Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania
Disasters come and disasters go, often buried under the glut of other news. Airplane crashes, train accidents, epidemics, and floods, while perhaps the focus of consistent government concern, fade quickly from the public consciousness. They are in the headlines for a while but soon become footnotes to current history, the continuing preoccupations only of those with a special regional, academic, economic, or personal interest. If the cause is discovered—say, for a plane crash—word of it is likely to be buried deep inside the newspaper or to be given only scant attention at the tail end of a television news broadcast. If a disaster area continues to have grave long-range needs, or if its recovery falters, features on the subject are regarded, by both editors and readers, as less compelling reading or viewing than the latest developments in news areas.
Attention has faded from WilkesBarre, Pennsylvania, which had a brief—and rare-bit of fame last summer after being devastated by Hurricane Agnes. Federal and state officials have measured, however, and declared that the impact of the flood on the Wyoming Valley, an area about ten miles long and four miles wide straddling the Susquehanna River, amounts to the worst natural disaster in American history.
Some 70 percent of the damage done to Pennsylvania, estimated in billions of dollars, was focused in its northeastern corner. In Luzerne County alone, of which WilkesBarre is the county seat, at least 25,000 dwelling units were affected, displacing more than 72,000 of the county’s 342,301 residents and profoundly disrupting the lives of almost all the others. About 28 percent of the victims were over fiftyfive years old. Many of the area’s new industries, recruited during the late 1950s and early 1960s to fill the economic void left by the decline and depletion of anthracite coal mining, were wiped out.
Viewed in historical perspective, this disaster should not have come as a great surprise. The Wyoming Valley is on the Susquehanna’s flood plain. The same factors that made it attractive as the home of American Indians, that made it worth a war between the colonial governments of Connecticut and Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, that made it the site of a great boom in the mid-nineteenth century and a prosperous haven for immigrants living off the hard-coal mines at the turn of the twentieth, make it vulnerable to the whims of nature. The valley is smack in the path to the sea of the water that flows from the mountains of upstate New York, a zigzag path that cuts southwest to Harrisburg and then sharply southeast across northern Maryland.
Every spring, as the thaw comes to the upper Susquehanna watershed, the river swells and quickens, and the scrawny islands under the Market Street bridge and the North Street bridge in Wilkes-Barre disappear for weeks until the normal lazy flow resumes. It has often overflowed its banks, cresting in 1865 at 33.1 feet above its normal depth, in 1893 at 28.7 feet, in 1901 at 27 feet, in 1902 at 31.4 feet, and in 1936 at 33.1 feet. Those were floods all right, the topics of local legends and family anecdotes, serious setbacks but not disasters.
In June of 1972, after a seemingly endless thaw and unrelenting rains, the Susquehanna rose to 40.6 feet before it began to recede. According to scientific studies—or is it really only regional folklore?—fifty-year floods, seventy-year floods, and onehundred-year floods punctuate the river’s history. But this, it is explained, was a four-hundred-andfifty-year flood, a bizarre occurrence that could not have been predicted, prevented, or controlled, surely not with the sandbags that volunteers futilely packed on top of the thirtyeight-foot dikes in the last desperate hours.
Nothing to show
Carl and Janet Fluegel were awakened at 4:30 A.M. on June 23, in their five-year-old home on South Gates Avenue in Kingston, just across the Susquehanna from Wilkes-Barre, with the warning that the river was rising and that the bridge to Wilkes-Barre, and to the interstate highway that would take them to their daughter’s home in Binghamton, New York, would be closed at 6 A.M. They would go there, instead of to his sister’s funeral in Reading, as they had planned. “All we did was grab” important papers and a few clothes, they recall, assuming at the time that “we’ll be back tomorrow.”
When they did return several days later, only the bird-feeder, tool shed, carport, and clothesline in their backyard were intact. The water had completely engulfed their little house and wrenched it off its foundation. About all that could be saved was a dust mop and Mrs. Fluegel’s vintage sewing machine, a happy circumstance since she is a seamstress. On August 16, they came back again to watch the Army Corps of Engineers carry out the kitchen and bathroom fixtures (“You just know they are going to take them somewhere and sell them”) and then demolish the house. Subsequently, when workmen came to clean out the still flooded basement, the few bottles of liquor that were there-thought to be drinkable because they were sealed—were stolen. In early November, the Fluegels made the final payment on their mortgage, despite having nothing to show for it except pictures.
