Emporia ? Scott Riddle’s car was the first to stall in the water.

He hadn’t seen the pool on the road ahead.

In the dark and rain of this Saturday night, it was nearly impossible to see anything. It was the kind of rain windshield wipers couldn’t slap away no matter how hard they tried.

With Riddle in the family’s Ford Escape were his wife, Kim, nearly six months pregnant, and their 2-year-old son, James, asleep in his car seat in the back.

They had been on their way home to Olathe after visiting Riddle’s grandfather in Wichita.

But now, a few minutes before 9 p.m., their car was trapped in the fast lane of the Kansas Turnpike. Water crept inside.

At least six other vehicles, traveling cautiously at 40 to 50 mph, swooshed in behind the Riddles’ car and stalled in the swirling water that had risen out of Jacob Creek.

The drivers included William Gorman of Wichita in his Buick Regal, and Helen Foster, a 79-year-old Topeka widow on her way home after attending a grandson’s birthday party in Wichita.

Robert Rogers, 37, and his wife and four children, on their way home to Liberty, Mo., from a family wedding, plowed into the pool in their silver minivan and stopped.

Al Larsen, 31, driving from Fort Worth, Texas, to visit family in Iowa, stalled in his Jeep Grand Cherokee.

Two other vehicles sloshed into the flood and stalled nearby: a car from Texas with a man and his girlfriend inside and a car with Oklahoma tags containing two young women.

Water began to rise in each vehicle, offering its occupants a choice: Stay inside or step out into the current and try to wade to higher ground.

It would turn out to be a life-or-death decision.

The unknown threat

Scott Riddle grabbed his cell phone and punched 9-1-1. He told the Chase County sheriff’s dispatcher that water was on the road and seeping into his car.

The dispatcher told him to stay put.

What the dispatcher and the Riddles and everybody else at Jacob Creek didn’t know was how much water was in the creek.

A series of lingering downpours had dumped more than 12 inches into the basin that feeds the creek since Thursday night.

Six to 8 inches had fallen in the last three hours. The culverts beneath the highway at Jacob Creek were designed to handle 8 inches of rain in 24 hours without flooding.

The water quickly overwhelmed the culverts 10 feet below the roadway. It rose until it formed a lake that spilled into the northbound lanes. Wind whipped the lake into whitecaps.

No flood warning had been issued. It had never flooded on the turnpike over Jacob Creek, turnpike officials would say later. They called it an act of God.

Creeping doubts

Soon after people began calling 911 to report water on the road, Kansas Highway Patrol trooper Marc McCune told his dispatcher he would leave the scene of an accident seven miles south to check out the reports.

McCune arrived at 9:01.

“We have a definite problem here,” he reported. “Traffic is backed up in both directions. Really backed up.”

The dispatcher called maintenance crews to divert traffic.

As the water in Riddle’s car rose, he phoned 911 again six minutes after his first call. Again, he was told to stay put.

He made two more calls to report “real trouble” and tell the dispatcher that water had reached his lap. Each time, he was advised he and his family were safer in the car.

Riddle was having serious doubts. The water was coming up fast, and semis were aggravating the problem, weaving between the stalled motorists and creating wakes that lifted his car off the road and made it flood even faster.

“As water came up over the seat, it was a situation close to panic,” Riddle said.

“It was a situation where you have a 2-year-old and a pregnant wife. You either take the advice from a dispatcher that every minute makes less and less sense, or you have to do something.”

Riddle decided to get his family out of the car. It was about 9:15.

Ryan Lane, of Lawrence, was there to help. Lane, 24, had been heading home from Wichita when he hit the water in his Mercury Cougar. He hopped out of the Cougar through his sun roof and landed in thigh-deep water.

As he waded past Riddle’s car, he saw that he could help. He and Riddle got the family out of the car and across the road.

Rescuing the willing

Lane decided to return to the flood.

Back on the northbound side, Lane saw Al Larsen, who had abandoned his stalled Jeep and was knocking on windows to try to get people to leave their cars.

Lane and Larsen tried to communicate with each other as they worked. They shouted “Go over there!” and “Help here!” through the wind and rain.

They may have helped William Gorman.

Gorman said two men, one on either side, grabbed his hands as he extended them through his door and pulled him from his car. Then they helped him across the barrier.

“I thank the good Lord for sending those two men to rescue me,” he said.

Helen Foster is certain that it was Larsen who came to her Camry. He knocked on her window and yelled at her to lower it as she sat freezing and terrified behind the wheel.

