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Marshall on the French Broad River
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,615 ✭✭✭✭
The brick building on the right, former jail, $2,5 million spent to remodel into a restaurant and hotel. Water up within 5 inches of the top of windows of first floor. This is the restaurant, all those expensive stainless steel refrigerators and ovens, destroyed. Flood waters rushing over the main bridge. Courthouse sets 7 feet above Main Street, it is flooded.
Comments
Computer extremely slow. More pics tomorrow, maybe. Millions in property destruction in Marshall. All 8 restaurants destroyed. Post Office, built under Jimmy Carter 1977, utterly destroyed. Marshall is destroyed.
Wow, that is a terrible tragedy……..
I hope the courthouse is not like the one where I worked. All of the old records were kept in the basement !
LOTS of people suffering big time around a lot of areas. That pic tells some of the utter devastation.
Oh man, that's awful. Prayers for all affected.
I did a search of the town and found this picture. @allen griggs , is this picture of the same area as yours Allen? Same bridge and court house in back ground?
To follow Joe, here's a google earth view that's close to Allen's photo. You can spin it and move to see how it was. Very sad.
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.7966721,-82.6844208,3a,75y,32.65h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1slXuVxll8c2W1j7LJJfixGg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DlXuVxll8c2W1j7LJJfixGg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D27.462042%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?coh=205409&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MDkyNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
Tiny url of the Google maps link
https://tinyurl.com/yh7377y5
Yes Montanajoe that's the bridge, and Marshall. Computer slow, I get high speed internet from a Verizon cell tower. Cell service came back yesterday but is still messed up. Power came back on Sunday at noon. Our little "neighborhood" six houses up here on a ridge is OK. We're 500 feet above the river. No trees down. Water was 8 feet deep in Marshall, all windows of restaurants and stores were broken out. Two feet of horrible mud in every building.
20 years ago Marshall was an abandoned hillbilly town with 15 vacant buildings. Then, it was decided that Marshall was a charming mountain village. Money began pouring in by the millions. Every building was occupied and remodeled, into bicycle shops, restaurants etc. Upstairs of every building turned into apartments. Hundreds of people lived un Marshall. Marshall called itself "The Jewel of the Blue Ridge" and it was "groovy" to be in Marshall. An abandoned cottton mill, Capitola Mill, was remodeled for $5million into shops, stores and hotel. Look up Capitola Mill.
Our favorite restaurant, Zuma. Just had lunch there a week ago. I walked into the kitchen and handed the cook a $5 bill for a tip. told him it was the best Reuben Sandwich I ever had eaten. Nobody does that in a restaurant it brought tears to his eyes.
This is a charity named My Sisters Attic. They took donations of coffee cups, clothes, CDs etc and sold them cheap, to benefit abused women. This place started up in an abandoned building 12 years ago.
One guy in town had a book store. He had 5,000 used books, mostly hard cover. $ Twenty, thirty thousand in inventory all destroyed.
There was a factory ten miles up river, they manufactured PVC pipe and 1 1/2 inch black plastic tubing. In their yard, right on the river in Woodfin, was a massive inventory of 4 inch PVC pipe, 12 feet ling. At least 100 18-wheelers worth of white pipe in the yard. Also ten thousand spools of 100 feet of the black tubing. These spools were bound up with plastic wire, each spool about 4 foot diameter. Their entire inventory washed into the river, and floated past Marshall.
You can see one of the spools, torn apart, in this pic. Standing there during the flood in one minute I saw 200 of the spools of tubing, and 300 12 foot lengths of white PVC pipe. Maybe $2 million in inventory, plus all the plastic melting machines, extruders etc. all destroyed.
Glad to hear your house was spared, sorry for the loss of your town.
Sad to see.
Sad, yes. I am just glad Allen is OK.
just devastating. Glad you and the houses are good. The town, its going to be awhile again. Best wishes.
These videos may be of interest. Really shows the during/after overview. Poor town really got nailed…….
Aerial Video - Marshall DURING Flooding (post-peak flood):
Aerial Video - Marshall AFTER Flooding:
Just awe struck, the force of natural disaster.