The Fluegels have been back on their lot since the Labor Day weekend, but now live in a meager mobile home deposited there by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It leaks, and on one twenty-degree night the heat conked out.
“At first you think, ‘How are you ever going to stand this?’ ” Mrs. Fluegel says. “But you get used to it. . . . You kind of get used to anything when you have to.” In December, public officials warned against using flammable Christmas decorations, but, she said with a brittle smile, “you can still make it look like Christmas with a few little greens.’' And it is a relief to the Fluegels that whereas they were almost alone on their block when they first returned, eight families of the original forty have now come back.
Although Mr. Fluegel will retire soon from his job with a supermarket chain, they cannot plan their new future until some of the political and bureaucratic decisions well beyond their control have been made: whether they will be relieved of paying their property tax, whether their street will be included in urban renewal, whether one government agency or another will compensate them for the pre-flood value of their losses. They are talking about retirement communities in the South. But it is hard to pick up and leave the only hometown you have ever known. Many who have left since the flood are already on long waiting lists to come back as soon as new housing is available.
“Rebuild we will”
Wilkes-Barre, as the saying goes, is the sort of place that people “come from.” Its relative isolation, geographically (Scranton, fifteen miles away, is “out of town”) and culturally, has kept the community from changing dramatically in the mid-twentieth century. The unemployment rate has declined largely because so many of the unemployed have moved away. The drive to New York City and Philadelphia has been shortened by new superhighways, but both cities remain intriguingly foreign to the average family. The crime rate remains one of the lowest in the nation, the drug problem has only just arrived, and even inflation has hit with a weaker punch than in most other places.
As the communal inferiority complex grew and the population shrank in recent years, those who had left found it increasingly difficult to come back. Only if one were well established elsewhere could the parochialism and prejudices be sufficiently overlooked to make a brief visit comfortable.
Coming home now, after the flood, is rather like attending a wake, sad because of the tragedy yet social because of a supportive familiarity. Those who have suffered have a need to tell their personal stories and to exhibit their losses. Some of the tales are pathetic—one man climbed into a tree and refused to come down for more than twenty-four hours-and others poignant one county judge, a grassroots ethnic politician, was arrested by the military police for violating the curfew and then stoned by his neighbors when he came up with a deluxe mobile home before anyone else. Picture books and special newspaper editions chronicling the flood are best sellers.
On Public Square, the monument to John Wilkes and Isaac Barre (English parliamentarians of the Revolutionary War era who supported the colonies’ cause), erected by the DAR in 1913, is firmly in place on the spot where Fort Wilkes-Barre stood in 1778. But the bandstand where Salvation Army musicians used to entertain checkers players on Saturday afternoons has been replaced by an oversized trailer that houses the well-promoted President’s Office of Consumer Affairs.
Fowler, Dick & Walker. “The Boston Store” (always a mysterious tie with the outside world), is back in business and booming on South Main Street. Beneath the charming 1920s facades of other buildings, however, what used to be sweet shops, paint stores, and restaurants have become dark caverns caked with dry mud. The windows of some former department stores carry signs announcing that service charges have been suspended, but imploring customers to pay their delinquent bills.
The Spa, which has swans engraved on its expansive mirrors and was a favorite headquarters for childhood birthday parties, is open again, but only pending a Redevelopment Authority decision on whether the building will be torn down. Meanwhile, a sixty-cent chocolate, marshmallow, and peanut sundae at the Spa is still one of the world’s best.
The Forty Fort cemetery, where the high school band marched in heavy woolen uniforms every Memorial Day playing John Philip Sousa marches, is now off limits. Even after all of the bodies exhumed by the Susquehanna when it broke through the dike on its west bank have been identified and reburied, it will take months to put the cemetery back into shape.
Neighborhoods, the most basic unit of community identification and organization in Wilkes-Barre and the surrounding boroughs, may never be reconstructed. A visitor returning to his boyhood home finds it a shambles and learns that most of the old neighbors sold their gutted houses at a fraction of their former value to real estate speculators in the first few months after the flood. Other houses have been left to stand as is and may stay that way, without occupants, for years.
Riverside Drive in Wilkes-Barre is where many of the wealthy lived, in fine old mansions or less imposing new ones, along a narrow, quiet street (no trucks allowed) fronting on the river and extending south for about a quarter of a mile from the city commons. A Potemkin village of sorts, with modest multi-family units around almost every corner. Those with Wilkes-Barre’s best address had fought for years, first against the erection of a blockhouse-like pumping station and then against the reinforcement of the dike with stark, ugly steel pilings painted dark green. They made it clear that they did not want to spoil their view of the river itself and of the lovely foliage in Kirby Park on its west bank.
