Ravaged Montezuma Gives Bleak Picture of How Flood Battered Depressed Towns : Deluge: Residents find homes and businesses awash in mud. Bouncing back from the damage will be a difficult challenge.

When Yancey Hill was a boy it seemed the creeks rose every year and flooded Montezuma. His dog would stand in the water downtown catching fish between its teeth. Men in hats plied Main Street in canoes. A levee built on Beaver Creek in 1954 stopped the yearly floods. But the area’s dam and levee system couldn’t stand up to the barrage of water that surged through last week in the worst flooding Georgia has ever seen.

Dams burst, spewing filthy, brown water that coursed through town after luckless town along the Flint, Ocmulgee and Chattahoochee rivers. It swirled through houses, snatched up people and cars, washed away livelihoods and lives.

Hill rushed downtown with an employee and two friends when he realized that the flood threatened merchandise in his department store. “When we got here the water was lapping at the back door,” the 70-year-old merchant said this week as helpers padded cautiously through the smelly sludge, trying to salvage what they could. In less than 45 minutes the water chased them away. “When we decided we’d better get out, it was waist high,” he said.

The waters are receding now in the ravaged, mud-caked towns of southwest Georgia. People have started warily returning to their homes to assess the damage. No dollar figures have yet been assigned to the flood’s widespread devastation. But to understand what the flood means to the hundreds of thousands whose lives have been disrupted, it is necessary only to look at its effects here in Montezuma, a depressed agricultural community of 4,500 people beside the Flint River southwest of Macon.

It is safe to say that Georgia has not seen such a swath of destruction since Sherman’s troops marched to the sea in the War Between the States.

“I’ve never been a part of anything like this, experienced anything like this or seen anything like this in my life, and I’m 70 years old,” said Preston Williams, Montezuma’s mayor.

The central business district, hardly thriving before, today looks like a war zone. Helicopters whir overhead. National Guard troops man barricades to keep out the curious. All 50 businesses downtown were closed by the flooding; water marks inside some buildings are almost 10 feet high. Water forced gas tanks at the service station to pop out of the earth, leaving deep craters in the ground as if a bomb had struck.

For as long as anyone can remember, most businesses here shut at noon on Wednesdays. Folks went fishing or golfing or just home to relax. But Wednesday afternoon, the town was busy digging out of the devastation. Bulldozers and dump trucks cleared debris as workers emptied businesses of spoiled treasures. Generators roared, supplying meager light inside ransacked buildings.

Standing in the middle of all that, courtly even covered in grime, was gray-haired Yancey Hill, surveying what was left of the department store founded by his grandfather, a former mayor and one of Montezuma’s most substantial early citizens. Hill’s whole life revolved around that store, even though he and his wife, Nancy, lately have opened it only on weekends. He had gone to work there as a child. It is full of ancient furnishings and memories.

Virtually everything in the store was soaked in dirty water. Hill and his wife and friends are recovering merchandise and washing it to see what can be salvaged. Two Laundromats have agreed to stay open late so that he can use all of the machines. A dry cleaner also is working overtime. He is hoping against hope that he will be able to sell the washed and pressed clothing when the store reopens.

Earlier this week, Hill’s sister, Rachel Thomas, drove to Montezuma from her home in Atlanta to help clean up. She was haunted, she said, by the image of her brother standing on the tiles laid in the doorway of the store. The tiles spelled out Hill’s and their grandfather’s name.

“I saw him standing there with mud all over him,” she said. “There was mud everywhere. It just made me want to cry.”

After having spent sleepless nights worrying, Hill said he is resigned to the possibility that he might have to shut down. The thought pains him, and he won’t do it without a fight--he swears he won’t leave his creditors hanging--but how could he not consider the possibility. No one downtown was insured for flooding.

“It’ll take hundreds of thousands of dollars to fix up this place, then restock it,” Nancy Hill said. “We’re too old--we can’t go into debt. There’s been a Hill’s Department Store here before anybody can remember, since 1887. But if we don’t get some sort of help we’re going to be in real serious straits.”

In two big ways Montezuma is typical of the communities ravaged by the flood: First, with the exception of Macon and Albany, which are sizable towns, the area hardest hit is relatively sparsely populated. They are already economically depressed communities that have little industry other than agriculture. Although this means the losses here are much less than they likely would have been had the floods hit the more developed northern portion of the state, it also means that bouncing back will be more difficult.

Second, the destructive force of the water was magnified by the failure of area dams. Officials blame nearly half of the 31 flood-related deaths in the state on breaks that occurred in a series of unregulated earthen dams. Although no one was killed in Macon County, where Montezuma is located, 15 people died just south in Sumter County.

Including the death of one person in Alabama, 32 people in all have died in the floods.

Williams, the mayor, said the town was struck twice--once when 13 inches of rain fell on already saturated earth, causing a flash flood as swollen waterways east of town burst through a dam, sending torrents of water flowing through Montezuma. As if that weren’t enough, the town flooded again later when the Flint River west of town spilled over its banks.

Unlike downriver, where communities in southernmost Georgia and the Florida Panhandle had days to get ready for rivers to crest, no one in Montezuma had time to prepare.

In Bainbridge, for example, people had been bracing for more than a week for the river to crest Thursday. They got a reprieve, however, when the river crested lower than predicted, sparing the town the total disaster for which officials had planned.

In Montezuma, the river crest came a day before it was predicted, and no one expected a dam to burst.

When Hill arrived at his store Wednesday morning of last week, just before the deluge, he and his helpers frantically started carrying merchandise to a storeroom upstairs. After 10 or 15 minutes, when they saw how fast the water was rising, they began pitching stock onto the tops of cabinets and high shelves.

In 1929, during the 100-year flood everyone in these parts talks about and that Hill still remembers, the water rose 16 inches inside the store. The water mark inside the store now is more than nine feet high. Everything except the few items they managed to get upstairs got soaked. “This isn’t a 100-year flood,” he said. “This is maybe a 500-year-flood to say the least.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.