Among those caught in the recent floods that struck north-central Pennsylvania was Teri Breon. She’s better known here by her maiden name, Woodis. Teri grew up in Elizabeth and graduated from Cherry Creek High School in 1994. She has relatives living in some of Colorado’s most colorfully named places: Last Chance, Wild Horse, Punkin Center, Thornton.
I can’t say I knew there had been flooding in Pennsylvania. Between the wildfires and droughts and hurricanes, I’m having difficulty keeping my epic weather events straight. Teri’s part of Pennsylvania is at least 1,600 miles from here, and, for my purposes, that’s 1,400 miles too far. But I had not bargained on Teri’s mother, Nila Cole, who would turn all eyes east if she could. Miles mean nothing to a worried mother.
Teri lives in a village called Barbours, outside Williams port. Her husband, Ken, is a local and a logger. They have three kids: Emerald, 7, Jade, 6, and baby Judah, 15 months old. Their house, their first home, sits at the crook of the Loyalsock and Big Bear creeks. Within 24 hours, from Wed nesday to Thursday, the Loyalsock rose at least 10 feet.
That Wednesday, Teri chatted with her nearest neighbor about expected flooding. Move the car to higher ground. Make sure everything in the basement is at least 3 feet up. Teri went downstairs and wrestled with the sump pump, just in case. She was talking to her brother on the phone. “And I hear this exploding and crumbling sound, and water is pouring into the house from the corner of the basement,” Teri says. “I go upstairs, and the house is surrounded by rapids. I don’t know how long I was downstairs, but my neighbors told me later that one minute it was normal and the next, it wasn’t.”
Her brother is a police officer in New Mexico, and he told her he would call local law enforcement to rescue her and the kids. “I’m thinking, ‘Do I need to be rescued? Is that where we’re at?’ ” She called her unflappable neighbor, who said: “We’re leaving.”
It unspools like a movie from there. Teri scouring the house for shoes that would stay on the kids’ feet. Ken, racing home, parking on higher ground, running about 3 miles on a dirt road through the woods to reach his family. A rescue team arrived with a flat-bottom motorboat, which Ken and another man gunned toward the house. The current had uprooted trees. The rain was coming down in torrents. Water was pouring into the house. The men braced the boat against the house, hanging on to the carport rafters. The kids, Teri and the baby climbed aboard through the kitchen window.
The rescuers told the family to head to the fire hall, but it lies on lower ground, and Ken fears flooding will strike there too. “He basically had tunnel vision,” Teri says. “He saw one way to get his family out, and that was the way he got in.”
He headed up the hill only to find Teri had squatted before the girls and was explaining they were about to go on an adventure. She kept this calm when they discovered the road Ken came down is now washed out, when the gloom of the woods and the rain is so dark, she can’t see her daughters and has to call out a running narrative, “Hold on to the grass like you love it.” She led them in innumerable rounds of “Amazing Grace” and “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Ken told his mother-in-law all this later with a note of amazement at his wife’s aplomb. Teri will say the love for a child is powerful incentive to focus.
Teri is not sure how long it took to reach safety. Ken slipped into the water once and disappeared but came up safe against a tree. Their neighbors’ homes were destroyed. Their home is flooded, the foundation punched with holes. They have lost almost everything.
Back here, the force of nature that is Nila Cole is arranging a fundraiser. She has started a drive to send her grandchildren postcards from local elementary-school children. Kids, she says, have a way of comforting other kids.
One moment she and Teri describe sticks with me. Ken has come out of the water and is searching for another way to get his family across. Teri sinks to the ground, baby tucked inside her jacket, his belly pressed against hers. The girls are curled up against her. She can touch them, she says. She can smell them. It’s all that matters.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
