RED LODGE, MONTANA

IT WAS 3 A.M. when the flood came on an unseasonably warm night in June, the summer rain melting snow from an unseasonable Memorial Day blizzard.

- Caroline Fanning

Susan Roberts, new to Red Lodge, Montana, a small town of 2,300, woke from an uneasy sleep. She saw the lights on at her across-theway neighbors, on the side bordering Rock Creek, a 55-mile river skirting the town's eastern edge.

"You could hear the boulders smashing together," says Red Lodge Mayor Kristen Cogswell. "It was surreal, like nothing I'd ever heard before." Roberts's next-door neighbor, a police officer, was evacuating with his four kids, and he advised Roberts to do the same. So she put her dogs in the car and moved it to an alley behind her home, about 10 feet uphill, as her husband went house to house, waking others.

"It was still dark; people were sleeping and didn't realize," says Roberts. "There wasn't a public response, it was more people going to each other's doors saying, 'Wake up, you gotta get out!"

The couple stayed in their car and on the few feet of dry land surrounding it for the entirety of the next day, watching their house crumble.