[Farmall] An 886 in the news

[Mike Sloane]

[There is an image of Grossnickle and his 886 on the Website below. We 
are under a flood watch for the area, and the Delaware River is well 
over its banks. Upstate NY has had some serious problems also, but our 
satellite reception is spotty, so I have to rely on the Internet for 
news. My little brook is over its banks and flooding the wetlands. 
Yesterday, a guy from the county mosquito commission spotted a fish 
swimming where I had been cutting grass two weeks ago. I don't think I 
will be cutting grass there real soon. MS]

The Roar, the Screams -- And the Silence of Death
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/29/AR2006062900033.html?referrer=email>
By Fredrick Kunkle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 29, 2006; A01

Black water was churning so hard around his tractor that Jimmy 
Grossnickle thought he, too, might be swept away.

The tractor -- a huge vehicle with a cab that stands as tall as he does 
-- had driven into darkness and into water so deep that the machine 
shuddered as he pushed forward. He was making an ill-fated attempt about 
8:30 p.m. Tuesday to rescue three young people swept from a pickup truck 
on the road in front of his Frederick County farm.

At least two of them were clinging to the thin branches of a tree just 
15 feet away, tossed up and down by the swift current.

He remembered yesterday that he heard their screams but could not make 
out their faces. By their voices, he said, he thought that one was a man 
and one a woman, but it was almost too noisy to tell. The tractor was 
loud, and the water created an unbelievable roar. It foamed around the 
engine block, threatening to swamp them.

"That tractor weights seven or eight tons, and the water was just 
rocking us back and forth," he said.

Unable to drive closer because of the water's depth and a submerged 
guardrail at the edge of the road, Grossnickle tied a rope around his 
son David, 25, who was in the cab with him. His son was going to try to 
wade or swim to the stranded people. But the current knocked him down, 
and it took all of his father's strength to haul him back with the rope.

Afraid his son might be swept away, too, Grossnickle began pitching the 
looped end of the rope toward the voices screaming for help as the 
minutes clicked by.

"They didn't have a good grip. They were just holding on to brush," he said.

And then the screams stopped.

Yesterday, Grossnickle returned to the spot along the Wolfsville Road 
and to the spindly, 20-foot tree on the bank of Middle Creek where the 
victims had struggled to hold on.

The stream runs along Route 17 through shaggy hillsides and open 
pastures, closer to Catoctin Mountain in western Frederick County than 
to the growing bedroom communities to the south and east. About eye 
level he saw the frayed shank of a branch, not much thicker than a 
curtain rod, that had snapped the night before.

"I bet you dollars to doughnuts that's the branch where she was," he 
said quietly. "I could have done something if I had got to them."

The three victims were also Myersville residents. They perished in the 
floodwaters of Middle Creek, a small tributary of Catoctin Creek that in 
most places can normally be crossed on foot by stepping stone to stone. 
Two of them -- Jesse R. Haulsee, 24, and Angelia S. Haulsee, 29 -- were 
trying to reach their 2-year-old daughter, who was being cared for at 
Jesse's mother's house just on the other side of the stream on East 
Church Hill Road, according to witnesses who spoke to them before the 
accident.

Whether the storm waters swept them and their friend Eric C. Zepp, 19, 
from the back of the pickup or whether they thought they could swim to 
their destination is not clear, said Cpl. Jennifer Bailey, a spokeswoman 
for the Frederick County Sheriff's Office. She declined to identify the 
driver of the pickup, who survived, saying the investigation was still 
underway.

Dwayne Weddle, 47, Jesse Haulsee's great-uncle, said the family was too 
shaken up to talk.

Witnesses said the three abandoned their car -- a burgundy Cougar whose 
child seat was stuffed with children's videos -- on a stranger's lawn on 
a bluff above the tiny town of Ellerton about 8:30 p.m. They walked down 
Harmony Road and turned left onto Wolfsville Road, Route 17, and began 
wading in waist-high water toward Jesse's mother's house, less than a 
half-mile away, according to witnesses.

Kim Wise and her boyfriend, Richard Jordan, were standing on their front 
porch at Harmony and Wolfsville roads, videotaping the muddy water 
lapping at their feet. The creek had risen over the bridge and filled 
Wolfsville Road. Then they saw Jesse Haulsee and two people they did not 
recognize walking around the corner, wading through water.

Jesse was in the middle of the road in front of the house when suddenly 
the current took his feet from under him. Wise, 35, fished him out with 
a broom handle, and he leaned on the porch to steady himself, she said.

"I said, 'What the hell are you doing?' and he said, 'I got to get my 
kid,' " Wise said.

The spill was enough to make Jesse reluctant to go further, but the 
other two persuaded him to keep going, the couple said.

"He looked like he was scared to death, because he didn't want to go any 
farther," said Jordan, 41. "We said, 'Y'all are crazy.' "

Somewhere farther south on Wolfsville Road, the driver of a 
brown-and-black four-by-four Chevy pickup gave the three a lift.

Grossnickle, 53, was sitting on the porch of his farmhouse, watching the 
storm with his wife and other relatives, when they saw the pickup, water 
up to its headlights, chugging toward the turnoff at East Church Hill 
Road. Water was pouring over the bridge that carried East Church Hill 
Road over Middle Creek, something Grossnickle had never seen before. He 
had already pulled a motorist to safety from a stalled car in front of 
his house.

"He is an angel from heaven," said Lori Pearson, 50, a bank executive in 
Baltimore who had been heading home from work about 6:30 p.m. when she 
was caught in the rising waters. She said she saw a line of cars going 
through the fast-rising water, figured she was only a mile from her new 
home in Myersville and decided to risk it. Stuck, she dialed 911 in a 
panic. As the water seeped into the car and approached the windows, the 
emergency dispatcher was ordering her to climb onto the car when she saw 
Grossnickle's tractor.

"He was just as calm as could be," she said. "He just pulled me out by 
the arm."

Pearson watched the water swallow her car and called her husband. Then 
the pickup came down the road.

"We couldn't believe it. Somebody said, 'It looks like you're going to 
have another rescue,' " Grossnickle said.

When the three people floated out of the back of the pickup, Grossnickle 
thought they were kids horsing around, maybe with inner tubes and ropes. 
Grossnickle's wife told Pearson it appeared that the three left the 
truck on purpose. Then they heard screams and watched as the dark water 
swept the three away.

"It was just a bloodcurdling sound, the way they were screaming for 
help," Pearson said. "It was horrible. You just feel so helpless in a 
situation like that -- and then worse when it goes quiet. That water was 
just so vicious."
-- 
Mike Sloane
Allamuchy NJ
<mikesloane at verizon.net>
Website: <www.geocities.com/mikesloane>
Images: <www.fotki.com/mikesloane>

It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be
unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong. -G.K. Chesterton,
essayist and novelist (1874-1936)


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