Opinions

50 years ago, Fairbanks looked like Houston did two weeks ago

The media has done a good job of reporting on Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath. But one thing is missing from the newsprint, television and website coverage: the smell.

I know what a major flood smells like. I was in the flood that engulfed Fairbanks in mid-August 1967 after the heaviest recorded rainfall in the community's history. The Chena River, meandering listlessly through town, its banks hundreds of feet apart, became a torrent several miles wide in places, 9 feet deep in places, according to news reports.

On the morning after the Chena overflowed its banks, I awoke to the stench of fuel oil, gasoline and sewage. The petroleum products had escaped from barrels and storage tanks; the sewage from cesspools, which some people still had in the '60s. The odor was not overwhelming, but it was omnipresent.

I was a fresh college graduate, home for the summer before looking for a stateside job, staying in the frame house in Graehl my folks had owned since 1954. The house was less than a mile from a bridge that crossed the Chena, connecting the north and south sides of town. I awoke on the floor of an upstairs bedroom, my room as a boy. My Dad, Fabian, as master of the house, had the bed. In the next bedroom were our neighbors, Paul and Marion Blackwell, who had come to the house as the water rose. Also joining us in flood survival were our family dogs, Oscar and Cinnamon, whom my Dad put on the flat roof of the garage adjoining my bedroom. The pooches had plenty of space to move around but frequently whined their disappointment with their emergency accommodations.

[Fairbanks recalls the great flood that changed everything]

Rain had fallen off and on for days, especially in the hills upriver, where the Chena begins. When the upriver water reached Fairbanks, the river began rising by the hour. Rain fell most of the day the flood hit town. Radio reports told us more rain was on the way. My Dad, exasperated and anxious, kept telling me, "Do you know how much rain it takes to raise the Chena a foot?" (This was later amended to 2 feet, 3 feet, 4 feet, etc.).

My mother, Mary, went to work the morning of flood day. She was a public health nurse, and I suppose, in today's parlance, a "responder." She became involved in various public health-related activities at her office, and my Dad and I didn't see her until after the flood was gone.

ADVERTISEMENT

Water rises in the back

I didn't know what to expect as the water rose. I guess I assumed my Dad knew what he was doing, given he was a woodsman and construction hand who had been in challenging situations. Somehow, I assumed our house would not float off.

The flood produced many surprises. The first was the waters did not reach our house from the front of the building, facing in the direction of the river, but through the back yard, away from the river. We had a large back yard; we watched the water make its move rapidly in feet, not inches. This proved conclusively something I had not realized: The land behind our house was lower than the land in front.

The water came into the house after dark, slowly now but inexorably. We had no electricity, only numerous flashlights to guide the Blackwells into the house and perform emergency tasks — most important, lifting off the floor everything we could. The beds, tables and chairs became covered with books, boxes of personal papers and heirlooms. When it became clear the house would be flooded, my Dad dug a hole in the wall of the crib basement to let in the water, thinking this would be less damaging than allowing the water to force its own entrance.

Before turning in for the night, the Blackwells, my Dad and I gathered around my transistor radio. A local station remained on the air providing updates on flood conditions, the weather forecast and brief messages from people assuring their families they were OK. "Bobby wants his wife to know he has made it safe and sound to the Eagles Hall where he is dry," said a disc jockey. I knew Bobby. I was sure he wasn't dry. The Eagles served booze, and I could visualize him on a bar stool chatting with the bartender as the radio blared and water inched toward his heels.

The rain stopped during the night and at daylight the neighborhood was silent. I hauled myself through the bedroom window to the garage, where the dogs wagged their tails in expectation of breakfast. "Water, water everywhere," said Coleridge in his famous account of the ancient mariner's tribulations, and so it was in Fairbanks as I stared from the roof. Before long, a helicopter rasped in the distance, then passed overhead. A riverboat drove by, the lone occupant waving from his seat. Empty gas drums floated down Front Street on the rapidly moving current. Timbers and pieces of raw lumber too. Bottles, jerry cans and plastic balls followed. Our redwood picnic table accompanied by its unattached benches, now upside down, rode the water. I started to yell, "Hey!" as if I could get them to listen to me and come back.

