After bringing the fire at Tempo under control, firemen returned to assisting in evacuation of persons whose living quarters were threatened by the flash flood.
Pulley Ambulance Service headed the evacuation of nearly 50 residents of the Roosevelt home on North Madison Street when Mule Creek overran its banks and backwaters extended to the home for elderly persons.
Tom Redikas, head of the county emergency and disaster service, arranged with Loren Pinson of the Jefferson School on East Boulevard to house the Roosevelt home residents there. The transfer was made with two ambulances and a motor home.
Redikas said today that 130 persons were evacuated from various residential areas by mid-morning. They included residents of 20 housing units in the county housing authority’s South Market Street for the elderly who were taken out in boats by persons who volunteered their equipment. Sixty residents of Gent Addition who left their lowland homes and gathered in Paul’s Chapel elected to remain there instead of accepting an offer to be taken out in boats to other areas of the city, Redikas said.
Some of those evacuated from the housing area on South Market and from individual private dwellings were taken to the homes of friends and relatives out in the community and the others were housed at the First Baptist Church.
Anticipating the return of evacuated persons to their homes, the county home economics extension office announced that instructions of value in returning to homes that have been evacuated under such circumstances will be made available to evacuees. They will be available free at the extension office, 309 N. Madison St., the information desk at the courthouse and at the First Baptist Church.
Not all of the homes from which residents were evacuated were actually entered by water, but occupants left when the water level continued to rise during the morning.
In the area of Boyton and South Market Street near the county housing project, however, the water was up to the window sills of some units and automobiles which had been left parked in the parking area had only their tops protruding from the weather. On South Market some trailer homes had one to two feet of water inside, and automobiles parked nearby where submerged up to the windows.
Police were busy helping in the evacuations and trying to keep the streets cleared of stalled automobiles. Some cars which were abandoned at low pavement intersections at the height of the flood during the night were towed out of the traffic lanes this morning. At midmorning one automobile stalled near the East Boulevard-North State intersection during the night was still there, although the water had subsided.
The flood was in some respects the worst Marion had ever experienced. Although the lowland area that was filled in many years ago to provide a site for the South Market Street housing project often became flooded in years past, this was the first time since construction of the housing units that the flood reached today’s level.
Marion was not alone in experience with the flash flood of last night. State Route 37 was covered with water both north and south of Marion, and for several hours traffic was halted on that highway south of Marion. It was reopened at 10 a.m. Traffic remained open on the higher Interstate 57.
(Photos from Southern Illinoisan and article extracted from Marion Daily Republican printed March 28, 1977)