Agnes: Pennsylvania’s Most Devastating Natural Disaster

Flood victims are rescued from high water on a main thoroughfare in Wilkes-Barre.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-218

The late Paul Beers, the longtime columnist for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, once wrote that some Pennsylvanians are “amazingly complacent” about the threat of flooding despite living in a state that is quite vulnerable.

Back in the day, around the midpoint of the 20th century, when old-timers in Pennsylvania spoke of “the big one,” they were referring to the 1936 flood — floods plural, actually, since multiple waterways in more than one part of the state were involved. It was the series of floods against which all others were then measured. Few could have envisioned anything worse.

The ’36 flood occurred in March. An unseasonable and sudden thaw, combined with rain, caused the winter’s accumulation of snow and ice to melt rapidly. In turn, the fast melt caused ice jams on waterways; icy water backed up and then spilled over banks, often taking disintegrating ice floes along.

Engineer William H. Shank wrote in Great Floods of Pennsylvania that the ’36 event had been the “worst flood before or since” in a state where “worst” floods occurred on average about every 25 years.

In June 1972, however, the title of “worst” was seized by a new champion, Tropical Storm Agnes — and to most Pennsylvanians it came as an unpleasant surprise. Today, Agnes still holds the title.

The disaster that Agnes became also spread to many of Pennsylvania’s neighboring Middle Atlantic states — New York, Maryland and Delaware among them — but it was in Pennsylvania, especially along the branches of the Susquehanna River, where the damage was the worst (at least in records dating back to 1784).

In 1972 dollars, the damage from Agnes overall totaled $3.1 billion, of which $2.12 billion occurred in Pennsylvania, according to a post-flood study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Many, if not most, of the losses were uninsured. The event was called “Pennsylvania’s most devastating natural disaster.”

An estimated 55,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, according to the Pennsylvania National Guard, which throughout the post-flood summer of 1972 handled relief operations in 35 of the state’s 67 counties. Farm crops were damaged and, according to the Susquehanna River Basin Commission, more than 2,700 businesses and 150 factories were wiped out (resulting in 50,000 people out of work in the immediate aftermath of the storm). One hundred twenty-six bridges were destroyed. The losses were not only in dollars, of course. The Guard reported the deaths of 49 individuals attributable to Agnes.

The Pennsylvania Governor’s Residence in Harrisburg succumbs to flood waters.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-309

People who lived a lifetime along Pennsylvania’s rivers and creeks and saw floods come and go said one reason the Agnes flood of 1972 was so devastating was that community wealth and the goods and possessions of everyday life were of significantly greater value than they had been in 1936 (during the depths of the Depression). Think of the expansion of housing construction along waterway corridors in the postwar boom during the years since the earlier big flood. Think of the dishwashers, refrigerators, chest freezers, television sets, power tools, stereo equipment and so forth that hadn’t existed in 1936. People’s furnishings likely were of a higher grade; simple wooden tables and chairs in 1936 might have become finished dining room sets in 1972. Wider ownership of automobiles meant more substantial losses for many people.

What was also different was that Agnes made a feint that caused people in Pennsylvania to take their eyes off the ball and think they were going to get a pass when it turned out they wouldn’t. As writer Cal Turner of the Harrisburg Patriot-News put it shortly afterward: “Coming up out of the Gulf a couple of weeks ago, she got big play in the newspapers and on the airwaves. But to Central Pennsylvanians, she was somebody else’s worry. She was going other places. . . . But boom! The state got it.”

In Pennsylvania, it seemed like the situation was under control at the outset, or at least predictable, and then somehow it wasn’t. “We didn’t have a good sense of what the storm was doing,” Dr. Jenni Evans explained in a recent interview. Evans is a professor of meteorology and atmospheric science at Penn State and director of the Penn State Institute for Computational and Data Sciences. She said forecasters 50 years ago didn’t realize that Agnes was what would today be called a “transitioning storm.” Evans explained that “transition means that a hurricane changes from having the strongest winds and rain wrapped tightly around its core — a tropical cyclone structure — to being similar in structure to a low-pressure system typically affecting the region but much, much stronger. In both its tropical and transitioned phase, Agnes was made up of many tens of thunderstorms, so was much larger than a single thunderstorm.”

Evans said it was this transition that “drove the volume of rain” that created the flooding. “Today’s forecast models are much, much better. We have better models, better data, and incredible advances in computing capacity.” As the storm changed structure, the rain shifted west of its center, which put the rainfall mainly over land, instead of heading out to sea. “There was much more rain in general west and south as the storm track moved to the northwest. It was over Pennsylvania more than New York.”

