Brent and Arlene Romrell Life during the Teton Flood. Box 8 Folder 12

Transcription

1 The Teton Dam Disaster Collection Brent and Arlene Romrell Life during the Teton Flood By Brent and Arlene Romrell July 21, 1977 Box 8 Folder 12 Oral Interview conducted by Alyn B. Andrus Transcript copied by Devon Robb April 2006 Brigham Young University Idaho

2 MA: We will start by having you, Mrs. Romrell, spell you name. Mrs. R: Arlene Romrell. MA: what is your birth date and where were you born? Mrs.: January 8, 1941 and I was born in Salem, Idaho. MA: Now, Brent, would you spell your name for me? MR: Brent Romrell. MA: And what is your birth date and where were you born? MR: March 30, 1941 in Idaho Falls, Idaho. MA: Do you have a family? MR: Yes, we have 3 sons, Bret, Ronnie and Kerry. MA: Were you children here at home the day for the flood, Mrs. Romrell? Mrs..R: No, I was here but the kids weren t. MA: The children were not here with you. Was your husband here? Mrs. R: No, he wasn t. MA: What is your current address? Mrs. R: Route 1, St. Anthony. MA: And do you live now where you lived before the flood? Mrs. R: Yes. MA: How long have you and your husband lived in this area? Mrs. R: All of our lives. MA: Did you own your home before the flood? Mrs. R: Yes. MA: What do you do for a living, Mr. Romrell? MR: I work for the U. S. Forest Service. I m a forest technician, a scalar for them. I measure the board feet of logs in the load. MA: Do you do any farming? MR: We ve got six acres of land out here that we raise crops on. MA: Did you own that before the flood? I mean you weren t renting it or leasing it? MR: No, I was buying it. MA: Mrs. Romrell, do you have a business of your own or did you have a business of your own before the flood? Mrs. R: Yes, I had a beauty shop in my home. MA: Mr. Romrell, would you mind explaining your feelings about the Teton Dam? Did you support it or oppose it? MR: Well, I believe I was kind of in favor of it because of the flooding that the Teton River did. I didn t think that they would build it so it would collapse. But I was kind of in favor of it for flood control. MA: Were you ever flooded out by the river before the dam was built? MR: Not directly. One year, just a year or two before I moved onto this place, The water came down the canals when the river iced up and it got around here a little bit, but it wasn t enough to do very much damage. MA: Do you know a lot of farmers along the river who were flooded out? MR: Yes, there were several of them along the river here that were flooded, not every year but when ever it was high and bad. MA: Did you ever get involved in sandbagging or in helping them in trying to control the water in the river when it would get high?

3 MR: Yes. The year before the dam was finished we sandbagged down on Larry Kerbs place in July to keep it from washing over the top. MA: Did you or any member of your family have a premonition of the Teton Disaster, any unusual, strong feelings that something bad was going to happen? MR: My wife always said it was going to break, but I didn t think it would. She said she was always afraid it would anyway. MA: Mrs. Romrell, did you have a premonition of that flood? Mrs. R: No, not directly. MA: Now, Mrs. Romrell, would you tell about where you and your family were when the dam broke that day in June? Mrs. R: I was here in the house, the two older boys were up working on the farm, and Brent was up in the hills planting trees. Kerry came just a few minutes after I heard. He had been gone on the bicycle and he came home. MA: After you heard about the dam breaking, would you tell what you did then, and just tell your story about what you did and what happened that day in as much detail as you d like to. Mrs. R: Okay. I was vacuuming in the living room. Usually on Saturday morning I have a lot of beauty shop ladies, but during the week everybody but one had changed to Thursday or Friday so I only had one appointment that morning and I finished by probably 9:30. We were going to have a picnic that night so I hurried and was cleaning up the house, vacuuming. Brent s brother, Max, stopped out in front and he came and knocked on the door, and I told Kerry to open the door. Max said, Well, what do we do? Do I pack or do we leave or just what? He said, Oh, just leave, it won t be anything. Just leave; we ll come back. So I immediately went to the phone to call my mother, and when I dialed the number, the line was busy so I dialed the operator and told her that this was an emergency and I needed the line and she said, Where are you at. And I said, I m in Wilford just below the Teton Dam. And she said, You haven t got time to talk on telephone. Get out of there. And I was crying and I said, But I have to talk to my mother. And she said, You make it snappy! And that was at five minutes to twelve. So when my mother came on the line, I was crying and I said, Hurry and come help me move my stuff out, the Teton Dam has broken. Asked her if she had the radio on and she said she hadn t. So she said they d be up in a few minutes. By then the kids came for dinner. They came in the yard in the car like they would never drive it again, and they hit the ground before they had the doors open and they were out of that car before the car ever quite rolling. So I knew that they knew that something was wrong. And they came in and the oldest one, he was really excited. That was Bret and he was just a hollering and screaming that we had to get out. I said, Well, I got dinner ready you d better eat because I don t know when we ll get dinner ready you d better eat because I don t know when we ll get back here. So they had their dinner while we waited for my folks to come. Then my mother and dad and my little brother and his wife came. My dad backed the pickup right up to the front door and my mother came in and said, I don t know, I don t know. She said, Well, if you ve got pictures or important papers or baby books or something like that and I said, Well, I want my organ. So my little brother and I

