Owner, Jim's Great American supermarket, Prattsville, Greene County
Eisel owns Prattsville's only supermarket. Irene flooded the store, but the community worked to re-open it in just 19 days.
Eisel recalls:
I got a phone call on Sunday morning from the store. I was at home. And my employee heard on the radio that cars were floating down Main Street in Windham. I didn't think it was raining that hard. I said, "All right, I'll be right down." I came down into town, and the creek was high, but I've seen it higher. So I thought, "What the heck's going on?"
I came into the store and looked around, and nothing was going on. This was at 7:30am on Sunday. Within one hour, water was running down Main Street.
Then I decided, "it's time to go." I just told them -- three girls and myself -- I said, "Let's go." By the time I got on the other side of the bridge, I was driving through a foot of water.
I've been through a few of the floods before, and we've never really gotten any water in the store. Most of the time, this all happened when there was snow, and this was August.
I didn't get back until Monday morning. You know, you pace back and forth at home. I was in contact with the fire chief at the firehouse, who was sending me pictures, and of course it wasn't looking too good. I came in at about 5:30am Monday morning. I walked to the store. We couldn't get across the bridge, so for about a mile and a half we had to walk.
I saw water coming down Main Street. Most of the water had receded. All the houses were twisted and turned and it was just an eerie, eerie quiet, almost like a bomb went off feeling. That's what it looked like.
Everything that could have floated, floated towards the front door. More or less the water just seeped in, picked up stuff of the shelves, and threw it on the floor, where it floated around. And then it receded and I walked into about three and a half inches of mud, plus everything that was on the bottom three shelves.
It's hard to say, but the first two days, there had to be between 70 and 80 people in here, and some of those people were affected themselves. So it was amazing to see that the was that much support in the town. You don't think you get that kind of support until something like this happens.
This became the community center. I have the biggest parking lot in the town. It became the common post for everything. FEMA and everything.
And now you're fully reopened?
And we're going to be bigger and better. It's going to be better.
Text by Julia Reischel. Photo: Jim Eisel in the Great American, by Christopher Auger-Dominguez.