Carolyn Gifford Life During the Teton Flood. Box 6 Folder 25

Transcription

1 The Teton Dam Disaster Collection Carolyn Gifford Life During the Teton Flood By Carolyn Gifford February 15, 2004 Box 6 Folder 25 Oral Interview conducted by Christina Sorenson Transcript copied by Bradley Broschinsky January 2006 Brigham Young University Idaho

2 2 Carolyn, would you spell your name please? Carolyn Gifford. Thank you. Carolyn, how old are you? I m 37. Where were you born? In Fairfield, Idaho. How long have you lived in Rexburg? Fifteen years. What was your address prior to the flood? It was the same as it is now. It s Route 4, Box 80. And did you own your home before the flood? Yes. Do you have a family? Yes. How many of you were in your home at the time? In my home? Living at home. Well, there was all nine of us at home. Lee was out of town; he was in Utah when it happened. The children were all living there at the time. Did you work at all? Are you employed? No. Prior to the construction of the dam were you aware of the controversy, were you in favor of it or opposed to it or did you not have an opinion about it?

3 3 We were in favor of it. We had lived near the river at one time and the constant flooding was just terrible. The mosquito problem that it presented was just unbearable and we were very much in favor of the dam. The day that the dam broke, do you recall where you were and what you were doing when you first heard the dam was breaking and what was your reaction to that? Well, I had been sewing all morning and the evening before I had very strong premonitions to go get the groceries and I had kept putting it off because we were going to go to town that afternoon and I wanted to get some sewing done. I was just pressing to get this sewing down. I didn t have the radio on, because I never play the radio and we had had two little neighbor children playing with us and their older brother called up and said he wanted them to come home because the Teton Dam had broken. He had to go find his parents. It didn t strike me at the time that it was any big deal. That s interesting about the premonition to go get groceries. Have you thought much about it since then? Oh, yes. I was very, very uneasy. It was just like I couldn t concentrate on sewing because there was so many things I was out of. I kept saying to myself, It s Lane s baptism and while we re in town, I ll just stop and get groceries and then we ll come home. I was just so nervous that day, I really was. That s interesting. Now after you heard the news what did you do then? The first thing that came to my mind after I realized the importance of what was happening, I remember thinking to myself, This is just how the families got separate during the Second World War. My husband and I had never talked about a disaster or what to do or where to go, where we would meet. He was out of town; I was very reluctant to consider leaving the house. First of all, my oldest boy was up on the dry farm moving pipe and he would have had to have crossed the flood plain to get home. My second boy was in town getting gas for the lawn mower and that was upsetting to me. I had no idea how to get a hold of Lee in Utah to out what he wanted me to do. I could not find and phone numbers. I wasn t conscious of being in a panic but I couldn t find any phone number. So finally, out of desperation, I called his mother collect through the operator and the phone was busy and I hung up and the phone rang and it was her asking us if we were all right and what we were going to do. At that time I still didn t know, I just said, We re going to stay here until the water gets so deep we can t leave with a four-wheel drive. She said, Carolyn, I think you ought to leave. And I said, Well, I m not going to leave everything I ve ever worked for to let somebody steal. I said, I m not worried because we can get out with the fourwheel drive.