4 picked up the organ and carried it out. We took it across the living room and to the front of the pick up without setting it down and he s littler than I am. And then they saved the microwave oven and the TV, and I went and got two boxes that I thought had baby books and pictures in and I dumped the drawer that had the papers from January to June, important papers. My mother said, Get any money you got in the beauty shop. I had about $300 I would have left laying there. I went in and gathered that up and we put all the hair rollers in a plastic bag and stuck them in the shampoo bowl, took the hydraulic chair and the two dryers and set them up on the kitchen table, and my mother went madly around rolling up rugs and sticking them in front of the doors so that we wouldn t have water in the house. Then she said, What about some clothes? and I said, Well, I guess maybe we had better have some. So I told the kids, I said, Run in your bedrooms and take all the clothes out of your closets and throw them in the middle of your beds and roll up the bedding and carry it out. Each one of the kids took care of their beds like that and I took what was in our bedroom. One of the kids got their 8 track, one got their radio. The kids said, What about the guns? And I said, Yeah, you can get the guns if you want to and your sleeping bags, so we had four out of the five sleeping bags. And they got the file cabinet that had all Brent s forest service papers in it. Then Linda, who is Jimmy s wife, her and Kerry, our littlest boy, and the dog decided that they would leave, so they left. Then my dad put Ronnie on the back of his pickup with what things we had in the pickup, to watch them to make sure nothing would fall out. They left. My mother got in the car with Bret and they left in Bret s car. Bret wasn t going to drive it. He was too shook up. He said, I just can t drive. I said, You got to take that car because our other car is over at the forest service yard, and if St. Anthony gets flooded, we won t have a car. So I made him take the car. So everybody left but my little brother and I, and his pickup was parked right behind our pickup. That day Brent had taken the Plymouth car to work, which he never does because it never starts. You never start it and get in it and go. You start it and go give feet, and then you wait and mess around with the starter four or five times, and maybe it will go in fifteen minutes or maybe sit there and wait. So anyway, they had taken the outfits and left and Jimmy and I were stading there in the living room talking and I looked up and there was my picture of the folk s house on the wall. So I grabbed it as we went out the door, and stuck it in the pickup seat. He said, Let s go turn the cattle out, let s open the gates so your cattle can get out. We had to go out through a gate into the pasture, and just as we got part way across the pasture I looked up and the water was coming over the tops of these trees right over here. A: The ones I see out this window? Mrs. R: Yeah. They are not very far away. It was coming, there was some in front, but the big gush of water was coming over the top of the trees, rolling sprinkler wheels moves and logs. He turned around and hollered, Get the hell out of here. We headed back for the pickups, and as I came in front of our pickup, Kerry s bicycle was laying on the ground and I picked it up and just threw it in the back of his pickup and he started up and backed out and waited for me to get in and start up and he said he was sure that I was going to kill it. He didn t dare honk, but he said I was taking so long he was afraid that we were going to get drowned because I wasn t moving fast enough. He said at one time he thought about just putting it in high gear and ramming me down the road. Time we got

5 started down the road, he said, he said the garage had hit the house and the house exploded. As we went down the road, I got just about to this corner west of here, there were two or three of Potter s outfits coming around the corner. One was a tractor, puling a manure spreader with snow machines in it. One was, I don t remember if it was a pickup pulling a pickup or if it was just a pickup, but there was furniture in the back of it and there was a boy on a motorcycle that went around the corner. And I waited for them and I looked in at Max s place and there were no cars there so I figured they had all left, there was no one there. When I got down to the corner where his folks live, one of the Potter girls was standing on the corner crying and I thought, You dummy how can you stand there and bawl. Then I realized that I couldn t see so well myself because I crying. I had waited for Delton Brower had pulled out in front of me out of a driveway and I thought, You re going to get us all killed, because the brakes on the pickup weren t that good and I don t usually drive it, so I m not to it. When I got on down about to where Greenhaldges live, I met Elmer Klein and his son, and they were coming up the road with motorcycles. They were going to come up and ride along the river and watch the flood. As they told me that, I just screamed down, Get out of here! The water is coming over the trees at our place! You ll be killed. And then I went on west. I went through the intersection and I don t remember seeing any people there. I went on down and just kept going west till I got down to Austin Price s corner. I never did look to see if my little brother was behind me. I kept having this feeling that if I looked back; I would turn into a block of salt like Lot s wife. I kept thinking, You ve got to keep going and not look. He stopped at the corner at Larry Kerbs because somebody pulled across the road with a boat and he couldn t get through and he and Larry Kerbs pushed the boat off into the gutter so that they would get on down the road. Someone was coming up to boat ride and watch the flood. When I got west to Austin Price s corner, as I turned the corner, the pickup door flew open so I had to stop and get out and go around and shut it and two or three people passed me that I knew. Then I went on up towards my folks place and by the time I got there they had heard on the a radio that we had to get out of there and they had turned the dog loose and he wouldn t come back to us and get in the car, so we just left him but I was feeling really guilty and bad to think that everything I had was in the back of my folk s pickup and they couldn t save anything of theirs. My mother came out with two or three loaves of frozen bread so we had something to eat. Bret was crying that, was all Grandma was going to be able to save because our stuff was in her pickup. So we all got in the outfits and left. The radio kept saying, Go to the college hill, go to the college hill. My dad kept saying, That s ridiculous. We are not going to try to go to the college hill. If it s already gone by your place, we could get caught between the two branches of the Teton River, so he said, We ll go north to the Sand Hills. We ll go up to the top of the Parker hill. So we went out to the top of the parker Hill and a lot of people from Salem were out there. Everybody was just kind of milling around and just talking. There were guys with field glasses standing up on top of pickups and when the water hit Myers Brothers, the cattle came out of there they said Just churning. Then they told us to leave there because they were afraid that the cattle would stamp down through there as wild as they were, and run over us. So we went out to the sand Hills and just listened to the radio and

