Remembering the Flood of 1972

Although the deadly Rapid City flash flood of June 9, 1972 had little physical effect on Custer County itself, many county residents have vivid memories of the event and some, who were either directly impacted by the deluge or helped with the cleanup, remember it well.
More than 15 inches of rain fell on the Rapid Creek watershed on the afternoon of June 9 which caused the creek to quickly leave its banks. But then the breaking of Canyon Lake Dam on the far west side of Rapid City sent what has been described as a “wall of water” plunging through the city. When it was all over 238 people were dead, another 3,057 were injured and over 1,300 homes and 5,000 vehicles were destroyed. The event that occurred 50 years ago this month was the worst flood in South Dakota history and one of the deadliest in the entire nation.
One of those who recalls the events of those days like it happened yesterday is Custer resident Ed Warne. One of the reasons Warne recalls the flood so vividly is because it happened just two days before his 12th birthday. In fact, Warne has jokingly told people over the years that he is actually a year younger than he really is because in all the chaos of the flood his 12th birthday was forgotten by nearly everyone.
Another reason for his clear memories is that his family home and his parents’ business, Warne Chemical, were located smack in the middle of the path of the flood.
The Warnes lived on Rapid Street which parallels Omaha Street and is less than 800 feet south of the banks of Rapid Creek in the area known as the Gap.
Warne recalls watching airplanes seeding the promising rain clouds over the town all day and the beginning of the rainstorm.
“Pretty soon Rapid Creek started coming up so we gathered up my mom and all the kids and started to get into the pickup,” he said, “and about that time that’s when Canyon Lake Dam broke.”
With that event the flood waters started coming from other directions as well.
“The water just started rolling over the railroad tracks and started washing the pickup away so we all jumped out and ran back out to the shop,” he said.
Warne says the home, which sat right behind Warne Chemical’s huge concrete block structure, didn’t float away like so many other homes that night because it was protected from much of the fury of the flood waters by the shop. However, the family eventually had to make their way to a game room in the attic of the house as the waters continued to rise.
“We stayed in the house all night and watched burning propane tanks go right by the house,” Warne recalls. “I’ll never forget there were three of them that went right by the house and all three of them hit other houses and burned them down. It was pretty crazy.”
Warne says his family was joined in their night-long attic vigil by a stranger whom his dad and his sister’s boyfriend had found hanging onto a tree in the back yard and rescued. He says he never learned the name of the man who simply walked away into the mud the next morning. Others weren’t so fortunate.
Warne also recalls watching bodies float by the house and not being sure whether the people were dead or alive. Over the next few days the bodies of three more flood victims were found on their property.
“When it was all over with, our house was the only one standing for about three blocks,” he said.
However, there was still all that mud to contend with. The basement was filled with it and the flood waters had left about three feet of it on the main floor of the house.
“I’ll never forget the mud,” he said. “It was just unbelievable.”
In the next few months, the Warnes managed to clean up and save their house. But it was to no avail because a year later the federal government came in and condemned all buildings in the flood plain, so it was demolished anyway. Today a frisbee golf course occupies that location.
Shortly after that, the family moved to Hill City where Warne graduated from high school. He moved to Custer in 1990 and has been employed with the hospital for the past 28 years.
Tammy Burtz, who has lived in Custer for the past five years and recently moved to Nebraska, has similar memories of the flood of ‘72. She is just a year older than Warne and her family lived on Jackson Boulevard only a block or so from Canyon Lake Park. She also recalls seeing houses, large appliances and other household items floating by, and the sound of frantic calls for help from neighbors on the south side of the boulevard (in what is now Meadowbrook Golf Course) who were standing on their roofs as the waters rushed by. She says her father shouted back that he wanted to help but there was no way to get to them. By morning, many of those houses and their occupants were gone.
Since Burtz’s home was located on higher ground, it had only about a foot of flood and sewage water backed up into the basement. The higher location also meant her home was the only one in the area with a working phone line in the days following the disaster and she recalls seeing national guardsmen trooping into the family home to use the phone.
Long-time Custer residents Bob and Martha Schilling also remember the flood quite well. Bob was a tech sergeant in the U.S. Air Force and the family was living in government housing at Ellsworth Air Force Base at the time.
On the afternoon of the 9th, Bob was with another airman in downtown Rapid City when they received notice that all Air Force personnel were to return to the base due to fears of the dam breaking, so they headed home.
Even though the base was on high ground and mostly unaffected by the flood, the Schillings still had an anxious night. Their son Robert had gone camping with another family and they didn’t hear from him for about 24 hours. He eventually turned up safe and sound, however.
The next day they got word that anyone volunteering to help with the cleanup would get a three-day pass from the commander. So he and a couple of others went to the Armory, registered, got their shots and were assigned to search an area by the Hubbard Mill on Omaha. Like Warne, he recalls the mud was “terrible.”
“You’d put one foot in and the other got stuck,” he said, noting the whole day was like that.
He was part of finding several bodies and recalls the first one they found was that of the owner of the Mr. Steak restaurant. He says early in the recovery process bodies were being transported in any way they could including in the back of pickups. However, Mayor Don Barnett soon put a stop to that, ordering the victims must be transported to the temporary morgue facilities in enclosed vehicles.
The second day after the flood someone found out the Schillings owned horses which they kept on an acreage they had purchased near an old Nike missile base. So Bob volunteered to lead riders to look for bodies along Battle Creek east of Keystone which had also sustained significant flood damage and loss of life. While Bob took six horses and riders to check downstream, Robert led another half dozen riders to search upstream.
While no bodies were found in this search, Bob says they did see a great deal of destruction caused by the flood waters. There were downed trees, appliances, a 10,000 gallon propane tank that had washed away from the Keystone Masonic Lodge and even a car that had been swept away by the rushing waters.
“There was a Volkswagen that was completely wrapped around a tree, bumper to bumper,” he remembers.
During the search that day Bob lost contact with Robert’s group of horsemen for a while and, as Bob puts it, “Naturally, Mom got shook.”
“I said I wasn't gonna let him out of my sight again,” recalls Martha.