Scars from 2011 flood linger on local landscape, local hearts

A decade ago this week, the record Susquehanna River flood gripped residents of low-lying Luzerne County communities.

The torrent churned through thousands of homes and businesses, caused tens of millions of dollars in damage.

Some were unable or unwilling to rebuild and left the flood zone for good.

It was nail-biting for those protected by the Wyoming Valley Levee because the system was pushed to the brink. Levee cracks and boils and leaks in the Market Street flood gates elevated tension.

“This force is coming that you just can’t stop,” county Emergency Management Agency Director Lucy Morgan said of the Susquehanna’s 2011 rise to 42.66 feet. “It’s so vivid in your mind and so horrible that it doesn’t feel like ten years have passed.”

Accelerating threat

The Susquehanna was at 7.41 feet the morning of Sept. 7 and projected to reach 26 to 28 feet due to Tropical Storm Lee.

By that afternoon, the river crest projection jumped to 38 feet, prompting the evacuation of approximately 50,000 people in the most vulnerable spots.

Around 6 a.m. the next day, Sept. 8, county officials announced the 65,000 residents protected by the levee also must be evacuated because the river was already at 21.65 feet and now predicted to rise to 39.9 feet.

Officials already were scrambling to respond to water gushing into properties in non-protected communities.

Levee seepage was discovered that afternoon in the Forty Fort Cemetery, prompting a hurried delivery of tons of rock and dirt to stabilize it. More worries emerged that night as workers struggled to stop leaking from a compromised seal at the Market Street Bridge flood gate.

At one point, officials discovered a faulty flood gauge had been throwing off readings.

Around 5 a.m. Sept. 9, then-Wyoming Valley Levee overseer Jim Brozena confirmed that the Susquehanna was cresting at a record 42.66 feet. A little over an hour later, large boils were discovered at the levee behind the county recreational complex near the Wyoming Valley Airport in Forty Fort, requiring about 1,000 tons of dirt and rock.

The levee was only designed to hold 41 feet, but it held thanks to an additional 3-foot top board, known as “freeboard,” added to handle waves and debris.

‘Surreal’

By daylight Sept. 10, receding waters allowed residents in many municipalities not protected by the levee to return to their properties to assess the damage and start hauling out mud-caked, waterlogged belongings.

Alicia Marranca’s family was among them.

“It was surreal,” she said this week.

Her late father, Sam Marranca, said at the time he was “shocked” to see the damage caused by more than six feet of water on the first floor of his Cafe Italia restaurant on River Road in Jenkins Township.

The thick walk-in freezer door had been blown off its hinges and ended up in another room. Furnishings and equipment were in shambles, though some items were inexplicably just as he had left them — a few bottles of wine on the shelf and a table still upright with its utensil settings intact.

With the help of outside crews and family, he redid everything and reopened in seven weeks, said Alicia, who now runs the restaurant.

Her father kept a bottle of the “flood” wine as a bittersweet memento, and the intact table also was saved and still in use at the restaurant. The basement is no longer used, including a huge room once a base for making homemade pasta, she said.

Never involved with flooding before, Alicia cried when her brother brought back photographs of the restaurant’s inundation he captured by accessing the rear of the site on an ATV.

“My father was such a strong person. He was upset but did not let it show,” Alicia said. “This restaurant was his life, and I know he would be proud we are still open.”

Moving on

Some could not bear to live with the looming threat of another flood.

Carl Bloom had spent 33 years customizing his Nescopeck ranch home, adding a brick path and extensive landscaping around the kidney-shaped pool, pool house and deck overlooking the once calming river. It was supposed to be his forever home.

He thought it was out of harm’s way because there was only minor basement flooding in the prior record flood of 1972. In 2011, he returned after the river retreated to find the basement still completely filled with water and the entire first floor in disarray and caked with mud that had a rainbow pattern from traces of oil.

“I can still picture it so clearly,” he said this week. “Ten years later, you just don’t forget.”

Bloom pushed to get in a flood buyout and relocated to nearby Berwick in a house far outside the flood zone.

Although thankful for a path out so he would no longer have to worry about the threat, Bloom regularly drives past his old homestead for nostalgic reasons. He happened to be there when the claws of demolition equipment picked up the deck and crushed it, and he left because he “couldn’t watch anymore.”

“All that work, and one day it was gone. It’s hard to believe it’s all gone,” Bloom said.

Buyouts

Morgan, of EMA, experiences a similar feeling when she revisits impacted communities.

From an emergency response standpoint, she wholeheartedly supports buyouts to lessen the potential for life and property damage, but the absence of familiar buildings is still there, she said.

“It’s heartbreaking 10 years later to drive through Shickshinny and other communities and see all the empty lots,” Morgan said.

Plymouth Township Supervisor Gale Conrad estimated about 75 properties were demolished since 2011 in her municipality, in addition to others following flooding in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Several torn down had been elevated as a preventive measure and still flooded in 2011, she said.

“If you were a lifelong resident, it does look different. But if you were not familiar with these areas, you wouldn’t even know the difference,” Conrad said. “It is what it is. What can you do?”