6 some of my cousins were out there and they were talking about things they d saved like bank savings books. I heard them tell that the Wilford church was completely gone. I was crying and saying that my house was gone and they d say, No it isn t, no it isn t. And I said, It is, I know it. It s completely gone and my aunt and uncle said, No, your house won t be gone. There will only be three or four feet of water go through there. I said, But I sat it. I saw it come over the top of the trees and they wouldn t believe me. My dad wouldn t believe me when we got out there and I told them how bad it was. He kept saying, It s not as bad as you think, now calm down. But I kept saying, But you won t have a house left. He said, Girl, do you know how deep it s going to be in this valley if it gets to my house? They live kind of on top of a hill. He said, It will have to be a whale of a lot of water come through here before it will ever get to mine. But their house had to be torn down too. So we stayed out to the sand hills till, I think it was after 5 o clock until a National Guard guy came and asked how come we hadn t gone into St. Anthony and registered in. And we said because all afternoon they had been saying the south side of St. Anthony was under water. So he told us to go into St. Anthony and register at the Stake Center. So my mother and dad kept Kerry with them out where they were at Parker. They were going to head back as close to the flood, to see if they could get back home and they kept him. I guess the two older boys and I went into St. Anthony. I went to the Forest service office first because I thought they would know where Brent was, and there was nobody there so I went into the Stake Center. Everybody I met as I would go in they d say, Have you seen Brent He s looking for you. And then I ran into Brent in the Stake Center. MA: How far would you say those trees that you saw the water coming over are from where we are now? Mrs. R: I would say less than a quarter of a mile, but I don t know, maybe a city block. MA: How high would you say the water was? Mrs. R: As tall as those trees are, I think it must have been 35 to 40feet deep. MA: Was it coming fast? Mrs. R: No. The sprinkler pipes and logs were bouncing, but the water didn t seem to be coming that fast. I never did worry about not having time to get in and drive off. I don t know whether I thought it would just stay there and wait, but I never worried about not having time. MA: How far from your house were you when the water hit the house? Do you have any idea? Mrs. R: How far is the end of the orchard? MA: About 100 feet. Mrs. R: About 100 feet. MA: You were about 100feet from the house? Mrs. R: When the garage hit the house. Then it exploded. Jimmy said the water was right on the bumper when he backed out and I backed out and we started west. He said the water was right on the front bumper from the gush that was coming. MR: The sprinkler pipe they said was bouncing out in front of the water, there wasn t any water bouncing it. It was just the air suction in there. They said it was bouncing it right out in front. MA: Why don t we have you tell your story now, Mr. Romrell. Where were you that day and what happened when you heard that the dam had broken? What did you do?

7 MR: Well, I was inspecting the tree planting project up on Black Mountain. That morning I don t know why I took the other car. It was easier riding I guess. I took the car that keeps killing. You know you back it out of the driveway and it will kill and you have to sit there and crank on it for a while before it will start again. But I took the car that morning and parked it over in the Forest Service Yard when I got up to work. I had to be at the project by 6:00 in the morning. We d worked for a couple of hours until about 8:00, and I reached in my pocket and pulled out the only set of pickup keys that we had, other than the one I had hid under the hood. I looked at it and I said, Well, Arlene isn t going anywhere today. I guess she won t need to anyway. She will do hair. Then I didn t think anymore about it. About 12:00, maybe quarter after 12:00 or 12:30 when we stopped to eat lunch, we had to radio to the Ashton office to see about a guy who was coming to work up there and we heard a couple of the other guys, one guy from Wilford, Lowell Birch, and Chuck Dexhiemer, talking on the radio. They were saying something about turning their cattle loose. Go down and tell my wife to go down to the pasture and turn the cattle out so they can have a chance to get away if something happens. I thought, What the heck are they doing that for? Then they kept talking for a few minutes and then they quit. So Wayne Jenkins, the fellow I was working with, called in to check on that and Chuck said, Is Brent there handy? He said, Yeah. He said, Well, you better get him in the pickup and get him down here because he lives below that Teton Dam, and the Teton Dam has busted. We signed off and pout the radio up and headed down as fast as we could. We made one of the fastest trips out of there I ve ever made. As we drove, I radioed Chuck to have him call my wife on the telephone to warn her. They tried twice, but the line was busy both times. The third time the line was dea. We were talking about it on the way down, and I said, Well, I hope my kids come home from work because my wife doesn t have the keys to that pickup. I kept saying that, and then we talked about how deep it would be. We thought, well, maybe it would be five or size inches deep in the house, and I didn t realize I guess how much water there was back behind that dam. I knew it was about full. When I got down here, we hit the roadblock. They had a roadblock up at Ashton and they said we shouldn t go on down, but I went anyway. I told them I had to find my family. There were neighbors at the Chester store, so we stopped there to see if my wife happened to be there and she wasn t. We went on down to St. Anthony and it was probably between 1:00 and 1:30 sometime when we hit St. Anthony. We talked to neighbors all around couldn t find anybody who had seen my wife. We tried to go out of town toward Wilford and there was a Fish and Game mane there, and He wouldn t let us through. Oh, I guess we could have gone if we had just drove on through, but he said, You better not go. He said the water was clear down to the roadside part at St. Anthony, and by that time I began to get frantic because nobody had seen my wife. They hadn t seen her leave or anything. So we looked all around and I finally heard that Lynn, my brother, was up to the Wendell Greenhaulgh place at Chester. So I and Larry Kerbs got together. He was looking for his family too. He was pretty sure that they were out, but he wasn t right positive and we took off back up to Chester looking around. Finally I found Lynn, and he hadn t seen Arlene, but he thought she was out. I looked around, and like she said, it was around 5:00 or so, I kept going back to the Stake center and looking all around. I got to thinking, Maybe she went over to Rexburg, or she decided to go over