Some time back they compromised, and the pilings stick up only a few feet above the earthen levee in most places. As if some biblical allegory were being played out, when the air-raid sirens went off at 11:45 on that rainy Friday morning last June, the people of Riverside Drive were among the first and hardest hit. The water’s force was enormous, and months after the flood the scene still resembles a war zone. Holes are gouged out of the ground, and trees are pitched at forty-five-degree angles. Some houses are completely off their foundations, and others tilt crazily, with jagged gashes in their brick facades. In some instances, the front steps are so far separated from the door that it has been difficult even to enter and haul out the rubble. Only the television antennae seem intact. A few families have moved mobile homes onto their spacious front lawns, but most of the properties are deserted. In the large picture window of a modern house near the intersection with Old River Road is a sign with one of the new slogans of the recovery effort: “Good People in a Good Community-EBUILD WE WILL.”
Most people, however, have not yet decided whether to rebuild. They have dragged their ruined possessions out into the street, cleaned up the mud and muck, and left their uninhabitable houses for the winter. On request, the Army Corps of Engineers or the Office of Emergency Preparedness drained pipes and boarded up the structures to protect them against the snows. One house after another is posted with a bright cardboard notice indicating, in institutional block letters, that “OEP’S WILKIS-BARRI WINTER SEAL" has been there. Left behind is an eerie ghost-town atmosphere, interrupted only by a few hangers-on living in upper stories, and by clusters of mobile homes.
Relief
“Never before has there been such massive federal aid to any area,” says Bob Ball, manager last fall of the federal Small Business Administration’s Wilkes-Barre disaster branch office. Normally the District Counsel for SBA in Oklahoma, he was taking his turn, along with other regional officials of the agency, at running the emergency program, and clearly thriving on the crisis. “I solve more problems before the first coffee break every day here than in thirty days at home,”he observed with a laugh, and a drawl that jars in contrast with northeastern Pennsylvania’s clipped ethnic accents. But then he became grave, acknowledging that “it’s going to take a long time to do what we’re here to do.”
On the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, as the SBA disaster office was preparing to close for its first Sunday off since the summer, Ball proudly tabulated the amount that his agency had so far disbursed: $131,440,631 in home loans and $22,313,751 in business loans. (As a result of congressional action taken just after the flood, the first $5000 of each loan need not be repaid, and the rest carries a low interest rate.) Still on hand to be picked up in the SBA office, which occupies nearly the entire ground floor of a large apartment building on South Main Street, were 2353 loan checks for a total of almost $24 million. Thousands of applications remained to be processed, and estimates were that as many as half of the families and businesses eligible for government loans might not have applied because of the uncertainty of their situations and their needs, or perhaps because of the embarrassment of admitting they are destitute.
On October 30, the Pennsylvania Housing Recovery Office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued its “victory release,” announcing that the agency had provided temporary dwellings for 14,358 families, about half of them mobile homes brought in from other areas of the country. HUD proclaimed that this was the equivalent of “establishing a city of about 50,000 people in less than 12 weeks.” Those in the mobile homes will have a choice, after a year without rent, of giving the units back, continuing to rent them at a fair market price, or buying them outright from the federal government. There has been no word, however, on who would pay the cost of moving the units from the “parks” and private property where they are now sitting to permanent locations that will satisfy zoning regulations.
Altogether, the federal flood relief effort is expected to reach almost $2 billion in the Wyoming Valley alone during the long recovery period. According to SBA official Ball, this is “more than in all previous disasters combined.”
What is baffling to some of the relief workers, especially those from out of town, is that the people of Wilkes-Barre do not seem grateful enough for what is being done. Indeed, there are stories galore of the unreasonable demands and quirks of the victims: the woman who insisted on keeping her travel camper as a backyard study for her son, despite warnings that it could not survive the heavy winter; the man whose trailer was burglarized but who refused to pay for a telephone call to the state police; the woman who was outraged to learn that HUD would not pay her child’s college tuition; the man who repeatedly disconnected the gas supply in his temporary mobile home and then called the local newspapers to complain that it was not being properly serviced.
