The horror, the heroes. I was mayor when Columbia flooded in 2015. This is what I saw.

I was standing not 300 feet away when rushing water collapsed the Columbia Canal wall during the October 2015 “1,000-year flood.” But it wasn’t the most amazing thing I saw.

I remember when a record 11 trillion gallons of rain fell over the Carolinas in just five days.

I remember the Congraree River cresting at nearly 32 feet and hundreds of families evacuating. I remember University of South Carolina’s Darla Moore School of Business estimating $12 billion in damage, the Department of Transportation closing 541 roads and bridges, 6,415 911 calls and 2,697 emergency dispatches on the first day of flooding alone. Statewide, 160,000 homes were damaged or destroyed and 19 people died, nine of them in Richland County.

But the numbers alone don’t tell the story of Columbia’s horrific flooding. I was out there every day 10 years ago in neighborhoods simply washed away by rushing waters — and I remember.

I remember the faces of that family who told me how it happened so fast and how their neighbors kicked in their bedroom windows and helped them climb to safety. I watched as they pointed out the line on the wall where the water had crested, and I helped them as they took precious family photographs from a soaked photo album and laid them in the front yard to dry.

I remember talking to a nearly 70-year-old man who had lost every single worldly possession. He was strong, stout, proud and tough as a pine knot, and I held him as he broke down and cried like a newborn child.

But then something amazing happened.

Even before the rains stopped and the waters started to recede, people who had every reason to seek out the darkness and hide there falling deeper into misery instead found the strength to pull their feet back under themselves and not only stand but march forward.

I saw police officers, firefighters, Army and National Guard personnel and utilities workers endure ungodly hours in unthinkable conditions, putting themselves in harm’s way over and over and over again for each other and for us.

I saw rescue and hospital workers turn shift after shift until they had to be pulled off the line because they wouldn’t rest unless someone made them.

I saw restaurants delivering trays of free food to shelters, shop owners donating their wares, students helping clear molding drywall and deacons delivering bottled water.

I saw community leaders; Girl Scouts; members of the Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint churches; people from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the fashion industry and volunteers from as far away as Israel come to our aid.

I saw families who’d lost everything they owned reach out and give of themselves freely to neighbors who somehow had it even worse than they did.

I saw one city become one people and rise above a 1,000-year flood with 1,000 simple acts of kindness and that — more than road closures or insurance claims — is the story of October 2015.

Ten years later, that’s the story we need to remember because we don’t see it much when we look at each other right now. It’s hard to remember that no one asked who you voted for before they let you into the emergency shelter and that the troops deployed during the flood were driving water trucks, not carrying assault rifles.

It’s hard to remember, and maybe there are some who’ll say that’s not who we are anymore. But I don’t believe that. I believe we are our brothers’ keepers and our sisters’ keepers, a fabric of families and individuals from across the wide spectrum of separate circumstance, beholden only to each other, woven free and indivisible into the greater whole of community.

Even with all the shouting and the slogans and the violence and the hate we see right now, I still believe that with all my heart. I believe it because I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

We just need to remember.

Steve Benjamin was mayor of Columbia from 2010 to 2021.