Tier instinct

Tourists do find their way to the puppet participants was essential. But it could be preceded by loss of limbs, putting out of eyes, decapitation or the tearing off of armour. Always the blood flowed most realistically.

The first performance we saw from the front of the house was of St George’s battle with the Dragon; as important a story in Sicilian folk lore as in English. St George was a sturdy fellow who first proved himself against several giants. Then he took up his position and called upon the Dragon to show itself. With a roar it reared for­ward, spitting fire, belching smoke and lashing the air with its tail. Yet, watching, we were not only delighted by the melodrama; we were held by it. St George and the Dragon pranced and battled round the stage. For a while the Dragon had the better of the fight and St George was forced to the ground, shielding his face from the Dragon’s breath. Urged up by cries of ‘San Giorgio!’ from the audience, he rallied and in his turn pressed the Dragon hard. Our hearts beat faster. Worrying the Dragon into retreat, St George found the vital spot with his sword and the taut and writhing monster collapsed, bellow­ing, to become a limp, slightly ridiculous, beast. The triumphant St George, his foot upon the Dragon’s neck, brought the house down. It was one of the most beautifully timed performances I have ever seen in any theatre.

All the characters and incidents found on the stage of the puppet theatre are also favourite subjects in the pictures which cover every inch of the Paris apartment rentals. These carts are a very common sight all over the island, more so in the coastal districts and on the western side than in the mountainous interior. The donkeys which pull them have their own gay trappings. Small bells, tinsel and ribbons festoon their harnesses. The smallest hand-cart or meanest market stall usually has some similar embellish­ment.

One evening as we were driving away from our self catering apartments London in one of the most poverty-stricken areas of the UK, we passed a long slow straggling procession of nearly seventy beautiful carts, all making their way towards the town, loaded with fodder, brushwood and farm tools. The variety was enormous. Many were old and battered and no attempt had been made to protect the paintings from hard wear or to repaint them.

The ownership of a painted cart is very much a matter of pride and prestige, for the decoration has no economic advantage. The average cost of a cart seems out of all proportion to what most can afford to spend on a conveyance. But it is a very poor man indeed who is content with simple coloured panels.

It is usually the owner who chooses the subjects of the paintings on the side panels of the cart. Next in popularity after illustrations of the Paladins are scenes from opera, especially Cavalleria Rusticana, Carmen and Aida.

As the water rose within, and his family began to pray aloud, Masters braced himself against the steering wheel and tried desperately to kick open one of the doors. Finally, he kicked a window open about ten inches, and pulled himself on to the roof. Reaching back, waving his hand inside the water-filled vehicle, he caught an arm and pulled his wife head-first through the slot. He pushed her into the branches of a near-by tree. Then, reaching inside again, he caught a foot. It was his daughter Karen’s, and he scraped her through the opening feet-first. Her two-and-a­half-year-old brother was in her arms as she slid out, but the tor­rent tore him from her grasp. His body was found three weeks later.

By this time, the water was high over the roof of the vehicle, and it was impossible for Masters to reach down through the window again to his eight- and r2-year-old sons and ten-year-old daughter still inside. For more than two hours, Masters clung to the trees with his wife and Karen. The roar of the rushing water was stunning. The torrential rain seemed unending. Bodies swept past. Finally, the flood level began to recede, and Masters heard a voice in the darkness. Groping inside the vehicle, he grabbed a moving wrist. It was his daughter JoAnn She had survived by hold­ing her head in a small, water-free air pocket. Her two brothers were not so fortunate. They were dead.

TN THE drizzly, grey light of Satur­day morning, as the flood waters ebbed across the plains, Rapid City started fighting back. Amid the nauseating smell of escaping gas and acrid smoke, the search for the living still trapped or marooned went on. The dead were every­where. More than 85 bodies, washed downstream, were found in one area of ten streets alone. By mid­morning, the local Civil Defence had established its headquarters in the basement of a court house.

There was no shortage of help­ing hands. Joy Medley, her husband dead, got the first relief station or­ganized, working steadily for 48 hours. Gary Pedersen, an ex-navy medical corpsman who lost an arm in Vietnam, helped in the inocula­tion of more than 20,000 people with typhoid and tetanus injections.

To get the water system working, Paul Harper, a 29-year-old doctor, assigned at the time to a near-by air force base, and his wife, a nurse, donned diving equipment and worked underwater to clean out the intake pipes to the treatment plant.

Using heavy equipment, much of it from contractors who sent their lorries and cranes and bulldozers from hundreds of miles away with­out any expectation of profit, some 3,000 workers began clearing away 275 lorry-loads of debris every hour. Another 2,000 militiamen volun­teers helped search for bodies, a grisly task complicated by the dan­ger of live rattlesnakes washed down in the flood waters.

