Eagle’s devastation brings Dawson City memories flooding back

Bill Bowie has been thinking a lot lately about the Dawson flood of 1979, those thoughts triggered by the devastation he's seen in photographs coming out of Eagle, Alaska, this month.

DAWSON CITY - Bill Bowie has been thinking a lot lately about the Dawson flood of 1979, those thoughts triggered by the devastation he’s seen in photographs coming out of Eagle, Alaska, this month.

“When I saw what they were going through over there, it really brought ‘79 back to me in living colour,” he said in a recent interview. “My heart really goes out to those people. It’s a pretty devastating experience.”

Bowie has some amusing memories: like paddling a canoe through the old fire hall on Third Avenue right in one door and out the other.

He and his family were living in a two-storey log house on Second Avenue at the time. Front Street was also the flood dike in those days and most of the streets up to Sixth Avenue were at a lower elevation than that.

” When the water started coming over the dike, we were scrambling to get as much out of the house as we could.”

Lynne (his wife at that time) took their two daughters to a friend’s house on higher ground. Bill stayed at the house as long as he could.

“I was wading around in the water trying to save stuff. It got to the point that I had to get out of there.”

Water would eventually cover the entire first floor up to the ceiling, and by the time Bill left, he was no longer able to shut the doors.

“In my confused state of mind, I was so worried that I’d had to go and leave the house and hadn’t been able to close the door or lock up the place. It was under eight feet of water, but that didn’t occur to me.

“About 6 o’clock in the morning, Joe Fellers took me down to the house in his canoe. I climbed over the railing on the second-floor balcony and opened the door to the bedroom, went in there and went to bed. Of course I couldn’t sleep because the house was gurgling.”

Some time before that, Peter Gould had awakened his parents in their Seventh Avenue home at around midnight, wondering how they could sleep through a flood.

“By that time,” John recalled, “it was up to Sixth Avenue. That was about as far as it came.”

About an hour earlier, the Goulds woke up Shirley Pennell, then the vice-principal at the Robert Service School, in her home at the Korbo Apartments on Sixth Avenue. She was asked to open the school on Fifth Avenue so it could serve as a shelter. About 45 people had to seek refuge there.

She was too busy to see much of the action outside, but recalled watching the boardwalks float up and down the street as the water ebbed and flowed.

“Some went by with dogs on them,” she recalled in a 1989 interview.

Some two hours before Bill Bowie climbed into his second-storey bedroom, Pennell was also in a canoe, paddling down to Front Street with a friend to see the flooded Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce building before heading back to the Korbo, where her apartment was above the flood.

Bowie’s house was flooded badly. He says there are many reasons why he’d rather live with a fire than with a flood.

With a fire, the damage is done and the things are destroyed - burned up. It’s worse, he thinks, to have to pick through the sodden and ruined remains of things you know you can’t salvage.

Other people had different experiences. Just down the street, the Castellarin house floated off its foundation and into the back alley where it settled level.

Owners Joe and Betty extended sewer, water and power lines and lived in it there for some months before they could get it moved back to where the dwelling had been.

The Cassiar Building, left over from the recently closed Clinton Creek asbestos mine, floated out into Queen Street and was there for about a year.

The original home of the Klondike Nugget and Ivory Shop was located where The General Store is now. It was simply destroyed. Where it now sits, George Shaw had had an outdoor mining museum.

“He had a whole bunch of old artifacts in there,” Bowie recalled. “It was pretty neat stuff and well presented. Of course that was trashed.

“There was a car in the water down by the MacDonald Lodge and it was totally submerged, but something happened in the electrical system and the lights were on - shining under the water. That car had a hell of a battery in it, ‘cause those lights stayed on for hours.”

In another part of the south end of town, something similar happened to another vehicle, only this time it was the horn that kept going.

“It went on and on and on. It was the most mournful bloody thing you could imagine.”

This event took place before the territorial government replaced Dawson’s old wooden stave sewer and water system.

All around town were wooden boxes at the sides of the street for the building connections. They had wooden lids on them that weren’t nailed or screwed down, so they all floated away, as did the boardwalks.

This led to a number of incidents with people sloshing through the water and suddenly dropping off over their heads.

Both Gould and Bowie recall the CBC news crew that came through here after the flood, but before the water had gone down. The camera operator, carrying one of those massive late 1970s style shoulder-mounted cams, was one of those victims.

“All of a sudden, down he went,” Bowie recalled. “The camera and the whole works. Fortunately, he wasn’t hurt. It didn’t harm anything except his ego, so it was kind of funny. A real ‘welcome to Dawson.’”

Pennell recalled that one of the teachers at the school walked around the block and flagged every one of those boxes so kids could avoid them.

The flood came at a bad time for Dawson. Gold mining was at a low ebb - the new rush caused by the rise in gold prices was still a year away.

As well, the Clinton Creek mine, which had been promoted as the salvation of the town in the late 1960s, had closed after just a decade in operation.

“It was a real low spot for the town,” said Bowie. “The economy was questionable and the only bright spot on the horizon at that time was Parks Canada, which was starting to do some things.

“The population had shrunk down to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 450 to 500 people. It took a good two years to get in a position where 80 per cent of the cleanup was done.”

Homes that weren’t ruined - and there were many that were beyond saving - were clogged with silt and mud. Rugs had to be cut out and removed by the square metre.

Some businesses received disaster relief but the town lost its movie theatre when the Orpheum Theatre on Front Street failed to qualify.

The new surface on the streets was a silty substance which raised a lot of dust when it was dry and became an oily muck the instant it got wet.

Rebuilding was a slow process, and building owners grew cautious. In the flood zone, new construction began more than a metre and a half above the street level, while many older buildings were raised that far on new foundations.

The practice continued, contributing to the access problems for those with disabilities the town has today.

When Bill Bowie repaired his log home, he elevated it too, but later on, he moved to higher ground on the Dome.

Other people also sought higher ground. Pennell built her first home on Seventh Avenue and later moved to Pierre Berton Crescent in one of the new Dome subdivisions.

Pre-flood Dawson looked a lot like it had for two decades prior to that. The decaying, dusty, grey place in Berton’s classic National Film Board film City of Gold lacked colour and had been in a depression since the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corp. closed down its operations.

Things changed after the flood.

Some of it was disaster relief funding. Some of it was that once people got started fixing things, they just got into the habit and kept doing it, including finding brighter colours to paint their homes and buildings.

Some of it was that the activity of Parks Canada became more evident year by year for some time after that.

Some of it was, as Bowie says, that a new gold rush started in the early 1980s when the cap came off the price of the precious metal.

Rivers and creeks did not stop creating spring time chaos. As with this month, there were regular floods in Rock Creek and at Henderson’s Corner outside town, but Dawson itself was spared as the 1980s rolled on.

Still, people watched the river nervously and by the middle of the decade it became clear that something more than just watching and wishing had to be done.

After much debate, a new flood dike was built and completed in 1987. It was a rough piece of work to begin with, and some claimed it ruined the waterfront.

However, it matured into a well-used green space, a favourite place to walk dogs, a focal point for a number of key community events, and a safe place from which to watch the Yukon River rise and fall.