The track of Agnes, with color scheme from the Saffir–Simpson scale, showing its start as a tropical depression at the Yucatán Peninsula, its progression into a tropical storm and then a category 1 hurricane as it moved north over the Gulf of Mexico, its return to a tropical depression as it moved through the southern U.S., and its swing back to a tropical storm on the coast as it moved inland toward Pennsylvania.
Created using WikiProject Tropical cyclones/Tracks, background image from NASA, tracking data from the National Hurricane Center

Agnes originated on Thursday, June 15, 1972, as a tropical depression off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. It reached tropical storm strength the next day. As it began to move north, it developed winds near 75 miles per hour, and it was declared a hurricane on Saturday, June 17. “The winds in Agnes never attained more than minimal hurricane intensity, but the area covered by the storm circulation was exceptionally large,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a poststorm evaluation in 1973. “Its slow development and movement permitted a large amount of moisture to be transported from the deep tropics into the storm system. This accounts for the extraordinarily heavy precipitation associated with the storm all the way from Cuba through the eastern tier of states from Florida into New York.”

The storm made landfall in the U.S. on Monday, June 19. When the storm reached Georgia on Tuesday, June 20, it had weakened back into a tropical depression. On Wednesday, June 21, the storm moved off the Atlantic Coast along the Carolinas, and once over water it began to “regenerate.” The National Weather Service said the storm was “reignited” and became “reborn.” The storm continued up the coast and reached the vicinity of New York City on Thursday, June 22. Then, nudged by a high-pressure system off the coast, it turned westward over Pennsylvania and toward western New York. Through that day, according to the weather service, “torrential” rain fell across Pennsylvania.

The culmination of it all was high drama. As the weather service later reported, “Friday, June 23, 1972, is often remembered as the most infamous day of the Agnes disaster, especially in the Susquehanna River basin, where rivers rose at rates never before experienced.” Saturday, June 24, brought the inevitable “high water mark for most Pennsylvania communities along the Susquehanna . . . an unusually long, nearly simultaneous, crest from the New York state line to its mouth at the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.”

According to William H. Shank’s account, the moisture-laden storm dumped “unbelievable quantities of water” over the Susquehanna River basin. It unleashed rains of up to 19 inches in some places. The National Weather Service said, “Flood protection works designed to provide protection against floods the magnitude of [previous records] were overtopped.” The worst of it was along the Susquehanna between the Maryland line and Williamsport in Lycoming County.

The front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for June 24, 1972, showing an aerial view of Point State Park submerged under water.
Copyright © Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2021, all rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

And, at the end of the storm cycle, just as Agnes seemed ready to move eastward, out toward the Hudson River, it veered into western Pennsylvania and “exhausted her remaining moisture over the Appalachian Mountain section” of the state. It was the storm’s feint as if to go east and out to sea that gave a false sense of safety to western Pennsylvania as well as central and eastern Pennsylvania.

The front page of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Tuesday, June 20, informed readers that though Hurricane Agnes had killed a dozen people in Florida, it had been downgraded to a tropical storm and was “rapidly losing strength” as it was moving into the Northeast. By the next day, Wednesday, June 21, news about Agnes was off the paper’s front page entirely, replaced by news about abortion, presidential politics, and the state budget. There seemed to be nothing alarming for western Pennsylvania about the weather report.

Agnes was back on page 1 in Pittsburgh on Thursday, June 22, but still the danger was not considered local. The forecast called for “prolonged heavy rains” in the Allegheny River watershed, but the headline proclaimed: “Rain Likely Here; Upstate Towns Prepare for Flood.” In eastern and central Pennsylvania, as well, people were mostly going about their business as usual. In many places across Pennsylvania, there was little sense of impending disaster.

Everything changed on Friday, June 23. It became clear that Agnes was delivering a sucker punch. News outlets led with the story that Gov. Milton J. Shapp had declared an “extreme emergency” in the commonwealth and was seeking federal aid. The Associated Press report said, “12 dead, 2 probably, 9 missing in PA.” Twenty-four National Guard units had been activated for search and rescue duty, and armories around the state were being opened to serve as emergency shelters. It was only the beginning.

The Post-Gazette on Saturday, June 24, featured a front-page photograph of the submerged Point State Park. Staff writer Vince Gagetta wrote, “The rising waters from the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers crept slowly into low-lying areas of the Golden Triangle. The swollen Ohio River, fed to overflowing at the Point, churned its way downstream and overflowed its banks.”

As dramatic as that photo was, the stakes in property damage and lives under threat were more concentrated in central and eastern Pennsylvania. In western Pennsylvania, the Ohio crested at 35.85 feet in Pittsburgh versus 46 feet in 1936. It was later estimated that the flood waters from the Ohio would have been 2 feet higher in 1972 had not the Army Corps of Engineers built a series of dams on the Ohio’s upstream tributaries after the 1936 flood.

