Lou’s View
THE FLOOD THAT ALMOST WAS
By Lou Bernard
Clinton County’s history is full of floods. When you build a bunch of communities along a big river, that’ll happen. I’ve written about a lot of them, the big ones—1972, 1936, 1888, 1918. There are plenty of smaller floods that I haven’t gotten around to writing about, as well, floods that didn’t have as much impact.
And then there are moments when a flood almost happened. With a county accustomed to periodic flooding, you can see how this would still make the news—People panicking over coming close to a flood.
This was pretty much how it went on February 10, 1925. A Tuesday, if you’re interested. A combination of cold weather and high water threw a scare into the city as the river rose. The Clinton County Times reported on it on February 13, with the headline, ”Flood Threatens City 24 Hours When Ice James.”
It began very early Tuesday morning. Ice blocks, freezing and clogging the entire river, and jamming up against the railroad bridge in McElhattan. The river began to rise, and local citizen Alonzo McGill reported that he’d taken measurements and it appeared to be rising at a foot an hour, which is alarming. Mayor Allen Sterner rang the fire bell and warned people that they might need to be prepared to evacuate Lock Haven, particularly in the first and second wards. (For those of you not obsessed with where the wards are, that is, essentially, down near the river.)
The Clinton County Times took all this a bit more seriously than they usually did. (The Clinton County Times was in the flood zone.) They reported on the flooding and how it was affecting the whole area.
“At noon Tuesday,” the front-page article said, ”The river showed a fourteen-foot flood, and Bald Eagle Creek had risen rapidly, and was over the banks at the covered bridge at Mill Hall, near Flemington, and over the fields at the extreme eastern end of the city.”
Sterner took a team out to the Pine Creek area to take a look at the jammed ice. This included safety superintendent Boyd Mader, PP&L manager C.W. Fisher, and city attorney John Myers, just in case anything led to a lawsuit. They looked over the ice piling up along the bridges and concluded that, yep, that was a whole lot of problematic ice. Or, as the Times put it, ”They reported a solid mass of ice in the river between this city and Jersey Shore.”
In response to the fire bell and the general word-of-mouth, hundreds of people went down to the river’s edge in Lock Haven to take a look for themselves. During the afternoon, the ice shifted a little, but didn’t show much sign of going anyplace, and a heavy fog moved in, killing visibility. The mayor ordered electric lights to be set up so that people could see the disaster coming.
“The highest point reached here was 21.65 feet above the low water mark,” reported the Times, ”An eighteen-foot flood, which was reached at four o’clock Tuesday afternoon.”
And then it began to break free. At about five-thirty, the ice began to shift a bit, slowly, and the river level began to drop. By six PM, “the ice was going out nicely,” and everyone began to relax a bit.
Except for Sterner, who still saw disaster coming, and he turned out to be right. Ice piled up against the McElhattan bridge, and backed the river up one more time overnight. This backed the water up, causing some minor but frightening flooding on the east end of Lock Haven where Bald Eagle Creek was overrun. The fire bells were set off at three-thirty and then four AM to warn people.
And then in the morning, it broke. For good this time. By nine AM Wednesday, the river had dropped to acceptable levels, and everyone could relax again. Even the mayor.
