(gentle relaxing music) (birds chirping) - One of the things that happens in a community that gets hit by a disaster is when you lose your material culture, your history gets truncated.

It's gone.

Sanford sits right along where we had a series of dam failures.

When the dams failed, we had a rush of water and trees and debris which came sweeping right through the center of town.

It was catastrophic, but there was warning.

So everyone got the word.

There was an excellent effort to get everyone out of town.

So there's tremendous loss of property and livelihood, and life stories were changed, but no lives were lost.

You know, there's a great success in that no one died, but people lost, not just their stuff, but entire houses floated away.

There's a section of Sanford where every single home just disappeared.

It floated down with the flood water.

It wasn't a flood in the way we usually think of floods.

It was a dam failure.

It was a series of catastrophic dam failures.

One dam failed, and the water kept coming.

It's a pretty incredible story.

Embedded within that are individuals and families who've been traumatized.

There's a lot of post-traumatic stress in the entire community.

Then there are people working with that from the community.

They're not relying on outside agencies to do this.

They're doing it all themselves.

As with every natural disaster, there's parts of the town where, you know, my neighbor's house is gone, my house is standing here.

It's part of the stress that hits the community.

Why were they hit so hard and I wasn't?

It's really complex.

One way to cut through that complexity is to capture the story of individuals.

Any project that tries to capture their totality is a project that's never gonna get finished.

We're impressing the idea.

We're capturing individual stories.

It's a way to also helps us follow through the complexity of what happened here.

There's an interesting story of what happened the day the dam broke.

But to me, the interesting story is what happened the day the dams broke and the week after that and six months after that and a year after that and two years after that.

How does this affect the individuals in the community who make up the community?

(gentle hopeful music) (soft string music) - I want people to know that Sanford is a friendly town.

It's a resilient town.

People are appreciative.

People help each other.

We accept help, we give help.

- Sort of part of this ecosystem of the lake.

And I don't mean that, like, the natural sense, but the sort of community sense of the recreation and leisure and everything.

- We're not a farming community.

There's farms here, but we're not a farming community.

We're a lake community.

And that's what drives our town.

It drives the businesses in our town, it drives people to live in our town.

To not have that, it's immediately felt like a loss of our culture.

- Pretty much Sanford in a nutshell, it's a lumbering town that turned into a recreational town and just a really nice place to live.

- The first alert came like after midnight on Monday night.

So I was getting ready for bed.

And I actually called the fire chief because I thought it was a mistake.

So I said, "What the heck are you guys doing alerting everybody?"

He said, "It's real.

You need to leave your house."

- There's not really any preparation or ideas in your head of what you do, what's the next step.

- You know, I knew it was gonna come in my house at some point.

I just didn't know how much.

- We just put our pictures and fundamental things on the top shelf and grabbed a change of clothes and left.

- I was asked to set up a shelter here at Meridian Junior High School.

We had set up over 100 cots.

I was wondering, "Boy, what actually happened?

Nobody's in here."

And then I went outside and I noticed the parking lots were completely full.

That's when it dawned on me that, yes, we're in a global pandemic.

- This all began this evening at about 5:44 when county dispatch and emergency management reported a structural failure of the Edenville Dam.

- On Wednesday, I had gone to work and it was about six o'clock in the evening when I heard from my neighbor.

She's like, "I don't know how to tell you this, but your house is gone."

(laughs) - [Amy] From there, it was a short time later, just after seven o'clock, when reports were issued by emergency management that the structural collapse of the Sanford Dam is imminent.

- Second alarm was the Edenville Dam.

So the first alarm was Smallwood and second alarm was Edenville.

The damage to the Edenville Dam was much, much worse than the first.

And when I heard that Edenville had gone, I figured that was our worst case scenario.

So then it was just a question of how bad it was gonna be.

- The power of water, it just exploded.

That water came 11 miles in 45 minutes or less than 45 minutes.

It came downstream 11 miles in less than 40 minutes.

So if you do the velocity times the volume, and I heard 3 trillion gallons or 2 trillion, I don't know.

It's a lot.

(river roaring) - I didn't think we'd get quite the amount of water that we did get.

Apparently it just washed around the side of it, which was just as bad.

- Like a dream.

It just seemed like a dream.

And then the magnitude of the damage just turned from a dream to a nightmare.

- Everything was just upside down, inside out.

I had thousands of books, all destroyed.

Water destroys everything.

- I knew at that point my house is probably most likely gonna be underwater, even the upstairs.

I didn't anticipate it all being gone.

I figured things will be in there and things will be wet.

When you go back and it's just a foundation, it's completely different.

- When I say they'd lose everything they own, they lose everything.

I went out of here dressed about like this.

Everything I had was in there.

I never moved a thing out.

Never figured it would get this high.

I never touched a thing.

Oh, we'll come back tomorrow and it will be cool.

You know, you come back, you don't have toothbrush.

- Whole town gone.

A whole town.

- And I don't think it's hit me yet.

I lost my house, I lost my car, I lost my truck, and obviously all of the contents inside.

- Our village was destroyed.

Our homes, you know, in the village were destroyed.

