Manager Ben DeCourcey had to carry the girls to dry land, Peter Allen said. Because he didn’t have a boat, he used a forklift with a manlift in front.īut as Allen transported three employees - owner Betsy Allen Kasey Demond, manager and Melanie Ahrling-Retzer, manager - the floodwater got deeper than expected.Īt two feet deep, the forklift stalled out. in Grafton, employees had to be transported in and out, said Peter Allen, one of the owners. Meanwhile, at The Loading Dock, 401 Front St. The people here want to see this community prosper.” “That’s quite a community - to have people show up and help on a working day and ask for nothing,” Bechtold said. Greenfield-Northwestern football team wins 7-on-7 state title By noon, everything had been cleared out. He put the word out and, by 9 a.m., nearly 30 people - including a few faces he didn’t recognize - had shown up. He had thousands of boards in his shop - walnut, pine, oak - that would twist and warp if he didn’t act fast enough, he said. Thursday, he had to scramble when water began entering his building, he said. Main St., saw a similar outreach.Ībout 5:45 a.m. In Grafton, Dan Bechtold, owner of Knotty By Nature, 15 E. They delivered the workers a 20-inch pizza with the fixings - pepperoni, mushrooms, bacon - along with Dasani water bottles, Brueggeman said. She could see five city workers from the Alton Public Works Department outside, and she suggested to Brueggeman they warm them up with pizza, Brueggeman said. Last Wednesday, when the wind began to whip and temperatures plunged to the 40s, Elisha Hutchinson, a bartender at 300 State Street Bar and Grill, had an idea. ![]() “When devastation comes, Alton comes together.” “Everyone on this side of the street works together,” says Karen Brueggeman, manager of 300 State Street Bar and Grill. “Without the city’s help, we couldn’t have done this,” she says. As of noon Saturday, the pub had seven pumps total keeping water from the main floor. On the north side of the pub, at a staircase, the city has fed six pumps through a removable stair, to pump water from the basement. “The people and the city have been here for us through the good times and the bad.”Īccording to Vankirk, Alton Mayor Brant Walker has stopped by every day. ![]() “I can’t say enough for the city of Alton, as a small business owner, on how much they help,” she says. Once it drops, they will clean, return everything to its right place and contact the health department. The pub has been closed since Sunday and Vankirk isn’t certain when they’ll reopen, as that depends on the water level dropping. Through a window facing the Mississippi River, the pub looks like it’s surrounded by a moat, Vankirk says. The scene, according to Vankirk, looks the same for a stove and freezer in the kitchen. Hard liquor and beer bottles line the bar and behind it, an icemaker, a freezer, a well and a reach-in refrigerator - all stand on cinder blocks. “We were playing Jenga with them,” Vankirk says. To the right, on an elevated stage, tables, booths and chairs have been stacked. ![]() In the pub, to the left of the air mattress, sits a cold prep table on cinder blocks. This time, they brought in a floor jack, and jacked all their equipment on cinder blocks. During that flood, she adds, they moved everything out.īut “every time you move equipment, you damage it,” she says. Their goal - protect the knotty pine flooring.ĭuring the last flood of this magnitude, which had been in December 2015, they had to strip and re-sand it, Vankirk says. “We’re fighting with all we got,” Vankirk says.
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