Salmon family devastated after flood
After a flood in Salmon over the weekend, a family of five was not sleeping in their home.
“You know the story behind those things that you’re grabbing. You know those are important pieces of our family and our history and us and to have it just swept away in water it was very intense it was very hard, it was very hard,” said Burns.
Stephanie and her husband, Mark Anderson, were more than an hour away in Challis watching a wrestling match.
When they got the call their house was flooding, they rushed back to Salmon.
“When we got home, I mean we came in and we had 6 to 8 inches of water on the floor,” said Anderson.
The water just kept coming.
“In the one part of the crawl space it’s three-and-a-half feet deep and it was a foot over that inside the house,” said Anderson.
More than 4 feet of water caused quite a bit of damage.
“A lot of the floors are going to have to be pulled up. The wood floor might have to be replaced. The linoleum in the bathroom is probably going to have to be ripped up and redone. I hope the carpet can be saved. If not, we’ll have to replace the carpet as well. Under flooring it might all have to be ripped up we’ll just have to see what the damages are,” said Anderson.
Local News 8 Meteorologist Michael Coats says with this unusually warm weather pattern, we’re seeing rapid melting of snow, ice jamming on the rivers and scattered rain showers. He says it’s perfect recipe for flooding, something we usually don’t see until late winter or spring. The National Weather Service in Missoula did issue a flood warning on Saturday for locations along the Salmon River.
Burns said she’s disappointed some key players didn’t respond to the disaster.
“We haven’t seen anybody from American Red Cross and I thought they were supposed to respond to floods and fires and things like that. As far as city officials, we never saw any city officials. Why didn’t they get their butts down there and sandbag with us? Why wasn’t the civil defense person here to tell them where to drop that sand, where to put the berm to protect all of the homes, to protect all of us from having to go through this?”asked Burns.
Anderson said he and his wife are grateful for family, friends and neighbors who have stepped up to the plate.
“Everybody pulling together was just amazing, and I want to thank every one of them, couldn’t thank them enough,” said Anderson.
We tried to contact city officials, the Salmon police and the Red Cross but have not yet heard back.
The Baptist church in Salmon will be helping the family with cleanup Monday.