4 4 It was kind of a panic, by that time my second boy had come home and he had heard the dam was broken and he thought it was nothing big. He wasn t too concerned. By that time I had turned on the radio and was getting messages that we were to evacuate immediately and then tried to call a few people that had been in the flood in 1962 to find out if it had flooded where our house was. Lee s brother had lived here at the time and he had showed us generally where it had flooded. I spent quite a bit of time of the phone trying to contact people. This is some of the funniest parts about it. I tried to call the bishop to see if they were still going to have Lane s baptism which was in the bottom of the tabernacle. I couldn t get him and eventually I just couldn t get anybody. His line was busy and two or three of my friends kept calling and saying, Carolyn, I think you ought to leave. And I d say, Well I m really not too worried about it. We live far enough away from the river. Although in reality we don t. I just don t think that I ll leave until absolutely have to and besides I can t leave until Brent gets home. I said I wouldn t leave until he got home. I did have Paul Nedrow s, who the boys work for, his two way radio and so I was able to contact him and find out where Brent was and why it was taking him so long to get home. He said that he had sent them over the dry farms, up over the bench so that they wouldn t get trapped but they were told to go to their own home. Then he advised me to get coats and a change of clothing and food and water and put them in the truck and go to the college. Then Brother Ed Malstrom came out; he knew Lee was out of town. He lives up on the hill by the hospital and he came out to see that I got out. I kept saying to him, I don t really want to go. So he said, Well, you ve got to go, so what can I do to help you get ready? I was concerned about the animals. I first would pen them up then I send the kids to go out and unpin them. I didn t know what to do. I felt like if they left out of the pastures they was probably better off. I think that s the way I left them. I opened all the gates so they could go where ever they wanted to go. There was some things in our storage room that I put up, powdered milk and beans and everything from off of the floor in the house. I had had the boys load the garbage in the truck that morning to take to the dump. So then we had to unload that before we could load up the truck. My older children were very reluctant to help. By the way, I just remembered that my oldest daughter who was 11 was not with us, she was in California with my mother. I missed her at the time because I felt like I could really depend on her. I couldn t get Kevin to settle down to do anything. I d ask him to do something and he d get it almost done and then he d turn around and not do it. What age was he? He was 15. It was very frustrating to me because I would depend on him, you know. I would think of things for him to do then I d turn around and they wouldn t be done. My eight year old was pretty good about minding but it surprised me, my five year old and my three year old minded me and were very solemn. They did exactly what I told them to. They were the only ones that got their clothes in the truck. The older kids, who you would think would do it, didn t

5 get their clothes in, but the little kids did. Kevin did pack a suitcase for the baby, Mitchell, took all the baby s clothes and I had just washed the day before and so I had all the diapers and everything clean. He packed everything of the baby s. I knew that all of our important papers were upstairs. I knew Lee s guns were upstairs. We took all the furniture that we could lift and put it on the kitchen cupboards. I had just gotten a new sewing machine and I took it upstairs. The sewing that I was sewing on I took upstairs, which was interesting. There was a few important things that I left on the floor, especially in the garage. I forgot Lee s chainsaw and then at the last minute as I was ready to pull out of the driveway I remembered that I didn t have the camper on, which would have been a lifesaver. Ed wouldn t let me stop to take time to put it on. By that time our eldest boy, Brent had gotten home and he said, Mother I ve got to take a shower before I can go. I thought, Well golly, it might be the last shower he gets for two or three weeks so he better, because he was just covered with dirt. So he took time to take a shower. Then of the older boys that my boys worked with came down and said, Kevin, I want you to drive my truck out so I can drive my car. So I said, Okay, Kevin, you meet me at Ed Malstrom s place. Kevin did; he went right over to Orin s, got the truck, and drove it right up to the hospital. We had to go around by the dugway and all the traffic and the music that they were playing on the radio just irritated me. I never did get the message that we were supposed to go to the college and report and tell people that we were there. I remember before I left the neighbors were gone. We had two sets of neighbors, Blacks and Thompsons, that weren t home at all. We had one set of neighbors, Hoglunds that had decided to stay. I remember telling Hoglunds, You better go up and turn Black s electricity off because nobody s home. But their fifteen year old boy, Kim, was home and he was asleep. Because I had told them, they went in the house and found Kim and was able to him on the ball and he was able to save a lot of things of his folks. Our other neighbor kids, Thompsons, heard it; they were older than my boys. They left. They went on their motorcycle and left three cars in the driveway. Then they did call us and we went over and shut off their electricity. As I was checking things over to leave, I walked out of the house with seven gallons of milk and twelve loaves of bread. I knew that we d be able to use them at Malstrom s. I remember that the music was so irritating to me on the radio and yet I felt like I had to listen. The people were acting like this was a great big circus or carnival. They were laughing and joking. It was hot; they were drinking soda pop. We were driving down this one lane road; it was dusty and the baby was crying and I was really nervous. I ll never forget, Mrs. Steiglmeyer was out, she has a large family and she evidently, I ve talked to her since she was just ready to set down to the table. She had put a meatloaf in the oven so just grabbed it and her barbecue grill and she was serving hamburgers to the kids. It was right at noon and there was a lot of little kids that hadn t eaten and she was serving hamburgers. It resembled a great big picnic. We passed some of the neighbors, the Merrills, as 5

