Floodwaters in Wilkes-Barre.
File Photo
Shown is a Sunday Dispatch from June 25, 1972, just days after the Agnes Flood that devastated West Pittston and the entire Wyoming Valley.
Tony Callaio file photo | For Sunday Dispatch
WEST PITTSTON — This weekend marks the 53rd anniversary of Agnes Flood. For those that lived through it, you can probably recall how bad the smell of dried out flood mud still remains in your mind.
West Pittstonians were stricken as the borough got hit in 2011 with Tropical Storm Lee.
The one difference, Agnes affected the entire Wyoming Valley causing $1 billion in damages in 1972 dollars involving 25,000 severely damaged or nearly destroyed homes.
Six people lost their lives in Luzerne County, 50 in Pennsylvania and 117 people perished over 12 states. Total damage from Agnes was $3.1 billion.
The 1972 flood exceeded the flood numbers of the great flood of 1936 by four feet at 40.9 feet.
Farmlands were devastated seeing $350 million in loss of everything from crops to equipment overall.
Locally, the Forty Fort Cemetery had over 2,500 graves displaced.
Officials called the Agnes Flood, “a 100-year flood,” but just 39-years later, Tropical Storm Lee came along, but this time pretty much affecting West Pittston.
After Agnes, 15 miles of levees and flood walls were raised three to five feet, leaving West Pittston with a bulls eye on it if another “100-year” flood would occur.
Troops of the National Guard called Wyoming Valley home for several months while clean up continued to keep law and order. A curfew was enacted and greatly enforced.
It was a crazy time with so much devastation from the Susquehanna River, which at times during most summers, only reach a few feet high in depth.
To know the 1972 flood level rose to nearly 41 feet is unfathomable; to think about the volume of water that spilled over its banks is something living through the natural disaster will never forget.
