that photo just reminded of the floods here in Richmond VA back in the early 70s - after coming home from the Navy i'd gone back to college and was working for a combination contruction/cabinet making company. They were up to their necks in what was then a growing industry, renovating dilapdated brownstones in what was a blighted area of Richmond, ie Church Hill (there's still a church down there where Patrick Henry gave his "give me liberty or give me death" speech at one of the early "congressional meetings".
Back to floods - their cabinet making shop was in a flood plain section of Church Hill, where tobacco had been sold going back to the 1700s, as well as slaves (there's a historical marker to the slave auction history a few blocks away). The original Phillip Morris factory was about 4 or 5 blocks east of our shop, with the accompanying tobacco aromas always in the air. Looking back, i don't understand how, but the tobacco aroma was always heaviest when Phillip Morris's side yard, by the railroad tracks, was full of fresh spools, i mean large spools like you see the electrical utility company with their spools, 4' & 5 feet in diameter.
I forget the names of the hurricanes that came thru that year but believe one was Camille. For whatever geographical reasons, Hurricanes always seem to dump tons of water in the mountains west of us, and the water drains down in the James River, which ran thru Church Hill. The cabinet making shop, was in an old storefront with glass fronts up to about the 10 foot mark, and had flooded one time in the late spring, with the water level reaching up to nearly the very top of the glass. The shop was at the lowest point in the area, so there was national TV footage of our shop, at the height of the flood, with National guard troops patrolling the area in john boats.
We never got around to cleaning the film of silt off the glass when later in the summer, we had another flood coming. I was busy helping move all the cabinet shop's equipment to the 2nd floor in preparation, but someone in the crew wrote in the dirt film on the glass, up at the top of the glass, "Noah's Ark rentals" with a phone number. On the next night's national news, the TV crew was going thru the two blocks at the bottom of the flood valley when the camera caught our little joke written in the dirty glass. This was before VHS tapes but it would have been interesting to have a shot of that, framed on the wall.