6 6 we were going down the road so they knew where we were. My husband was able to find us because he saw these neighbors and I hadn t reported in. Did you go from Malstrom s over to the college? No, we stayed at Malstroms s. We just stayed at Malstrom s and Lee had heard about the dam in Utah and they had just started home already. Instead of stopping in Pocatello and finishing their business, they just came right on. He was here about 4:00. He found us in rather a unique way. He, of course, checked with the college and we were listed as missing. I had kept my oldest boy with us up there at the house. I don t know, he just never did ask to go and go around so I didn t urge him to but our 15 year old boy, as soon as he hit town, he borrowed a bike from Malstroms and he took off. He was all over town, up to the college, and he knew where everybody was, knew what was happening. I decided if we ever had a war and we had to have a scavenger for food, we d be lucky to have him around. But Lee found him milling up at the college and that s how he found out where we were. Now were you able, from at Malstrom s, to see the water coming in? Yes, they live right on the edge of town, overlooking Mill Hollow, and we were able to the water coming. What did it look like and how did you feel when you saw it coming? It looked like a great big cloud of dust. This great big straw stack that we could see just blew up like somebody was exploding it. I don t remember having feelings about dread or anything. I was very irate when I had to leave my house. I remember driving out the driveway and thinking to myself, Well, it will never be the same. I know that it won t be gone when I leave. I got a mental picture of what it was going to be like and that s just the way it was. I knew that the house would have water in it. I knew nothing would be washed away, but I was mad at the inconvenience it was causing me. I was irate that everything I had worked for was going to go, the garden and the yard was just going to be havoc when I got home. I was really mad about that. I was irate and I still had those feeling and I wasn t conscious of the grandeur or the consequences of the flood. When it hit, I just still wasn t, I don t think I realized any of that until two days after the flood. Now, did you stay with for the next few days? Yes, we stayed with Sunday, well Saturday, and Sunday and Monday and then Tuesday afternoon, when they got the electricity on out to our house we went back home. When was the first time that you actually went back to your home and saw it and what did you see and how did you feel about it?

7 7 Well, Ed finally talked his wife and I and some of the kids to going down and they just lived a couple of blocks from the park and we could go walk down to the water s edge and see it. I remember how I felt when I saw President Clark s home and I though they re not even in town and all those beautiful things and there it was completely full of water. I felt really bad about that. Of course, my husband went out as soon as he got home, they borrowed a boat from the biology department because some of the men that he was with didn t know whether our neighbor, this Kim Black, had gotten out. So they borrowed a boat. They were out to our house about 5:00 that night. We could see with the binoculars just how bad it was from the hill. Lee went out, he didn t milk the cows that Saturday night. He came and he found the cows and there was a couple of cows missing and we lost about eight chickens. He couldn t find some of the calves. He came home and the next morning he and the boys went out at about 5:00. The cows had some back and so he milked the neighbor s cows and our cows. He did what he could, fed the chickens. The chickens never quit laying. He came home with the milk. By that time he was able to go in the house and so he was able to report on what he felt like the damages were. Then by the time he got back out, about 10:00, my brother, Loye Blackburn, from Montana had started to clean up mud. He was flying over early that morning. He called my folks and told them about it. This was the first they had heard about it in California. Then he came back to Rexburg and landed at the airport. He walked over to our house and the neighbors wouldn t let them in. He finally convinced them who he was. He had gone in the house, pulled the carpets up and had started to clean the mud off the floor. So they had the mud almost all scooped out by Sunday. They had taken the pump off and taken it apart, had scrubbed it pretty well by Sunday night. They spent most of the day Monday working on the pump. By the time they were ready to hook up the electricity again on Tuesday, it was dried out and we re still using the same pump that we had before. That s the only motor I ve heard of in the flood that survived because we had several other motors that we tried to do the same thing with and they just blew up. You didn t actually go out there until Tuesday afternoon? No, it was Monday. I kept saying to myself, Well, why wouldn t Lee let me go out? I was really upset because we d drive around town and Sunday morning it was like the deadest calm. It was just a terrible feeling and that prevailed over the whole town until about Tuesday. Finally Monday afternoon I convinced him that I wanted to go out and see what it was like. When I went out here and I just did not know how on earth I was ever going to cope with it. As we drove around town and saw the mess that everybody else was in, it was far worse than ours. We decided that we d better go out and clean it up. You Know, Clorox everything and wash everything down as much as we could because we felt like there were other people that needed to stay at Malstrom s worse than we did. We got the electricity on and the freezers worked. One only worked for a little while.

