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RECONNOITERING
IN THE EASTERN SIERRA NEVADA & GREAT BASIN |
RESN
& GB 4x4 Trip Series:
August 15, 2004 Deadly
Flashfloods at Death Valley
After sundown, Sunday, August 15, 2004, a cloudburst hit the upper reaches of Furnace Creek Wash. Flood waters roared down the wash, creating mayhem, death and terror. Simultaneously, the same immense thunderstorm cell system impacted the entire region between the Sierra Nevada and out into Nevada. As a result, an entire National Park had to be closed to the public.
As an introduction, two articles are taken from the Associated Press:
August
16, 2004
DEATH VALLEY FLASH FLOOD KILLS AT LEAST 2
Associated
Press
DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, Calif. -- A fierce storm triggered flooding in the Mojave Desert that killed at least two people and forced the closure of Death Valley National Park. Campers and visitors were evacuated from the park Monday.
The intense thunderstorm struck Sunday night, closing roads, stranding vehicles and knocking out power and water.
A day later, the bodies of two people remained in a vehicle stuck in mud, rock and debris, officials said. "We haven't been able to remove them yet," park spokeswoman Roxanne Dey said.
California Highway Patrol and National Park Service helicopters spotted at least eight other vehicles off highways and dirt roads. Officials said they could not immediately tell if they were occupied.
"We're trying to account for all the visitors who were here," Death Valley Superintendent J.T. Reynolds told The Associated Press on Monday, using one of two telephone lines still operating from the park office.
Visitors to the 200-room Furnace Creek Ranch and 20 people staying at a nearby campground were escorted by state police out of the park, Reynolds said.
He said rangers weren't sure if backcountry campers or hikers might have been caught in the flooding.
Reynolds said water and sewer lines were severed, and the park would be closed at least two days and possibly through the weekend. The last time the park closed that long was in 1985, he said.
A California highway that serves as the main road between the eastern Sierra and Nevada was closed for 130 miles, to near the Nevada state line. Another highway was closed to Shoshone, Calif.
The 3.4 million-acre park, about 300 miles northeast of Los Angeles, is the largest national park outside Alaska.
August
18, 2004
DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK CLOSED INDEFINITELY
Death Valley National Park has been closed indefinitely because of heavy flooding in the Mojave Desert that killed at least two people and washed away stretches of road. Fierce storms that hit the desert over the weekend triggered flooding that washed cars off roads and sent mud, rock and debris cascading into the Furnace Creek Wash.
The two people who were killed were in a car stuck in mud, rock and debris about five miles from the Furnace Creek Ranch complex. Authorities recovered the vehicle late Monday, but they didn't know if the people were male or female or where they were from. No other deaths or injuries have been reported, park spokeswoman Roxanne Dey said Tuesday.
California Highway Patrol and National Park Service helicopters spotted at least six other vehicles off highways and dirt roads. CHP officers canvassed the backcountry but did not find any campers injured or in distress and no one has been reported missing, Dey said.
The park was closed to visitors Tuesday and will remain closed indefinitely, Dey said.
Workers trying to fix a break on the park's main water line found a second break and the park's wastewater system also was damaged, Dey said. There was no estimate on when the second water line break would be repaired.
Power was restored late Monday afternoon to the visitors center, park offices and the Furnace Creek Ranch, where about 240 concession employees are housed in dorms. The employees remained in their dorms Monday night, although visitors to the ranch had been evacuated.
"They are happy they have air conditioning again," Dey said. It's not unusual for Death Valley to record high temperatures between 100 and 120 degrees this time of year, with overnight lows in the 80s.
California Highway 190 -- a main road between the eastern Sierra and Nevada -- was closed to through traffic for 130 miles, from U.S. 395 in the Owens Valley to Death Valley Junction near the Nevada state line. The CHP said state Highway 178 also was closed to Shoshone, Calif.
"We have extensive roadway damage," Susan Lent, a spokeswoman for the California Transportation Department said Tuesday. "A 6-foot by 50-foot wide section has been completely washed away. There's a big 6-foot deep hole -- that's in one area, and there are several areas like that along the road."
Visitors from the 200-room Furnace Creek Ranch hotel, and the 20 people who had been camping in a nearby campground were escorted Monday by CHP caravan out of the park.
The park, with 3.4 million acres, is the largest national park outside Alaska. Reynolds said water remained Monday in the Badwater basin -- the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, at 282 feet below sea level.
