Toccoa Falls College employees install a new sign commemorating the flood of Nov. 6, 1977, and its aftermath.
It was 40 years ago this November that 39 people lost their lives in a catastrophic flash flood at Toccoa Falls College. On Saturday, college officials, students and alumni took part in a Remembrance Service during the school’s annual Homecoming.
“The day of the flood was a tragedy, but it was one of many tragedies that shaped this college and demonstrated the Lord’s faithfulness,” says TFC President Dr. Robert Myers. “We must remember the past, but we can not live in the past.”
Teresa Graves Bill is among those who attended the service. She was a senior at Toccoa Falls College when the flood hit. “I think (it was) about 12:30 or 1 in the morning – my window was open and I remember terrible smells – and a young man from the boy’s dorm came running in screaming ‘The dam is breaking! The dam is breaking!'” She says, “We were quite confused.” She’d hiked up the falls and around the lake plenty of times prior to that morning, but Teresa says she never thought about what held back the water. In the chaos and confusion she found herself thinking “What dam?”
Others in the dorm questioned the same. They were unsure of which direction the water was coming. They woke up the rest of their dorm mates and fled to the hospital just off campus. “So, we just hung out there and then the news was coming that the dam broke and bodies. And we could not visualize, because it was so dark, ‘What’s going on out there?'”
It was hours before any of them knew the full extent of what happened.
The girls were moved from the hospital to LeTourneau Hall at the center of campus. “It was dark. We couldn’t see anything until about seven in the morning when it was light,” Teresa recalls. When they finally did step foot outside she says, “Everything was mud and flattened and the smell of gas was very strong. We were hearing all the body counts and we just were like, ‘What has hit us here?'”
What hit the TFC campus that fateful morning was a wall of water that rushed down from Kelly Barnes Lake Dam after it burst under the stress of days of heavy rains. The flood roared through campus at up to 120 m.p.h. It left behind a swath of death and destruction that crushed the hearts of locals and captured national and international news headlines.
Deborah Kerr, who now lives in Clarkesville, graduated from TFC High School two years before the flood. She was at home in Clearwater, Florida, when she heard the news. “My husband lived here and his family had moved away the year before. The family that moved into his house, they all lost their lives that night,” she says, tears welling up in her eyes. “We were such a close family at Toccoa Falls that it impacted everyone. It was heart wrenching because there were so many little children.”
Kerr’s high school classmate and friend, Rebecca Dosien, was in Colorado when she learned of the flood. As she stood below the falls on the TFC campus on Saturday she recounted the shock she felt upon hearing the news.
“My sister and I had just gotten back from a weekend away with the youth group from church and our phone was ringing off the hook,” she says. “People were wondering if my parents were still here (on the Toccoa Falls College campus) because my father taught school here.” Dosien’s parents were safe in Illinois, but the flood still hit close to home. “I worked in a nursing home at the time and I can remember feeding the patients and watching the television and crying.” As she watched friends and acquaintances being interviewed on TV, Dosien says she found herself “reaching up to the television and touching their faces because I was so far away and I couldn’t get to them.”
That sense of helplessness did not lend itself to hopelessness.
Faith stronger than flood waters
During the Remembrance Service, Dr. Myers read a letter sent by former First Lady Rosalyn Carter who visited the college in the aftermath of the flood. In the letter, written expressly for Saturday’s service, Carter writes of how inspired she was by the “hope, courage and love” that she found on the campus after the tragedy. “Even in the midst of the devastation, when it would not have surprised me to find the survivors racked with grief and despair, the Toccoa Falls community instead rallied together.” Carter adds, “Your spirit of optimism and faith has proven stronger than the flood waters. The college has done more than recover from the tragedy; it has thrived.”
TFC School of Christian Ministries Dr. Jon Penland says the impact of the flood was analogous to the creation of stained glass. “Many of you can think back to the days of this tragedy when you were cut, when you were broken, when you were sanded, when it felt like you were going through a grinder,” he said. “We, from a distance, saw you glorify Christ and it was a thing of beauty, but for you it was a thing of great pain.”
“God used it for good,” says Kerr. “We didn’t see it at the time, but it was.” Dosien adds, “Yes, there was good, but there was also that sorrow.” When asked how she and her fellow TFC alums cope with that sorrow even now, forty years later, Dosien says without hesitation, “That’s where your faith comes in. You lay it in the Lord’s hands.”
Full circle
Teresa Graves Bill graduated from Toccoa Falls College the year after the flood. She went on to seminary and married. She and her husband David served as career missionaries to Africa. The couple recently returned to her alma mater for a year-long residency.
Now, back in Toccoa on the same campus where so many she knew lost their lives, Teresa marvels at how God turned tragedy into triumph. The small Christian college in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains has grown from a student body of 425 at the time of the flood to around 1,400 today. The school operates on a budget of around $25 million, offers a variety of degree and certificate programs, and recently opened a new school of nursing.
As she recounts that harrowing morning on the Toccoa Falls College campus nearly four decades ago, Teresa recites a Bible verse from the book of Isaiah that speaks to the Lord’s faithfulness. “‘He brought us through the fire. He brought us through the waters.’ I really have claimed that verse,” she says.