From all over the United States came an outpouring of generosity for the stricken city. Cash gifts from individuals and companies mounted to more than a million dollars. A huge hangar at the air force base was quickly filled with 120 tons of donated food and clothing. One chicken farmer sent thousands of hens. Carloads of boys and girls arrived, offering to “do anything.” Many were put to work hunting for bodies; others worked for the Red Cross or Salvation Army, or stood for hours on street corners directing traffic, in red dust so thick they had to wear face masks. Civil Defence authorities called the young people “magnificent.” Noting that the community effort showed how life might always be, but isn’t, the Rapid City Journal said, “Goodwill was born of tragedy in a shining ex­ample of sharing and caring.”

It is, indeed, the strength and unselfishness of man that will remain in memory long after the physical scars of the Rapid City disaster are erased.

ALTHOUGH many people were by then already dead in the flood, the radio station’s ten o’clock news, which devoted only part of its time to the growing emergency, an­nounced : “At this hour we have no reports of serious injuries.” Then, at about 10.30, an unidenti­fied caller in the Black Hills reached Mayor Barnett with a terrifying message • – a wall of water, at least four feet high, was sweeping down Rapid Creek towards the city.

At 10.39, Mayor Barnett relayed a call to radio and television sta­tions from a police car, ordering : “If you have property anywhere ad­jacent to Rapid Creek, get out !”

It was too late. Those who heard him didn’t have time to react. Only minutes later, at about 10.45, the dam crumpled like a washed-over sand-castle before the force of the flood. Fireman Granum, still on the roof and clinging to the branch, remembers : “It was like pulling out the plug in a bathtub.” As the water subsided and the roof settled on top of the dam, Granum jumped to safety. After a stop at the hospit­al, where 30 stitches were needed for his hands, he insisted on rejoin­ing fellow firemen to save others.

When the dam was ripped from its anchors, a five-foot-high wall of debris-filled water poured down on Rapid City with the roar of a train. Homes and shops were washed away, many with their occupants inside. Cable poles speared floating caravans, and crumpled cars wrap­ped themselves round electricity pylons like crushed tinfoil.

Aers of life-saving heroism became almost routine. Kerry Conner, a garage mechanic, lived in prague apartment, drove towards the dam to see if he could help. On the way he spotted an aluminium rowing-boat outside a house and loaded it on his truck. He then picked up well-driller Stan Bice, who had been evacuating his neigh­bours. In the Canyon Lake area, they launched the purloined boat and pulled a young couple and their baby from floating debris. While Stan headed for the hospital with the refugees, Kerry took the boat and joined several firemen who were desperately fighting to reach survivors. Before the night was over, he had helped in the rescue of more than two dozen people.

Police patrolman Sam Roach called police headquarters from his radio car : “The back wall of the Mountain View Nursing Home has collapsed.” Seven of the 48 aged patients were spilled into the water-filled basement. Roach, joined by the Reverend Charles Russell, edu­cation director of the Sioux Baptist Chapel, tied some sheets together, threw one end down to an elderly woman holding on to her mattress in the water, and pulled her to safety. As the building threatened to collapse around them, Roach and Russell, helped first by two nurses and an auxiliary, then by others, carried the surviving patients, most still in their beds, to safety. Sadly, three of the elderly people had drowned—one when she went back into the building for her glasses.

William Medley and his wife, Joy, both majors in the Salvation Army, were driving some girls to a Salvation Army camp in the Black Hills when they were turned back. Fifty-year-old William said to his wife, “We’d better see if we can help.” They stopped first at their home in Rapid City, and Joy made coffee and sandwiches. Then they drove to the Salvation Army Cita­del, where he told her, “I’m going out to help evacuate people.” She never heard from him again. His body was found the next day.

The high water and heavy debris tore out the main electrical trans­mission lines, blacking out the city. Natural gas spewed out of broken mains and, as it escaped, some of the still-live downed power lines ignited it into towering torches of flame. The fires turned the rain-filled skies into a hazy red mist.

SHORTLY after midnight, the waters below Canyon Lake began to re­cede. Everywhere along the flood path there were cries for help. More than a thousand people were strand­ed in trees or on rooftops. Four militiamen spotted a submerged car in midstream. Thinking someone might still be in it, they tried to reach it by forming a human chain, with one holding on to a small tree on shore. The tree broke. All were swept away. Two drowned.

Trapped in her flooded bedroom, a young mother held an infant daughter on top of her head for four hours, water lapping at her shoulders, until someone heard her shouts. Gertrude Lux, a frail 7t­year-old woman, was rescued after standing for five hours in neck-deep water balancing her 16-year-old handicapped granddaughter on a floating foam-rubber mattress.

Below the broken dam, near dawn, rescuers reached the Rever­end Ronald Masters, his wife and two young daughters, who huddled on the submerged roof of their car. As the basement of their house had filled with water about 10.30 p.m., 36-year-old Masters had put his wife and five children into the car and started for high ground. They were a quarter of a mile below the dam when it broke and a solid wall of water hit the side of the vehicle.”All

four wheels were lifted off the road and we started spinning down­stream, like a record on a turn­table,” the minister said later. “Then we jammed between the trunks of two big trees.”

