Pittsburgh, Pa. Sunday, Jan. 14, 2007

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Pittsburgh's Flood of Memories: St. Patrick's Day 1936

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

	Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center   Floodwaters cover the Point in 1936. The Manchester Bridge, left, and Point Bridge no longer exist. Click photo for larger image

Audio Slideshow / Echoes of a Disaster: Click image to view this presentation.

In 1936, the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers were converging near Smithfield Street. Downtown below that was under as much as 15 feet of water that filled all the first floors and basements. It was the same in low areas up and down the rivers, from Ambridge to Vandergrift, where thousands had to be rescued from their second stories.

Flooding was slamming much of the eastern United States, but it was particularly bad here. In Allegheny County alone, more than 40 people drowned. Much of the region was without power, drinking water, gasoline and other staples for days. Refinery and factory fires raged out of control.

By the time the brown water receded, the toll here was more than 60 dead, 500 hurt and 135,000 homeless. Flood damage just within Allegheny County was estimated at $150 million to $200 million.

Pittsburgh Press reporter Gilbert Love, who kept working by using adjacent railroad tracks to climb into the newspaper's second floor, wrote on March 20 that Pittsburghers could hardly believe what hit them. "Who would have expected to see khaki-clad National Guardsmen; cars bearing Red Cross flags; police cordons barring entrance to most of the downtown area?

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette The houseboat in which John Carey grew up on Pittsburgh's North Side was carried away during the 1936 flood. Click photo for larger image.

Alas, as every year passes, there are fewer people alive who would think to look up at them.

This St. Patrick's Day, Friday, on the 70th anniversary, a new exhibit on the "Great Flood of 1936" opens at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center in the Strip District.

The tale is retold using 60 photographs, period newspapers (that at the time had to be printed out of town) and personal letters.

The exhibit also will air a 12-minute video of silent amateur movie footage that was compiled by Horne's department store, which was inundated, too. The film depicts the piles of ruined merchandise, rowboats plying the streets, steam locomotives with barely their stacks sticking out of the drink.

The History Center's Lauren Uhl, who's curating this exhibit, says she's "trying to show the magnitude" of an event that left an indelible mark on Pittsburgh's public conscience.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Carey holds a picture of himself and several members of his family as they sought refuge in a sister's house on the North Side. Carey is the boy in the center window; his face is partially obscured. Click photo for larger image.

"Something like that never leaves your mind," says the woman who once described for the Post-Gazette how Herr's Island at the base of Troy Hill -- now Washington's Landing -- was a sprawling stockyard. The night of the flood, her neighbors wondered if workers had been able to evacuate all the livestock.

"My husband-to-be and I ran to the edge of the hill and watched and listened," she wrote. "The water came up so fast some animals were left behind and some were in railroad cars ... Everything was so still that their frightened cries carried sharp and clear. ... We felt we must help, but there was nothing we could do as we watched the water close over the cars. Then everything was quiet; it was as if the whole world was quiet.

"We turned without a word and walked home; it did not seem a time for talking."

The hill-dwellers had their homes. But they couldn't escape the after-effects like a week without running water. She recalls gathering snow to melt in laundry tubs to drink. "You didn't get bottled water in those days."

	Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center Some houseboats near the Seventh Street Bridge along the Allegheny River were sunk in the 1936 flood. Click photo for larger image.

From her Troy Hill perch, Mrs. Wohleber muses, "I was so worried about the houseboat people. Houseboats for me were something magical."

That's a good transition to another survivor with a different perspective on the Great Flood.

John Carey, 81 and now living in Cranberry, was 11 years old in 1936 and living in a seven-room houseboat his father built on an old wooden barge. It was tied up on the Ohio River along the North Side, at the west base of North Avenue.

Lots of "river rats" resided in such makeshift floating homes, at which the rushing, rising torrents tugged and tore.

After evacuating, "The thing that I remember is that my dad and my older brother -- he was four years older than I was -- they kept an eye on it. ... They tied the boat to the railroad tracks that ran along where we lived. ...

"We lost everything."

His father and brother joined him and his mother at the nearby home of one of his sisters, where they hunkered on the second floor. He has a photograph of them leaning out the windows -- and they're grinning.

Mr. Carey has also hung on to an admiration for his parents and siblings -- and so many people at that time -- for being so resilient. After all, they'd survived the Depression, by doing whatever it took, whether it was cadging coal and lumber or eating noodles and corn (how he hated that dish).

"I could never understand how my mother and dad survived these things, and what torment and whatever they went through."

As chronicled in the History Center exhibit, some good did come out of the Great Flood of 1936. And greater good than the camaraderie that had some "floodies" holding reunions to celebrate how Pittsburghers came together to work through the destruction and threat of disease, the hunger and the muck.

The disaster also moved people to finally enact fixes, including the Flood Control Act of that June that authorized the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and communities to construct more than a dozen dams and reservoirs -- the system that protects the region, if not from all floods, from another one so great.