It was raining lightly outside at about 10 p.m. when Steve Nally of east Thermopolis heard a sudden sound that brought him outside to his porch.
“I heard this roaring coming in my direction,” Nally said. “I saw a wall of water coming down around the van, and it looked like it was 10 feet tall.”
Nally quickly dialed 911, and by the time he got through, the water was already getting close the road.
"You need to send rescue out here,” Nally told the operator. “We're in trouble."
By the time he hung up, the flood water was already up to the skirting of his house.
“From there, it just went crazy,” Nally said. “I hollered for my wife to come out when I first saw it, and by the time she got out there it was already up to the house, and it just kept getting worse and worse, going on the highway.”
That water came from a deluge of about 4.25 inches of rain in an hour, which is close to half what the town typically gets in a year, said Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day.
“I heard from someone in Thermopolis that they got 4.25 inches of precipitation in one hour on Wednesday,” he said. “Thermopolis usually gets around 9 inches of precipitation in the whole year.”
The flash flood was “classic monsoon” behavior, he said, the result of several intense thunderstorms reported throughout northwest Wyoming on Wednesday.
Woman, Dog And Rabbit Rescued
Nally said that he saw the lights from emergency vehicles responding to help people caught in the torrent, but the road was already so flooded that they could only get so close.
“They showed a light over here to see if I was OK. I said, 'Yeah, but check on those people,' because I hadn't seen anything but them, because they couldn't get out the front door,” Nally said.
He was referring to a trailer house where 24-year-old Morgan Jacobs lives. Her trailer is in a low valley where a culvert was directing the water.
Thermopolis Chief of Police Pat Cornwall said that he had only seen the area flood once before, and that Wednesday night's was the worse he had ever seen.
Once the waters began to recede, Cornwall made the decision to wade through waist-deep water to rescue the young woman and her dog, who were stranded in the trailer.
“We waited probably about 15 minutes, and I could tell that the water was starting to recede back, but it was still rushing in (and) this gal is scared to death,” Cornwall said. “When I got to the front steps, they were full of debris, so I had to clear it out of the way just to get in the front door.
“Logs were floating by me as I was going by.”
Cornwall reassured the young woman she was safe and told her to pack a bag.
“She had ankle-deep water inside the house,” Cornwall said. “She had her dog and a rabbit, and she's a younger gal, so I could understand why she was so scared.”
Cornwall said that when he got inside her home, the entire house was full of mud and it felt like it was rocking.
“I just calmed her down,” Cornwall said. “I told her to pack a bag and that I'd piggyback her out of there once she was ready. I think she was more worried about the whole trailer starting to float away because it was pushing so hard against that trailer.”
Kathy Sorensen also watched the rescue, and said she was impressed.
“The chief waited a few minutes because we could tell the water was going down, so it wasn't quite as risky,” Sorensen said. “He tested the water a couple of times and came back out.
"Once he thought it was a calculated risk, he went over and sat with her until the fire department could get in and carry her out, along with her dog.”
Once they got Jacobs safely out of the house, Cornwall continued to survey the damage and realized her car had been swept about 75 feet away.
Attempts to reach Jacobs were unsuccessful by publication.
‘Begging For Her Not To Let Me Die'
Jacobs told Cowboy State Daily that the flood came up so fast, she had no time to react or get out.
She was alerted when her dog, Raven, was outside and wanted to come in.
“She started whining, and then it became an extreme whining, so immediately I was alerted and I thought something had happened,” Jacobs said. “So I had gone outside.
“I didn’t make it two steps off of my office stairs into my house before I realized that everything was underwater. There was nowhere for me to go.”
She said that not only was the water rising, it was fast and aggressive.
“The water was moving so fast, and it almost looked like a waterfall in flash-flood form,” she said. “It was pulling just so extreme.”
It didn’t take long after retreating into her home that Jacobs said she became aware that she wasn’t out of danger.
“When we got into the house, I realized that our situation had gravely changed directions,” Jacobs said. “The water was coming up through the vents and the floorboards. It was filling the hall, the bathroom. There was nowhere there wasn’t water, and it was coming fast.”
After trying to call her boyfriend, Jacobs said she spent 26 minutes on the phone with a 911 operator “just begging for her not to let me die."
“I genuinely didn’t think I was going to make it out,” she continued. “I could feel the house moving like we were on a boat, and it just got worse and worse.”
By the time emergency responders arrived, they couldn’t immediately get to her as they worked to cut off power to the home. Then Chief Cornwall got there.
“As I waited, he found a light and he had made his way across the yard into the house to sit there with me and comfort me,” Jacobs said. “I will never forget the feeling of seeing somebody come to my rescue and knowing that I’m not alone and that I’m not going to die by myself.”
Now she’s waking up to the reality that her home is a total loss and “my car is three houses down,” Jacobs said. “I swear it was parked next to my house last night. It’s filled with water.
“Everything we owned is just totaled, and it doesn’t look like my landlord’s insurance is going to cover it.”
Despite that, Jacobs said she’s “thankful for everybody who showed up for us and who is continuing to show up for us."