8 8 One floated and it s still working. It was empty enough that it floated. The other would have if I hadn t put all the storage food in it. I don t know when I went out there. I just didn t know how I was going to cope. Then, as we drove around and saw the devastation and our friends, our really dear friends and people in our ward, I just felt so blessed. I felt guilty like everybody else did that hadn t been hit harder. Lee with four-wheel drive had driven way out in the country, you know, had checked on all of the people that we knew, to see what had happened to them and he d come home and say, Well, if you re tired of your mess, let s go see somebody else s mess. Now, at that time, when you first went back to the house and saw it and you wondered how you were going to cope with it, did you feel ever during those next few weeks at that time close to despair or hopelessness, did it ever get quite that bad? Well, the thing we found out, that we couldn t work and awfully long time in our own mess. My first impulse was to just throw everything out that the water had touched. I didn t want to have anything to do with it. The things that were in the garage, the coats, the kids boots, everything, all the tools, I didn t know why Lee just didn t take them out and throw them away. Yet it affected him just the opposite. He wanted to go through everything. It upset him to see people s belonging laying all over and them just hauling them away. The lumber and the timber bothered him really a lot and yet, I wanted to get rid of everything the flood had touched. So when we would get feeling like we couldn t cope with it, I don t know, we just went for a drive. It was hard on the boys because they had to crawl under the house. We had a crawlspace under the house and they had to get under the house and tear all the insulations out. Everything that was in the garage just went right into the crawlspace when the water left. So there was all the garbage we had the boys unload and everything almost that was in the garage that was floatable under the house. So the boys would work moving pipe in the morning and, of course, it was raining, it was hot for a few days after the flood and then it started raining. It was cold. They d go out in the morning and work for four hours in the muck and the mud, then they d come home and they d work for three or four more hours underneath the house. Then they d go back and work in the muck. I know Lee would come home discouraged and he just would say, Let s go someplace else. We d come home and feel like we didn t have anything to worry about. I don t think we ever had any really pains of despair, only that the devastation was there. Now did you have any outside volunteers helping you in your cleanup or did mostly just your family help you? Well, we did have two sets of volunteers come out. Lee had to go back to work because the man that he was working for had so many of his people that were just really so much worse off that Lee felt like he could go and do some cultivating and things like this. As soon as the house was fixed up, he had his brother come

9 9 back up and lay the carpet just a week after the flood. He felt like he wanted his home to be nice as soon as possible. He thought the outside could wait, and it bothered me to see the outside just going to ruin, because, you know, there was no garden, there was no flowers. The lawn was just being riddled with cows and herds of cattle would come through every night and just trample things. We had two set of volunteers that came and then the Agricultural Department came and carried five great big truckloads of logs from around our house and cleaned up 2 loads of debris. The volunteers came and stacked all the fence post. We were able to identify our fence post and poles that we had. We had just gotten the five acres fenced. They found some animals and, of course, we had drug off about 40 animals off the 40 acres of the neighborhood. That were dead? That were dead. I felt very guilty having them there because I couldn t work outside, you know. All my men were out making money someplace and there they were helping us. Carolyn, did you have any association with any of the organizations that were helping such as the Red Cross and the LDS Church and also later on any involvement with the government as far as helping you in the recovery? Of course, Lee took care of going to the disaster center and getting all of their material and doing all of that. I didn t have any direct contact with them except with the church, of course. I felt san I wasn t even asked to come up to the college and help with the meals, you know. Where there were so many in our ward that was, course they were all eating up there. So I didn t ever have any direct contact except with the BOR and the Red Cross. I was home when the Department of Agriculture came to clean up and I felt like they were very nice. The BOR, I felt bent over backwards to help us. They pointed out a lot of things that we hadn t thought about claiming or that we felt like wasn t worth claiming. I felt like they were just really generous and they were very nice to work with and they didn t give us any static at all. So, were you and your husband satisfied then with your claim settlement? Yes. I think that it was conservative and I am pleased about that. We didn t wait until everybody had figured out all the angles. We had it settled by the end of August, 1976 with the BOR. We felt very please about it. You know, as you watched your family, having a lot of children over a wide age range, did you notice over the next few months after the flood, and maybe even over the whole last year, any affects on them that you would attribute to the flood, depending on their ages and how they handled it?

