In the neighborhoods surrounding Lake Katherine, one of the most heavily flooded areas in Columbia during October 2015’s historic “thousand-year flood,” locals went from house to house on Jon boats and pontoons to rescue neighbors trapped in their flooded homes.
Marwan Marzagao was among those who teamed up with a small group of men to help save others from harm’s way. The following year, he shared his experience with StoryCorps, a national initiative to record and collect stories of everyday people. This excerpt was selected and produced by Linda Nunez.
TRANSCRIPT:
Marwan Marzagao: I got a phone call at 5:30 in the morning from Kevin Shalkham, who lives right up the street from me, and he goes, “We need a boat. Does your Jon boat work? We need to get somebody out of their house.” And I was like, “What are you talking about?” And so, I quickly went outside, and immediately, I realized that something really bad is going on. So, we went out in the street to meet Kevin. Dave Herpel was there as well, Brian Boyer, and Geordie Schroeder. We kind of congregated in the street towards where a lot of that floodwater was coming down. Our thought process was executing some kind of rescue to get these people out of their house. The Duprees that were sort of really in the thick of it. Immediately, when we were assessing the water and the strength of the water, we just figured we gotta get a boat and put it in right here at this intersection. We got the boat going, we jumped on, and right as we were getting ready to cross kind of where the water was the strongest, the pontoon boat stalled out. So, we kind of drifted a little bit. And then we grabbed onto some trees in somebody's yard, got the boat going again. And Brian did a nice job just kind of maneuvering through that water to get over to the Duprees. They jumped in the water and went in the house. Literally, the water was about up to their necks when they jumped off the pontoon boat. And we started bringing the family out. We put them on the pontoon boat and kind of headed back towards where we had put in on dry land. And so Geordie mentioned Artis, who was the older lady that lived a few houses down. So, we pulled up to her house and I jumped in the water and kind of walked towards her back porch. I tried to open the door, but the water pressure was so strong. So, literally, I got back up on the boat and climbed up on a roof and looked down and I could see her standing in her doorway. And I think the water was probably about chest high on her. I was like, “Okay, I've got to get to her,” right? As soon as possible. So, I ran back over the roof, got a life jacket, climbed back over, and literally jumped in the water. It was pretty deep, so I went completely submerged, swam to her door. She was starting to shake a little bit. I think she was getting really cold. So I asked her to put herself in a position where, out of the current's way, coming through the doorway. Because I knew that as soon as I opened that door, the current was going to start flowing through her house. So as soon as I did that, sure enough, everything just started getting moved through her house. So, I put my life vest on her, I picked her up, and I carried her through the house, out the back. And then Geordie pulled her up onto the boat, and she was like, “Could you please get my pocketbook?” And sure enough, not five seconds later, her pocketbook just came floating out of the back door right past the boat. So, we were able to get that. We put her on the boat, and, we told her that everything was gonna be fine. And we did those initial rescues, and then we kinda tried to travel around to other areas, but when we kinda walked back down to that divide where we first put in, I remember seeing just one pickup truck after another with trailers, and, all the people that had come out with their Jon boats to just help people. It's amazing that, I don't think anybody within that neighborhood lost their lives. So, it's pretty phenomenal that everybody did what they did.