Meanwhile, severe thunderstorms washed out highways and knocked out power about midnight Monday in the Needles area near the California-Nevada border, California Highway Patrol spokesman Shannon Stumbaugh said. Road crews cleared mud and rock from U.S. 95, which reopened Tuesday morning between Needles and Laughlin, Nev.
Needles Highway, a state highway connecting the two towns on the west side of the Colorado River, might remain closed until Wednesday, Stumbaugh said.
On Tuesday, August 24, 2004, the Park Service held a media tour so that journalists could be escorted to the worst of the flooding at Furnace Creek and Zabriskie Point. Representing the Inyo Register and the Pahrump Valley Times (Pahrump, Nevada), correspondent Robin Flinchum and I rode along with the group of media representatives from as far away as New York City.
The tour started at the east entrance of Death Valley National Park, just west of Beatty, Nevada. This required me to travel east out to US95 south of Goldfield, Nevada, then down to Beatty. At a little after 11:00am, we were escorted down in our own vehicles to the visitor center at Furnace Creek. A briefing took place at the auditorium, then the group were put into vans and other vehicles to the flood zones.
Our tour focused on two locations: the junction of Badwater Road and CA190, just below Furnace Creek Inn; and about 3.5 miles further up Furnace Creek Wash at what was once the parking area for Zabriskie Point. Tour participants were allowed to mill about these two locations for a half hour or so and see for themselves the destruction.
After viewing Zabriskie Point, the tour returned to the visitor center. There, several people in authority were available for the media to interview and answer questions about short and long term plans to return man made features of Death Valley National Park back to its former condition. There were also other Park Service and Xanterra employees who had met the storm personally and told us about it.
I did have a mishap. While navigating the debris field just below the Furnace Creek Inn, I stumbled and fell, crushing my digital camera onto a large rock. The camera was in my hand and took much of my weight on its lens. The camera was turned on at the moment and its lens extended. When I examined the camera, I noted first off a series of small dents around the perimeter of the lens body. The lens was also cocked to one side. The camera was still in the power on position and the LCD screen was still showing what the lens was looking at. I shot a photo and then turned the camera off to see if the lens would straighten up. The lens remained unmovable under the camera's power. I attempted multiple times to power up the camera, but when it would attempt to manipulate the lens and autofocus, it couldn't move the lens and would then shut down. I attempted repeatedly to get the camera to work, finally succeeding about a half hour later when I managed to unjam the lens. The camera then appeared to work normally, however it did shut itself down occasionally when activating the digital zoom feature. I hoped that the remaining photos were coming out normally.
Herein are my photos taken during the day. And yes, they did come out just fine after the mishap.
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The Meeting: National Park Service rangers and administration position themselves at the park boundary on Nevada 374 west of Beatty, Nevada. Members of the media met here prior to the 11:00am tour. While Robin and I waited, several carloads of tourists, oblivious to the park closure, had to be turned back by park rangers. KLAS-TV8 (Las Vegas) cameraman Brian Podner films some of the activity while awaiting the start of our escort. |
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Entering the Valley of Death: The Park Service escorted the media group in our own vehicles down to the Furnace Creek complex, where we met and parked at the visitor center. Road crews were still busy removing alluvial debris from the road here just below Hells Gate and above Mud Canyon. |
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The Briefing: National Park Public Information Officer Joe Zarki invited the guests to introduce themselves, then gave a briefing on what happened, when it happened, what we would see, where we would go and what we would do. Mr. Zarki normally works at Joshua Tree National Park, but is temporarily working at Death Valley during this emergency. |
Before sharing the photos of the worst damage, perhaps this information, part of a press kit handed out by the Park Service, will help set the scene (italics mine):
FURNACE CREEK WASH FLOOD EVENT OF AUGUST 2004
Arid climate flood events such as the recent one in Furnace Creek Wash are normal, naturally occurring geologic events that have been ongoing for millions of years. These events while potentially catastrophic for humans and some other species are part of the ongoing geologic precesses affecting the earth's surface. These events should be viewed and accepted as part of the natural process. They occur when intense rainfall is deposited on the desert surface in quantities far too great to be absorbed and consequently run off toward lower elevations. The moving water gains energy as it gains momentum. The energy of the rapidly moving water is then capable of performing impressive actions.
It is this erosional process that creates the superb alluvial fans for which Death Valley is renown. It requires tremendous energy to move the millions of tons of rock, gravel and sand that make up the fans. That amount of energy when released in single storm events, as just seen, is indeed awesome and potentially destructive. When a large even such as this one occur where human infrastructure such as the park's road networks, buildings, and other facilities are located it can be devastatingly impressive. When similar events occur in undeveloped areas of the park we tend to take little notice of them.