10 10 I don t think so. I don t think our teenagers lost anything and I know that some of their friends that did really felt despair and unhappiness at the things they lost. Our boys didn t seem to, I can t tell. People would say, Oh all these things are happening to my kids. Well, I can t tell ay difference. I just couldn t. I really tried to make things pleasant at home and I tried to get our home back in order. I guess I was quite impatient with people that wouldn t take time to sit down to meals or to take time to bake bread or take time to can or do some of the things they did before the flood. I felt like those things you needed to get back to as quickly as you could, to keep from getting upset and getting your routine mixed up. Maybe I was able to do this because we weren t as badly hit as other people were. As you have watched the community recovering over the last year, what changes, if any, for the good, do you think are coming out of this whole flood experience for Rexburg and the surrounding areas? What if any, perhaps negative things have you seen happening to the town? I think it s updated us about 40 years. Not only in building, but people would have made due with a lot of things that they had had for years, rather than change. I see a lot of good things happening in the schools because of it, new equipment, of course, and new textbooks and every kind of equipment. Some of the things I see, some of the merchants haven t gone back to what they were doing before. There is a lot of new people that have come in that are kind of fly-by-night. They don t really care whether they get your business as long as they get you money. I think there are a lot of things we had better before the flood, but then there are a lot of things that I m really glad that we got rid of too. I think competition is better, it s not always bringing the prices down, but I think good competition is better. There s been some talk, because of all the construction going on, of a lot of contractors and sub-contractors that have come into town to help in the rebuilding who have taken advantage of the situation. They were sort of the fly-by-night type. Have you heard of any experiences of this kind where people have been cheated? Well, I think right after the flood, there were a lot of contractors, even local contractors, that would hire anybody, you know. They had took on too many jobs and they weren t able to oversee unskilled labor like putting up sheetrock, and there was a lot of waste and things like that. We didn t have any direct experience, of course, my husband did all of our rebuilding. The thing that impressed me is when you went out of town, and we made an awful lot of trips to Idaho Falls (The boys would get home really late at night like eight or nine and we would go to the falls and go to the flood sales and things like that just to get out of town.), people were so willing to cash your checks and to talk to you about the cleanup. I d go out and buy groceries and I d get so mad. Then when Safeway opened I thought, Oh, I ll never go back to that store as

11 11 soon as the other ones open. I resent Safeway and I won t go back. Now that s really dumb. Now why is that? Well, I felt like they took advantage during the flood. I really did. Right after the flood, they opened up right soon and I felt like they were making a killing. Course it was unfortunate because prices were going up but there were a lot of markets in St. Anthony and in Rigby that were holding the line on prices. Safeway didn t, they kept going up. Of course, they re a big chain store, they don t buy exactly what the people here want, you know. You couldn t get disposable diapers, you couldn t get soybean milk, you know, things that my baby had to have, soybean milk on his cereal. Things like that I felt like they could have gone out of their way to stock up on and have available, but they didn t. Did you or any of your family members have any spiritual experiences during this time that have stayed with you? Well, I felt at the time, this was during the flood before we left our home, I should take time to have prayer with them. I don t know, as I look back on it. I was really in a state of shock and I was in panic. I do know from now on that I will panic at first, then eventually I ll settle down. Our eight year old said he knelt down and had a prayer and that s why our house wasn t taken. I think the thing that struck me the most was how much my family and friends meant to me. We had a family from Provo that we had been close to ever since college. They came up on the Fourth of July which was about a month afterwards. That s the first people out of the flood area we really had a chance to visit with and they stayed with us for a week and we just couldn t get enough of them, their insight and just letting us talk and feeling empathy for us. And yet, they didn t do anything special except that they were there. I remember none of our families came. Lee s one brother is the only one that came to help us. He has a brother that lives in Ucon and he checked on us all the time. He was delivering soda pop up here all the time, so he would check on us. But, I don t know, it really came to me how the little things of caring and showing people that you care and going to visit them could mean. I felt kind of bad that none of my family came, although they probably would have if we would have been in a mess. My sister brought my oldest daughter back from California but she didn t want to, or her husband didn t feel that he wanted her around all of this and so she just dropped her off in the Falls and went around. As I look back, I just hungered to see her. I did go up ad spend a week and a half with her later on in the summer. It was really good to get away, it was just like solace to my soul. I just really felt like our friends, those friends will always be so near and dear to us cause they saw us in that mess and they were so empathetic. We decided at this time we need a tiller because our trees and everything were dying because the flood sealed the ground. They couldn t get air, any water, so we followed the

