Stories: Sion Deluge
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| In the summer of 1992 I was serving in Sion Switzerland with Corey Nasman who just happened to be a childhood friend from my own ward. Anyway I think it was July and that afternoon a real doozy of a summer thunderstorm was developing just toward the end of lunch. Just as we were about to leave the apartment on rue de Lausanne, it began to pour buckets of rain from the sky. We waited a little hoping it would pass after a few minutes but it didn't. The rain just kept coming down. Being fairly adventurous we grabbed out umbrellas and backpacks and set out into the storm to check on a Salt Lake referral that we had previously contacted. As we walked down the street past Migros, the water was flowing down the street 3 or 4 inches deep from sidewalk to sidewalk. Meanwhile up on the north side of the valley, the creek that feeds thru the middle of town and joins in the Rhone river had turned into a raging wall of water full of boulders and entire trees. Right before the creek meets the Rhone it passes under the train tracks east of the Gare. Well as this wall of debris got to the tunnel under the tracks we saw it bottleneck and the force of it literally lifted the track 4-5 feet off the ground. At this point the water and sediment started backing up along the tracks and began to flood the apartment buildings along the tracks. Since our Salt Lake referral lived in one of those buildings we headed over there. When we got there, people's cars were starting to float away and were going to get destroyed. I looked at Corey and said, "Should we go for it?" He said, "Sure." So off came our ties and backpacks on the lawn and we jumped in to the muck up to our waists. I started moving as fast as I could toward a Peugot 205 that was floating toward an opening between some parking lot barriers that the water was able to escape through. If the car reached and blocked that opening the water would have no escape route and peoples apartments would be flooded even worse. About 2 feet before the car reached the open I reached the car and got my fingers under the edge of the bumper. With Corey right behind me, we got the car and "floated" it out of the way along with some other cars and large logs. The water kept flowing and when all was said and done, the entire vielle ville was under a layer of mud and sediment. So without a word of thanks from the people who's cars and apartments we helped save, we headed home coated in mud from the chest down. As a red blooded American, I could not believe that people would stand by as their possessions floated away or stood in harms way! The next day we came back to the same place. We found a Mercedes that was completely unrecognizable except for the Mercedes insignia on the wheel rims. When I pull out the photos, I'll scan them in and put them up on the mission site. Salut tout le monde! |
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