8 there where the hill was or something. I finally found her at the Stake Center. She was coming back out as I was going back in. I asked her then, How did you get that pickup out of there without the keys? How did you get these keys? How did you get these keys? She handed me the keys to the pickup because we were going to go over to my cousin s place to see if he would store some of our stuff she had in the pickup. She handed me the keys to the pickup that I had had in my pocket that morning. To this day I don t know how they got there, but I swear on a stack of Bibles that they were in my pocket that morning, and when I got down there, she handed me the keys. She had driven the pickup and the spare key was still under the hood. MA: Did you feel in your pocket to see if the keys that you found there earlier were in your pocket? MR: Yeah, when I was talking to her, I reached in and there was nothing there. That was the only set of keys that I had. It was a brass key that had a brass figure on it that had a cowboy riding a horse. That was the only key like that I had, and it was the only key to the pickup I had. MA: And that was the set that she handed you? MR: That s the set that she handed me when I was talking to her. Mrs. R: I never looked for keys. I don t remember thinking I ought to have a key or I needed it or anything. We were out there to turn out the cattle and I just ran and got in the outfit and drove off. MA: So the keys were in the pickup when you got in the pickup? Mrs. R: I don t know even if I had a key, all I know is I just got in there and drove. MA: Started it. Mrs. R: Started it and drove off. There was a little peg just above the kitchen stove that we keep the keys on; we went out with the intention of turning the cattle out, not with leaving. I don t know why we went out when we did, we had just been standing there talking and said maybe we had better go turn the cattle out and so we went out. MA: Did you turn the cattle out? Mrs. R: No, we didn t have time. MA: Mr. Romrell, did you ever find any of your cattle after the flood was over? MR: Well, we figured they were dead, being this close to the front of the water when it came out of the canyon. We didn t look for a week, and when we finally looked, we got to looking through the corrals and the first one I found was the milk cow. I didn t have a brand and the brand inspector said, Is there any way you can prove it? I said, Well, she s got a cyst on her bag that she s had since she calved. I told him where it was and e said, Well, if she has the cyst, she s yours. I went over there and checked, and sure enough. So he let me take the cow out, and then we looked around some more. We had about a seven month old calf and I walked up to the corral and said, That s my calf there. And he said, Well, prove it. But I couldn t. I said, Well, my wife and kids could probably identify it if they d come up. About that time Kerry came up and he said, That s our calf in there, Daddy. Arlene came up later and I hadn t talked to either one of them and the inspector knew, I hadn t because I was standing there with him. Arlene said that was our calf and he said, Well, you d better take the calf. Then I had a steer besides that and a bull in the pasture out here. They weren t in any of those corrals at Orme s in Egin. I went over to the Crapo corrals in Parker because they were supposed to have some there. I found the steer; I had just traded a big heifer for the steer. He didn t

