When a storm named Agnes arrived in Pittsburgh in June 1972, she was the first tropical storm of the season and drenched this region with more than eight inches of rain.
Forty three years ago this summer, mountaineers in West Virginia lost their shacks and affluent people in New York’s affluent Westchester County experienced damage to their fancy homes because of the wettest tropical cyclone on record in Pennsylvania’s history.
On June 24, 1972, President Richard Nixon declared five states disaster areas: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Florida, Virginia and New York.
Two weeks before Agnes blew into town, a series of rains swept across New York and Pennsylvania, completely saturating the ground so that it was unable to absorb additional water.
In Pennsylvania, the storm left 220,000 people homeless. Damage and death toll were the highest in Pennsylvania, with more than $2 billion in losses and 50 fatalities.
Harrisburg was inundated; 8,500 people there had to leave their homes.
In Wilkes-Barre, 45,000 people went to emergency shelters; the community’s water supply was contaminated and it lost phone service due to the raging Susquehanna River.
The Ohio River swamped the city of Wheeling, W.Va.
But for the construction of 10 flood control dams that ring Pittsburgh, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimated, the waters that inundated the Golden Triangle would have been two feet higher than that of the famous March 1936 flood on St. Patrick’s Day.
Hurricane Agnes inflicted $45 million in damage on Pittsburgh. If the flood control dams had not been built, the Corps of Engineers, estimated, damage would have soared past the $1 billion mark. Erie was the only Pennsylvania county to be spared.
Pennsylvania’s climate, location and terrain all played a role. A wet weather state subject to sudden and violent storms, Pennsylvania typically receives 40 thunderstorm days each year. The state also lies in a hurricane pathway and its steep valleys channel runoff from storms.
Taking into account damage in all five states, Hurricane Agnes killed 122 people, destroyed 5,000 homes and damaged 100,000 more, and left 400,000 people homeless, according to Gen. Richard H. Groves, a corps engineer for the North Atlantic Division who testified before Congress.
Half of Pennsylvania’s National Guard was mobilized to do relief work and used helicopters and boats to rescue people.
Gov. Milton Shapp knew all about the flood because the Georgian mansion he occupied, which is set on land overlooking the Susquehanna River, had two feet of water in it, covering the home’s first floor.
*A note on the images: The Pittsburgh Press librarians were known to fold oversized prints in half to fit them into standard-sized archival envelopes. Thus, many of the paper’s beautiful large photo prints are permanently creased, including many from Hurricane Agnes.
My friend Joyce and I took a bus from Reserve Twp. just to walk on the bridge and see all of the water. This happened before I left Pittsburgh to go to college in KY. If I am remembering right Three Rivers Stadium was flooded and so were stores downtown. I had never seen anything like it before.
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There was an Alice Cooper Concert that night in 3 Rivers Stadium……obviously the Show never went on, but we got to hang out with Alice and the boys at the Golden Triangle Hilton that night
Was telling some folks today about Alice’s show being cancelled.
We left McKeesport towing a trailer, five adults and a ten year old, for a vacation in Cape Cod. Zig zagged all across the state running into major flooding. Took forever to get to ParsIpanny, New Jersey where we had planned to stop that night. Woke up the next morning to a beautiful sunny day and had a great time that week. However, when we started back, Central PA was still a mess, so we came back through New York State and it was still pretty wet there. We camped at a place outside of Syracuse and they had to use a tractor to get us into the place and back out the next day.
The commencement for the Penn State class of Spring 1972 was scheduled to take place on June 24 1972. Asyou can guess we recieved our degrees by mail. What a reward for 4 years of work? I spent the day watching the Yough river fill my parents home in the town of Blythedale in Elizabeth Township.
I lived on the North Side of Pittsburgh and I was 17 years old, the point was under water, water was over the banks of the Ohio River where the ferry crossing for Bruno Island, also we stood and watched everything and anything float down the river rather briskly.