Cities and towns in central and eastern Pennsylvania experienced an unfolding array of struggles and damages. For instance, 10,000 volunteers were called out in Wilkes-Barre to pile sandbags atop the dikes built by the Army Corps of Engineers after 1936 to protect against the main (east) branch of the Susquehanna in the Wyoming Valley. It was a valiant effort, but the Army Corps ultimately reported that about two-thirds of the homes in Wilkes-Barre wound up being damaged by water — up to 20 feet deep in some spots.

A Coast Guard rescue boat sets off as Pennsylvania governor Milton Shapp inspects the flood waters. Shapp surveyed the devastation in communities throughout the commonwealth and coordinated recovery and relief efforts.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-309

In one of the most grotesque events to occur, the flood waters washed out a cemetery in Forty Fort, Luzerne County, and disinterred some 2,000 bodies from their graves.

When newspapers in the flood zones managed to publish again, they told story after story of individual tragedies: Two persons were swept away in Lewisburg in Union County, including the chief of police. A mother and her daughter were lost to a raging creek in Lancaster County. A young firefighter lost his life attempting a rescue. A body of a lost child was uncovered in a field when flood waters receded. Altogether, the lives lost directly due to Agnes in Pennsylvania was put at 50 (the total varies depending on the source).

Lives were also saved. A hundred children were evacuated by helicopter to escape rising water that threatened a scout camp in Dauphin County. A mother gave birth prematurely to a baby boy in the flood-threatened Nesbitt Memorial Hospital in Kingston, and the infant was flown by helicopter in wind and rain to a medical center that had been set up for flood victims at College Misericordia in Dallas, Pennsylvania.

State government was shut down with nearly a third of Harrisburg under water. At one point, “965,000 cubic feet of water per second rushed past the state capital,” the Army Corps estimated.

Small cities and towns along the Susquehanna River experienced flood crests many feet above the record levels established in 1936. A thousand residents were evacuated from the City of York. Farther to the southeast, the Schuylkill River went 8 feet over its banks at the City of Reading in Berks County and over also in Pottstown in Montgomery County.

Even pets didn’t escape the danger. Rescuers in one place found a dog standing atop his doghouse to escape the rising water.

According to Shank, Pennsylvania has always been a virtual “weather belt” state, encompassing all kinds of weather tendencies. His book pointed out that the Ohio River and its tributaries drain one-third of Pennsylvania in the west, while the Susquehanna drains one-half of Pennsylvania plus one-fourth of upstate New York. The Delaware River drains portions of eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and upper New York. Some parts of York and Chester counties drain directly into the Chesapeake Bay.

Flood veterans will verify that second only to the terrifying experience of the flood itself — witnessing one’s home surrounded by roiling, rising water — is beholding the aftermath, especially the mud. The slimy, oily mud that coats yards, that coats indoor rugs and floors and walls, that fills cracks and crevices, that ruins cars and other machines.

By the weekend, the rain had started moving on, and in many locales the sky was turning deceptively clear and blue, as if there had been no disturbance. But the Susquehanna was still swollen — and raging.

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Doug Dohne, then a newspaperman, was moving into a new house, one that sat on Boulder Hill in York County, a high spot overlooking the 5,000-foot-long York Haven Dam on the Susquehanna River.

He couldn’t have picked a better spot from which to observe. The dam sits near Three Mile Island and is downstream of a spot where the course of the river drops 19 feet over a fourth of a mile. Dohne had a front row seat to the spectacle of the rampaging waters from 150 to 200 feet above, and, as he put it, the river was “in a fury.” He said, “It was the ugliest, brownest water I had ever seen. It was really angry and it was very noisy about it.” The river itself was “making a racket like thunder.”

And, as he watched, all manner of debris swept by and went over the dam, punctuated by the “crack, bang, slam” noises of destruction. He saw a small herd of dead cattle — black and white Holsteins — go by and over the dam. He saw the roofs of houses, garages and porches go over. Planks, logs, telephone poles, metal sheds went over. Unoccupied boats and loose docks went over. Even a large commercial trailer unattached from its tractor went over. “That was one scary sight,” he remembered.

Now, 50 years on from Agnes, the Army Corps’ “philosophy” of its flood-protection mission has changed, according to Adoratia Purdy, a public affairs specialist at Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C. “The [Corps] primarily constructed levees from 1850 to the passage of the Flood Control Act of 1936,” she explained. “With large floods in the late 1920s and early 1930s, dams became a favorable way to ‘control’ floods that often crossed state boundaries and, due to the [Depression,] there was political incentive to put people to work through large public works projects.” The big dams are upstream on waterways that have tended to flood. They impound and hold back water — and incidentally add value by often creating recreational lakes.