9 have a brand but we loaded him up and took him home anyway. I saw the fellow the next day or two that owned the bull. I said, I think that bull is in there. I didn t know him well enough to recognize him, but it looked like the one that was in my pasture. I think that bull is in Crapo s corral. So he went down to the corrals to see if the bull was there. This was Dell Palmer, the one who had the bull in our pasture when he went to guard, and he just hadn t got the bull out yet. He went down there and checked, and sure enough, he said, That s my bull. But he didn t have a brand on the bull either because he had just bought him. The brand inspector said, Is there any way you can prove it? And he said, Yeah, I can ride that thing out of there. So he jumped on the back of the bull and he rode him out of there and they let him take him home. We found all four of the animals that had been in our corral alive. They were bruised but not too bad. MA: Do you have any idea where the animals were found? MR: Not really, no. They had to be found down in the Salem area though because they took all the cattle they found in that area over to Orem s and the cattle they found in this area they took over to the old slaughterhouse near St. Anthony. MA: Mrs. Romrell, do you feel that the fact that you cattle were found is incredible, I mean found alive? Mrs. R: Yes, because like he said, for a week I wouldn t even let him go look because I didn t think they would be alive. MA: Having seen that wall of water, do you think that any animal could have survived it? I mean, we know that animals survived it, but at the time did you even think about that or as you look back on it? Mrs. R: I didn t think there would be anything left. I didn t think there would be a thing. I didn t think any animal could live. MA: You were telling how you found Mrs. Romrell after the flood. Now would you pick up the story and tell about what happened after that on that first day? MR: Well, after we got the pickup, she said, Well, let s leave the car at the stake center and take the pickup. She said, I can t drive the pickup very well. I believe a couple of the boys had gone out to some friend s house. We took the pickup and went over to my cousin s place to see if they d put us up because we didn t know what to do. I had bet two or three different people in town, and they had told me if I needed a place to stay to go to their place. But I guess I just didn t feel right going to strangers places. I mean, I knew them, but not that well. So we took the stuff over to my cousin s and asked them if we could stay there for awhile until we decided what to do. They said Sure. We took the pickup over and unloaded all the stuff Arlene had in our pickup, and then we went down to where he dad was with their pickup, and we had them bring their pickup so we could unload that stuff there, too. That was about 6:30, 7:00. Then we decided we would drive back this way and see what we could see. So we came out there to the stud mill corner on the Wilford Highway and turned east said you couldn t go any father south because the water was still across the road and there was no way of getting through. You d have to turn around and it would really foul traffic up, and they had a lot of traffic in there. I believe it was the police that had the checking station, but I don t remember. Somebody had a checking station there or a road block. So we turned east and went up to the corner of Delton Brower s place and the water had gone down. It had been through there, and it had gone down quite a bit through

10 that part. In fact, it had quit coming over the hill, so you knew there was still water standing out in there. We saw the house of Pete Angel and the water had been up eight feet on the outside. You could see where the waterline was and he was like the rest of us. He said, What am I going to do. I don t know what to do. And Delton was trying to round up a generator he had out in his garage. The back of his garage was washed out and he was trying to get the generator out to see if we could get it fixed to see if he could hook it up and milk his cows. But it wasn t running at all. And it was still about three miles on over to our place and with as much water as was still around, we decided to go on back to my cousins. It was getting late anyway, about dark. We went back and stayed at my cousin s place, Roger and Carolyn Bratt, that night. Then early the next morning we heard on the radio that they letting anybody in the flood area without a pass, and you had to get the pass from the sheriff s office. So I went down there and the forest service guys were helping set up roadblocks, checking the homes and empty cars and stuff, looking for any possible bodies or anything that would still be out there. They told me I could go ahead because I worked for the Forest Service. In fact, all the clothes I had been a Forest Service uniform with the badges on. That got me through any roadblock when I needed to go anywhere because when they saw my uniform. They just said, Go ahead. So I took the Daw family out to their place. They were really concerned about Grandpa and Grandma Daw because they had never found them. We went out to Delton Brower s corner. The Sheriff s office said we shouldn t get through the Teton Highway yet because there was still water going across it and they didn t know how bad it was washed. It was abut 7:00 in the morning and we walked in to the Daw place. Grandpa Daw s place was completely washed away and there was no sign of anything for quite a ways. I left the Daws there to look at their grand dad s place and to look for him and to go on over and check their own places. I decided I would walk on in and see what happened to my place. I really kind of expected to see the house still standing, but when I walked over the hill and saw nothing but sand, it was really a sad sight. I couldn t believe it until I got here and saw that there was nothing left but sand and gravel in this whole two mile stretch. MA: Excuse me, but were you alone? MR: Yeah, I was alone when I came over the hill by the Kubal place. I walked down the road until got to these trees east of our house. They were about 800 feet east of our house. It had been solid trees. You couldn t even see through them. After the water had gone through, all that was left was two trees on one end and three on the other end. All the ones in the middle were completely gone. MA: How big were these trees? MR: Oh, I d say they were about feet tall. They were poplars and they were really thick in there. You know they really suckered out and they had suckered out quite a bit. I imagine they were about feet thick in that grove. Almost everything was completely wiped out of there. On our place, we had had seven or eight older apple trees. I imagine they were 20 feet tall, and there wasn t a tree left of them. And my house, all that was left there was three sides of the foundation. The back of the foundation was completely washed away and there was no sign of anything. And as far as mud and debris to clean up, we didn t have that. We had a lot of sand and gravel to clean off the place and the well pit that was about six feet deep was full of sand and gravel. Two walls of the

