Linda and Aaron McWhorter, owners of North Georgia Turf Inc. on Black Dirt Road in Whitesburg, have been looking at their submerged farm fields for nearly a week and still don’t know how much they’ve lost in the flood that started early Monday.

They have two sod farms, a total of about 600 acres in rural Whitesburg, bordered by the Chattahoochee River and Snake Creek, giving them a double whammy of flood water.

Storms Sunday night and Monday morning dumped anywhere from 5 to 10 inches of rain over the county after more than a week of rain and swelling both rivers over their banks. The Chattahoochee River broke a 90-year record on Wednesday when it crested at 29.84 feet at 7:30 a.m. The old record, 29.11 feet, was set on Dec. 11, 1919, said Kent Frantz, service hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Peachtree City. The Snake Creek raged through Carroll County, taking the life of a 2-year-old and damaging roads and bridges in its path.

Although no houses were affected in the Whitesburg area, the McWhorters’ fields were totally submerged in some places by 15 feet of water. The water covered their sod crops and eight tractors.

“We actually put a motor boat in Monday and rode around the farms in the motor boat,” Linda McWhorter said. “The water has started receding today.”

But even Thursday there was still 6 feet of standing water in some areas and the property looked more like a lake than a farm.

Aaron McWhorter figures he’s lost at least 50 percent of this year’s crop, but he can’t get an accurate estimate of the damage until the water recedes completely. Then he can check the irrigation systems, dry out the tractors and see if he can repair them, check for erosion and see if any of the crop made it.

The two have been at their Whitesburg farms for 25 years and have never seen flooding like this. In 2005, there was some flooding from Snake Creek, but it was minor compared to this week. They had made some preparations on Sunday in case of a flood because they had seen the weather reports, but it wasn’t enough.

“We moved things out of what we considered to be the normal flood situation, but it went 4 or 5 feet above what we’ve ever seen before,” Aaron McWhorter said. “It caught some stuff that we never dreamed it would.”

The McWhorters don’t have flood insurance because it doesn’t exist for sod farms.

“There are only certain crops that you can buy insurance for, things like corn, soybeans, traditional row crop farms,” he said. “Vegetables, sod and specialty crops, there is no insurance.”

Not only will they lose the income from the crops, but any damage to their farm and equipment that was caused by the flooding will not be covered by insurance.

While the flood was a disaster for the McWhorters, for others it was a spectacle. People gathered all along Highway 16 on the Chattahoochee River to witness the rising waters Tuesday and Wednesday.

“You could have charged admission down there,” Linda McWhorter said. “People were stopped all along the sides of the roads. I mean, it was bumper to bumper, and once they detoured the traffic off the Interstate 20, all that traffic came through Carrollton and Whitesburg.”

It was something people had never seen in their lifetime. The floods were a culmination of widespread heavy rain, following a wet week, Frantz said.

“When you get widespread heavy rainfall amounts like this over a large area, that is a whole lot of water on the ground that needs to work its way through the system,” he said. “Also, we’d been in a wet pattern for a long time. This didn’t just happen by itself.”

The soil was saturated and the rivers were already rising, leading to the 100-year flood.

The weather forecast is for weekend rain. If it stays within the predicted 1 to 2 inches, the rain may cause a little bit of a rise in water levels but should be manageable, Frantz said.

At Whitesburg, the Chattahoochee had already dropped 4 feet on Thursday to 25.4 feet, so another record is not likely.