Name/Title
Teton Dam Scrapbook Rexburg Food CenterDescription
Rexburg Food Center. This is one of the few scrapbook pages that is double sided, and has four photos on the back.
The note reads:
Clean-up! After the dam flood, was an understatement. It was more like doze down and start over. At least it would have been easier. For the first six days there was indecision within three different government agencies as whether the food products in bottles and cans were salvageable or not. For the first few days we tried to salvage the canned goods we could by wheeling them to the parking lot and washing the cans and placing them on visqueen. The time spent washing and cleaning was wasted because the rains came and washed mud onto the clean cans. There was no clean space anywhere. The government then stepped in and put a condemned sign on the door and therefore, we could salvage nothing unless we first washed the can, put it through a sanitation bath of clorox water, rinse, and re-label each can with the product name and weight. Many cans were rusty and first had be be cleaned with steel wool. This process did not warrant the time nor money it took to undertake so we rented a small tractor with a blade on the front to go between each aisle and scoop the cans, bottles, etc. out the front door and into the gutter to be hauled away to the garbage dump. The first day of the tractor rental we had four flat tires. A local salesman and his son plus many more salesmen from as far as Salt Lake City approximately 250 miles away came to help out. After scooping out much gunk, manure, debris etc. out of the store, we used the fire hose to wash down the walls, and found four of the six walk-in boxes used for frozen food had to be torn out. The back wall which had been blasted out by logs from the lumber mill had to be repaired.
All of our department heads and many of the other employees went to work cleaning, scrubbing, tearing out and rebuilding. Our building contractor was short of skilled workers so a lot of the work had to be done by our employees. After being closed for 5 1/2 months it was exciting and wonderful to open our store again!
The front of the store had to have new windows and doors, all frames replaced, cleaned down and repainted.