11 partial basement were completely washed away. There was still one wall left in there, but the basement was completely full of sand and gravel. I just couldn t believe it. I followed the tracks made by the house. You could see where the house, well the debris from the house, had just drug right down through the field and into my brother s house. The Ashcroft house was east of my place and you could see the drag of it coming right down by mine and in towards Max s house. You could just see the drag marks in Larry Kerbs hayfield down here where it went through. I just couldn t believe it. Then I saw some Forest Service outfits down there on Max s corner and I decided maybe I could catch a ride back with them. If they could drive in, then maybe I could go get my pickup and come back in as far as they did. The ranger from Ashton, Burt Webster, was down there and he took me back around to my pickup. I come back up here and looked around a little bit ore and was looking for anything I could find. Then I decided I would go back to town. It was Sunday and Arlene had waited in town. I think she had gone to church that morning and some friends had drove up from Rigby clear around through dubious and come in and picked her up from church and was coming out. I met them and we come back out here to my Brother Max s corner. We started walking out to our place here and Arlene kept saying, Are we to our house? We ve gone past it. And I kept saying, No, and finally I had to say Well where was the cemetery? You could still see the trees and stuff in the cemetery and the one, white building that hadn t washed away. And she said, Well, it was just straight north of or house. And I said, Well, where is it? And she said, Well, we re not there yet. Finally we came on up here and she finally could see the foundation where our step had been on the house. MA: What did you do when you saw what the devastation was, Mrs. Romrell? Mrs. R: Well, walking up here I could see there was nothing, but I had the nerve to believe that when I got here, I would walk in and that house would be there. I walked up those steps and fell on the other side. There was no door when I went to open it. I just, I don t know, if you ever felt like nothing, it was nothing. I said seventeen years ago when we got married, we didn t have three kids to be responsible for and we even had a bed to go to bed in and here we are seventeen years later with not even a knife or fork or spoon to our name. MA: Did you feel any bitterness toward anyone at that time? Mrs. R: You bet. If they would have been out there, I would have clobbered them all. As I said, if I could have slapped or kicked or hit anybody, I think I would have felt better because there was nothing there at all. We dug around in the sand and you found like a record or a sheet off of one of the kids beds. They didn t take the bottom fitted sheet. One of the kid s shirts was in the sand, the ironing board; the handle of the vacuum was sticking out of the gutter over there, just little things like that you passed as you came out, front panel off the dishwasher. MA: so where did you stay during the weeks to come while you built a new home? MR: Well, the first couple of nights or three we stayed at Bratt s. Then while we were gathering up the livestock we ran into a fellow that said that he knew of a couple that had a house, or an apartment and we could stay there. He was sure. They told him that they would let anybody stay there and we could stay there. It was Elmer Rate and his wife. They are in St. Anthony and they had a bedroom, a kitchen, and a living room apartment underneath their trailer. It s a basement underneath their trailer. So we lived there until our HUD trailer moved in July. We had quite a time with the HUD trying to get the

12 trailer out here. They kept telling us there was too much sand and they couldn t believe we wanted it back out here. But we had a well out here and I figured we just as well have the HUD trailer out here where our own land was rather than live in town somewhere. At least we were back on our own property. And so we moved to here and we camped in the HUD trailer with a Coleman stove and a gas lantern until they got the power hooked up. The power company was about the best outfit of the utilities around. They had the power in here right the next week. But the trouble came in getting the HUD people to put their service pole up and get the trailer hooked up. I finally put my own utilities on my own service pole out here and then HUD finally came along and put their pole in and put their hook-ups. They had to have their pole in, and then we got the trailer hooked up and probably lived in it three weeks before we ever had any electricity. MA: So how soon after the flood did you get your HUD trailer? Mrs. R: The HUD trailer was pulled in here, one of the very first HUD trailers probably ten or eleven days after, It was pulled in but they wouldn t let us move into it. MA: So when did they finally let you into it? Mrs. R: we stayed the first night, The 4 th of July, was the first night we stayed in the HUD trailer. MA: Let s see, so that was just about a month after the flood. You were some of the first to stay out here right after the flood is that correct? MR: Larry Kerbs was the first ones out here that was actually in the flood area, and then we were the second. It was an eerie feeling when we moved out here. Why that first night we stayed here there wasn t a light anywhere around to be seen in this area. You could hear people over in Teton just normally talking to each other just as plain as if they were standing beside you. It was really eerie. I think it felt worse than the time of the pioneers because there just weren t nay lights or nothing, not even a lantern. Mrs. R: There weren t any animals, there was no machinery, it was just dead silence and it was so pitch black. MA: Where you uncomfortable, Mrs. Romrell? Mrs. R: I was scared. Well, they had done so much talking about people looting and there was all kind of trashy people in here. I mean everyday this road was like Grand Central Station. They d go up and then they d have to turn around and come back, but people with their heads out the windows just gawking at you. It was just a steady stream of people all the time. Of course you never knew what, out of state licenses; there were people in here that you just wouldn t believe. MA: Do you think they were tourists? Mrs. R: I think they were out to just get a look. They had heard what had happened and they wanted to see. MA: Have you wondered how they got through the roadblocks? Mrs. R: Out of state people got through them easier than the people who lived here. Of course there is always a way to get around road blocks if you want to run them bad enough, if you know the area. Because we had to go through to or three sets of road blocks to get folks place but we knew the other roads. If you couldn t get through you could detour a mile and get through. MA: Do you feel that the roadblocks and the state police were generally effective in helping during the flood and after the flood? Mrs. R: I though they were real good.

