Floods Claim 12 Lives in Northeast As 200,000 Told To Leave Homes
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – Up to 200,000 people in the Wilkes-Barre area were ordered to evacuate their homes yesterday because of rising water on the Susquehanna River, swelled by a record-breaking deluge that killed at least 12 people across the Northeast.
Thousands more were ordered to leave their homes in New Jersey, New York, and Maryland. Rescue helicopters plucked residents from rooftops as rivers and streams surged over their banks, washed out roads and bridges, and cut off villages in some of the worst flooding in the region in decades.
Wilkes-Barre, a northeastern Pennsylvania city devastated by deadly flooding in 1972 from the remnants of Hurricane Agnes, is protected by levees, and officials said the Susquehanna was expected to crest just a few feet from the tops of the 41-foot floodwalls.
But the Luzerne County commissioner, Todd Vonderheid, said officials were worried about the effects of water pressing against the levees for 48 hours. The floodwalls were completed just three years ago.
“It is honestly precautionary,” Mr. Vonderheid said. “We have great faith the levees are going to hold.”
An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people in the county of about 351,000 were told to get out by nightfall.
Flooding closed many roads in the Philadelphia area, including the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
“We lost just about everything – the cars, the clothes, even the baby’s crib,” said James Adams, who evacuated his family’s home near Binghamton, N.Y., after watching their shed float away and their cars get submerged. “I’m not sure what we are going to do.”
Elsewhere in the Binghamton area, an entire house floated down the Susquehanna.
The soaking weather was produced by a low-pressure system that has been stalled just offshore since the weekend and pumped moist tropical air northward along the East Coast.
A record 4.05 inches of rain fell Tuesday at Binghamton. During the weekend, the same system drenched the Washington and Baltimore region with more than a foot of rain.
Although the bulk of the rain moved out of the area yesterday, streams were still rising from the runoff and forecasters said more showers and occasional thunderstorms were possible along the East Coast for the rest of the week.
Floodwaters in Washington closed the National Archives, the IRS, the Justice Department.
The weather was blamed for four deaths each in Maryland and Pennsylvania, one in Virginia, and three in New York, including two truckers.
