Nightmare in Rapid City

The tourist season was beginning and life in the clean, green freshness of Rapid City was turning busier after the relative quiet of a long winter and a welcome spring. Nestled in South Dakota's Black Hills, attractive with its broad business streets and wooded parks, the city of 44,000 people beckoned visitors to the nearby Bad Lands, the granite faces of Mount Rushmore, and the Old West where Wild Bill Hickok was gunned down at a card table and Calamity Jane lies buried. Then one night last week the rains began.

Up to ten inches fell in less than 24 hours. The usually shallow mountain creeks burgeoned out of control, hurling waves of water down the hills into Rapid City. "We watched in amazement as a small stream spilling from the hillside turned into a four-foot-wide torrent," recalled Jerry Mashek, a reporter for the Rapid City Journal. "Rapid Creek, normally clear and placid, sounded like a freight train passing in the night. It must have been 150 feet wide."

Walls of water rolled across highways, knocked down power lines, ruptured tanks containing propane gas. Explosions and fire erupted anomalously amid the surging waters. Landslides sent mud cascading down the hills. Homes buckled, cars were swept away, bridges and small dams collapsed.

"The smell of a world ripped apart hung in the air," said Mashek. "Gigantic blocks of asphalt and concrete as large as the walls of a house were strewn across the highway. Boulders lay haphazardly, and bridge structures were ripped and dangling. It was like nothing I've ever smelled before and hope to God I never do again." Another Journal reporter, Harold Higgins, stood on a bridge and watched a 30-foot house trailer "riding a wave like a surfboard." A woman reported "a Volkswagen floating down the street with the people hanging on and screaming for help."

Everywhere came the plaintive calls. But there was little that those lucky enough to find solid footing or something to cling to could do in the darkness to aid those engulfed by the flood, smothered in the landslides or caught in burning buildings. Commercial radio stations were knocked off the air by the cut-off of power. A civil defense station, using emergency power, tried to fashion some kind of order out of the chaos. "If you find a body, do not touch it. Call," said an announcer. "Stay in your homes and do not drink the water."

By dawn the rains began to subside, but a fog shrouded the city. Some 1,800 South Dakota National Guardsmen attending a summer camp joined the rescue operations. Mayor Donald Barnett ordered police to arrest any sightseers who ghoulishly descended on the stricken city. All gas service was shut off. The injured filled the city's hospitals and overwhelmed medical facilities at nearby Ellsworth Air Force Base. But for many there was no help. At week's end the toll of known dead passed 125, and another 500 were still missing.

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