The floodwaters unleashed by the Teton Dam when it burst in 1976 caused damage which impacted 300 square miles of land. Many residents across counties lost a lot of valuable crops. Brigham Young University religion professor Fred Woods and BYU-Idaho film professor Christian Mawlam teamed up to create a documentary with compelling footage and details about the flood from people who lived through it. The documentary’s title is “Flood of Memories.” Woods produced the film and Mawlam directed.
In an interview with BYU-Idaho Radio, Mawlam said the heartfelt stories that you hear in the film can cause you to be emotional.
“These are profound stories,” he said. “And of course, stories can be profound, and we can be affected by them when we hear via other people. But there's something remarkable, I think, and quite special about making sure that we preserve these kinds of histories.”
Mawlam also said, we need to conserve all the historic accounts we can.
“We need to safeguard whatever stories we can and make sure that subsequent generations get to hear this,” he said. “And so, one of the things that we're going to do with this, and one of the reasons that the city was involved with helping to pay for some of the interviews to get done, that they've got kind of a stake in this is that they're really keen on having a film that can be in the Rexburg Museum, in the Teton Flood Museum, so that school kids can come, can be brought, or this can go to them, and they can get a bit of what this story was about.”
The opening for “Flood of Memories” event is on September 11 at the Romance Theater. It will begin at 7 p.m.