Angry waters claimed homes and lives
By Joe Kovac Jr.
The Macon Telegraph
The night Monty Folsom and Lisa Jane Sheppard died, Macon was just finding out what a flood could do.
Like turn a Family Dollar parking lot into a pond. Or make a McDonald's and a Piggly Wiggly lakefront property. Or snatch an aqua 1970 Chevy pickup underwater like a fishing cork.
Or send a widow's storage freezer sailing away into Lake Wildwood.
Patricia Reid watched it float right out of her garage. Her husband had died three months earlier and there she was having to cope with a lake lapping at her living room.
"It started making me sick, the stench and everything," says Reid, 64.
When the lake tried to claim her freezer, she took off after it, salvaging what frozen deer meat, fish and vegetables the mud didn't claim.
Then she went to work rebuilding, rescuing her home from the depths of the Flood of '94.
Her house on South Plantation Parkway needed new floors and walls. The Red Cross gave her a bed.
"I had my husband's life insurance money, and there it went to fix back the house," says Reid.
She had been retired. Now she's a waitress at her neighborhood Waffle House. She likes the work. So in that, she figures, the flood wasn't all bad.
Even if, she says, "I've been living in poverty ever since."
At least she's living.
The night after Independence Day 1994 was the night a town, a region, suddenly found itself quite dependent.
Barely a block from Interstate 75, along the swamped banks of a glorified drainage ditch called Rocky Creek, people were wading in their living rooms.
Basements became mudholes, carpets turned to sponge and furniture floated. Not only was the rain and its runoff running right through homes, at 8:45 p.m. it started killing.
To Monty Folsom and his girlfriend, Lisa Jane Sheppard, the submerged Pio Nono Plaza parking lot couldn't have looked like much of a match for his old Chevy. Folsom, 35, had grown up in south Macon. He knew his way through that lot, which stretched from a Bank South up on Pio Nono Avenue down to a tire shop fronting Rocky Creek Road. Folks cut through all the time.
But that night, Rocky Creek churned deadly.
Wrecker driver Tracy Ford was towing stranded cars out of knee-high water when Folsom's pickup boated past him, maybe 10 feet away, just across from the McDonald's and the Piggly Wiggly.
"The water couldn't have been more than a foot or so deep," Ford remembers. But then Folsom's Chevy appeared to float. And spin.
"Like you see in a bathtub, like you see when you uncork the drain," Ford says of the sight that sent him racing to help the man and the woman in the truck.
Bibb County Coroner's Case No. 15-398-94 tells what happened next: "The woman was halfway out of the window when the truck turned around twice and disappeared under the water."
Not only did it sink, a ripping current crammed it whole into an 8-foot-round drain that ran under five lanes of Rocky Creek Road.
Folsom's brother, Miki, recalls, "It physically smashed the truck. It had to cave in the whole hood to shove it through."
Sheppard's body was pulled from the torrent the next morning. A 26-year-old mother of five from Telfair County, her children's names were etched on her shoulder next to a tattoo of a flower.
Folsom, who had a son and a daughter, drowned in his truck.
His family found out he was dead when a crane hoisted his pickup out of the water on the midday TV news.
The Lewis Grizzard book surfaced on the dirt-packed driveway of Lot 15.
That lot in the Creekview subdivision in Crawford County, on the shores of the Echeconnee Creek, held what was left to hold of Mary Anne Davis's snapped-in-half two-story house.
Water run mad had buckled its foundation and plunged it into a sinkhole. A vintage Chevy Camaro drowned in its garage.
A few days later, a neighbor stumbled upon the Grizzard tome: "Elvis is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself."
"That was my book. I guess it just floated out into the yard," Davis says. "But that's the way I did feel at the time."
She and her husband had just moved into the new house 10 days before. As the creek in their back yard crept closer, Davis didn't think much of it.
"It got higher and higher. I was out there taking pictures on the deck and an alligator floated by," she says. Before long, "it looked like an ocean flowing up."
The Davises ended up moving back to Bibb County. They still own the Creekview property, and leaving it, wrecked as it was, was tough.
"You feel, my Lord, what else can happen?" Davis says.
"But after you cry a while and come to your senses, you have your family."
She and her husband moved back to Bibb County. They don't live near a creek.