A Drowning in the Headwaters

1993 aerial photo of College Park showing the location of the tragedy and the missing river.

A couple years ago, I gave a presentation about Finding the Flint to a group of community leaders in Northwest Atlanta. After my talk, I met a woman who shared that her cousin drowned in the Flint headwaters in College Park in the ‘90s. I had heard rumors about a drowning, but it seemed impossible. And without a name, I couldn’t verify it.

Dr. Jacqueline Jones Royster, then the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech, illuminated this tragedy for me. Her cousin’s name was Carolyn Harmon. Her life mattered and her story matters. Now seems like a good time to share it.

Carolyn Harmon drowned in a flash flood on Labor Day weekend, 1992. She was 32 years old and she left behind two young sons.

Harmon lived in East Point and was visiting a friend’s apartment in College Park that Friday night. It had been raining heavily all day and the creek next to the apartment building, normally a small drainage ditch, was swollen with stormwater. When Harmon tried to return to her car, the parking lot was flooded. She slipped into the stream and was pulled into a whirlpool at an open culvert. The pipe led underneath six lanes of highway and the Atlanta airport.

That “creek” was the West Fork headwaters of the Flint River, but Harmon couldn’t have known that. There was no sign, no fence, no reason to suspect that the force of a river ran through the neighborhood. Since the 1960s, this residential corner of College Park had been obliterated by the construction of the new airport terminal, I-85, the MARTA rail station, and an FAA office complex. While most houses were relocated, these apartment dwellers were left behind, at the confluence of two open creeks and the concrete wall of the highway. It was an accident decades in the making.

A week later, search crews found Harmon’s jacket in the Flint River in Clayton County, over seven miles away from where she disappeared. Her body was never recovered.

Through lawsuits between her grieving family, the city of College Park, and the owner of the apartments the court determined, amazingly, that Harmon’s death was her own fault. The city of College Park now maintains a series of fenced-off stormwater detention areas along this unmarked segment of the river.

I am haunted by the injustice of Carolyn Harmon’s drowning. Like so many brutal deaths of Black people, without a cell phone video, it sounds unbelievable. But less dramatic, daily environmental injustices are just as insidious—floods that cut off access to Southern Regional Medical Center, sewage and fuel spills from the airport, unchecked runoff from industrial sites that erodes and contaminates the creeks. Even litter that blows off the runways and highways—it all ends up downstream. Clayton County residents, who are 66% African American, suffer the impacts of pollution, flooding, and depressed property values.

I try to keep our social media content positive, inviting, and future-focused. But in order to “find the Flint,” I’ve had to dig into the history of these headwaters, and what I’ve learned disturbs and educates and motivates me, as a White person, to find my place in the work of justice. Finding the Flint can’t advance a brighter, greener vision for the future without calling out patterns of environmental racism and the lethal impact on vulnerable, low income communities of color. And with our majority White team, we can’t accomplish a fraction of this vision without prioritizing the desires of Black residents, relying on the leadership of Black elected officials, the wisdom of Black experts, collaboration with Black business owners, and lifting up the voices of Black creatives.

For example, Dr. Royster continues to be involved in Finding the Flint with the goal of creating a memorial for Carolyn Harmon at the headwaters. What community leaders, designers, builders, funders, and volunteers will help us say her name?