12 killed in US floods
Up to 200,000 people in the Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania were ordered to evacuate their homes because of rising water on the Susquehanna River, swelled by a record-breaking deluge that has killed at least 12 people across the US North-East.
Thousands more were today ordered to leave their homes in New Jersey, New York and Maryland. Rescue helicopters plucked residents from rooftops as rivers and streams surged over their banks, washed out roads and bridges, and cut off villages in some of the worst flooding in the region in decades, with more rain in the forecast for the rest of the week.
Wilkes-Barre, a city of 43,000 in north-eastern Pennsylvania coal-mining country, was devastated by deadly flooding that killed 50 people in 1972 from the remnants of Hurricane Agnes.
It is protected by levees, and officials said the Susquehanna was expected to crest just a few feet from the tops of the 41-foot floodwalls.
But Luzerne County Commissioner Todd Vonderheid said officials were worried about the effects of water pressing against the levees for 48 hours. The floodwalls were completed just three years ago.
“It is honestly precautionary,” Vonderheid said. “We have great faith the levees are going to hold.”
The river was expected to crest early Thursday at a level at least four feet below the tops of the levees, said Alan Pugh, county public safety chief.
An estimated 150,000 to 200,000 people in the county of about 351,000 were told to get out by nightfall. The evacuation order applied to more than half the residents of Wilkes-Barre, as well as residents of several outlying towns, all of them flooded by Agnes more than three decades ago.
By late yesterday, 50,000 to 70,000 people had heeded the call to evacuate, Pugh said. Police and National Guard troops were patrolling the streets in the evacuated area and were under orders to arrest anyone who violated a 9pm curfew.
A dozen helicopters from the Pennsylvania National Guard, the state police and the Coast Guard were sent on search-and-rescue missions, plucking stranded residents from rooftops in Bloomsburg, Sayre and New Milford. Hundreds of National Guardsmen prepared to distribute ice, water and meals ready to eat.
Flooding closed many roads in the Philadelphia area, including the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
“We lost just about everything – the cars, the clothes, even the baby’s crib,” said James Adams, who evacuated his family’s home near Binghamton, New York, after watching their shed float away and their cars get submerged. “I’m not sure what we are going to do.”
The soaking weather was produced by a low-pressure system that has been stalled just offshore since the weekend and pumped moist tropical air northward along the East Coast. A record 4.05 inches of rain fell on Tuesday at Binghamton. During the weekend, the same system drenched the Washington and Baltimore region with more than a foot of rain.
