City of Franklin remembers Floyd

FRANKLIN, Va. - It's been ten years since Hurricane Floyd left the entire town of Franklin buried under more than ten feet of water. It was part of the worst disaster in the city's history.

Hurricane Floyd swept through the area on the heels of Hurricane Dennis, which had just saturated the region.

The devastation in Franklin was some of the worst the city had ever seen. The Blackwater River crested, flooded the town and destroyed nearly 150 homes.

"You just can't imagine it," said Franklin business owner Vic Story. "I don't want to imagine it again."

September 1999 was a very wet month.

"We had so much rain," added Franklin business owner Parker Darden. "The ground was saturated."

First, Tropical Storm Dennis moved though the area. It was soon followed by Hurricane Floyd, which dropped 17 more inches.

"We saw the water coming out of the river," said Franklin Mayor James Councill. "We saw it coming up the street, but we figured it would stop."

"No one had any idea it was going to come up as fast as it did," added Story.

The banks of the Blackwater River could no longer hold it's contents. The waters spilled into the streets and started seeping into nearby businesses.

"Unless you've been through it there is no way to explain it," said story. "Sitting there, everything you basically worked for all of your life was sitting under water."

In some spots the water was 11-feet high. Most everyone lost everything.

"It's absolutely overwhelming," added Darden. "You just know what to do, but you just have to grab your boot straps, put them on and get going."

Clean up was a long process and ten years later Franklin is back, but the flood is not forgotten.

Councill says everyone learned a lesson in 1999. A lesson that storms are unpredictable.

"You can't put up dikes and you can't put of flood gates, but what we can do is more accurately monitor the river," added Councill.

Flood gauges have been strategically placed along the Blackwater. Officials are working with the Army Corps of Engineers find why the river flooded.

"They are going to go up the river," said Council. "They are going to look over the entire basin and we are going to look at the entire region. We are going to look at where the clogs are."

Councill says you can never fully prevent a flood from happening again, but the idea is to give people more time before the water rises.