Years later, the thought of standing on the roof brought to mind the words of poet T.S. Eliot in "Four Quartets": "I do not know much about gods, but I think the river / Is a strong brown god — sullen, untamed, intractable." Indifferent, too.

I crawled back into the bedroom and walked down the stairway until I could see the gloomy living room. Four inches of water on the floor. The books, personal papers and heirlooms we raised up were dry.

Wade to the boat

My confidence in Fabian was not misplaced. He knew what he was doing. The first thing he did after inspecting the house in daylight was head for our large red barn behind the house. A previous owner had built the barn for his horse; we used it for storage. The water in the back yard, barely moving unlike on the open streets where it raced, was waist deep on my Dad as he warily lumbered maybe 120 feet to the barn door. Fabian disappeared into the building and minutes later appeared with our boat, which he climbed into after throwing in a 6-foot pole. The small wooden vessel, its Lincoln green paint fading, had been dry in the barn for 15 years. We never used it. My Dad kept it because it was part of our history – our fishing vessel at Lake Minchumina in the '40s.

The boat may have been old and unmaintained, but it was flood-worthy. Standing mid-vessel, Fabian used his pole to turn the boat toward the street behind our house and began poling toward the supermarket about a quarter-mile away. Once he reached his destination, he discovered the owners had opened the doors to the public — take what you want, the contents are worthless to us. So Fabian loaded the boat with canned food, snacks, candy and pop and poled back. Poling a boat in a flood is not for amateurs. Fabian developed the skill as a greenhorn on the Kantishna River in the '30s, learning from sourdoughs for whom a pole was an important tool.

Before he left our house, my dad had the presence of mind to get his movie camera, and he shot movies of what he saw. Later in the day, he took additional movies of flood scenes near the bridge. The guy had a sense of history and recorded what he could of it. He also had a sense of what could happen to civil society under stress. He told me: "It took thousands of years to evolve out of the cave. It takes less than 24 hours to evolve back."

The rest of that day was, for me, loud and wet. Helicopters. Airboats. Military riverboats. And Coleridge's "Water, water everywhere." Radio reports boosted our morale. Most important, we learned that parts of Fairbanks had not flooded — and help was on the way. We also learned that the flood took six lives.

Fire and flood

In the early afternoon, we experienced sudden drama. A large warehouse about 300 yards north of our house caught fire. I don't know if the fire was caused by an electrical short or some form of spontaneous combustion. The flames roared into the sky accompanied by acrid smoke, and many rapid explosions followed. The warehouse was full of booze owned by a liquor distributor and bottles of bourbon, scotch and gin went off like cherry bombs. This was a strange experience for Fabian, the Blackwells and myself — watching a warehouse burn to the ground while we were surrounded by water. Actually, the warehouse didn't burn to the ground; it burned to the water line.

Over at the Eagles Hall, Bobby must have wept when he heard radio reports of the alcohol inferno.

I don't remember when the water subsided or I when began to walk the slippery, smelly streets. It seemed like every driveway had a car or truck that had been flooded. In fact, soaked cars were one of the most common sights in August of '67: water over the door handle during the flood, covered with silt and slime after.

My mother came home finally, delivered by a giant military truck. She was like some member of royalty as she climbed from the cab and GIs helped her to the ground. A Red Cross van dispensing sandwiches and coffee followed the truck.

Fabian laughed: "I never thought I would take anything from the Red Cross." He was so stubbornly independent. We ate the sandwiches while standing in the street, and afterward, he ran the back of his hand across his mouth and confided, "Not bad."

As the people of Fairbanks returned to their feet, vehicles were for sale in yards all over town, for sale by owner.

ADVERTISEMENT

The cars and trucks had a piece of cardboard on the windshield with the price, a phone number and a message for prospective buyers: "Never In Flood."

People of Houston, trust me. Soon, you will have a wide selection of automotive bargains to chose from, all bearing the reassurance "Never In Flood."

Michael Carey is an Alaska Dispatch News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@alaskadispatch.com.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com. 

Michael Carey

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

ADVERTISEMENT