The Furnace Creek Wash flood event of 2004 was unusual within Death Valley because of its magnitude. It was a large magnitude event because to the large area of contributing drainage basin. The Furnace Creek Drainage Basin is the largest secondary basin in the valley with the exception of the valley itself. In this event nearly 80% of the total basin contributed runoff rainwater to the wash. Once the combined storm waters gained sufficient volume and velocity increased magnitude erosional damage occurred. By the time the combined floodwaters reached Zabriskie Point the resulting energy was of considerable magnitude capable of performing tremendous feats.
When the volume of water exceeded the capacity of the constructed diversion notch at Zabriskie Point it jumped the bank and resumed its natural course on down Furnace Creek Wash. The pit toilets at the visitor parking lot presented little obstacle and were easily displaced. Long before it reached Zabriskie Point the racing floodwaters had sufficient energy to perform huge damage to highway 190. The racing water undercut the roadway and broke up large sections of pavement. Impressively the water rafted pieces of pavement weighing several tons as if they were toy boats.
Vehicles presented no match to such force. Those unfortunate ones caught in the path of the floodwaters were simply something else to be moved by the irresistible force. Once under the influence of the floodwater the vehicles became subject to the massive forces of the bed load. When floodwaters are coursing down drainages they are also moving and rolling the alluvial boulders, rocks, gravel and sand that make up the surfaces of the drainages. It is this movement or displacement of alluvial materials down the drainages to their mouths where the floodwaters disperse and dissipate their energy where the alluvial fans are created. Once the water disperses and looses its energy it stops moving the bed load and drops its suspended load. The severity of the damage to the vehicles caught up in the flood came from the action of the moving bed load.
The flood was not a unique event. A similar event happened in 1984 and others have been recorded. In recent time the floods appear to occur on approximately 20-year cycles although they are not constrained to any timetable. Much information can be obtained from documentation and data analysis of this event that can be utilized to mitigate damage from future ones. Impressive as it seems the flood is only part of the natural scheme of things in the desert.
Now, back to the tour:
Flood Zone #1 – Furnace Creek Inn
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on Map to Enlarge
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Below the Inn, the junction of CA190 and Badwater Road come together, right at the mouth of Furnace Creek Wash and the Death Valley floor. The main crush of flashflood waters disgorged themselves out onto the Death Valley floor through a narrow squeeze between the natural features of the mouth of the canyon and the substantial stone structures of the Furnace Creek Inn. |
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The floodwaters did little structural damage to the employee apartments, but did wipe clean the parked vehicles from the lot. Loaded with tons of boulders, stone, gravel and stand, Nature's body shop took control and did its own savage body work to each as they rode out the last of the flood. |
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As for the vehicles parked at the Inn, some were carried far downstream, others stayed relatively close to the spot their owners parked them. Some showed amazing damage, others appeared relatively unscathed. Two vehicles stuck close to their point of origin, the remainder went much farther downstream. Some appeared to ride the watercourse upright, others were ground and chewed over and over. |
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The uppermost vehicle was a late model Chevrolet full size custom van. Parked with its nose upstream, the water and it's “bed load” simply knocked out the windshield and coursed through unimpeded. Brush, boulders, rocks, sand and mud filled the interior cavity and smoothed the flow for the water and bed loads yet to come. The van appears to have kept upright for the length of its ride. Most interesting to me, though, is seen inside the van. Take a look at the photo below: A Club steering wheel lock is still affixed to the steering wheel; the transmission lever is still in the PARK position. |
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A late model Toyota Corolla is found farther downstream. Behind this car is where I disabled my camera, so there are no other photos of the remainder of the wrecked vehicles. Farther downstream from the Corolla is what appears to be a Nissan Sentra, upside down and nearly buried. It's suspension, front and rear axles were ripped out of their mounts, pointing haphazardly in directions not intended when the car was built. |
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Nearby was a Ford Taurus station wagon, upside down. It was pretty well pummeled, but otherwise fairly intact. About a hundred yards further down was a Volkswagen Vanagon, 1980s and the last of the rear engine vans. It appeared to be in the best shape of all the vehicles, its wheels and tires partially buried but the body in good shape. Below the Volkswagen about 300 feet was a late model Chevrolet Malibu, boulders wedged into the windshield frame. Below that and bringing up the bottomost of the washed out vehicles is a customized late model van. I did not get close enough to the van to determine its make and model, due to time constraints. |