13 MR: They did as good a job as they could, I think with the facilities they had. There were a few times it was rather irritating. But like I said before, with that forest service shirt and hat on I could get in and out anytime I needed to. I could even go through Rexburg anytime because they didn t ever question me. Mrs. R: About two weeks after the flood, we were going to the folks one day and the kids were in the back of the pickup and one of them started banging on the top and said, stop, stop stop, we ve found the dog. See we had never found the dog after we let it out at the folk s place. Before we stopped the kid was out and had the dog in his arms and the people where the dog was said it had been in their yard, floated through on a log and they caught it. It died later, it wouldn t stay here. The minute it was turned loose it headed west as fast as it could go and it just wouldn t stay here. I don t think he though this was home. But we did find it. The kids had a grin you would have thought they had found a million dollars. MA: How would you rate HUD s dealings with you? Did you feel like HUD treated you fairly and that they were quite efficient in getting you your trailer and getting you into it? MR: I think looking back at it, they probably did about as fast as they could. I think the thing that really surprised the HUD people so much was the people in this community were willing to get back into their own places. They had already started the motion of doing these things. They told me when they go back to these other floods and stuff like this that it might be two or three weeks and people are still sitting there waiting for help. They let HUD and everybody else does everything for them, but the people here were cleaning their place off and wanting to put their trailers out on their own place while in other disasters, the people would move into a town or somewhere. HUD was really surprised. We had a little trouble with some of the people from HUD because they didn t want to put our trailer out here because of the sand. One night at one of the meetings I caught Jerry somebody, the head man from HUD that was out here at that time. They told us if we had any problems to talk to him. So I said, Say, I want my trailer to on my place. I ve had a cat come in and clean the sand off which is about 12 to 18 inches deep out here. I ve had them push it back and clean it off so I can put the trailer there. I want that trailer out to my place and they keep telling me there is too much sand in the roads there. It s cleaned off real good and although there is still a little bit of sand there, nobody will get stuck. Even if it isn t good enough, I ll go get the county and they ll come in again and finish cleaning it. The next day the second in command of HUD came out with the guy that was giving me the trouble and he said, Where do you want the trailer. Then when we got it here, I wanted to put it in the old driveway so it was on solid footing. They kept insisting that we had to put it over here where my pasture was, and finally that s where I let them go ahead rather than keep fighting them. Then I had trouble getting my house situated in the direction I wanted because of that. Mrs. R: They insisted that you could not put a HUD trailer within 15 feet of any existing building. But three walls I didn t think constituted any existing building. And then another thing that irritated me about HUD was the type of people they sent. Some of them didn t know anything. I could have done things they were doing. I had more sense about things they were doing. Like they went to put the steps up to the HUD trailer and they were like about an inch and a half too tall and you couldn t get the door open. So they were going to load them back up and go back to town or wherever their headquarters

14 were and build new steps. All you had to do was taking a shovel and shovel down a couple of inches of dirt and set the steps up, but they were going to build new steps. MA: Did you suggest to them? Mrs. R: No, a guy that was standing there showed them how. A friend who was here said, Don t go. I ll show you how to do it. MR: One of the funny things, when we did get a service pole, they were storing some of their stuff here and they were loading up their poles to take off. I said, You can t do that until you put my pole up. They said, Well, we don t have no way. Our backhoe is clear down there. They kept telling us they d get it. It was down there at some other place in Rexburg. I said, Well, you give me fifteen minutes and I ll go down here and get my cousin s backhoe that he brought up to my dad s place. It was on a big Minneapolis Molene tractor and I never drove that kind of tractor before, or backhoe. But I went down and started her up and came back and dug the hole for them. Then they wanted me to push the dirt in but the backhoe just wouldn t push like that. A friend came along and he said, You got a shovel? and I said Yeah, over there. He went and got it and started shoveling and pretty quick the HUD guys got feeling guilty I guess, and so they started shoveling then, instead of me trying to push the dirt in, spinning a couple of hours trying to push it back in with that backhoe because I d never run one before in my life. But we finally got the pole put in. MA: Did you deal with any other government agencies after the flood? Mrs. R: We got a loan through SBA but they were really, really good. MA: You got along with SBA very well? Mrs. R: Yeah. In fact, we didn t have any trouble at all. Other couples kept saying they were having so much trouble with them and we never had any trouble at all with SBA. MR: They did want out title to our trailer and they had it all the time. But they kept telling us they didn t and they wanted it. We got our settlement before they finally got pressuring us, but we didn t have any trouble. They were real nice about it. FHA didn t really want to deal with us too much. We did apply for a loan and I suppose we could have gone ahead and got it, but they wanted us to build the same size house and wouldn t let us have a mobile home. There were quite a few restrictions they had on it. MA: Did you get along all right with the Bureau of Reclamation? MR: well, we had quite a time with the Bureau. We turned our claim in August and the first verifier that came out really raked us apart. He said You couldn t have had $200 worth of sporting equipment. And the beauty shop stuff, I don t know I haven t checked it out. I ll have to go to some of these other places in Rexburg. Arlene said, Well, those places in Rexburg don t sell the equipment. It s these beauty supply places that sell the equipment, not another beauty shop. The people that they sent out didn t know anything about this kind of stuff. He was supposed to have been an FHA verifies, but he didn t even know very much about land. And then when he left, Arlene was in the hospital for a week because of almost a nervous breakdown just because of the trouble. He had irritated us just saying this isn t right and that isn t right. Mrs. R: He was here for three and a half hours saying You couldn t have done this, and you didn t have that. He was a young kid, a bachelor, I don t think he had any idea what it takes to run a house; he had no idea of what a beauty shop consisted of. MA: Did you request another verifier?

