FLOODS in Pittsburgh! Oh No, Never Happen ...
 

The information below discusses events
of our areas past...

Do you remember the Flood of 2004?
Unless you where one of the flood victims,
you can not realized the anguish, frustration
and the feeling of complete loss
each individual and family underwent.
 

Trib NorthBy Brandon Keat TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Thursday, March 17, 2005

Grant Bar owner Frank Ruzemberka vows he will reopen the Millvale landmark next month -- thanks to countless hours of hard work by unpaid employees, friends and relatives.

"It's been phenomenal," Ruzemberka said. "It's been a wonderful experience. I'm not glad this happened, but it showed me something."

Millvale Mayor James Burn said Ruzemberka's story exemplifies the upside of the floods Sept. 17, when remnants of Hurricane Ivan devastated Millvale, Etna, Sharpsburg, Carnegie and other communities throughout the region.

"It's had an effect of unification," Burn said. "People who didn't speak to each other for years are working side by side still to get each other back on their feet and on with their lives."

Six months after the flood, many residents and business owners are still struggling to get back to normal.

In Sharpsburg, nearly 30 of 72 affected businesses have closed for good. Many homeowners -- including Mayor Donald A. Ferraro -- have not been able to return to their houses, according to Ted Dillenburg, operations manager for the Network of Hope Flood Recovery Center there.

Burn said virtually all of Millvale's 400 affected homeowners are back in their houses, and it appears only one of the almost 200 affected business will not reopen. In Etna, 34 of 35 affected businesses have reopened already and only about a dozen homeowners are still out of their houses-- although many in both towns are still replacing rotted walls and floors, laying carpet, painting new walls and cleaning debris from lawns.

But clawing back has not been easy. The Grant Bar will reopen after sustaining more than $400,000 in damages.

For Ruzemberka, 72, it all looked a little familiar. He was 3 years old in 1936, when floodwaters gushed into the bar his parents had opened just three years earlier. He was pulled from a second-floor window and carried to safety in a boat.

Seeing the damage of Sept. 17, Ruzemberka thought about throwing in the towel.

But the day after the flood, 36 employees, relatives, friends and customers unexpectedly came to the bar to help begin the cleanup.

Jason Femc had been working there only a month and a half when the rains came. He has been there almost every day since, working for free.

"I won't just leave because they get flooded. They're too nice," he said. "It's like a family almost."

Volunteers throughout the region have rallied to help flood victims rebuild, secure grant and insurance money and connect with charities and social services.

The Etna Team for Neighborhood Assistance has 500 to 700 volunteers, including church groups, Scout troops, labor unions and people who simply want to help, said coordinator Patty Bontempo.

For flood victims such as James Bentley, of Millvale, volunteer help has been a godsend.

He recently got a new bathroom -- completed in a single weekend -- courtesy of four volunteers from the Millvale Assistance team. "I would have never been able to get that bathroom done if not for them," Bentley said.

Allegheny County officials have teamed up with local foundations to provide $4.3 million in grants and no-interest loans to small businesses and are working with Hosanna Industries in Rochester Borough, Beaver County, on a $2.6 million program to help low-income homeowners.

"You can help by sending a check, or you can help with your hands. When you do it with your hands, sometimes it's a little more meaningful," said Mike Pettit, of Shaler, who has been spending weekends volunteering with Hosanna Industries.

Hosanna hopes to help rehabilitate 500 homes by year's end. The group has worked on 100 homes so far, said client relations coordinator Amy Ed. Grants and insurance frequently have proved insufficient, Ed said.

"It is just not covering the vast disaster that they had," she said. "It's amazing to me after this long how many people are not close to a state of recovery yet."

A long-term recovery team run by the Carnegie Area Ministerial Association has received 220 applications for help but has closed just 60 of those cases, said the team's president, the Rev. Bruce Nordeen.

"If I had 100 stoves, I could get rid of them instantly," Nordeen said.

People have donated more than $100,000 to aid relief efforts in Carnegie, but the recovery has a long way to go, borough council President Dorothy Kelly said.

"I just don't know what will become of this town if we don't get some government grants to assist us," she said. "If we don't have aid, we will be doing nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on a sinking ship."

The devastation from the record Sept. 17 torrent extends well beyond Carnegie, Etna, Millvale and Sharpsburg.

Even living atop a hill in McKeesport didn't shield Dora Glenn from the storm's wrath.

Rainwater flowed into her basement and lightning struck the chimney, showering bricks onto the ground, Glenn said.

As volunteers, friends and family hammer back together battered homes and businesses, the community spirit that began building the night the floods came is thriving.

"Half of these guys didn't know how to read a tape measure when they started," marveled Grant Bar cook Joe Rothlein as he watched bar workers install 2,000 feet of new hardwood floor. "These guys, they put their heart and soul into it."

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
   
By Bob Batz Jr.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The liquid many Pittsburghers associate with March 17 is green beer. But there still are a few folks around who can remember St. Patrick's Day 1936, when the dark brown waters of creeks and rivers fast rose into the region's worst natural disaster.
 
 

Audio Slideshow / Echoes of a Disaster: Click image to view this presentation.
 
 
Fed by extraordinary snow melt and rain, the ice-filled three rivers crested at the Point that March 18 at the highest mark since anyone has kept track: Just over 46 feet. (That's 15 feet, or more than a story, higher than the last big flood many of us experienced in September 2004.)

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.

 
    

 
To this day, a plaque on the former Horne's building's Penn Avenue corner at Stanwix Street shows how high the water rose. There's also a plaque on the front of the Post-Gazette building on the Boulevard of the Allies.

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.

 
 

 

   

 
That bothers Mary Wohleber, 89, the Troy Hill historian. She was 19 at the time, living on that same hill, and still has vivid memories of the flood.

"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.

   
She says most Pittsburghers were stoic, but it was a "trying time." Many couldn't reach or communicate with their families, or get any news as radios died. As reporter Love recounted, "Most persons, having nothing else to do, went to bed, lying in darkness, listening to the frequent shriek of fire and police sirens."

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. ...

"A barge apparently had sunk up the river. It come underneath our house and it raised up. How and why I really don't know. But it snapped all lines my dad had tied. Here the boat went down the river [with the loose barge].

"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.
 

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