Conrad regularly praises government officials for assisting with buyouts that “gave these folks the opportunity to relocate and be safe.” She’s also grateful her municipality has land on higher ground that has been developed to offset the loss of tax revenue from demolished properties.

In all, more than 300 flood-prone properties in the county have been demolished since 2011, said Brozena, who was executive director of the county Flood Protection Authority during the flooding and now works as a consultant.

“The unprotected communities, especially the ones downstream like Plymouth Township, Shickshinny and Conyngham Township, have done an extensive amount of buyouts, so even when the river does come up, the number of impacted properties will be dramatically less,” Brozena said.

Emergency response

Morgan recalls working round-the-clock under then-EMA director Steve Bekanich during the flooding and said the county was fortunate no lives were lost.

When she was finally able to retreat to a cot in her office to close her eyes for a few minutes, Bekanich burst in to alert her about the threat that water forcing its way under the levee could compromise the system.

They raced to provide identification badges to heavy equipment operators so the National Guard would allow them to get through to address the problem.

“It was just terrifying,” Morgan said. “If the levee did break, we’d be in big trouble because not everybody evacuated. Some people refused.”

One of her most moving memories was stopping by a fire department reception center in Plymouth Township filled with donated clothes and crockpots of hot food for the victims. Learning of a resident with a newborn who lost her mobile home in the flood and couldn’t get diapers, Morgan traveled to a social services provider to retrieve some.

“She was crying and hugging me so tight. Here she lost everything and just had a baby, and she was so thankful,” Morgan said. “It was so little what I did, but to her it was the world.”

The list is too long to name all the agencies, volunteers and governmental entities that assisted with flood response and recovery, she said.

There was an EMS strike force of medical professionals with a caravan of ambulances from other parts of the state that came to assist local emergency responders swamped with flood-related calls.

Volunteers from county fire departments on higher ground helped relieve valley crews exhausted from pumping water out of basements and other duties. Another group of animal advocates set up pet stations at shelters to encourage more people at risk to evacuate, she said.

A mobile vaccination unit traveled through flooded communities, and a range of government agencies and organizations gathered at the Luzerne County Community College to provide flood victims with help replacing lost social security cards and driver’s licenses and applying for loans.

“It was horrible, and I hope we never have to go through it again, but so many good things happened too. We’re so blessed with our emergency responders and all the people who help us,” Morgan said.

When Morgan eventually returned home and sat on her couch, she broke down thinking of all the people now without a living room and couch.

“It took years off me,” she said of the experience. “It took a very long time to decompress and cope with everything that had happened.”

Sandbags

Then-assistant county engineer Christopher Belleman’s duties in 2011 included levee patrolling and making sure thousands of sandbags were placed at levee gaps where Beade Street crosses in Plymouth and trains pass through on the Wilkes-Barre and Edwardsville sides of the Black Diamond Bridge.

He was pleasantly surprised when a large group of volunteers, including many college students, appeared to help fill and line up in a chain to pass the 50-pound sandbags.

“That was a wonderful show of support and community spirit — all of us coming together to try to save the valley,” Belleman said. “It was incredible.”

He also was amazed to see the volume and velocity of the water entering the local river stretch. It drains from a massive 10,000-square-mile watershed extending into the Finger Lakes and Catskills in New York.

The federal government spent more than $1.3 million repairing pumps, flood gates, relief wells, boils and other damage along the 16-mile levee system, with no local cost share required, because the authority had kept it maintained and up to federal standards, Belleman said.

While the success of the levee was cheered, the destruction in non-protected communities was heartbreaking, Belleman said.

“All their belongings at the curb and so many people and families affected — it’s just something you hope you don’t see again for the rest of your lifetime,” Belleman said. “Your heart goes out to them. It tosses your life upside down.”

Challenging conditions

The most “complicating factor” in the 2011 flood was the failed gauge, said Brozena, an engineering consultant who was the county Flood Protection Authority’s executive director at that time.

“Suddenly the data we had was not accurate. We were thinking the river was at 38 feet, and it was at 42 feet,” he recalled. “That really threw all of us for a loop at that point in time.”

Unbeknownst to officials, the old gauge stopped increasing its readings when it reached capacity at 38.6 feet on Sept. 9, giving the National Weather Service and local emergency management officials the false impression that the river had crested at that level, according to published reports.

The U.S. Geological Survey, which monitors stream and river heights, installed a new, higher-capacity gauge on the Veterans Memorial Bridge a month after the record flood.

Brozena said he had been wondering why the levee was experiencing so many issues, not knowing the river was actually beyond the system’s design capacity.

“It also made us realize that we had a bigger issue on our hand than we thought,” he recalled of the gauge error discovery.

Prior county commissioner and councilman Stephen A. Urban, who chaired the flood authority board at that time, said he remained at county EMA and participated in levee patrols throughout the flooding.

The pump stations, revamped as part of the levee-raising, and other essential levee components were performing as intended, he said.

Weather forecasts showing wind would move the rain away from New York convinced him the wall of water would start decreasing just in time.

“I never got excited about it. I had full confidence that the levee was going to hold,” Urban said.