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George Picard gets a hug from his daughter, Lynne Schoonard of Kennebunk, after they arrived at his house in Fort Kent on Thursday. In the background is Picard's brother, Jim.

enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

George Picard leaves his house by boat.

enlarge Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

George Picard treks through his dining room.

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Lynne Schoonard carries her sister, Anne Picard, through their father’s home in Fort Kent on Thursday.

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FORT KENT — George Picard awoke with a start. Someone had turned the light on in his bedroom.

Picard, an 80-year-old former store manager, began to rise and saw his 50-year-old nephew, Jerome Ouellette, in the doorway.

"Uncle George, there's water in front of your house," his nephew said.

The older man glanced at the clock. It was 2:30 a.m. Wednesday.

He walked with his nephew to the porch. Around the base of the red, two-story New Englander, murky water was creeping up the foundation.

All spring, the lifelong Fort Kent resident had heard the predictions and possibilities of flooding, as the huge amount of winter snow melted in Canada and at the farthest tip of northern Maine. He and every other native of this river valley knew that the right combination of rain and warm temperatures could trigger disaster.

Picard bought flood insurance and didn't waste time on worry. It's not in his heritage.

For 100 years, the modest house has occupied this lot off East Main Street. Picard's parents built it and raised 17 children here. George Picard took over and raised his own four children at the very same spot.

The basement floods almost every spring, and sometimes the water even encircles the foundation. Year after year, it was nothing that patience and a good pump couldn't handle.

But even the old-timers like Picard didn't foresee how far and fast the Fish River would overflow this week in Fort Kent, where it empties into the much larger and faster St. John River.

Picard couldn't foresee that the St. John would shatter its record crest, test the massive International Bridge and force the water of the Fish River a quarter-mile beyond its banks.

"It came up on us fast," he said Thursday.

After his nephew came with the warning in the early morning hours on Wednesday, Picard stayed put until dawn. When he saw the water was not going to relent, he put on his rubber waders and walked to higher ground up Main Street.

He took a room at an inn across town.

"I thought this year was maybe a good year to get insurance," said Picard, speaking in an accent that evokes the French ancestry of most people in the valley.

On Thursday afternoon, like many others who were evacuated, Picard went back to check on his house. The floodwaters, which peaked halfway up the first-floor windows, had retreated a few feet. There was still about 18 inches of water throughout the first floor.

Picard and his brother, Jim Picard of Bangor, used a boat to get to the porch, then slogged through the water inside. Two of George Picard's daughters joined them for the expedition.

Some of Picard's belongings were ruined. When they left the house on the boat, they took with them his insurance policy, some suits and his set of golf clubs.

Of all the homes in Fort Kent, the Picard house was one of the hardest-hit. It's closer than almost any other to banks of the Fish River, near a town park and recreation courts, and a stone's throw from the river's confluence with the St. John River.

There used to be a lot of other houses just as close to the river, but most of the neighbors relocated in the 1980s because of the flood threat. When the town built a 30-foot-tall dike to protect downtown, that shifted much of the risk to this neighborhood off East Main Street.

"My parents, they didn't want to move," said Picard's daughter, Lynne Schoonard of Kennebunk.

Schoonard, along with her 9-year-old son Colin Yates, raced up to Fort Kent on Wednesday afternoon when they saw the extent of the flooding on the news. The family stayed Wednesday night at a motel in Caribou, so they did not meet up with George Picard until Thursday morning.

"I talk to my dad every day. I talked to him on Tuesday around 10 o'clock at night. I couldn't reach him Wednesday morning," Schoonard said.

She assumed her father was all right, but she was happy...