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Transcript |
GODDARD: The river came over the banks about four or five o’clock. And we got, everybody from our neighborhood got rescued by boat and taken to the nearby park which is Loch Two Park. But the last boat was too full so me, my neighbor, and the friend that was helping us didn’t get rescued by boat so we had to swim out. And we got caught in the current and caught onto a tree and everything and then finally got to shore. But when the waters didn’t rise anymore we got about four, four and a half feet in our house.
GIBBONS: Did you realize that you were going to have to swim, I mean how did—?
GODDARD: No.
GIBBONS: Can you tell us a little more about that?
GODDARD: Yeah.
GIBBONS: Because the current was pretty strong, I imagine.
GODDARD: Yeah, well, we got, I don’t live on the river I live across the street from the river, but I mean you can see the river from my house, but so a nearby person from the neighborhood across the street from us had his fishing boat out there and was rescuing people from our neighborhood. And what really happened to our neighborhood is it became an island because the river was rising on one side and behind us is a flood plain or whatever, so it was rising up there, and then it came into our street, so we were stuck on a little island type thing. So he was rescuing people and then were just taking people out to the park where his truck was. It was flooding and so he wanted to get his truck and boat out.
So he took the last boat and he said he was going to come back and then when they got there my brother-in-law called me and said that they wouldn’t be able to come back. So just, they said we could walk all the way down the street and “We’ll meet you at the corner with a boat.” But earlier in the day it was already four or five feet deep, so I thought, why not just since we’re at the end of the street, we’ll just swim over to the Briley Parkway bridge and then walk up the rocks. I mean, we would of been fine. And so they thought it was a good idea and so we started walking from the house and it was probably a hundred feet or so. We were walking and it was up to our chests and then, and there was no current right there, and then it got up to our neck and we were still fine. But as soon as we got onto Pennington Bend, we crossed over the guardrail and it was like another river was going down Pennington Bend and it just, we all got swept away. And I got to the shore first and then my friend got on the rocks a little farther and then my neighbor luckily grabbed onto a little twig and my friend pulled him up. But to show how strong the current was, we started on one side of the bridge, under the bridge, and we got on the shore on the other side, so we crossed eight to ten lanes of traffic underneath the bridge, that’s how strong the current was.
GIBBONS: Wow.(laughing)
GODDARD: Yeah.
GIBBONS: Were you nervous at all? Or were you just kind of? Adrenaline?
GODDARD: Adrenaline, yeah.
GIBBONS: Yeah.
GODDARD: We, none of us, were scared or worried at that point but when we got picked up by a police car up on the bridge and they took us to our church and once we got to our church then it kind of all hit us because there was people with, we were all freezing cold and dripping wet and so they had dry clothes, they had showers, and food and that’s when it all hit us basically. |
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