Reminds me of eastern Kentucky where I did environmental compliance for local flood control projects for a number of years, I had many local residents tell me that they couldn't sleep any night when it rained.
Just terrible as I really feel for those people.
Words…..I have no words…..Prayers for all .
How you doing @allen griggs ,still hanging in there? Got food , water, ect? Best wishes continue.
The floods on the French Broad made the national news. Glad Allen built that cabin way up there on the mountain.
Damn… That's gonna be a ghost town.
Sad
My computer is still super slow, Verizon cell tower is screwed up. My cell phone works some times and sometimes does not.
Power has been on since Sunday noon, Gott sei Dank. We are on a very good well, so we have plenty of water, hot showers etc. The local grocery store, Ingles is now open. Ingles didn't bother having a big diesel generator installed, so all the ice cream, steaks and pizza rotted. But they got lots of canned tuna, mac n cheese and beer! We did already have lots of food, freeze dried etc. Ingles also sells gasoline so I have a full tank. Ingles, source of life.
I have had a party planned for months, we will have it on Saturday, just as planned, four ducks in the smoker. [It is an electric smoker.] Got some guests coming in from out of town, roads are pretty much open. Like Nero, we will Fiddle while Rome Burns.
The ducks were in our freezer for 48 hours with no electricity but they didn't start to melt and are OK. Damn ducks cost $152. I like smoked duck.
Ingles is the biggest grocery store around here, there's dozens in the Asheville area, and was begun here, the first Ingles was built, 70 years ago in Asheville. Ingles has a monster warehouse in Swannanoa, just east of Asheville. I made 6 deliveries to Ingles Swannanoa when I was driving the big rig, it is the biggest, hands down, terminal I ever saw and it is one mile long. The Swannanoa River flooded and the warehouse went completely underwater for 48 hours.
Talk about some ruined ice cream, pizza, and steak! $Ten Millions worth, or, $20 Millions worth? Plus a bunch of Ingles 18 wheelers destroyed, probably $ Five million more in trucks. Plus millions in stainless steel freezers and refrigerators destroyed at Swannanoa Ingles. Plus, two feet of stinking, toxic Swannanoa River mud over that entire floor, and that floor is around fifty acres. How'd you like to shovel out that muck?
I bet there is drone video of this debacle but my computer is so slow I can't watch videos.
Glad to hear from you. Sounds like you are doing good and was prepared before hand.
Such a shame of the damage caused and loss to the community. Best wishes for recovery to all.
Stay safe, check in when you can.
Good to read you are doing OK, I hope your party is successful.
The ducks were good. Big hit.
Wooo. Looks great.
Something very nice, amongthe disaster. Well done.
Those look like some good sized ducks!
Seven-pounders. They were a big hit. Hickory and cherry wood, ten hours in the smoker.
Frogdog I just watched your first video. My computer has been too slow for videos until today. Good God it is unbelievable. Six or seven buildings, 150 year old brick buildings, are simply gone. We had a train station, built in 1905, of course no passenger train service any more, but Friday nights they played Bluegrass in the beautiful old building. Called it The Station. Completely gone.
It makes me sick to watch this, I only could make it half way through. My little town is destroyed.
So sorry you’re going through this stuff, Allen. The continued existence of small, rural towns was hard enough already without Mother Nature adding to it with a heavy hand. Country folks are a lot more resilient, though, and I’ll bet on them to make a comeback way faster than anyone expects……. and they’ll do it the way they always have…. on their own, looking out for each other, without big government holding their hand.
So very sad to see and hear about this town's destruction. Just shocking!
Those before pictures really attracted me that town. The river, the train tracks, courthouse set back a bit. So cool.
The after storm pictures are just heart breaking.
Marshall was built in 1820 because it was on the stagecoach, and later, the railroad line.
The only way through the mountains from Asheville to Hot Springs, and Knoxville, was along the river.
The good news: It was flat.
The bad news: It was the flood plane.
Time to scrap the rails for some cash. It's removal will make a nice bike/walking trail along the water.