Members of the Botetourt community share memories of an event that impacted the county 40 years ago, and still affects some areas to this day
By Matt de Simone
Forty years ago this week, on November 4, 1985, the mountains and valleys of southwestern Virginia were caught in a deluge few will ever forget. The remnants of a tropical system—what would come to be known as the “Flood of ’85” or the “Election Day Flood”—dumped unprecedented rainfall across the region. In the Roanoke Valley, the official tally reached about 6.6 inches in 24 hours, with more than four inches falling in just three hours. Rivers, creeks, and tributaries swelled beyond their banks, and in the darkness of that night, the flood came.
The Roanoke River crested at a record 23.35 feet—more than double its flood stage. Along the James River in Buchanan, gauges registered 38.84 feet, a historic crest that swallowed homes, businesses, and bridges alike. Entire neighborhoods found themselves under water.
Across the region, hundreds of homes and businesses were damaged or destroyed. In Botetourt County alone, agricultural losses were estimated at $4.5 million, and the Buchanan sewage treatment plant was knocked out of operation for six months. Despite the destruction, the toll on human life was miraculously low, thanks to heroic rescue efforts—including one helicopter crew that airlifted about 125 people to safety.
In the immediate aftermath, local officials scrambled to understand the scale of the disaster. As The Fincastle Herald reported in its November 6, 1985 edition, “Botetourt County officials have started assessing the damages from Monday’s storm, which took at least two lives here and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of property in the county.” More than six inches of rain fell across the county, the article noted, the result of a tropical system and a stalled low-pressure front that turned “small streams into roaring torrents.” Sheriff Norman Sprinkle called it was “the worst flooding the county has experienced,” comparing it unfavorably even to the 1913 flood, Hurricane Camille, and Tropical Storm Agnes. “If it was ever anything that slipped up on us quick,” Sprinkle said, “it was what we had Monday.”
Board of Supervisors Chairman Fleming Ring declared a local emergency at 8 a.m. on November 5, and county officials began the difficult process of applying for disaster relief funds. Early estimates then suggested that “200 to 250 homes were in water at one time or another,” though officials cautioned the number could be as high as 500 once the full impact was known. Roads, bridges, and farms were devastated—nearly 30 secondary roads closed, along with major highways like U.S. 220, U.S. 11, and U.S. 460. “I don’t know of a highway in the county that hasn’t been damaged by water,” Sprinkle said in the article. “Bridges are out. There are landslides, trees down, roads washed out. It’s a disaster.”
The Herald described the scene vividly: in Eagle Rock, floodwaters reached the second story of some businesses, while in Buchanan, “businesses and homes were inundated and some completely moved off their foundations.” A Chessie System train stalled on the tracks in Eagle Rock as water rose halfway up its cars. By that Tuesday afternoon, officials still could not estimate the total cost, though they agreed it would be “in the millions.”
For those in Eagle Rock, the night remains especially vivid. Steve Vaughn, who served as chief of the Eagle Rock Volunteer Fire Department during the flood, recalled that the realization came suddenly. “Maybe around six o’clock that night,” Vaughn said, “I was home with four kids. My wife was stranded at Alleghany High School, and I got a call from the fire department that I needed to get out of where I was.” Floodwaters had already made travel treacherous. “I plodded through water to get from my house to Eagle Rock,” he said.
When Vaughn arrived at the station, chaos had already taken hold. “The thing that sticks out in my mind most is the fact that we had a propane tank from the storage bins blow loose,” he said, referring to the silos north of town. “It floated down the river and ended up right at the end of town, butted up against an engine on the C&O line. We had to evacuate that end of town in case it exploded.” The massive tank, which Vaughn estimated had drifted half to three-quarters of a mile, underscored how unpredictable and dangerous the night had become.
As waters rose, the fire department’s focus shifted entirely to saving lives. “We were just trying to get people out of their homes,” Vaughn said. “We had people in town that had to move out.” He remembered volunteers—many of them not even official members of the fire department—joining the rescue efforts. “Everybody just pitched in as best they could,” he said. “We set up routes around the area, and we had members and volunteers go around with generators to help people charge their freezers so they didn’t lose everything while the power was out.”
Power, Vaughn recalled, stayed out for a long time. “We tried to set up stuff in the firehouse to feed people, a place they could get warm and get water,” he said. “We were able to get a generator— I think the county brought it over—so that the town had water. We had a public water system, we just didn’t have any electricity to get to the pumps.”
Even decades later, the memories stir unease whenever storms return. “People still get nervous when it starts raining,” Vaughn said. “There’s a lady that lives on Church Street here in Eagle Rock, and when we start getting heavy rain, she monitors the gauges upriver and on Craig Creek.” For many in Eagle Rock, he said, “the town never fully recovered from that flood.”
Despite the chaos, there were moments of relief and even heroism. The paper reported that while small streams were subsiding, “the James River was rising,” cresting “at its highest level in memory.” Two cows were even seen swimming out of the river in Buchanan and “up one of the alleys to safety.”
In the midst of the flooding, local institutions faced unprecedented challenges. Weldon Martin, principal of Breckinridge Elementary School at the time, recalled the tense hours as rain poured endlessly. “I remember standing in the cafeteria, looking out at the rain and realizing how serious the flooding could become,” Martin said. With no cell phones or real-time updates, he had to make critical decisions about student safety with limited information. When the central office notified him that buses could not operate, Martin and his staff prepared for students to remain at the school overnight.