And up and down the lake shore, you know, just the devastation and the loss of homes there.

It was not a pretty sight in this community.

- It's disorienting because so much of your life depends on your home and things in your home.

And it's disorienting 'cause you don't expect it.

It's the last thing you expect.

(somber music) - We lost 78% of our business.

Out of 33 businesses in town, after the flood, we had five that were operating.

At the last count, we lost 31 residents' houses that were destroyed.

That's 10%.

We have roughly 360 residents.

So we lost about 10%.

And I've heard more people say the same thing I have, is, "Yeah, I lost a lot.

Joe over there lost everything.

I need to go help, Joe."

And I watched them do it.

- When the aid rolls in, when the relief crews roll in, there's never enough.

There's never enough to go around, so Sanford was left largely on their own.

Sanford rose to that challenge, and it's pretty amazing.

They rose to that challenge in ways I've not seen.

- It was very emotional for me to see the devastation firsthand.

I mean, pictures you'd get it, but when you're really standing there looking at it, it's a different feeling.

I just feel like, you know, all these people who put their lives into building these buildings and these businesses, you know, the community here supports their business and the community is gone.

So what do we do?

- Everybody's overwhelmed, A, with the magnitude of what we just experienced, but we're all sold around what?

The volunteer support that just keeps pouring to help us all out.

- It wasn't just one or two people.

If it had been one or two people, you wouldn't have seen this.

- It just all spiraled into this really beautiful thing of our community coming together just as private citizens and getting the job done.

(somber music) - This cannot be stated enough.

The fact that we didn't lose anyone, I think, made it so that we could recover quickly.

Like, we were not dealing with the loss of life.

There was no way anybody was going to survive if they hadn't been evacuated.

- Is it didn't take anybody being in charge to get everything organized.

People just went next door to their neighbor and what can I do to help you?

And then to the next house.

And the same way with downtown.

I mean, Denny that owns a hardware store, he didn't have to ask for help.

100 people showed up to help him.

- And the people in the town kept coming by with water, kept coming by with snacks.

Stop.

There's this one guy, I don't even know who he was, but he had a cooler of chocolate.

Here, you need chocolate.

It makes you feel happy.

- Go to the village right after this disaster and see this response, you couldn't help but feel like we're gonna be okay.

- I've worked here for 30, 40 years.

Everybody knew each other, but everybody's on their little islands.

Today, they're not on their islands.

We've all been humbled.

We've all realized that we're not all that special, that you can use everything in a blink of an eye.

- Some people actually contacted us and, "Hey, are you guys going to work in Sanford?

You know, neighbors of mine, we wanna come with you."

And I think there was probably five or six of us at the time.

Well, I'd gotten on Facebook and just put a post out there.

It's like, "Hey, got a home that could use 15 to 20 volunteers."

People started parking on the side of the road and coming in and helping.

And I just thought it was great that people were just driving by and seeing what's going on, and they were wanting to volunteer and help.

You know, until one of them come and ask for my name and, you know, are you Rick Hartfield?

I said, "Yeah."

She says, "We're responding to your post."

Just kind of triggered to me, you know, it's like, if we can't use social media for anything else, you know, we should be able to help use it to help each other, to communicate.

(somber music) - The group has grown.

I just checked.

We have 7,500 people in it, which is probably the population of Stanford.

(laughs) And as of about 20 minutes ago, there have been 123,000 posts and comments.

You know, if you wanna help or if you need help, that's where you go.

- Social media was critical because we ended up, by using social media along with Sanford Strong, getting most of the cleanup equipment in Sanford.

And people were antsy to do something important, so they were saying, "I don't have any work anyway, but I might need some gas money, but I can be here for two weeks with my equipment because we're waiting for COVID things to be lifted."

People were too caught up in the tragedy to think about COVID and we haven't had a case that I'm aware of that came from any of this debris clean up and came from that time in May.

- I think people are recovering from the shock and now there's this hopefulness of rebuilding.

- Throughout this disaster are people leading and people stepping up to make sure that we come back, you know, I know it's cliche, but bigger and better than ever.

- Just keep encouraging people.

You know, it's like just have faith.

You know, keep hoping.

Keep your chin up, you know, and everything's gonna be all right, you know?

There was one day we did 14 homes.

That was just volunteers in the homes.

That ain't the trucks and trailers and skid-steers we had removing debris on that same day.

- Rick shows up one day and he's got this team with him.

I'm now an archeologist in my own life, so I'm digging my stuff out of the mud and silt, and he immediately assesses that if he leaves his crew here to help me, they're gonna have to wait on me to sort that stuff.

So he said, "I'll leave two people here if you want me to, but I got to go.

I got another thing, you know, that I gotta take care of."

So I not only admire everything he's done, but I admire the fact that he was so perceptive.

- It's tough out there.

A lot of people out there with nobody that's coming to their aid.

We have an opportunity right now to show the world love like you don't see no more.

And, you know, nobody's taking it.

- You'll re-skim it, sand it, and repaint it.

- [Woman] Okay.

- But we'll keep doing what we're doing and give hope to those that we can.