Larsen scooped Foster out of the window and carried her to the other side of the highway.

When he finally reached the other side, he helped Foster into a car that had stopped in the southbound lane.

Desperate choices

Larsen also approached Rogers’ minivan, which the water had jammed against the barrier. He advised the family to get out.

Robert Rogers would later say that he thought his young children, including a 5-year-old son with Down syndrome and a 21-month-old girl, were safer in the van than in the rapidly rising water.

Robert and his wife, Melissa, stayed in the van, trying to comfort the children with Bible songs and prayer.

Larsen approached them again moments later, but the family remained in the van.

The two girls from the Oklahoma car waded up to Lane.

“They were crying because their car was under water and their parents were going to kill them,” Lane said. “I told them they had other things to worry about.”

Flood breaks lose

The stranded vehicles in the northbound lanes continued to rise with the water, their headlights bobbing in all directions.

“They started floating like little dinghies,” said Roger Farthing of Topeka, who was sitting behind the flood on the northbound side of the road in his Chevy Tahoe.

One person thought cars had begun to float over the barrier and called the Highway Patrol dispatcher, who relayed that to a trooper near the flooding at 9:21.

“I don’t doubt that,” the trooper replied. “It is raining really hard. Nothing I can do.”

The dispatcher began calling off-duty officers to the scene. At 9:29, a turnpike official advised her to do whatever was necessary to clear the road, including shutting it down.

Sometime in the next couple of minutes, the cement barriers in the median, each 20 feet long and 10,000 to 12,000 pounds, suddenly gave way.

A wall of water crashed through the gap.

“It was an absolute cascade, like you see in the Rocky Mountains,” Kathleen Pearce said.

The wave swept Larsen away.

Robert Rogers kicked out the driver-side window of the minivan and was sucked into the current just before the van, with his wife and children inside, tumbled over the barrier and disappeared off the other side of the road.

“It probably rolled two or three times before it actually got into the creek bed,” Farthing said.

The wall of water swept away Gorman’s Buick, Foster’s Camry, the Riddles’ Ford, Larsen’s Jeep, the Texas car and the car belonging to the two girls.

Lane had found refuge in a car on the other side of the highway.

At 9:35, trooper McCune reported: “Water is running so fast. Numerous vehicles swept off the road. I can hear people screaming, but I can’t see anybody.”

Panic feeds confusion

Traffic was backed up at least a mile in both directions.

“It was mass panic,” said Kris Hill of Maize, who was stuck in southbound traffic with a friend.

They saw people get out of the cars and run up a hill with children.

“They were panicking. One lady just fell apart,” Hill said.

By 9:50, seven troopers had managed to weave their way through the traffic and around the water.

The rescue workers from Emporia arrived a few minutes before 10.

Bystanders helped carry the boats and equipment down the embankment and over two cattle fences to the edge of the creek.

At 10:10, about 40 minutes after the wave of water had taken his van away, Rogers emerged from the darkness soaking wet and walked up to McCune.

“My family’s missing,” Rogers told him.

Two minutes after that, the Highway Patrol requested that a helicopter equipped with infrared radar be sent from Topeka. A half-hour later, the troopers were informed that bad weather had grounded the helicopter.

By 10:40, rescuers from the Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks as well as those of Chase and Butler counties had joined the search in boats. But the water rose and fell erratically with the rainfall.

They had to pull the boats out several times.

“This was no creek,” said Bill Renfro, a shift commander from the Emporia Fire Department who was in charge of the rescue effort. “This was a full-blown river. It was way out of control. I’d never seen anything like it.

“It rained off and on all night. It would come up, and when it quit raining, it would go down. It was like a yo-yo.”

The water’s toll

By 11, water had receded from the highway enough to open a single lane of traffic. The damage to the road became clear. Huge chunks of asphalt were strewn along the turnpike for 100 feet.

Between 2:30 and 3 a.m., rescuers found Rogers’ van a mile and a half from the road. The bodies of three of his children were strapped in their car seats. They found the fourth child some distance from van.

Killed were Makenah, 8; Zachery, 5; Nicholas, 3; and Alenah, 1.

The bodies of Melissa Rogers, 33, and Larsen would not be found until Tuesday morning.

The rest of the missing cars were found Sunday morning scattered along the creek bed on their tops or sides.

It would take several days for some of the survivors to absorb the experience.

“It wasn’t until long after, about 1 a.m., sitting in the tow truck, that I thought I could’ve been seriously injured,” Lane said.

“I’m still kind of soaking that in.”