A year after their dramatic rescue, Peggy Donahue and family are again enjoying their James Lane home

Editor’s note: This is one of several updates we’ll share this week and next recounting survivors’ recovery from last year’s historic flood on the weekend of April 29-30, 2017. See additional story, page 16.

Carpenters and roofers were working at Clint and Peggy Donahue’s vacation house on James Lane, near Dawt, a few months ago when an unfamiliar pickup truck pulled into the driveway. “The truck just sat there awhile and then it drove on down the lane,” Peggy said Monday from her family’s Donahue Roofing office in West Plains. “We found out later it was one of the water patrol rescuers who took us off the roof that night. He said, ‘I didn’t know this was a two-story house.’ It gave me chills. But of course when he was there, the water was nearly to the gutters. Unless you’d seen it before, you wouldn’t know. The water was so high.”
As the waters of the North Fork of the White River rose in front of and then around their house that Saturday night a year ago, April 29, Peggy and her daughter and son-in-law, Autumn and Joshua Shirley, watched in fear, not believing what they were seeing.
Their driveway was washing out, “so we moved our vehicles out. But we were still thinking we’d had a 22-foot flood before and it didn’t flood the house,” Peggy said. As the water continued to rise, she was able to check the USGS website one last time. “The website showed the water meter that shows the river level. It was reading 35-36 feet that last time. And then it failed,” she said.
By the time the night was over, the river would be at 40 feet – or higher.
They scrambled onto their home’s second-story deck then stood a stepladder on a table and climbed onto the roof. Peggy and Autumn had kept their cell phones on their chargers until the last minute and then they put them in waterproof bags so they could still communicate with those outside the flood zone.
Peggy’s husband, Clint, couldn’t reach the house because of water over PP Highway – and because James Bridge had been washed away. He spent the night parked at Clear Springs church, Peggy said. They could talk or text, though. “Clint had told me to take a rope and tie us to the antenna. I didn’t have a rope, but we found an extension cord and tied it to the antenna and held on to that all night long,” Peggy said.
They were on the peak of the roof nearly nine hours that harrowing night. Neighbors and emergency responders knew they were on the roof, and several rescue attempts were launched – but each one had to turn back. “Then we saw someone coming toward us with a bright light. But the water was rushing by so fast, and it was carrying trees and buildings and propane tanks that you couldn’t see in the dark until the debris was right on top of you. So we saw them turn around and head back. We understood. They just couldn’t do it. It was hard to take, but we understood. It was just too dangerous,” Peggy told the Times a year ago. “But we didn’t give up. We planned on making it through the night, and thankfully, so many factors contributed to helping us. A lot of things worked in our favor,” she added this week.
Last year she described how “Missouri State Highway Patrol Water Division troopers and Missouri Department of Conservation personnel spent about a half hour trying to reach us, but the water was too swift. They said they had a 50-50 chance of getting there and getting back with us, and that wasn’t good enough. So they pulled back and told us they would come back at first light.”
At daybreak, the current was still raging, but the rescuers “were able to get a lot closer to us before launching their boats, and that turned out to make all the difference,” Autumn wrote in an online post last year, describing the terrifying ordeal.
The boat was level with the second-story windows when the rescuers began taking the terrified flood victims off the roof. “They took me first and then went back for Autumn and Joshua,” Peggy said.
One by one, they lowered themselves off the roof using the extension cord they had clung to all night. “The cord took us to about 2 feet above the boat,” Autumn said in the post. “Letting go of it to drop into the boat was the scariest thing I have ever done in my life.”
“Those guys were such pros,” Peggy said. “They had really good equipment, and I can’t say enough how focused they were. There was no chitchat in the boat. They told me exactly what to do and how to do it. They veered upriver and then curved back around. There were a lot of tree snags coming down the river, and that had to make it a lot harder for them. I’ms so thankful for those trained first responders.”
The rescue team took the three survivors to the home of their neighbors, Dan and Caroline Israel, where more than a dozen other James Lane survivors had congregated, unable to get out through flooded roadways and destroyed bridges.
Monday, Peggy said she got teary-eyed, looking again at the photo taken the Monday after the water finally went down. “I see the dry bag we had our stuff in and that electric cord ...” She paused. Took a breath. And said, “Anyway...” as though she was moving on from the memories of that terrifying night.
Amazingly, the Donahues’ riverside home, built in the 1980s, stood fast in the treacherous current, even though it filled with water and almost everything inside except the dishes and pots and pans was destroyed.
“No windows broke,” Peggy said. “So everything stayed in the house. But it was full of water and everything was covered with muddy, sandy, horrible muck.”
Recently, the Donahues, with Autumn and Joshua Shirley spent three nights in the house – the first nights they’ve stayed there since the flood.
It rained while they were there.
But there have been no nightmares, Peggy said. “It was great to be back. We don’t want to think about it too much, really, but of course we remember. But we just have to also remember it was a unique situation. Not just one rain but water way up the river the week before and then an incredible amount of rain that fell over several days. Now we’re keeping an eye on the river a lot closer than we used to.”