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When hundred-year floods don’t wait a hundred years


Every year, every area publication is taxed with penning the obligatory memorial to June 9, 1972. There was a flood that day in the Rapid City area, and nearly three hundred people died. For those who lived through those dark days, the memory refuses to fade with time, because it was one of those rare events that traumatized the entire community; folks and families from every walk of life, and few communities were harder hit than the Rapid City Indian Community.

In the years just after the Flood, almost every person in town had a powerful memory of the events, and much of the specifics were unnecessary to revisit during remembrances. But as time passed, more and more of the population was born after the Flood, until today, when most of the people living in the Rapid City area were not alive in 1972.

It is hard for those who were alive in 1972 to imagine a majority population that did not exist until after the Beatles, until after Color TV, until after CDs, internet, and cell phones. The times seemed so cutting edge, everything seemed so new and innovative and exciting. We look back and see that time now as a time of limited trends and perspectives, the CB radios, the polyester leisure suits, disco, rabbit-ears TV with three channels, cable TV with maybe a dozen channels, public phones and telephone booths, and Eighth Street crowded top to bottom with teenagers cruising just about every single night.

This was the reality back in 1972. Much of that reality was never learned by those born after 1972 to even be forgotten. The city population has almost doubled. It is inevitable that the events of June 9, 1972, will become just dates in a history book, just an historic event absent minded grandparents occasionally reference, like Pearl Harbor or the JFK assassination. At some point, probably early in the 2070’s, not one person who lived through the Flood will walk this earth. They called the Rapid City Flood a hundred-year flood, meaning it wasn’t going to happen again for another hundred years. And yet the next weekend, even more rain fell than on June 9, and 17 more people died, and the only reason that flood was not worse than June 9 was that the Canyon Lake Dam had already burst, the subsequent swath of destruction was relatively free of people a week later.

Every June dark clouds churn above the Black Hills skyline overlooking Rapid City, and the younger residents of the city don’t feel the fear older residents experience, those who saw those dark clouds dump a deluge so intense windshield wipers could not clear the water, and picture windows went opaque. Some saw a ten-foot wall of water roaring through the center of town as fast as a car. That is not something any human being in the path of such danger wants to ever see again or can explain to a person who has never seen such a sight.

One of the reasons the 1972 Flood killed so many people is because they would not believe it was happening. They were judging that night by previous nights when flood warnings were issued and National Guardsman came around warning people to evacuate, like back in 1962. Those flood waters topped people’s steps, licked at the bottom of their front doors, but they never graduated to the next threat level. Were similar rain clouds to form over Rapid City now as they did that uncharacteristically hot and muggy afternoon 51 years ago, would the populace be sufficiently alarmed, would the danger zones be comprehensively evacuated in time? What would happen to Central High School, the Civic Center, the Club for Boys, the Journey Museum? Back in 1972 over that very ground, cars were lodged in the boughs of trees ten feet off the ground.

In Sturgis they intentionally destroyed the river. They built a levee all along the banks, they sacrificed beauty for safety. Only one small Sturgis neighborhood remains vulnerable to severe flooding. Not the case in Rapid City. Everything seems safer, but that is because nothing remotely similar to 1972 has ever happened again.

 

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