Marilyn Leisner is afraid of the water.

Living in Times Beach, Missouri, a town that hugged the Merrimack River about 30 minutes outside St. Louis,

she had a healthy respect for the water and what it could do.

I used to be nervous about the river.

There have been so many people drown in that river that I didn't want my kids in that river,

but there were times when they would sneak down there and swim,

they had a rope swing that with a tire on it that went out

over the river. Times Beach back then was a close-knit working-class

neighborhood of about 2,000 people. Lots of folks in town worked at the Chrysler Plant just down the highway.

There was a baseball diamond where the hometown team, the sons of the beach, played.

It was the kind of place where kids grew up to marry their high school sweethearts and stayed to start a family.

The babysitters here were absolutely amazing. I used to watch out for the kids across the street from my house.

If they got in any trouble, they'd be blocks away from home and the mother at the house would know about it before

they got home.

Because somebody else's mom would already call them and told them.

And in this small town, flooding was a fact of life.

Marilyn and her family had the routine down.

We put things up on concrete blocks.

We'd tie the drapes up and not knots so the water couldn't get to them and

practical every time that we did that it didn't get into our home. But the flood

in 1982 was different. We barely got out with our lives. We were at the last minute with the

floodwaters laughing at the front porch. With the water rising fast, Marilyn, her husband, one of their daughters and the family's dog all got in a boat to leave.

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