Purdy said the philosophy began to shift in the 1950s and 1960s toward a focus on the improvement of water resources policy. “In more recent years, the consideration of economics in conjunction with societal effects and environmental laws, as well as the large number of already-constructed dams, have favored smaller projects, such as levees and nonstructural solutions.” She said, “It is fair to assume that the number of large dams built in the future will be far less than was constructed in the past.” (Officially, there are a total of 50 Army Corps dams in Pennsylvania, 33 of which are more than 50 feet tall and 17 less than 50 feet tall.) Purdy said the Cowanesque Dam in Tioga County “was the last [Army Corps] large dam built in Pennsylvania, with construction ending in 1980.”

The Susquehanna crests at the top of the floodwall along Front Street in Sunbury.
The Daily Item (Sunbury), file photo

The efficacy of local flood walls was dramatically demonstrated at Sunbury during Agnes. The city lies just below the confluence of the two branches of the Susquehanna and was protected in 1972 by a 14,000-foot length of earth levees and 12,100 feet of concrete flood walls, which were installed in 1948. The flood waters came within inches of the top of the wall but never spilled over. The residents of the city painted a message of thanks on the inner side. It said, “We Love You, Wall.”

The emphasis on smaller projects is illustrated by two post-Agnes undertakings on the Susquehanna. One involved the creation of the Luzerne County Flood Protection Authority in 1996 to improve and expand the existing flood protection system in the Wyoming Valley.

The Luzerne County 6,400-foot-long levee, on the East Branch (aka the main stem) of the river, built in 1935 and 1936, was designed to protect against a flood crest of up to 33 feet. The Agnes flood crested there at 40.91 feet. After Tropical Storm Eloise and another flood in 1975, there was a supplemental levee project that added up to 16 miles of higher levees and sections of concrete walls, a cost of $200 million.

The other post-Agnes effort involved the construction of a levee system around the City of Lock Haven in Clinton County, operated by a newly created Lock Haven Area Flood Protection Authority.

Agnes inflicted $88.5 million in damages (in 1972 dollars) on Lock Haven, located on the West Branch in Clinton County, but the proposal to build the 6.5 miles of levee engendered extreme local emotions. Those who wanted to avoid future economic flood damage were pitted against those who wanted to preserve the town’s riverside ambience. It was so controversial that when the final vote was taken at the local high school, the then-mayor, a proponent of the project, wore a bullet-proof vest as precaution.

The economic equation, however, was stark: The overall project cost $84.4 million versus the potential of another Agnes devastation. Significantly, the local share of that cost, taken on as municipal debt, only came to $4.4 million. The project started in 1991 and finished in 1994. In 1996, there was another flood. It wasn’t as bad as Agnes, but had not the levee been there, “we definitely would have had water in the city,” according to Richard Marcinkevage, director of the flood authority. He said the local newspaper put a triumphant headline on the front page: “It Worked!”

An Amish buggy attempts to cross flood waters on a secondary road in Millheim, Centre County.
Pennsylvania State Archives, MG-218

Even as we gain better understanding and better solutions, Mother Nature always seems to have an upper hand. Dr. Evans points out that as global warming continues, a greater amount of moisture will evaporate into the atmosphere. “There will be more water in the atmosphere to be turned into rain,” she said. The Gulf of Mexico is part of the warming trend and that means there will be more and stronger storms that may come our way and may “transition” the way Agnes did. “We need to be more aware of the need to work with engineers, local emergency management, and local government to make us safer for what may come. Where are our biggest vulnerabilities?” She added, “I think the atmosphere can always surprise us. The job of the meteorologist is not just to let us know whether to wear a coat or take an umbrella along. It’s to keep people safe.”

Further Reading

Fasick, Erik V. Tropical Storm Agnes in Greater Harrisburg. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2013. / Glahn, Bryan. Hurricane Agnes in the Wyoming Valley. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2017. / National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Final Report of the Disaster Survey Team on the Events of Agnes: A Report to the Administrator (Natural Disaster Survey Report 73-1). U.S. Department of Commerce, February 1973. / Shank, William H. Great Floods of Pennsylvania: A Two-Century History. 2nd ed. York: American Canal and Transportation Center, 1993.

Don Sarvey, a former newspaper reporter and magazine editor, is a freelance writer who lives in Harrisburg. His previous articles for Pennsylvania Heritage include “Ahead of Her Time: Pennsylvania Aviator Helen Richey” (Spring 2020) and “Paying It Forward: The Legacy of Genevieve Blatt” (Winter 2019).