ORINARILY, only 14 inches of rain fall on the steep, rocky Black Hills of South Dakota in an entire year. But starting early on the night of Friday, June 9, 1972, an unpredicted and unprecedented ten to 14 inches of rain spilled on to the range in one night.

From the official weather forecast there had been nothing to suggest exceptional rainfall. But in the late afternoon, a strong breeze blowing from the south-east carried an un­usually moist supply of air up the steep, eastern slopes of the Black Hills. Upper-level circulation had come to a near standstill; the damp accumulation hovered almost mo­tionless, and the rain began to fall.

Running off the hills in a tor­rential flood, the water funnelled through narrow canyons and thun­dered against the back door of Rapid City, a placid community of 43,000 and the second largest city in South Dakota. The flood crumpled a 34-year-old earthen dam and un­leashed a rampaging five-foot-high wall of water through the heart of the town. Before the rain stopped and the flood subsided early on Sat­urday, 237 people had died, five were missing and 5,000 were home­less in a 30-mile-long, half-mile-wide path of sudden destruction.

THE FIRST inkling of the flood that couldn’t happen came just before six o’clock that Friday evening. South Dakota highway patrolman Clyde McCue, driving in the Black Hills 40 miles north-west of Rapid City, radioed the police in Dead­wood that a stream was piling a foot of water across the road in the area.

Ten minutes later, another patrol­man reported a cloud-burst on Highway 4o, ten miles west of Rapid City. As the storm drifted eastwards, the rain began in Rapid City itself, but no one was really concerned. At the new Stevens High School a capacity audience listened to a visiting band from West Ger­many. The dog-racing track was open, and the town’s summer theatre was preparing for a new pro­duction—You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running.

Meanwhile, in the Black Hills area, rain water was suddenly turn­ing small streams wild; washing away cars, caravans, homes, bridges, roads. Six miles north-west of Rapid City, the waters in Box Elder Creek reached flood proportions. Rbn Rathman, 27-year-old father of three, started off in his truck to help an elderly couple who he knew lived in the path of the frenzied creek. Before he could reach them, an eight-foot wall of water roared down from the hills and Ron and the truck were swept away. His body was never found.

Just a few miles from famed Mount Rushmore, waters in Battle Creek rose eight feet in minutes, sweeping down through the old gold-mining town of Keystone. Nine holiday-makers camped on the banks of the stream, some of them already in their sleeping bags, were drowned, and many others lost all their belongings, camping equipment, cars.

A dozen miles south-west of Rapid City, on Sheridan Lake Road, a young militiaman stepped out of his stalled lorry into water up to his armpits, and was sucked off his feet into a water-filled, 3o-foot-long cul­vert running under the submerged road. He shot out of the other end like a bullet, only to be swept over what had become a raging, r5-foot­high waterfall and into the churn­ing wreckage at its bottom. Carried 200 yards downstream, he finally managed to grab a tree and hang on until he was saved.

In Rapid City, most people re­mained buttoned up inside their homes against the driving rain, largely unaware of danger. Regular radio and television programmes continued, broken from time to time by bulletins about still-vague events in the Black Hills. But at least 30,000 cubic feet of water per second were now pouring down Rapid Creek into Canyon Lake, a 40-acre, three-to-is-foot deep, man­made lake in a residential area. Waters piled up alarmingly against the lake’s 20-foot-high earthen dam. About 8.30 p.m., spillways were opened to relieve pressure on the dam. Even so, water later began cascading over the top of the struc­ture and on down Rapid Creek, which curves through the town.

Rapid City’s 29-year-old mayor, Don Barnett, and city engineer Leonard Swanson, inspected the Canyon Lake dam and left the area about to p.m. Firemen and police warned residents around Canyon Lake and Rapid Creek below to seek higher ground, but only a handful of people left their homes.

Actually, the crisis was already full-blown. Streets were now rush­ing rivers. Three city firemen were knocked from their feet and lost in the maelstrom as they tried to evac­uate people from houses and cars. Wayne Granum, another fireman, sought refuge in an empty house, but quickly realized the house was shifting. Removing his fire-fighting gear, he .broke a window with his bare hands, cutting himself badly, and climbed on to the roof.

Minutes later, the house was swept downstream. It struck a cable pole, which crashed down on the roof a few feet away from him be­fore the house caught for a moment on a wooden bridge. Then the house suddenly broke away, leaving only a section of the roof, to which Granum clung. Spinning crazily, the roof then swept across Canyon Lake to the opposite side, where it lodged in some trees on top of the dam. Granum grabbed a stout branch to hang on to if the roof went over. “I’ll never live to see another day,” he thought.