I was sweet 16 on June 23rd 1972. I had a pool party scheduled that my parents had planned for me at Holiday Inn South. We went anyway and jumped in the pool and then jumped right back out. I remember it was chilly and windy and raining in Erie Pennsylvania that day. We were spared the brunt of the storm but it was certainly a very memorable sweet 16! This past June 23rd, I turn 61 and it rained all day. :-)
My one-day memory was on a June,1972 Friday afternoon. I had to go from the east side of Pittsburgh to my warehouse job west of the city, in the low-lying Bottoms of McKees Rocks.
I was supposed to be at work at 3:30 pm to load trucks. By 4:30 pm I had to call and tell boss that ramps to four different bridges were flooded. He said, “We know! Just keep trying! We need everybody here tonight!”
Apparently the Ohio River had risen into the back parking lot, and blocks of Bottoms houses were flooded. And the Ohio was still rising.
I drove up over a hill and looked down at the bridges for some open ramp, and was dumbfounded.
Point State Park where the rivers come together was GONE, just the top of the deck arch of a bridge, sticking up in the middle of a giant lake up to the Hilton Hotel.
The roads on both sides of the Point were gone too, all way underwater. Waves were scooting up all the ramps.
But I could make out unflooded ramps to 16th Street Bridge across the Allegheny, and one high-and-dry ramp from downtown to the South Side of the Ohio, so I had a plan.
But after driving over the first bridge to Downtown, I decided to delay, because I had just never seen anything like this, and was guessing my boss was short-handed, and wouldn’t complain, as long as I got there sometime.
I parked Downtown where I was ten feet above the water, and started walking along the south side of the Allegheny River.
The biggest amazement was coal barges, on the streets!
Dozens of them floating in from the river, with little draft, because they were empty. 150 feet long and ten feet high over the water. They were beached on flooded ramps, stuck under bridges as the water rose, spinning in the turbulence in the middle of the river. And they looked really huge.
I made it down around Stanwix Street, the parts not flooded, and looked out on a giant lake. You could see the roofs of some cars, but not the windshields, some of them pushed into each other.
I climbed up on the rails of a high ramp to get a look down into the Park.
The 1700’s brick Blockhouse was just a roof. The two rivers, never more than 250 yards across each, had merged a good quarter mile east of their usual spot
They had become one big “lake”, well over a mile across, with buildings popping out of it in places, like little islands.
After two hours of walking around, I noticed the water was still rising, and that soon all ramps would be underwater. I jogged back to my car, and went through 6″ of water to get up onto the bridge lane going across the Monongahela.
I got to work a full FOUR hours late, but nobody cared – the Superintendent even thanked me! Only four of us showed up, plus a couple route drivers still around, because they were asked to stay and help.
The crisis was that the warehouse was going to flood. They abandoned loading trucks for the next day, and just wanted to get all the plastic two liter in cardboard boxes into trucks and off the floor. So four of us started trying to load half a warehouse into 75 empty trucks. [One guy suggested just loading the bottom layer from each pallet – “The rest are high enough not to get wet!”].
Trucks parked outside were parked in 12″ to 18″ of water, so we used a 35,000 pound tractor as a taxi, to get out to them and drive them back in. But the water kept coming up. And we were only getting them two feet off the floor.
Finally some smart driver mentioned that multiple lanes of a highway north of the Ohio were closed (and empty) for highway repaving, enough to hold a hundred trucks easy.
So we started driving trucks through unflooded alleys in the Bottoms, up onto the McKees Rocks Bridge, and across to Ohio River Boulevard high above the Ohio River.
We lined them up in three crowded rows after knocking over a couple of orange pylons set up by PennDot, and got a ride back jammed four to a seat in a one-ton. We went back and forth for hours, load and drive, load and drive.
We got the last truck up there about 6:30 am, just enough time to get our cars out of the now-flooding employee parking lot, and go home. Nobody got penalized for coming in late, and I got 7 1/2 hours time-and-a-half that night!
Monday the water was way-down, and everywhere was mud!
Our Kennywood picnic was cancelled. Very disappointing
Our son was 20 months old. We took him up to Mt. Washington to see it. He says he remembers it.