Ohio Flood Victim, 9, Swept From Bathtub Into Creek

A 9-year-old girl said she was swept down a creek during a flash flood and stayed alive for seven hours by hanging on to logs and “just drifted” until she reached shore Friday morning.

Amber Colvin was in her family’s home playing a card game with a neighbor when the storm hit Thursday night. The house started to fill with water.

Amber said a 12-year-old friend, Kerrie Trigg, wanted to get in the bathtub.

“We got in the bathtub, and the water was over our heads and then the house collapsed,” Amber said from her hospital room.

She doesn’t know why they got in the tub but remembers Kerrie being hit on the head and knocked out. Kerrie was still missing on Friday.

“I tried to save her,” Amber said. “I almost drowned. I was swept out of the house.”

Amber was swept down Wegee Creek and then into the nearby Ohio River. Although she can swim only a little, she said she kept kicking her legs and held on to two logs.

She said she was in the water from about 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. She tried to work her way to the shore to get to a factory where her father worked. She reached shore about seven miles from her home.

“I can’t begin to tell you how she looked,” her mother, Karen, said. “Her hands and feet had no color. She had her senses, but you just could tell she had been in the water. All she talked about was Kerrie. We prayed all night.”

Amber was listed in fair condition in the hospital, suffering from scrapes and other minor injuries.

Meanwhile, tears, prayers and other stories of homes and families swept away were offered Friday by residents who saw flash floods gush from hilly coal fields and sweep through their village.

“I just couldn’t get to them. I hollered as loud as I could,” said Herman Adams, who wept as he recounted seeing the trailer home containing his daughter and two grandchildren carried off by the surging Pipe Creek on Thursday night. “It happened so fast.”

At a disaster center set up in this Belmont County village in the eastern part of the state, Adams waited Friday with others for word about the fate of missing relatives.

Trailer homes appeared to be hit hardest when water surged from the Belmont County highlands down the Wegee and Pipe creeks past Shadyside and into the Ohio River, said Jim Williams, chief of staff of the Emergency Management Agency.

“Any mobile home in the path of the water is gone,” said Mead Township Trustee Gregg Warren. The two creeks in Mead Township were turned into raging rivers after 5.5 inches of rain fell there in less than 3 1/2 hours.

“It’s hard to explain. It’s unbelievable. A creek you could walk across with water up to your ankles in some places rose 15 to 25 feet,” Warren said.

Adams said he had eaten dinner with his daughter, Sue, and her two children at their trailer home Thursday night and returned to his house about 200 feet away when he heard the sound of rushing water.

“ ‘What the heck is that?’ I thought. I have a window facing the creek. I looked out and saw the water” about three feet high.

“The water was all around the trailer. I hollered and hollered. They couldn’t hear me. The water was too high. I couldn’t get to them.

“And then they were gone,” Adams said. He lowered his head and wept.