15 MR: No, but we had two more before we got through. MA: Did the Bureau finally honor your claim? Mrs. R: Part way. MA: They cut us $17,000 at one time on the house which we couldn t accept because of the fact that when the flood first hit, and right after the first week or so, we went and got bids on houses because we had heard that there was a possibility that the government would pay. But we felt like whether they paid or not, we didn t owe any payments anywhere before the flood and we could afford a payment on the house. We felt we could afford it better than some of the other people so we were going t go ahead and build the house whether they reimbursed us or not. So we got these bids on the house right after. They were three local people, they hadn t raised their prices, and they kind of had an idea of what our house was. They had been by it, and one of them had been in it, and all three bids were within $1.000 of each other. Then the Bureau cut us $17,000. After meeting with them for two weeks every night almost, they did come up and give us full price on the house. We did get cut in other places where we felt like we shouldn t have, but rather than have Arlene in t he hospital and all this nervous tension between everybody, we just finally gave in t them. I really felt like anybody that turned in a claim, that the Bureau would cut them, and if they didn t say anything, that would be fine. That s that much less money to pay out. I really got that feeling when I met with them and everybody I talked to felt the same way. There were a few that sent claims in and didn t have a bit of trouble, but I think it was just few and far between. And usually they were people who didn t have a lot of different things like land, house, and beauty shop and a whole bunch of different farm machinery. It was just a simple house that the claims had just gone right through on. Mrs. R: They told us that were the reason we had so much trouble with ours was because it was more complicated because we had a farm, beauty shop, house, cattle, and machinery. MA: Did you try to assess the full damage to your land at the time you submitted your first claim or do you intend to submit another claim for the land? MR: I tried to assess the full value. I put in a value with a salvage value in it which probably wasn t enough to take care of it. Then I had a fellow clean the land that told me that they would be fair about it and they said it only took so much an hour for all the equipment. I can t remember the figures. They were on my brother s place and I said, Well, I ll let you clean the land if you won t go over a certain figure. They had told me they would be fair about it and I figured they would. I know now that if I had another fellow do it, he would have done it for half the price. Figuring out their hours on it, it would have been half the price to do it. So I kind of got took. But Arlene says I didn t get took because I had them do it. MA: Well, you told them a price. MR: I set a price that they couldn t go over and so that s the price that they did it for. I really felt bad about that, too, but there was nothing we could do. MA: Do you feel that during rebuilding operations here in the upper valley that there were those who tried to rip off the people and rip off the government by getting more money than they deserved for the work that they did? MR: I know that there was. I know there were several cases where they did that. They took advantage of the people and the government. It s sad in some cases. There were a lot

16 of the people who wouldn t stand for some of it where it was against the people. Some of them took advantage of some of these elderly people and the widows that I know of. They just put in such a high price you wouldn t believe it. MA: Do you know of anyone, without divulging names of course, who filed fraudulent flood claims? Mrs. R: Oh, yeah. MR: Yeah, I believe I do. Mrs. R: They re the ones that made it tough on those that filed an honest claim. MA: How do you mean? Mrs. R: Well, I think they saw several of those so they sere on the look-out and watching for everybody and if anything looked out of line at all like with ours, the first thing the guy did was jump on us at cur sports equipment. Well, I said to him, we didn t claim doll buggies and doll houses and dolls and play dishes and things like that because we only have boys in our family and they don t stop to consider any of that. It just looked way out of line. Our boys are older, they ve worked moving sprinkler pipe for four or five years and that s the kind of things they spent their money on so we had more sports equipment that most people would have had. MR: Our boys had averaged about $1.500 or $2.000 a year during the summer and they had spent a lot of money on their porting stuff and we had spent quite a bit because we like to fish and hunt. MA: So what you re saying is that the people who filed fraudulent flood claims made the Bureau suspicious of everybody? MR: Some of them got through without making the Bureau suspicious I feel like but then there was some that the Bureau did think was suspicious. I don t know if they paid fraudulent claims but I think they realized that it wasn t that high and they cut them down. That s what hurt the rest of us because they knew that the prices they put in wasn t that good. Mrs. R: I feel like we were on the raw end of the deal, we were on this end where there was no help. We got the big batch of water, but that s all we got. When it came to help being sent in and fun and games for all the wards in Rexburg or being invited out by other wards we didn t have nay of that. MA: You were talking about your dealings with the Bureau and about people who filed fraudulent flood claims. Now let me get back to your claim. When did you finally get your claim? Mrs. R: Just about a week before Christmas. MA: Had you started building your home before that? Mrs. R: Oh, yes. We were in it. MA: By then. How soon did you move into your new home? Mrs. R: The last Saturday in august. MA: So you were one of the first out here to move into a new home. Mrs. R: There were three in before we were. But then we put a double wide trailer on a basement so the top half was finished. MA: Are you happy with your home now? Mrs. R: It s a house, it s not a home. MA: In talking with you, Mrs. Romrell, I get the feeling that you had some very strong attachments to that home you lose?