How the great flood of ’94 may have been Macon’s finest hour
Even on the grayest of days in July 1994, when a tropical storm named Alberto sloshed into this region, plopped down in its atmospheric recliner, kicked up its feet and overstayed its welcome, the hospitality famous in these parts shined through.
As aimless Alberto puttered and stalled and as floodwaters rose, Middle Georgians stood taller. Their spirits bobbed higher.
Even if those of us in Macon, thanks to 18 days with no running water, were not as fragrant as some close to us might have liked, there emerged a groundswell of good deeds, a communal will the likes of which have not been seen since. And in the face of hardship, there were smiles.
The smiles became my beat. In my second full year at The Telegraph at the time, many of the stories I wrote during those wet-then-waterless days captured the resilience, the occasional strangeness and improvisational wit of people making the best of less-than-ideal conditions:
Yes, high water had come, but Macon was anything but condemned. Rather, the people who lived here, spared destruction for the most part, were marooned in a surreal working vacation. It was as though the breezy seemliness of coastal life had washed 180-odd miles inland. “I Survived the Flood” T-shirts were as plentiful as off-brand Evian. Portable toilets were as ubiquitous as Waffle Houses.
Early on, the river levels were eye-popping. The Ocmulgee, which at times during summers here is low enough to walk across, was so swollen that it was lapping at the Otis Redding Bridge. “IT’S STILL RISING,” a headline in the Telegraph declared.
Then the waters receded. The sun came out. Macon’s character and its characters shone through.
As floodwaters seeped into the northeastern edge of downtown, where the rail trestle crosses Martin Luther King Drive, one evening a team of prison inmates stacked sandbags while a drifter with a can of Coke in his hand ranted, “Macon is hell!”
But it was not. While violent crime dipped, drinking water became a hot commodity. As resident Wiley Allen told me back then, someone stole two of his lawn chairs, an ashtray, a mop bucket and a 20-gallon trash can full of water from his patio. “I didn’t care too much about the lawn chairs,” Allen said. “But the water? … Didn’t they used to hang people for that?”
One Telegraph headline at the time mentioned how portable-toilet companies were “flushed with orders.” More than 500 of the things were deployed in downtown. A woman at one firm that rented the toilets, Doodle Phillips Hersey, spoke of working 20-hour days and of the squeamish, “prissy women” calling to complain the toilets were full “just because there’s a little paper in there.”
One caller to the Macon Water Authority’s customer-service line complained about the inconvenience of having to, as the Telegraph dutifully reported, “having to drive her car to Milledgeville twice a week just to get it washed.”
The city was so waterlogged from all the rain that Lawson Petty in east Macon found a salamander in his kitchen sink.
A sign behind the counter at the Nu-Way on Hillcrest Boulevard read: “No refills on tea until the water is back.”
When water service returned to Macon the morning of July 23 — a glorious morn that a quarter-century later should be designated a city holiday — some locals said hallelujah hurried for a heaven-sent shower.
A front-page write-up in the next morning’s paper began:
The day running water returned to much of Macon … a time to forget floods for a moment and flush, a time to rinse, a time to soak. It was Saturday, July 23, 1994: The Day Macon Took A Bath.
Nothing anytime soon will likely wash away memories of that hard-living July when a flood, in many ways, unearthed our humanity. There was hope despite hellish highwater, and there were helping hands to be found among neighbors.