(soft music) - What I've seen out of our community is I have no doubts that, it's gonna take time, but I have no doubts that it will get rebuilt.

- There's so much hope in there.

I mean, we will rebuild.

Sanford will be as strong, if not stronger, than it was before.

- I believe that it will be different.

I believe it will be something more than it was before.

- The generosity of this town.

You can see the slogan, Sanford strong.

- Sanford strong.

We will come back.

(soft music) - Ima start in the back and we'll work our way to the front, and it gives us time to think about what to do with the front.

The first four days, I was a broken down wreck and I couldn't believe that we would ever be here.

Within the fifth day, Kim said, "We're doing this.

We can do this."

And then my ex-husband stepped up and he says, "I'll help you guys get it back."

We were lucky.

I was lucky.

I had Kim to say, "We're doing this," because I would have had no hope of doing it on my own.

- I think it was important not to know how much work it was going to take to manage the rebuild of the village because I might have folded right at the beginning.

But I think when you take a crisis and you eat the elephant one bite at a time, then it seems manageable.

And if I had been faced with it with all the knowledge I have now, I might have doubted whether I could actually go through the process and still be standing at the end.

(hopeful music) - This town was the most devastated I've ever seen, like a bomb hit it, but, and every one of the owners did the same posturing, and it was the head down, and then all of a sudden, you'd see a head go up and look up in the sky and then just shake their head and just stare out in space.

And we all did it.

I don't think any of us can believe we're here and we've got better than what we had.

And though we're all in debt and we're paddling water like everybody else and we're basically all starting all brand new businesses.

(hopeful music) - People were everywhere, saying, from day one, "We're gonna rebuild this."

And the best way it was put was the Sanford Hardware was interviewed about whether they ever doubted they were going to rebuild 'cause it was, you know, it's about a million-dollar project, right?

And the owner's wife said, "The first day of the flood, when we walked in, the community walked in behind us and said, 'We're gonna fix this and we're gonna rebuild this.'"

And she said, "Then there was never any doubt 'cause the community was always behind us and helping us move."

It's that feeling of when we walked back to town, everybody said, "We're gonna fix this."

There were dark days when I wasn't sure I was gonna still be standing, but I just felt like the amount of support that we get right out of the gate was way more than I could've ever imagined and we continue.

Every time we post something about the littlest thing we want done, all kinds of people show up and donate their time, their equipment, their labor.

It's an amazing journey for sure.

- When you would drive by these places every day and see work taking place, you know, whether it was the hardware when it was being demolished to seeing the footings poured and seeing, you know, structures going back up, it does give you a sense that we're recovering.

That I think provides a lot of hope.

I've been asked the question around impact.

And I think we, you know, the figures that I saw early on is that, just in this school district, around 400 properties that were either a complete loss or suffered major damage.

For us, it's a very conscious effort to still make sure that, you know, that we are supporting our students and our families, but we know that a caring and consistent environment is one of the keys to, you know, what I would say is the unfinished learning that has occurred as a result of the pandemic for many students, as well as the trauma associated with the flood.

It's about focusing, though, more on the social-emotional part for our students intentionally this year and planning for what we're going to have to do over the next couple of years as well.

- We're further ahead than a lot of folks.

We're back in.

So we've been back in since around Christmas.

In one way, you're really settled.

In another way, you're still completely unsettled.

So to your question about timeline, I think there's the inside of a house, there's the outside of a house, And then there's the psychological timeline.

And a psychological timeline is just when you stop thinking about it?

When do you feel settled into your house?

When do you stop thinking about the old house?

And then probably at that point, maybe there's a timeline at which you begin to live this new life that was forced on you.

And I would say that, as far as those two last things, I'm somewhere in the middle.

I'm getting some idea of what the new life looks like and I'm still in the old one.

- I think we've all gone through awful.

So we know we're all in debt, some more than others.

And just the excitement of getting going and getting back to work, all of a sudden, you don't really think about what you've been through, you think about, "What do I do to get the next client in here and happy?"

You like?

- Yep.

- so now it's about business, instead of being stuck in the mud.

We're not stuck in the mud anymore.

We'd been there, (laughs) we'd pulled ourselves out.

We're not stuck in the mud.

We're looking for new and trying to do new things.

And, I don't know, it feels like a happier place.

- I think Sanford's a more cohesive community than we might have been, and I would call it a better place.

It was a good place, but we all came to know and love each other through this disaster more than any of us had ever imagined.

- Individually, right, we've all been through a lot.

Collectively, we've been through a lot.

Will the things that people have gone through that they get over or through or whatever, will that have some impact on the community long-term?

Probably.

Will the infrastructure would be better if we can pay for it?

Sure.

But I think to kind of gloss over that, that's kind of back to the punch in the face.

When people say, "Is it gonna be better?"

Oh yeah.

It's gonna be better.

- What's it gonna be next?

We don't know yet.

If the lake comes back, it'll be a recreational community.

If the lake doesn't come back, it'll be something different.

It's still here because of the nature of the community that came together to save it.

That community's been changed probably for the better because they pulled together, and a year later, they're still here.

(graceful music) (graceful music continues) (graceful music continues)