‘Flood of Memories’ set to commemorate the Teton River area resilience
REXBURG, Idaho (KIFI) - An event coming to the Rexburg area on Saturday, June 4, 2022 is called a 'Flood of Memories.' The event is will happen at Rexburg's Romance theater which is located on Main Street.
Alisha Tietjen, the curator of the Museum of Rexburg, says the event is really about preserving the memories that people have from the disaster of the Teton Dam in 1976.
"It's just an opportunity to go together to all the people who are affected by it and those who weren't affected by it. So that they can remember and also be able to teach their children, and there are other people who are new to the air what, what happened and what we overcame," Tietjen said.
Tietjen says they hope to collect enough stories to help share the days events for future generations.
"We really need to hear those stories, and we want to preserve those stories before they're gone, before before they're there's somebody here to have to tell it," she said. "So that's also what this is about, is to collect those stories. We're encouraging people to write them down or to video them or any way that they like to record those so that we can get them archived."
She says they are hoping to create an updated documentary for use at the museum with all of the first hand accounts.
"Right now, our documentary film is from the 1970s and we'd like to have one that we can update and have be closed captioning to help with that. I'm not quite sure exactly what we're going to do with all those stories. We're just collecting them right now," she said.
Tietjen says they also hope to help the children in the area learn some of their local history.
"I think that's important for our kids to understand today is that hard things have happened and we've through our resilience, we've overcome that and so that they can overcome hard things as well," she said. "We were finding a lot of our when we go into the schools, a lot of the kids don't know that that happened and what happened and that it affected this area and that some of the damage and the things that happened with it."
The event will start at 2:25 p.m. Saturday, June 4 at Rexburg's Romance Theater on Main Street. Tietjen says the time of 2:25 p.m. was chosen to commemorate when flood waters reached Rexburg. She says if you have a story you wish to share but can't make it to the event, you can send it to museum@rexburg.org or you can call (208) 359-3063 to share it.