The response from the school community was swift and coordinated. Staff volunteered to stay late, prepared meals, and organized activities to keep children calm. By the first night, about 30 students were stranded due to impassable roads and rising water, many coming from far-flung corners of the county. Civil Defense cots, blankets, and pillows arrived from the Fincastle Volunteer Fire Department, and the school turned into a temporary shelter. “We tried to make it seem like a great adventure,” Martin remembered, noting how the students remained surprisingly calm amid the uncertainty. Some children even spent a second or third night at the school, with staff rotating responsibilities to ensure rest and care.
In Buchanan, the James River corridor bore the brunt of the flood’s fury. Longtime Fincastle resident and former librarian Paige Ware remembers the moment she realized the waters were rising beyond anything the county had seen. “I was working at Fincastle Library that day and my husband called me and said the James River was flooding his mother’s home in Cherry Tree Bottom,” Ware recalled. “We traveled on I-81 until the James River bridge. We got out and saw the flood was in the house almost to the second floor. All the houses on Cherry Tree Bottom were flooded. After the flood, we started cleaning out the house—most things were destroyed.”
Ware said that even amid the devastation, the community spirit that defines Botetourt shone through. “Volunteers from everywhere came to help Buchanan,” she said. “I hope that this kind of flood never happens in Buchanan again.”
For Buchanan resident Jessie Burton, the memory remains vivid. “My parents lived in town, fortunately far out of the flood zone, and my mother called me and said that ‘the town was gone,’” Burton said. “She talked about the devastation on Lowe Street and how far up Main Street the water had risen. The building that is now Mrs. B’s Bistro had floodwater up to the roof.”
Robin Reed, former WDBJ-7 chief meteorologist and now a Fincastle resident, covered the 1985 flood from the newsroom. He said a perfect storm of meteorological factors made the event especially destructive.
“A dying tropical system stalled in the mountains, resulting in heavy rain over the same area,” Reed said. “There was some thought that rain in the creeks and tributaries got hung up with leaves and downed tree branches, and when it broke through it overwhelmed the Roanoke River basin.”
At the time, flood monitoring systems were fairly basic. “Flood signs and measuring poles marked past high water levels,” Reed explained. “Given the damage, and the fact that Roanoke Memorial Hospital was threatened, systems were put in place by the National Weather Service and affected counties to provide real-time levels. IFLOWS, the Integrated Flood Observation Warning System, made it possible to watch levels live. Also, the Army Corps of Engineers also reshaped the Roanoke River basin to hold back future floods.”
File photos
Reed recalled the chaos of those days in the WDBJ newsroom, where even power outages couldn’t stop their coverage. “The newsroom was on full alert, all hands on deck,” he said. “Complicating our coverage was the loss of power that evening. The APCO system was underground at Towers Mall where the station operated back then. We had a generator on Poor Mountain with the transmitter and tower so we stayed on the air for network programs but we didn’t have a generator at the studio. At one point we were broadcasting from a poorly lit newsroom by feeding our signal to a microwave truck and sending that to Poor Mountain. The engineering staff really earned their pay during this event.”
Back in Botetourt County, The Fincastle Herald was grappling with how to tell the story unfolding around it. Edwin McCoy, who served as editor at the time and penned the referenced November 6, 1985 article, remembers the challenge clearly. “The rain was intense, and as the day continued, we were hearing reports of flash flooding from the Sheriff’s Office,” McCoy said. “Overnight, it got worse, and on Tuesday, the water from the Roanoke River backed up in a drainage at our Salem office where we printed. Several inches of water got in that building, which meant we could not print. That proved to be helpful since it delayed publication for a day. I spent that day traveling around the county to see what damage had been done and taking pictures.”
McCoy spent the next day traveling across the county with his camera, documenting the devastation. “The Town of Buchanan was essentially cut off by the still-rising James River,” he said. “Rt. 11 south was flooded, the river had washed out the swinging bridge and the river was running down Lowe Street, crossing Main at the Stop In. Rt. 43 south was flooded as well.”
From Eagle Rock to Arcadia, bridges, homes, and roads were destroyed. “The old steel bridge in Eagle Rock was washed downriver, as was the old Springwood bridge,” McCoy said. “Its remnants are in the James River just downriver from the I-81 bridge. Catawba Creek washed out bridges. Tinker Creek and Buffalo Creek flooded through Cloverdale where one person died. Tinker Creek carried its devastation into Roanoke to the Roanoke River, as did Glade Creek as it left Blue Ridge and flooded Vinton.”
When the water finally receded, The Herald published an edition that not only documented the damage but also helped direct residents to aid and resources. That issue would go on to earn the Virginia Press Association’s Public Service Award for its coverage.
McCoy said some of the most powerful images came after the water went down. “So many families and businesses lost so much,” he said. “The Town of Buchanan took years to recover, but every Christmas, townspeople remember the help they received from outsiders by lining Main Street with gallon water and milk jugs as candle luminaries. The jugs represent the thousands of gallons of water that were delivered to the town after the flood.”
Four decades later, the Flood of ’85 remains one of the defining events in Botetourt County’s modern history—a test of resilience that revealed the strength of its people. As floodwaters consumed homes and bridges, neighbors waded in to rescue each other, school staff cared for stranded children, journalists chronicled history as it happened, and volunteers from near and far helped rebuild.
For those who lived through it, the memory of that cold November storm endures as a reminder of both nature’s power and the community’s unyielding spirit. As Steve Vaughn put it, reflecting from his Eagle Rock home f40 years later, “This was a long time ago, but I remember we were just running on adrenaline. We don’t ever need to see anything like that again.”
