CARLTON FLETCHER: Community is at its best during emergencies

If you can, Lend a helping hand.

— Lynyrd Skynyrd

It doesn’t matter that the cradle of Southwest Georgia, lying as it does along a system of waterways that includes the Flint River, is prone to flooding.

When running water leaves its generally assigned banks and starts moving toward your home, the helplessness and fear you feel is crippling.

This region got a taste of what real flooding is in 1994 when a 500-year, once-in-several-lifetimes event left thousands homeless and cut off most families in East Albany from their friends and loved ones in West Albany. Only those willing to make a 100-mile-plus journey north or south could get from Albany State University — which was itself under feet of water — on the east side of the Flint to the Albany Civic Center on the west, a distance ASU students easily walk.

Before citizens in the region had fully recovered from that devastating natural disaster, a second 500-year flood hit the area in 1998, washing out some of the same homes that had been hit in ‘94 and leading some residents to give up and head for drier ground. Twice-in-a-lifetime proved too much to handle.

Significant, but certainly less dramatic, high-water events occurred in the region in 2005 and 2009, reminding many of the old saw, “If you live close enough to see water, one day that water’s going to get up-close-and-personal with you.”

And so it was over the Christmas holidays that a slow-moving storm front dumped as much as 8 to 10 inches of rain on Southwest Georgia — and, perhaps more damaging, Central Georgia — leading to what’s been typically described as “minor flooding” in the region. Many of the same homes that had been impacted by past floods, especially those located where the Kinchafoonee Creek dumps its waters into the Flint, were once again hit, weary homeowners granted an almost six-year reprieve once more forced to evacuate.

The first few hours of the latest high-water event offered a few dramatic rescues, as some residents were caught off-guard by the swiftness of the rising water, and there was a growing fear for the first 48 hours or so — sparked, it probably should be noted, by some overly dramatic doomsday media reporting — that it was “1994 all over again.”

Thankfully, that wasn’t the case, but it certainly doesn’t diminish the impact the latest flood, which with continued rains, has stretched into the new year, has had on those hardest hit.

Residents in Lee County, which, as Albany Fire Department Chief Ron Rowe noted, “took the brunt of this blow,” had to be comforted by the quick response of emergency personnel in the community as flood waters started leaving their banks. Lee Fire Department, Sheriff’s Office, Public Works, CERT team, EMS and Leesburg Police Department officials set up a command post at the county’s Century Fire Station and several first responders — Fire Chief/Emergency Management Agency Director James Howell, Assistant Fire Chief Jim Weaver and LSO Lt. Col. Dennis Parker among them — spent most of several days and nights at the site.

But the quick response — the offer to help in any way possible — was not limited to the people who are paid or who volunteer to serve and protect their community. Leesburg PD Lt. James Vick noted that, with the establishment of the Emergency Operations Center, he put out a couple of calls to see if local businesses would donate provisions for those manning the station.

“I was a little overwhelmed by the response,” Vick said. “Local businesses — Little Ceasar’s, IGA, Pizza Hut, Subway, Publix and Brick Oven (restaurant) — started bringing in food, water, snacks, as soon as they heard that there was a need.”

Last Sunday afternoon, a table set up in the command center looked like a hungry-man’s buffet, filled from end-to-end with pizza boxes, sub sandwiches, water, soft drinks, chips and just about any other food staff might have wanted. Vick smiled as I asked him about the smorgasbord.

“That’s just the kind of community we have,” he said.

The spirit that led Lee citizens to support their first responders and neighbors is the same one exhibited by Albany citizens in the wake of high-water events like the floods of ‘94 and ‘98. It’s a spirit that, when help is needed, sets people of this region apart from those anywhere else in the world.

It’s a shame, then, that that spirit is usually only evident during emergencies.

Email Carlton Fletcher at [email protected]. Follow @ABH_Fletcher on Twitter.