Mary Shroyer
Santa Clara, St. George, UT
Across from the Jacob Hamlin home

Interview with Shroyer family

Mary:  All over you could hear it loud and strong.  You could hear it for two days, and I knew something was wrong.  My cat's eyeballs were so big and she was running all around.  She was scared and it was getting me scared.  That's when I knew there was something awful.  I was really worried.

Tammy, daughter:  "I was calling my family and my friends saying, "This is 911.  Please answer you phone.  911 come."  They came and I got my entertainment center out.   I got all my paperwork together and put it in the trunk of my car.  I got all my expensive stuff out and when I got home that night, everything seemed to be okay.  The water was going back down. I decided to clear the whole upstairs and pack all the Christmas decorations away and get them all nice and neat -- we lost all of them.  We lost everything.  We got big things out, but not pictures and stuff like that."

Pete:
We had two hours to start off with, but the electrical line went and they worried about it igniting the gas, so they pulled us out and stopped us for awhile. When they had us evacuate, I had Mary leave. We weren't too worried about the water coming up here and washing it like it was with the sewer line. Bur there was a 10-foot wall of water coming down, so I got them up and told them to leave. They left, and the water kept rising. It rose five feet per hour or something like that. It didn't slow down. I kept thinking, "It's going to stop. It's going to stop."

Tammy: That's when you called Mom. You said, "The house is going." You called mom, but mom wasn't with me because I was at the store, and when we hung up I was crying in the store, and then my son called me back and said, "You better get down there." That's when I rushed on down there, and we had about 45 minutes tops to get everything out.

Pete: I was just scared.

Tammy: I was very scared, hyperventilating and crying and trying to hurry going from one room to the next, not getting anything done, but throwing everything in piles. You know, trying to do it as fast as I could. Very frightened. Just scared. All I could say is, "It's gone, it's gone." The firemen were trying to get me out and I was trying to grab things. There was no time, I went back in to get Mom's dialysis bag, because we left that, and they were pushing me up the stairs and up the porch and right to the car.

Then, all of a sudden, we heard a big crash. that's when the garage collapses. I was shaking and rushing for my keys, and they said, "Oh, now you want to go,": and I was crying and I got my car door open and it was snowing. It was snowing on me. It was sunny and it was raining, and it just started snowing.

Pete: It was like sitting there watching the news. Watching a tornado out the door, gone. Sitting our there on my lawn watching it go, weed by weed, bush by bush. that's when I left. I couldn't handle it anymore.

PORTRAITS OF LOSS  |  THE FOUNDATION  |  FUNDS RAISED  |  PROGRESS TO DATE 
EVENTS/MEDIA  |  CONTACT US  |  ORDER A BOOK & DVD  |  MAKE A DONATION   
PORTRAITS OF LOSS/STORIES OF HOPE CONTRIBUTORS |   CONTRIBUTORS