Frantic knock roused couple

They awoke to find river at deck

Terry Whatley embraces his son Chris (left) Saturday afternoon in Langley. The Texas family and Keri Gilbert (right), Chris’ girlfriend, narrowly escaped Friday morning’s waist-to-neck-high water.
Terry Whatley embraces his son Chris (left) Saturday afternoon in Langley. The Texas family and Keri Gilbert (right), Chris’ girlfriend, narrowly escaped Friday morning’s waist-to-neck-high water.

— State police Sgt. Brady Gore and his wife, Gina, awoke at 3:15 a.m. Friday to the sound of fists pounding on the back door of their cabin.

“When she opened the door, I could just hear this roar,” Gore recalled Saturday afternoon. “It was the river.”

Campers Matt Whatley and J.D. Quinn had been awake when the Little Missouri River overflowed its banks. They were running along the row of cabins rousing as many people as they could.

The Gores’ cabin is normally 150 yards from the edge of the river, in the third row of cabins and up a small hill. But when Brady Gore looked out the back door, the river surged along the back deck.

“Of the cabin just down below us, all I could see was the top,” he said.

“It’s an odd deal I was even there,” he recalled. “Thank goodness I was.”

SPUR OF THE MOMENT

Gore decided late Thursday afternoon to make a spur-of-the-moment trip to his family’s cabin near the Albert Pike Recreation Area in the Ouachita National Forest. His wife was already there, visiting with relatives who had just bought a cabin two doors down.

Gore arrived about 6 p.m. He planned to leave early the next morning to go back to work in Hope.

There had been a light rain off and on all day. It had grown to a steady, pounding downpour by the time Gore and his wife went to bed about 11 p.m.

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“It was raining pretty hard but nothing that alarmed me,” he said. “We’ve been there when it’s rained all night like that.”

He woke briefly about 2 a.m. and thought to himself that he should drive by the river as he left for work later that morning to see how high the water had risen.

Gore went back to sleep, until Whatley and Quinn began frantically pounding on the door. At first, Gore thought the cabin must be on fire.

Then he saw the river.

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He and Gina spent maybe three or four minutes dressing, putting on shoes and turning off a few things in the cabin. By then, the water was just a few feet from the back door. Whatley and Quinn ran to the cabin where Gina’s mother was staying,and then the family drove to the campground’s store a couple of hundred yards up the hill.

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“That’s when we began to hear screams and yelling back down toward the water.”

Gore, Quinn, Whatley and a few other men who had found their way to the store walked back through the darkness toward the water, which was sweeping away cabins and debris.

One man saw the beam of a flashlight under the water.

In the distance, they saw a woman hanging from the windowsill of a house that stood on pilings. She was surrounded by swift, debris filled water.

“We had no way to get to her,” Gore said.

The men stood helplessly, some 40 yards from the unidentified woman, and yelled for her to hang on.

They watched in horror as the woman lost her grip and fell briefly into the water before grabbing onto a utility pole. She clung to the pole for two hours before volunteer firefighters were able to use a rope to pull her to safety.

Because there was no cell phone service in that area, Gore had used his police radio to call the Arkansas State Police and the sheriff ’s offices in Pike and Montgomery counties, but impassable roads kept help from arriving quickly. He stayed at the scene to help with rescues and body recovery until the sun set Friday.

Gore plans to keep his cabin but thinks some of his neighbors won’t. He said it will take a long time to sort the memories of good times there from the tragedy of Friday morning.

“I lost a friend of mine we didn’t even know was there camping.” Information for this article was contributed by Noel Oman of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 06/13/2010

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