Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most devastating natural disasters to ever hit the Roanoke Valley. Days of rain culminated with the Roanoke River rising 19 feet in 12 hours on Election Day, 1985.
The city has worked to be better prepared for flooding in the decades since.
It had already been raining for days as the remnants of Hurricane Juan sent several storm systems towards the region. That culminated in nearly seven inches of rain falling on Roanoke on November 4th, 1985 – resulting in a dramatic rise of the Roanoke River and many rescues and evacuations.
It’s a day well documented in news coverage and remembered by David Hoback – the city’s current Fire Chief. In a video documentary put together by Roanoke officials, Hoback talks about how he and other paramedics couldn’t even get to some folks because of the rising water.
“Back then, the city of Roanoke and the Roanoke Valley was not prepared for flooding," Hoback says. "We did not have the teams that we have now – swift water teams, we did not have the boats, the technology or the training. So, we were just kind of ad libbing whatever we could do.”
Former WDBJ Chief Meteorologist Robin Reed remembers that November 4th well, too. He had just started working for the television station a few years prior and recalls that forecasters at the time knew what Juan had done along the Gulf Coast and that even more rain was on the way, but yet…
“Then what happened, I think was very much a surprise to everybody – just the way the rain tracked, the way the rain kind of got hung up a little bit upstream because it’s November, so leaves in the creeks and branches in the creeks – it’s a little bit of a backup going on," he says. "And so, when it released, it released kind of all at once and overwhelmed the Roanoke city infrastructure, which is pretty low down and not far from the river.”
Reed says his wife asked their neighbors at the time about the rising water, and they weren’t concerned…
“I think the phrase was, ‘It’s never gone any higher than the tops of the tires of the car,’ or something like that," he remembers. "Yeah, 25 feet later that got smashed pretty badly.”
The Roanoke River crested at just over 23 feet, sweeping away homes, cars and anything else in its way. Three people died in the city and 10 in the Roanoke Valley.
“We classify – looking back on that event – it as a one in 175-year flood event. Which just means that it has about a half a percent chance of happening on any given year," says Gwyneth Martin, an environmental specialist with the City of Roanoke’s Stormwater Utility department. She says Roanoke just wasn’t prepared at the time.
“People noticed that a lot of the storm drains that were in place at the time were very quickly flooded or backed up," Martin says. "And coming out of that flood, the city took a lot of actions to mitigate future flooding – primarily with the benchcuts, partnering with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to implement those throughout the city – from the border with Salem to the border with Vinton.”
That project with the Corps is probably the biggest resiliency effort Roanoke took after the Flood of 1985. It began in 1990 and took more than two decades and millions in federal dollars to complete but has been helpful in preventing other floods – including in 2018 and just last year as Hurricane Helene rolled through.
“It’s basically a floodplain bench that’s constructed or cut into the streambank – so it’s like benchcut," says McKenzie Brocker, Water Quality Administrator for the department. "And a floodplain bench is just an area next to a stream that the floodwater can spill out onto and sit on like a bench. So, the water can expand there so that it doesn’t go somewhere we don’t want it to go – like into a building or a roadway or someplace that might risk human health.”
Roanoke has implemented other mitigation practices since 1985 as well – including better monitoring and maintenance of storm drains, capital improvement projects, stream restoration, floodplain revisions and other efforts. Brocker says a lot of the city’s park system has also been strategically placed within the floodplain to limit damage to structures should waters rise again.
“Some of those areas that experience a lot of devastation – like Brown Robertson Park used to be a neighborhood and that was bought out after the flood and the damages and turned into a park," she says. "Same with Vic Thomas Park and some other areas that we call acquisition demolition that we still do now for areas that are high risk of repetitive flooding.”
Meteorologist Robin Reed says Roanoke leaders took action following the flood in 1985, which isn’t always the case.
“Sometimes that doesn’t get done after disasters – everybody moves on and it comes back to haunt them again," Reed says. "And I just think that sometimes people don’t want to put in the energy or the money or the time to avert something that may not happen for another hundred years.”
The city is still working to improve its stormwater efforts – just recently receiving some state grants for continued resiliency-related projects.
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