt highways and parking lots. The Roanoke River contributed to those awful two days in November. But it didn't kill. When the rain stopped and the sun came out on Tuesday, there were still bodies to be found. And counted.
And the smell a flood leaves behind is still part of the valley's memory of Nov. 4-5, 1985.
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Eleanor Witt was rescued by rope from the Tultex plant in Salem.
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