Jack McGraw was one of the first federal officials to arrive in WilkesBarre after the flood, coming in with six others directly from Buffalo Creek, West Virginia, where he had headed the HUD recovery efforts after the flood there in February, 1972. Now settled in for what is expected to be at least an eighteenmonth assignment, he has found his background in the ministry and in psychology absolutely essential to handling his administrative post. McGraw rejects a popular local theory that the problems between the citizens and the flood-relief workers arise cut of the peculiar self-reliance and independence of the people of the Wyoming Valley, the vast majority of whom are children of European immigrants who worked hard for everything they own.
In Buffalo Creek and on an earlier disaster assignment in Lubbock, Texas, McGraw says, “the trends and syndromes were almost identical. Only the magnitude is different here.” Helpless in the aftermath of a natural disaster, the victims provide “100 percent cooperativeness at the start,” he relates. “But then, a person begins to feel sorry for himself. He compares others and finds inequities. . . . There is an immediate credibility gap. Nobody trusts anybody. People don’t believe the stuff is on the way” when they are crowded together in evacuation centers or at the homes of relatives and friends.
By early winter, McGraw feels, the flood victims here reached a predictable stage of “real dependency. They feel ‘the government owes me. . . .’ Everything becomes a demand. . . . They say, ‘HUD is making us live like pigs.’ ” McGraw, fresh from an appendectomy and resigned to a “very thankless job,” sighs deeply and adds, “I can’t believe that there’s not a lot of good appreciative people out there that you never hear from. . . . But a family that completely loses everything, they’ve got to find somebody to strike out against. In West Virginia, the coal mine became the object of hostility. In Texas, it became racial.”
To an extent, the popular discontent and grumbling is fueled by a subtle competition among government agencies. Caseworkers and staff people, calling on or consulting with victims, inevitably pass the bureaucratic buck and drop nasty remarks about how a different agency is performing. Officials loyal to the Republican Administration in Washington have also competed publicly with those favoring the Democratic one in the state capital of Harrisburg. When HUD moved, for example, to recall the 1800 summer camper units that had been distributed as temporary emergency living quarters, people complained bitterly, and a member of the state Cabinet threatened to seek a court injunction against the federal agency. HUD backed down, and of the last units picked up, 98 percent had been seriously damaged by frost.
Prevention and cure
How did it happen and what can prevent it the next time? Some blame the wealthy Riverside Drive residents who fought the raising of the dikes, or the local sanitation authority which, as one Kingston resident tells it, “punched holes in the dikes” during its efforts to clean up the river.
Rejecting statistical reassurances, many Wyoming Valley flood victims fear that the next “four-hundredand-fifty-year flood” wall defy the law of averages and come this spring or next. The only sure and convincing protection, say the skeptics, is against the worst. But the Army Corps of Engineers, responsible for repair and maintenance of the levees, says it is economically, aesthetically, and structurally unfeasible to rehabilitate and raise the dikes to that extent; it would require almost the equivalent of medieval city walls along the river, and even they might not hold. An effective long-range solution may have to include the completion of dams and reservoirs in upstate New York, the dredging of a clearer path for the Susquehanna, and, at the least, a meteorological warning system that will permit the orderly evacuation of property to higher ground. But, as the weekly Wyoming Valley Observer recently pointed out, all the options stir controversy:
Levees are rejected by many because they feel it blocks their view, channel improvements such as cutting out sharp bends and removing islands are objected to by those who love the natural winding river and the beauty of the picturesque growth. Flood plain management is resented by private enterprise who feel it an encroachment on their right to do what they wish with their private property, and reservoirs are frowned on since they usually require people of another area making sacrifices for those downstream for whom they feel no obligation.
In the end, the only total guarantee against future floods would be to abandon the valley permanently.
The immediate question is whether the dikes have been sufficiently repaired to handle this year’s spring thaw, the subject of a bitter dispute between Major General Frank Townend, Luzerne County’s civil defense director, and Colonel Louis Prentiss, chief of the Baltimore District of the Corps of Engineers. Townend contends that the Corps used only weak fill in the five areas where the dikes were washed away last June. If the river were to reach even the twenty-eightfoot level in the near future, he says, they might begin to erode; and he would order a new evacuation of the community if it reached the thirty-foot stage. Supported by outraged community organizations, he is demanding that new steel pilings be driven into the ground or that a concrete cap he used to bolster the dikes in every area where they broke.
But the Corps says that it has adequately handled the problem and predicts confidently that the river will not rise very high this time around. Frank Carlucci, a Nixon Administration official born in Wilkes-Barre and the President’s post-flood problem-solver, agrees; he says that the Corps of Engineers has a “long, distinguished, commendable record.”
