‘It’s a mess’: In flood-ravaged North Georgia town, more devastation
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McCAYSVILLE — When the rain started falling Wednesday night, Kim Bowers headed to her downtown shop with sandbags.
She’s on edge now whenever it rains. It was only in the past few weeks that Bowers had been able to reopen the Nature’s Collectibles General Store. In August, flash flooding had dumped about a foot of water and mud into her shop in her small North Georgia town, and she’d had to replace all the flooring and much of the merchandise.
Sandbags in place, she felt as prepared as possible.
Then she got home, and the weather alerts on her phone started going off. One flash flooding warning after another, alarms blaring throughout the night. She didn’t bother trying to sleep.
By early Thursday morning, the devastation was overwhelming. The water system was out of operation and rescuers on motorized rafts and boats were busy saving dozens of residents from floodwaters. Gov. Brian Kemp would later declare a state of emergency in Fannin, Gilmer, Murray and Union counties. Fannin County Schools closed and will remain so Friday.
The hardest-hit areas, primarily south of McCaysville near the Fannin-Gilmer county line, saw roughly 8-11 inches of rain in 24 hours, National Weather Service meteorologist Luke Culver told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Thursday morning. The Toccoa River, which runs through McCaysville, crested at a record high.
“It’s unbelievable what we’ve lost,” Bowers said.
Remarkably, emergency management officials in the four affected counties said no injuries had been reported, though a few people had gone to a hospital for precautionary evaluations.
But inside Bowers’ shop, devastation. Shelves knocked on their side and piled on top of one another. A filing cabinet from her office that had floated to the front. Picture frames dangling from the walls.
Similar scenes of destruction were visible throughout the valley. McCaysville and Copperhill are really one town, split only by their names and a state border, and the sign marking that line was splattered in mud.
Everywhere, so much mud, so much out of place.
A ship from a church’s playground was lifted and carried down the river like Noah’s Ark and now rested several hundred yards away, the cross on its bow still erect. A field of debris had collected near the bridge that cuts through downtown McCaysville, which remains closed while Georgia Department of Transportation crews assess the damage.
The bridge itself was covered in a thick, muddy sludge. There was enough water in places that fish displaced from the river were seen swimming, lost. Two blocks away, another fish cast a ragged shadow as it lay in the street, mouth wide open.
“Oh yeah, it’s a mess,” said Copperhill resident Rich Lund, looking down at the river.
Record high river levels
The Toccoa River, which flows through McCaysville and changes to the Ocoee River at the Tennessee-Georgia line, reached records levels Thursday morning. Culver said at 7 a.m., the river crested at 18.05 feet, breaking the previous record of 17.75 feet in February 1990.
Over the past several days, Culver said the river had sat between 2 and 3 feet, which he said was normal. Since its peak early Thursday, Culver said the river has since been slowly lowering.
“The worst of the conditions have passed,” he said.
Still, the Weather Service warned that flooding is ongoing in Fannin and Gilmer counties, where schools also closed Thursday. Roads may still be unsafe to pass. Sections of McCaysville are under a mandatory curfew Thursday night.
People should be cautious, especially near the river, for the next several days, warned Scott Fiedler, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Valley Authority, which manages the watershed in the area.
Fiedler said the agency started working to stem water flowing into McCaysville on Tuesday, when weather forecasts predicted heavy storms were coming.
Although the city’s flooding came from uncontrolled streams pouring in from the mountains, the watershed’s entire system is still “seeing a tremendous flow from the Toccoa and the Ocoee,” he said, and the rivers could rise again.
“It’s deceiving because people think it’s over, but it’s not over yet,” Fiedler said.
Impacts in McCaysville
At the McCaysville Drug & Gun, store owner Hugh Rogers surveyed the damage.
“Look at the target over there,” he said, noting a water line about 5 feet high on the interior wall of his store. “Goes right through the bullseye.”
Friends had taken some of his store’s guns and were cleaning and oiling them so they wouldn’t rust.
On the other side of the river, there wasn’t much Ann Williams could do. The antiques she sells are special, one-of-a-kind finds from other eras. She found a ceramic saltshaker in the gutter as she walked up to her store Thursday. When she opened the door, more items were carried out by the floodwaters.
Crystal cups and bowls on high shelves were filled with yellowed water. A mahogany table set with pink Depression-era dishes had been carried clear from one side of the store to the other. Not a single place-setting looked disturbed, an oddity in a shop where almost everything else had been overturned, and where a pile of decorative Santas were lying face down in several inches of water.
Her store is called the Cuckoo’s Nest. Williams named it that because opening a business seemed crazy.
“It really feels like that way now,” she said.
A friend helped her recover her cash box, and she pulled the dirty bills and coins into a bag to take home. Williams joked she’d need to launder the money.
Mayor Terry Arp said he was just grateful everyone was alive. He hadn’t slept any, either, but it was a relief knowing that as bad as it was, there had been no loss of life even as dozens of people had required rescuing, some from the tops of apartment buildings.
McCaysville dealt with catastrophic flooding just a few months ago in August, when 7 inches of rain fell across eight hours. The city’s drainage systems were overwhelmed quickly when dirt and debris from road construction on Ga. 5 washed downhill toward downtown.
The city’s water treatment facility was damaged, and the police department and post office were flooded. McCaysville spent weeks making repairs. The city had only just reopened the police department and post office earlier this week before the latest round of flooding, according to police Chief Michael Earley.
Having two major floods in recent months has been devastating, Earley told reporters and, he added, “August was nothing compared to this.”
With McCaysville’s water plant down again, officials plan to distribute water Friday morning at City Hall.
Woken by alerts, residents escaped the flood
At a temporary Red Cross Shelter in Blue Ridge, about 20 minutes south of McCaysville, Brenda Oneal told the story of how she was rescued from rising floodwaters in the middle of the night.
Oneal, 64, lives in Copperhill and works at the Pilgrim’s poultry facility in Ellijay. Around 2 a.m. Thursday, she awoke to the sound of an emergency alert.
Oneal told a neighbor to put on his shoes. The water covered the hood of her car. It rushed into her duplex and rose to her knees. Rescuers arrived on a raft. She had to walk through water up to her chest.
“And the next thing I know, before we left,” she said, “the car was floatin’ down the road.”
Several other cars drifted away, too. Oneal said she knew of neighbors who had to leave so suddenly they didn’t have time to grab their pets.
Although Oneal expected the contents of her home to be a “total loss,” most of those things were replaceable.
“But you can’t replace your life,” she said.
— Staff writer Vanessa McCray and breaking news editor Kat Greene contributed to this article.