Not Out Of The Woods
The National Weather Service in Riverton issued its first warning for flash floods at 5:22 p.m. Wednesday for the Thermopolis area, and continued advisories and warnings until about 1:30 a.m., said meteorologist Jason Stroub.
“There is a flood watch in effect again (Thursday) pretty much from Thermopolis northwest toward Cody,” Stroub said. “This same scenario is possible for the next several days.”
Stroub said that these areas now are pretty saturated, which means any small thunderstorms can develop more quick flooding to any little creek that hasn't seen a lot of water recently.
“This same scenario is possible the next several days,” Stroub said. “If anybody sees floodwater, we just advise ‘turn around, don't drown.' You don't know what the depth of the water might be.”
Roaring Spring Creek
Sorensen had heard reports of the flood and went with her husband Basil to see what was going on. They own property in the area and arrived to see the home surrounded by water.
Eleven-year-old Micah Moon had gone outside at about 9:45 p.m. when he saw the flood rush down the street at his home in east Thermopolis.
“I thought there was just lots of rats going down the street,” Micah said. “Then I looked closer and realized it was water.”
He ran inside and got his dad, Joe, who watched as the flood surrounded the house.
“Water was on both sides of our house,” his dad said. “It was just flooding, and there were emergency crews out here, the fire department, and everybody.
“They had some roads blocked off, and it was just rushing down that creek there. It's devastating.”
Receded In Two Hours
G.R. Davis was visiting Thermopolis from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.
“Nothing like a natural disaster to welcome you to town,” Davis said. “My daughter noticed some police lights about 9:45, we came outside, and the water had already come up and had gone back down.
“It had already peaked and was receding ... in just a short amount of time.”
That also was Nally’s experience — intense and short.
“It just seemed like it lasted for a couple of hours,” Nally said. “Just water everywhere. It was horrific, (and) kind of hard to describe. It was the first time I'd seen that much water that way. I've seen it once before, but this just came down so fast.”
During the flood, Nally said he and his wife Donna had tried to get out the back door, but by the time they got to the door, the water was already around back.
“I guess we could have waded through it because it wasn't swift back there, but we didn't,” Nally said. “We just stood here and didn't know how much worse it was going to get.”
Joe Moon said that at his place several blocks from Spring Creek, the water had reached the rims on his truck and had washed his wood pile away.
“It took somebody's shed down in the creek over here,” Moon said. “At least a foot of water was running down this alley. It’s not good.”
Once the water receded a little bit, Sorensen said that she kept hearing a strange glugging sound.
“Everybody was looking at one another, and then we got the smell,” Sorensen said. “All at once everybody said, 'Oh no, that is a gas line.'”
Davis said that he had witnessed the gas line going off as well.
“The gas line was shooting up out of there for quite a while until they got it shut off last night,” Davis said.
According to Sorensen, the fire department plugged it off once the water had receded enough to safely do so.
Blue Skies
Joe Moon and Nally both said that it wasn’t raining that hard when the flash flood hit.
Meteorologist Straub said that the thunderstorm that caused all the damage developed about 10 miles east of Thermopolis and just kind of sat there for about an hour and a half.
“All of this moisture flowing across creeks that haven't seen a whole lot of moisture recently isn't going to absorb quickly,” Straub said. “So some of this floodwater was able to make it into east Thermopolis.”
Straub explained that the overarching impact was that they hada lot of monsoon moisture moving across western Wyoming yesterday. Little showers and thunderstorms were popping up here and there in isolated areas.
The thunderstorm that caused this flash flood had developed an estimated precipitation accumulation of between 2 and 4 inches.
Shane Rankin, the road supervisor for the Hot Springs County Road and Bridge, said this is the worse flooding he had seen.
“It didn't even really rain that hard in town, but I've heard reports of Lucerne Valley getting 2½ inches in an hour and the Buffalo Creek/Kirby Creek area getting up to 4 inches in an hour,” Rankin said.
Rankin had been called out at 10 p.m. to start closing down Buffalo Creek and Kirby Creek roads. The road closure has been lifted since they are passable, but Buffalo Creek Road remains closed to through traffic.
“Talking with some ranchers up on Buffalo Creek, it's the worst they've seen,” Rankin said. “It pulled fences out of the ground and stretched them across the road.
“It washed over the road in several spots, but we never lost the road anywhere. It remains intact, but all the gravel washed off in those places.”
Rankin said the county is going to have a couple of weeks of repairs to do once it dries out.
“Roads are still passable, but we do have some major damage in places where it's going to take us a while to fix,” Rankin said.
Joe Moon is already surveying the damage around his own home and said that he has about 2 inches of water in his garage. He has about a half inch of mud all the way around his place and his family is just trying to get out without wading through mud.
“It washed the little bridge out over here near east Thermopolis,” he said. “The bridge is literally hanging off into the creek, and they just redid that when a flood happened eight years ago.”
Sorensen said she is grateful the damage wasn’t worse.
“I was amazed — our house was surrounded by water, but it was dry inside,” she said. “Our yard is a debris field.”
Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.
