The attached audio above is from SDPB's daily public-affairs show, In the Moment.
The 50th commemoration of the 1972 Black Hills Flood is June 9. It’s a time to honor the 238 people who died, and it also brings a flood of memories for those who survived. Each week between now and June 9, SDPB is sharing stories from those survivors, in their own words.
This week, we hear from Don Konechne. He was at home on his farm alongside Boxelder Creek, north of Rapid City, when the creek suddenly flooded. Two neighbor children rushed over and said their dad was trapped in a tree, surrounded by water.
"So I had a four-wheel-drive pickup out in the yard, and I got a big long rope, and I drove over there and I said to Mrs. Snyder, 'Where's he at?' She said, 'There he is. He's on that tree, right close to the house.'
"And at that time I could see 18 inches of their aluminum screen door on the side of the house, and I could see Mr. Snyder hanging out of a tree about 6, 8 inches around, right on the corner of the house. And I kept throwing the rope to him and throwing the rope to him, and the water had such a velocity, it wasn't even getting anywhere close.
"And I drove in a little bit farther and pretty soon the water started moving my truck. So I thought this isn't going to work. And I came back home and I had a tractor sitting out in the yard with a disc on it and I said, 'Well, we'll take that over there. And I'll back that in there. And I'll get out on top of the disc and I'll throw the rope in the water.'
"Well, I backed that disc into the water and the water — again, the force was so great, it jack-knifed the tractor wheels, and it sat there just spinning in the mud and the water. And I couldn't get close enough to throw him the rope again. So I drove up on the county road, which was still dry, and I turned the tractor around and I drove down into there till finally the water killed the tractor. And I got out on the hood of the tractor, and Mrs. Snyder was standing up on the tractor with me. And I think I threw the rope upstream six or seven times. And we kept hollering at him, 'Tie it around your waist, tie it around your waist!'
"He couldn't hear a thing because the lightning and the thunder was so great. Well, about the sixth or seventh time, he got the rope and he didn't wait for us, if we had to tie it on to anything or not. He jumps into the water. And so we wrapped the rope around the steering wheel to the tractor and we're trying to pull him in. And the water was so great that we couldn't get him pulled in. He'd come up for air, go back down, come up for air. And he was a pretty strong, healthy swimmer, which saved him a lot.
"So Mrs. Snyder says, 'Well, he's going to drown out there. We're going to have to let him go.' So we just cut the rope loose and we let him go.
"And about four or five minutes later here, he comes walking up the roadbed out of the creek. And moss was hanging over his shoulders, and telephone poles were going down between us and the house. And trees and barrels and you name it — it was all going crazy."
The Journey Museum & Learning Center in Rapid City will screen a new SDPB documentary, “Surviving the ’72 Flood,” at 6:30 p.m. Mountain time on June 8. The film will air on SDPB-1 the next evening, June 9, at 9 Central/8 Mountain.
An SDPB episodic podcast of the same name is available now on various podcast platforms.
