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.
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.