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Flood Zone #2 – Zabriskie Point
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on Map to Enlarge
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At the parking area for Zabriskie Point, two bathroom structures – each weighing 42,000 pounds apiece – were ripped from off their foundations and vaults and sent 200 feet downstream. Each was filled with debris, mud and gravel and had bent doors and frames. |
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KLAS-TV8 cameraman Brian Podner videotapes one of the toilet assemblies, more than a mile downstream below the Zabriskie Point parking area. |
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Water flow in the wash below Travertine Springs. The large set of springs deliver a tremendous quantity of water into the Furnace Creek Wash system. The vast majority of it is used by the facilities at Furnace Creek for agricultural and human use. The water system is still not capable of being used to its full potential, so a small flow of water runs downstream a ways. |
Interviews
– Furnace Creek Visitor Center
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CalTrans District 9 Director Tom Hallenbeck is interviewed by a reporter from the Las Vegas Review Journal. Death Valley National Park Maintenance Supervisor W. Badder looks on. |
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Dave Peterson, Xanterra employee who runs the Chevron gas station at the resort, tells reporters and camera crews his experience of loosing his car to the flood waters. |
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Robin Flinchum, a regular contributor of eastern Inyo County news to both the Inyo Register and Pahrump Valley Times, interviews Death Valley National Park Superintendent J.T. Reynolds. |
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KLAS-TV8 reporter Edward Lawrence interviews Park Service Chief Ranger Nancy Wizner about her role during and after the floods. |
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KLAS-TV8 reporter Edward Lawrence and cameraman Brian Podner interview Xanterra employee Linda Small about her terrifying experience of being trapped in her car as the floodwaters collided with her as she was traveling to Furnace Creek on CA190. Read her story in Robin Flinchum's article below. |
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The road home: road work still continues as I traveled back to Beatty. This point is near Beatty Junction, north of Furnace Creek. |
As
a wrap up to this page, I quote Robin Flinchum's fine article in
total, unedited, that she has submitted to the Inyo Register
and the Pahrump Valley Times.
ANATOMY
OF A FLOOD
by Robin Flinchum
At his office in Furnace Creek on Sunday, August 15, Death Valley National Park Superintendent J. T. Reynolds was working late, finishing up a report for a meeting in Las Vegas the following morning. It had been raining on and off all day, the air was muggy, the winds were high. Some minor flooding had already closed a section of road between Stovepipe Wells and Cow Creek. Up until closing time, rangers inside the park visitor’s center had been making regular flash flood warning announcements.
Just as Reynolds put the finishing touches to his report, the lights started to flicker. After 34 years with the national park service, in a job where nature tends to take precedence over paperwork, Reynolds had a feeling something was about to happen.
It was then around 7:30, just coming on dusk. Reynolds walked outside and stood in the parking lot, watching the lightning show beginning in the darkening sky. A pair of headlights announced the arrival of park naturalist and 20-year NPS veteran Charlie Callagan, out in a 4WD vehicle.
“I’m going to go chase the storm,” Callagan called to Reynolds, and drove out toward the clouds hovering around Zabriskie Point.
Around the same time, some twenty miles away, Linda Small was heading toward the park on Highway 190, coming in from Pahrump, Nevada. Small’s Buick Park Avenue was loaded down with everything she’d need to get comfortable in a Xanterra dorm room, because that’s where she’d be living once she started her new job as a PBX operator at Furnace Creek the following morning.
When the rain finally started, it came down fast and hard. Small didn’t know much about Death Valley, but she remembered something her mother told her, that rain in the desert could be dangerous. Just inside the park boundary, past the turnoff to Dante’s View Road, Small spotted another vehicle, a white van headed in the opposite direction, pulled over on the berm. The sight of another person was comforting and Small also pulled over to wait out the storm.
As he approached Zabriskie, Charlie Callagan’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the heavily pelting rain. He’d been in Death Valley long enough to know what was coming and started trying to warn the other cars he met on the road. He managed to reach three and direct them to slightly higher ground before he started to lose traction in the water on the roadway. He turned back toward Furnace Creek.
Now, he wasn’t chasing the storm so much as it was chasing him.
