In the last week of March 1962, snowmelt floods cut Arbon Valley off from the rest of Idaho. The creeks washed out the roads to Crystal and to American Falls, the road toward Malad was already closed, and for a time the valley was without power and telephone as well. Three Utah papers followed the story from day to day. Read together, their reports say a good deal more than the one item on this site's Stories page.
After the February floods
The valley had already been hit that year. Early in February, floods had done millions of dollars of damage in southeastern Idaho, as the Deseret News recalled, and the Salt Lake Tribune noted that fills had since been placed in the road from Arbon to Crystal, "known as the Mink Creek road." In late March, the Logan Herald Journal reported, runoff from thawing snow and ice as high as 8,500 feet brought new flood danger to most of southeastern Idaho. National Guardsmen fought the water at Bancroft, and families in south Pocatello fled the floodwaters.
Cut off on every side
At Arbon the power failed at about 6 o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, March 27, and was still off the next day, the Deseret News reported. It gave Arbon a population of 300. High winds and freezing temperatures were slowing the crews trying to repair bridges "washed out for the third time this year." The paper does not say which bridges these were.
On Wednesday, March 28, the papers reported the valley marooned. The Deseret News said runoff had cut the state highway at numerous points. A wire report in the Logan Herald Journal said floodwaters on Bannock Creek had closed the northern entrance to the valley on Tuesday, and the southeastern entrance at Malad was reported closed too. Power County authorities at American Falls were "attempting to reach the valley" to see how things stood.
The Salt Lake Tribune's report, printed on Thursday, gave the details. The creeks had overrun their banks and cut the roads between Arbon and Crystal and between Arbon and American Falls, isolating the community on Wednesday. The fills in the Mink Creek road had washed out, and the main road to American Falls along Bannock Creek was washed out in several places. The only other way out, toward Malad, had been "closed much of the winter by deep snow, mud and wash outs."
That Wednesday morning the telephone line to Arbon was cut as well, leaving the community, in the Deseret News's words, "cut off from the outside world." According to the Tribune, the authorities said residents were in no danger.
The papers did not agree on how many people were shut in. The Tribune counted 25 dry-farm families still isolated in "little Arbon Valley." The reports in the Logan Herald Journal and the Deseret News said several hundred farm families were trapped or marooned. Since the Deseret News gave Arbon's population as 300, the smaller figure is probably nearer the truth.
Mrs. Newport's switchboard
By Friday, March 30, the telephone was working again, and the Logan Herald Journal's news of the valley that day came from inside it. The paper's informant there was Mrs. Lee Newport, who ran, in the paper's words, "a private telephone exchange serving the valley." She was almost certainly Gena Newport, who with her husband Lee had bought the T. B. Evans farm in 1940 and had kept the valley switchboard in the Evans house ever since. The Firsts page tells how the switchboard passed to her from Susannah Evans.
Mrs. Newport said the water on Rattlesnake Creek, which drains the Crystal basin into Bannock Creek, was going down. But the creek's first surge had cut a break "About 40 or 50 feet wide" in State Highway 38, the road that connected Pocatello with the valley. The paper put the break about 20 miles south of Pocatello. Planks had been thrown across the gap, she said, and the mail carriers "walked the plank" and were then driven on into Arbon.
The reports stop there. They do not name the mail carriers, say what brought the power and telephone lines down, or tell when the power came back, when the roads were mended, or how long the families were cut off. The Idaho papers that would have followed the story, such as the Power County Press and the Idaho State Journal, were not available for this post.
Christmas 1964
Less than three years later, families in the valley were cut off again. In the week of Christmas 1964 floods swept much of Idaho, and on Sunday, December 27, an Associated Press roundup in the Salt Lake Tribune reported most of the state's rivers back in their banks, after at least two deaths and damage to as many as 100 homes. Families at Atlanta and in three other areas were still cut off by washed-out roads. James Imper, assistant director of civil defense, was quoted as saying that families in Arbon Valley had been isolated. The digitized page is so jumbled that the number of families, and what had failed, cannot be read.
The story as reported
Deseret News, March 28, 1962, page 7. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
ARBON VALLEY — With the state highway breached by runoff in a number of places, Arbon Valley was isolated on Wednesday, March 28, 1962. That highway connects the valley northward to Pocatello and southward to Malad. Bannock Creek leads up into the valley, which is about 30 miles south of Pocatello. The people living there were not thought to be in any immediate danger.
The lights were still out Wednesday in Arbon, a community of about 300. They had gone off at around 6 o'clock Tuesday morning. Crews trying to fix the bridges were working against strong wind and freezing cold. It was the third time that year the bridges had gone out.
Elsewhere in southeastern Idaho, emergency officials pointed to Bonneville and Haystack mountains as the likeliest big source of floodwater. The two stand on the Bannock–Caribou county line, roughly 25 miles east of Pocatello. Snow lying at many elevations on their east sides, up to the summits at 9,500 and 8,700 feet, was melting and feeding the Portneuf's drainage from slopes on the north side of Lava Hot Springs. If temperatures climbed quickly, or held above freezing for a long run of days, one official explained, the Portneuf system would be unable to keep up with the runoff. Much of the water off the mountains was collecting in Pebble Basin, upstream of Lava Hot Springs, and officials said towns down the line, McCammon and Inkom and after them Pocatello, would in time be affected.
Gauge readings at Pocatello put the river at 6.3 feet by Tuesday noon, a foot past critical flood stage. The level kept climbing, to 6.42 feet at 9:30 p.m. and 6.52 feet at 4:30 a.m. Wednesday. Spokesmen at the department's Pocatello headquarters worried that the high water could force a complete shutdown of the Pocatello-to-Bancroft stretch of both the main through routes and the state highways.
Over the 24 hours ending late Tuesday night, the Portneuf rose by a foot. In Lava Hot Springs, the makeshift span on U.S. Highway 30N in the center of town was dismantled before the river could sweep it away. Traffic still had a way around, according to Mayor Roy Judd: some six miles west of town, motorists could turn off at a steel river bridge and follow a county road. Bancroft stayed open to traffic Tuesday night even with part of its main highway under water. On a section of highway west of town the water lay 18 inches deep, and a street one block south was flooded to wheel-hub depth, yet cars kept going.
Emergency officials said they had engineers keeping watch at the Portneuf's problem points, with flood-fighting crews available on a few hours' notice. Idaho Falls woke to snow on Wednesday, while near Arco floodwater was crossing State Highways 20 and 26. Gov. Robert E. Smylie's emergency committee sat down Wednesday to work out how to deal with the growing threat. The hope was that Wednesday's chill, with more forecast for Thursday, would ease the flow enough to let the area's drainage carry the water away southward.
On this site: the Stories entry on the 1962 flood; the January 1911 flood on Bannock Creek; the winter of 1948–49, when the mail came by air; and the first dial telephones of 1965, which ended the days when every call went through Gena Newport's switchboard.