Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

If you’re reading this, there’s a decent chance you remember the 1972 Flood already. I even have a few vague memories of it, and I was three at the time. But, of course, when it’s suggested that the Record run an edition focusing on the anniversary, I’m enough of an attention sponge to jump on that and write something.

It’s been fifty years since the Hurricane Agnes caused the 1972 Flood, an event that still has effects in Lock Haven. I once worked at a bar where the owner claimed to still have flood mud under the freezer. I’ve served on committees where people say things like, ”Don’t trust that guy. He was out looting during the ’72 Flood.”

Throughout late June of 1972, Hurricane Agnes was working its way up the coast, causing all sorts of damage. It finally hit Clinton County on June 22, causing the Susquehanna River to rise and crest at a level of thirty-one feet, which is over twenty feet higher than it usually is. People evacuated, carried their furniture up to the second floor, took measures to ensure their safety.

There’s no real way to measure the damage of a devastating flood. We tend to gravitate to money, because we’re Americans and that’s how we measure things. But there’s no way to quantify the fear, the death and injury, the lives forever changed. So we reduce it to dollar amounts.

The Keystone Central School District suffered losses of a million dollars, a high amount for a school system in 1972. The American Red Cross came in, and assisted over fifteen hundred families with their services, to a total amount of $345,217. The Industrial Development Fund later estimated the total loss at fifty-five million dollars.

On the east end of Lock Haven, Piper Aviation got hit especially hard. Piper had been making airplanes in Lock Haven since 1937, and was in a low spot down near the river. They dealt with a loss of twenty-three million dollars, and later were granted a short-term loan of four million from the Pennsylvania Revolving Fund to assist in repairing the damage.

The late Piper Museum President, John Bryerton, once told me about some of the damage and the losses. Piper employees made an attempt to remove all of the planes before the flood, with some limited success. Obviously it takes too long to clear out every single airplane; it’s not as if they’re all that easy to move. They saved some of them, but others were caught in the flood and damaged, mostly a set of Piper Navajos that had recently been manufactured.

About a dozen of them were sold afterward to the government, for crash testing. The government tested the effects of air crashes by lifting the planes into the air on cranes and dropping them to simulate the crash effects.

Clearly, if that’s all you’re going to do, you can just as easily do it with water-damaged planes. But aside from those dozen, destined to crash anyway, the flooded Navajos were unsellable. It’s too much of a safety issue, and a series of potential lawsuits, to sell planes that have been damaged in a flood.

So the company buried them. In an area near the former paint shop, on the south end of the property, Piper dug a huge hole and buried a collection of Navajos. They’re still down there, an odd reminder of the flood fifty years ago, sort of like that mud under my boss’s freezer.

And then, soon after the flood and before the damage was cleaned up, there was a parade. That’s right—The Central District Firemen met in Lock Haven, and had an actual genuine parade through the flood damage in the city. No matter the disaster, you just can’t keep Clinton County people down.