The three vehicles Callagan reached on his mad dash found higher ground and the passengers hunkered down to wait out the storm. But a Ford Ranger pickup truck driven by 71-year-old Tabea Reith, a seasoned traveler and outdoor enthusiast, kept moving through the downpour. On the other side of the Black Mountains, a rented van carrying a family from France pulled over on the Badwater Road.
Back at Furnace Creek, a soaking wet Callagan arrived with a warning; “It’s coming, J.T., it’s coming!”
NPS Chief Ranger Nancy Wizner had just finished her dinner when she got the radio call from Callagan and headed out.
In less than twenty minutes time, the skies dropped .33 inches of water, a quarter of the park’s annual rainfall, and overloaded the diversionary dams.
By this time Linda Small had rolled down her window and asked the driver of the van, NPS maintenance worker Matt Stokely, whether they were safe where they were or should make a run for it. But before they could do anything, Stokely, who was facing in the opposite direction, saw the water coming.
“Hurry, hurry, turn around and get out of here,” he yelled and drove off. But there was no time for Small to do anything but roll up her window. She hadn’t heard it coming, she hadn’t seen it, but she knew when it arrived. Terrified, unable to think of anything else to do, Small stomped her foot on the brake and held it there while a raging torrent of muddy water, rocks and debris crashed into her car, lapped up around the sides and began gurgling in at the floor boards.
The car rocked and jostled as the waters pushed it back about a hundred feet down the road while Small held her foot down and prayed hard. With her windows slathered in mud, she could see nothing of what was going on outside. From the summit above, Stokely watched in horror, sure the water would swallow her up and helpless to do anything about it.
The flood traveled fast, gaining momentum and strength. The wall of water that had been about two feet high when it first hit Small was growing higher. As it passed below Zabriskie point, it lifted two 42,000-pound concrete toilet buildings and carried them 200 feet downstream.
At some point, the torrent engulfed the pickup driven by Reith, with her 48-year-old son Bernhard as a passenger. Whether they even saw it coming remains unknown, but the water swept up their vehicle and tumbled and pummeled it, packing it with mud and debris before the Reiths even had a chance to unfasten their seatbelts.
The torrent raged on, sweeping a dozen cars out of the parking lot below Furnace Creek Inn and strewing them, crumpled like so many tin cans, across the open desert below the junction of Badwater Road and 190. Water and mud seeped into the employee housing units as workers scrambled for higher ground.
Ranger Nancy Wizner watched two cars swoosh by from a vantage point between the Furnace Creek Ranch and the Inn before she was forced to retreat to safer ground. At the Furnace Creek Chevron she ducked into the pay phone booth, now one of the only working phones in the park, and started making calls. Clearly, they’d be needing help in the morning.
Meanwhile, completely bypassing the Timbisha village, offshoots of water rushed through Furnace Creek Ranch, miraculously only soaking the floors in one section of hotel rooms and leaving everything else almost untouched. The bulk of the flow finally exhausted itself in the Badwater basin, passing by the French family in their van but leaving them unharmed.
Later, Linda Small said it felt to her as if she spent two lifetimes sitting in that car while the waters raged around her, but in reality the whole event lasted about 40 minutes. Her heavy Buick lodged up on a hummock of dirt and, weighed down with most of her worldly goods, resisted being carried away in the waters. As soon as things grew quiet again and the water began to recede, Small heard a knocking on her window and Stokely helped her out of the car, amazed that she was still alive.
That night in the darkness, Small and Stokely unloaded some of her provisions, still dry in the trunk of her Buick, and took shelter in his van, where they watched the explosion as a nearby power transformer blew. Further down what used to be the road, visitors stranded in cars, realizing there would be no driving away that night, settled in and got as comfortable as they could. Lightning continued to be the only illumination in the dark, dark skies above them.
Meanwhile, J.T. Reynolds and his staff began receiving reports of the damages as power lines fell, water lines broke and phone lines went out of service. Operating from three old fashioned phone lines not dependent on electricity, Reynolds sent out calls for assistance. Cal Trans crews were already on site, having been at work in the park since early Sunday.
Charlie Callagan hardly slept that night, worrying about the people he’d seen in those cars out on the road. By daylight, he was back at Furnace Creek along with Nancy Wizner. Reynolds, following established protocol, set up and incident command center in a hangar at the Furnace Creek airport where they could meet incoming air traffic bringing backup resources.
The morning dawned clear and found Linda Small and Matt Stokely glad to be alive. But they were astounded by the devastation. “It looked like the desert had reclaimed itself,” Small said, “and we didn’t matter at all.” The road they had traveled in on was completely destroyed around them, covered over in debris as if it had never existed.