12 12 Rowers back to Utah to get the tiller. It was just like we couldn t get enough of each other. It was just really good. There s been talk too about the cause of the dam breakage and of course, most people have accepted the idea that it was a man-made disaster or mistake or whatever. But a few people have expressed the idea that perhaps it was some kind of an act of divine punishment for the sins of the people in the area. How would you feel about that? I don t feel like that at all. I feel like the only thing the Lord had n mind was that he might have kept it as a good time of day and in the summer time and not in the winter. Because I saw the devastation in the winter time of the flood in 62. We were here about a month afterwards and it was bad. I think it s one of the things that happened and I think it was the fault of the men that build the dam. I don t think. I just don t think the Lord works that way. You know, there s talk about the dam being rebuilt. Would you be in favor of it or opposed to it and if in favor of it would you want it in the same location? I m in favor of it being rebuilt. We need the irrigation water, there s just no getting around it. They need it. But I don t know enough about geology to know whether it s a good place or a bad place. To me, looking at it from my point of view, it s where it was, we had never been to the dam until last September. To me that seemed as good a place as any. I was just sick then when we went up above the dam and looked at the dam, it s the first time that we had been up there and I don t ever want to go back. I guess that s as good a place an any, as long as it will keep it from flooding. As you looked over the last year and what you personally have experienced, what sort of changes have you noticed in your values, your attitudes, your beliefs, perhaps even your personality that you would attribute directly to the flood experience? Well, like I mentioned before, I feel getting back to the things that are really important, the little things in your household, that make it run smoothly. I don t know whether I can explain it the way I really feel, like getting back to having meals on time, sitting down to the table, putting a table cloth on the table, having someplace nice to go to, even if it s just the front room or just a pretty bouquet of flowers. I think that those things should have been stressed. It s been brought back home to me that those are the disrupting things when you get out of the routine and when you get out of doing what you usually do those are t he upsetting things. Since I felt like getting back to those things really quick, and I ve seen people that didn t do that really get depressed. I had one lady mention to me in October that they were now, just getting to sit down to a table to eat, that they had just put things on the table and the people would just come and grab food. Yet she s so depressed, she was so upset and I felt like maybe some of the

13 13 things she could have done and could have gotten back to having, maybe just one room in her house nice sooner. I felt like a lot of people had used the flood as an excuse not to attend church, not to do their visiting teaching, not to do their home teaching, especially the mothers. I ve got to stay home for the carpenters. I ve got to do this. That s true, you have to do some types of those things, but it really got quite commonplace, you know. The attitude still lingers right now. I can t do this because of this. I didn t feel as much a personality change through this disaster as I did four years ago where I broke my, I was seven months pregnant and I broke my ankle and my shoulder. At that time it was probably more a personal growth period for me than the flood was. I felt like I could breeze through the flood after I had gone through that. Are you LDS? Yes. Do you think that you have noticed any difference in response and reaction to the disaster between people who are LDS and those who are non-lds or even between people who are active in the church and those who aren t active in the church? Well, I don t have an awfully lot of contact with people who aren t members of the church. Lee was working with some fellows during the flood on this farm that weren t LDS, and they were very thankful for the church stepping in and organizing things. I just don t think that I could answer that constructively. It s an individual thing. Some people I have resented the claims that they ve filed, you know, because I knew what was in their home before and yet I see what they have replaced them with. It s upsetting to see the difference. Yet, I don t know what I would have done. I probably would have done the same thing had I had to chose all over again. Yes, I have talked to people who mentioned fraudulent claims filed and I was going to ask you, without, of course mentioning any names, if you were aware of any people that you know of who had filed fraudulent claims? Well, I don t think there are fraudulent, only in the fact that a couch they paid $20 or $30 for at a second-hand store, they could claim as a couch costing $500 or $600. Because it was a couch and that was what you had to replace it with was a couch that you can get today. Those types of things bothered me. I have an occasion to visit with people out of town, out of the area, that are very bitter, you know. They don t think the people had to go through a thing day to day. Oh well, it doesn t matter, you guys are going to come out better off than you were before, that s true but, they didn t have to go through it. People out of the area are quite upset with the amount of money, I feel, that is coming in here. Yet, I don t know what I would have done, if we would have had to replace everything.

14 14 Why not change? Why not do things different than before? If you had the opportunity, why not do it? Carolyn, I don t have any more specific questions. Is there anything else that you d like to say at this point, any other thoughts or feelings that you d like to express? No, I guess not. Thank you, Mrs. Gifford.