The day of the flood

It’s been 6 years since Gaston flooded Main Street and Shockoe Bottom:

Then, at about 6pm at night as we all stood in the main entrance way to our street level offices the front doors opened….. it was a wall of water about 12 inches high. It swept through the office. Everyone ran to get stuff off of the floor and into the cars in our parking deck behind our office. Within a minute or two the water had risen to about 3 feet deep. It was time for us to leave. [...] We ran up stairs and spent the next 5 hours on the second floor of the building watching in amazement as we looked out the windows onto what was East Main Street. It was now a 9 foot deep river.

The bulk of the photos above are from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. Check out Ken Weber’s narrative from that day for some amazing on-the-spot photos.