Stokely didn’t like the idea of sitting still, waiting for rescue while the desert summer sun rose higher in the sky and the heat set in. He began clearing debris out from in front of the van and embarked on an arduous journey out of Death Valley. “Where the ground was missing he’d get out and build it up, where there were boulders in the way he’d get out and move them. Basically, he built us a road out of there,” Small said. Eventually, they made their way out to Death Valley Junction.
The French family stranded on the Badwater Road, also anxious to get moving, abandoned their vehicle and began walking. The mother lost her shoes in the sloggy mud but they kept going until they reached Furnace Creek, where an employee loaned her a pair of tennis shoes.
By that time, all park entrances were barricaded. J.T. Reynolds, still receiving a litany of damage reports, had ordered the park shut down completely until the major safety concerns could be addressed.
A fixed wing aircraft from the California Highway Patrol arrived by 8AM and along with a CHP helicopter began doing flyovers to assess the damage and look for survivors. The helicopter spotted several stranded motorists and began lifting them out, transporting a total of about 15 people.
An investigation of the Ford Ranger occupied by the Reiths revealed that both passengers had drowned. Inyo County Coroner Bob Franke began the long trek in from Lone Pine. At Furnace Creek he was transferred to a park service 4WD and they began slowly climbing over the gutted terrain. Franke was awestruck by the devastation. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” he said later. “It was unbelievable. It didn’t even look like the same place.”
Because phone lines were still down and Reynolds couldn’t spare anyone from inside the park to deal with growing press inquiries, NPS public information officer Roxanne Dey was drafted from Lake Meade National Park. She was flown in to view the damage and meet with Reynolds and his staff at the hangar. Passing over the remains of 190, she saw massive chunks of asphalt sticking up from the mud and watched as rangers attached the Reiths’ pickup truck to a tow cable. The truck would soon be removed to Furnace Creek, where the bodies could be extricated from the mud and debris inside.
By late Monday morning, Xanterra employees were able to account for all visitors checked into the park’s resort facilities and evacuation procedures began. Over 400 people were escorted out of the park through the west gate leading to Lone Pine, since that portion of Highway 190 remained relatively intact.
With no visitors the park became an eerie, ravaged landscape. But it was far from uninhabited. By late Monday reinforcements for the Cal Trans and NPS crew were arriving from all over California as repair efforts began in earnest. Power was restored by Monday night, though it took a little longer to restore phone lines. Much of the park, however, was still without water. Accounting and curatorial staff were detailed to bring water and Gatorade to workers laboring in the heat of the day.
About 15 displaced Xanterra employees were relocated to rooms at Furnace Creek Ranch, where other workers loaned or gave them replacement items for things they’d lost when the water hit their quarters.
Flyovers by the press and the office of emergency services provided aerial views of the damage that went out over nationally broadcast news programs within 24 hours. Early hopes that the park might reopen in a matter of days were dashed and European travelers moved on to Yosemite or other national park destinations. Booking in gateway community hotels dropped dramatically while inside the park hundreds of park service, state road crew, Xanterra employees, and local and state law enforcement personnel were working overtime to get the park back into shape.
Meanwhile, coroner Bob Franke struggled to locate Tabea and Bernhard Reith’s next of kin. When he released a media request for help, he was inundated with phone calls. But of the approximately 150 he received from across the country, none were from the victim’s family. Finally, almost a week later, a half brother of Bernhard’s was located. He had been away on vacation from his home in Salem, Oregon.
The family made arrangements to have the Reiths cremated. Their ashes will be released at sea, Franke said. In Downey, California, where the Reiths lived, friends and neighbors and will gather to remember them this Saturday at the Christ Lutheran Church.
In the end, it took ten days to partially reopen the park to the public, making sure that the water lines had been repaired and potable water was available, sewage lines were working, and roads wouldn’t collapse under vehicle traffic. But the area below Furnace Creek Ranch remains off limits as engineers and road repair crews marvel, wonder at and begin the monumental task of assessing and repairing the ruptured landscape.
The incident, says Ranger Wizner, “gave us all a lot of respect for the power of water.”
And what of Linda Small? Her Buick was totaled but she eventually returned undaunted to Death Valley where she remains, ready to get to work when Xanterra reopens its Furnace Creek facilities to guests. “I’ve been through the worst of it now,” she says. “I’m just glad to be here.”
©2004,
2005, 2006 D.A. Wright
All Rights Reserved
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