Broken heart
Only three people died as a direct result of the flood last summer, all of them while working in rescue or cleanup operations. General Townend, one of the Wilkes-Barre brahmins whose family has been in the area for two hundred years, a lawyer who has been the county’s civil defense director for over sixteen years, is proud of his record in evacuating tens of thousands of people m a few hours with almost no advance warning. (Wilkes-Barre’s “river watchers” were never informed of the heavy Thursday rains around Elmira and Corning, New York.) He is also pleased that epidemics of disease were avoided and proclaims that the citizens of the Wyoming Valley “are healthier than they’ve ever been before.” “When people are aware of the dangers, they are more careful,” Townend says, noting that the local Blue Cross insurance plan, on whose board he sits, “saved a lot of money in July, August, and September.”
But others, like Edward Heffron, director of Project Outreach, which is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, are concerned with the problems of emotional health which seem to have emerged from the flood. Only a few suicides have been documented so far, but a number of people were hospitalized in psychiatric wards because of an inability to cope with flood-related troubles. And mental health workers arc hearing about unexplained premature deaths, especially among nursing-home patients and other elderly residents. Project Outreach has sent teams of counselors, in many cases ordinary citizens converted during hasty training sessions into “pseudo social workers,” out into the community just to give the people an opportunity to talk about their problems.
They have found, among other things, an almost claustrophobic reaction to the pressure of living in close quarters or with relatives for an extended period of time, an anxiety about spending holiday seasons out of one’s ordinary surroundings, concern about future flood-protection measures, and an intense pathological fear of rain. When the Susquehanna rose briefly last October to an unusual autumn crest, panic began to spread, and the frightened public was reassured only when it could learn from the newspapers and radio stations-the river is a constant headline preoccupation these days—that there would be no flood. The emotional reaction includes, above all, an enduring attitude of dependency, a reluctance to give up government-subsidized housing or anything else free until the last possible moment. In the first weeks after the flood, some families refused to leave evacuation centers in schools, and local authorities decided they had no choice but to force them to find more permanent arrangements.
Many of the flood victims feel a loss of roots, a sense of having had their past washed away by the water. “I can go back to New Jersey and find the house I was born in,” says Sylvia Brooks, who worries that her sons will not be able to do the same with the family’s seriously damaged home in Kingston. “We lived in this house for thirty years, and there will be no sign of us. I feel like putting up a poster that says, This is where Jack and Marshall were born,’ and then letting it be bulldozed under with the house.”
There is a popular story about the time that Lady Bird Johnson came to Wilkes-Barre in the 1960s and said she could not believe that it was classified as a “depressed area,” because it didn’t look so poor. Even now, with a particular kind of change imposed upon it, the area might seem to be an essentially lively and prosperous place. For the time being, the economy is booming. With Red Cross or SBA or other relief money, and with little or no rent to pay, people are spending heavily. There is a race among businessmen to reopen and share in the sweepstakes. Thousands of people who would be unemployed or underemployed under normal circumstances have been placed on government agency payrolls as clerks, administrators, caseworkers, repairmen, and construction crew members. For the first time in years, the classified advertising section of the newspaper is filled with helpwanted ads for everything from salad-makers to tire salesmen.
Although he would not dare say it at a public political appearance these days, E. C. Wideman. Jr., chairman of the Luzerne County Board of Commissioners, is beginning to believe that the flood was “almost like a blessing in disguise,” because of the economic development it might bring to the Wyoming Valley. He foresees an influx of new industry, and even of new people, to fulfill the post-flood slogan, superimposed on a heart, that appears almost everywhere: “The Valley With a Heart Comin’ Back Better than Ever.”
Others are pessimistic. When federal programs are exhausted, many families will be faced with spending more to restore their homes than their homes were worth, and will then be stuck with both an old mortgage and a new loan to pay off. The Wyoming Valley Flood Victims Action Council, with a cracked black heart as its symbol, also insists that Wilkes-Barre is being lulled into contentment with far less than its proper share of Pennsylvania’s statewide post-flood urban renewal funds. “The crisis still exists,” says the council. Some local observers go so far as to predict that the area’s economy could collapse on its face once some of the emergency federal relief is phased out, and no one knows how some of the tiny municipalities will make up for devastating slashes in their tax base.
Meanwhile, through a tough, sad winter, life went on in Wilkes-Barre. They still announce lost dogs on the radio, the bars are serving liquor and beer to underage customers, and, of all things, children living in mobile home sites are being bused back to their old schools.
-SANFORD J. UNGAR