By Derek Kravitz, Michael Grabell and Michael E. Young
The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 2007 The Dallas Morning News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
GAINESVILLE, Texas — Search crews resumed their efforts in Gainesville Tuesday to find at least five people who were missing after Monday’s historic flooding, the worst in 150 years.
Three National Guard helicopters were called in to help ground-based search and rescue teams. More than three dozen soldiers were deployed to Cooke and Tarrant counties.
Meanwhile, the Texas Department of Public Safety warned it would take action against anyone caught looting in flooded areas.
“This is a public disaster. This is about taking care of your neighbor. This is about taking care of each other,” DPS trooper Rebecca Uresti told WFAA-TV. “When people loot, hopefully we can catch them in the act. But if they decide to loot, they’re just damaging their own community. So that’s what the citizens need to know: That if they do it, they’re only hurting themselves, because the bottom line is, it’s going to be your neighbor that gets hurt.”
Five people lost their lives Monday and hundreds of others were left homeless after devastating storms swept across North Texas, leaving whole neighborhoods under water.
The worst of the damage stretched from Gainesville to Sherman, where flash floods trapped victims in their homes and in their cars, the water surging 6 to 8 feet deep in some areas before it receded as quickly as it came.
Gone is a young girl pulled from her mother’s arms in Haltom City. In Gainesville, the bodies of a woman and her granddaughter were recovered, but another granddaughter was still missing late Monday. A Denison woman died on her way to work, her Jeep overwhelmed by the water. Rescuers found another man, still unidentified, dead in his pickup in the receding flood.
“Mobile homes floated away like boats,” said Haltom City Deputy Fire Chief Fred Napp.
The force of the flooding dragged a school bus downstream in Sherman. The water cut the Arnett family’s mobile home from an embankment along Pecan Creek in Gainesville, tumbling it into a bridge and dumping four members of the family into the floodwaters.
Rescue crews later recovered the bodies of 5-year-old Teresa Arnett and her grandmother Billie Mollenhour, 60. Teresa’s 2-year-old sister was missing. Their mother, Lisa Arnett, had clung to both until the water pulled them from her.
Alexandria Collins, 4, died after slipping from the arms of her mother, Natasha, when their rescue boat capsized in Haltom City.
Patricia Beshears, 48, died while driving to work in Sherman, when her Jeep stalled and the flood covered it before she could escape.
“This is definitely the worst flooding this area has seen in a long time,” said Chris Cypert, a municipal court judge in Gainesville.
Rescue crews were going door to door in some portions of the city late Monday as floodwaters receded and helicopters flew over several of the hardest-hit neighborhoods.
It was in one of those neighborhoods that Rosa Garcia got ready for work early Monday morning and found floodwaters rushing into her home.
“I opened up the door, and the water started coming in. I ran,” Mrs. Garcia said.
She quickly reached the attic and climbed out the window onto the roof with her 4-year-old son, David, and 8-year-old nephew, Eduardo Morales.
There they waited for five hours for rescue crews to pick them up with a crane.
Down the street, Joe and Sherry Clark watched as their 5-year-old horse, Baby Girl, was washed away by floodwaters. Rescue workers spotted her a short time later swimming several city blocks away.
“We’re just glad we found her,” Mr. Clark said. “Now, as for our home, it’s gone. There’s nothing left.”
Rescue workers from dozens of Texas and Oklahoma towns joined Gainesville crews to rescue hundreds stranded by the water, many of them from their rooftops.
Most lived in low-lying areas near Pecan Creek, east of downtown, or along the Elm Fork of the Trinity River west of Interstate 35.
More than 400 people came to the Gainesville Civic Center and Whaley United Methodist Church for dry clothes, cold drinks and a hot meal until the water went down and they could survey the damage.
Few were prepared for what they found.
Gloria Rojas, her husband, Manuel, and their four sons lived in a modest blue-and-tan home along Pecan Creek. Three feet of water surged through the house, knocking aside the washing machine, tumbling the TV and leaving everything coated in mud.
“This morning the water was coming. Everything was floating,” Mrs. Rojas said in halting English. “I take my babies. I go somewhere else because I was scared.”
She tried to put on a brave face as she stood in front of the uninsured house, the yard still under water.
“My house — everything is terrible,” she said. “I don’t have anything now. But that’s OK. I have my kids and my husband. I’m good.”
Farther along the creek, Kinberlyn Gomez, 8, held an aquarium with three fish inside, fish her father found floating down the street.
“I was so scared, and the water was coming down so hard,” she said. And now her home is “ugly inside.”
Shawn and Ginger Price, with their two children and their black lab, Duke, scrambled onto their roof after awaking to water rising around their home.
“We waited up there for hours,” Mrs. Price said. “It wasn’t raining at first, but then it started again, and we got cold. We had no dry blankets, no dry towels.”
The flood destroyed most of their belongings, she said.
“It’s my parents’ house, and we were renting it,” she said. “We don’t have renters’ insurance on any of our things in the house. I was able to save my daughter’s baby book, so I was happy about that.
“But our car and truck flooded, and we just have liability insurance. So that’s not good.”
Four inches of rain fell on Gainesville, where the ground was already saturated from weekend storms, and the water rose quickly along flood-prone Pecan Creek.
Sherman was hit even harder, with 8 inches of rain falling between 2 and 10 a.m. Monday, officials said.
Grayson County Judge Drue Bynum declared a state of emergency and was seeking federal and state aid.
“Nobody can remember this much water this quickly,” he said. “It cut our county in half. The folks on the west side of Sherman couldn’t get to the east side of Sherman.”
The brown water from Post Oak Creek began rising around 4:30 a.m. and started creeping toward hundreds of low-lying apartments on Archer Drive.
Janette Hamel, 71, was getting ready for work at the Mission Oaks nursing home about 6 a.m. when she looked out back.
“Everything was washing down the creek,” she said.
“People’s belongings, wicker baskets, barbecue pits, ladders,” added her daughter, Monica Davis, as they sat wrapped in yellow towels in the emergency shelter at the municipal hall ballroom.
“I’ve never seen so much water,” said Ms. Davis, a 45-year-old nurse’s aide. “Then I opened my front door, it was just like the floodgates had opened up. ... We’re thankful to be alive because you can replace material things.”
Ms. Hamel never made it to work at Mission Oaks nursing home, where rescuers evacuated about 120 residents, some of whom were on oxygen or unable to walk.
Sherman firefighters first tried to evacuate the residents by school bus. But the current was so swift that it pushed the first bus of evacuees downstream. So dump trucks and front-end loaders were brought in to haul the residents to dry ground where they boarded school buses to shelters at the Wilson N. Jones Hospital and Fairview Baptist Church.
“Water was so high, a dump truck was the only thing that could get them out of there,” Mr. Bynum said.
During rescue efforts across the city, a Sherman firefighter was struck by lightning and treated for burns.
“I highly doubt it was a direct hit because he is already back to work,” said Grayson County spokesman Jeff Schneider. “It was enough to knock him off his feet and daze him a lot.”
Two firefighters from Tom Bean had to be rescued after their boat capsized, leaving them stranded in a tree for two hours before other firefighters could pull them out of the floodwaters.
And a Sherman fire truck, engine and car were swept downstream.
“They parked well out of the water to go rescue people, and when they came back, it flooded in areas where just five minutes before it was dry,” said Sherman Fire Chief J.J. Jones.