The Day of the Cemetery Flood – 50 Years Ago

Well, its been 50 years this year, 2022, since Hurricane Agnes caused a massive flood in my hometown near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. The swollen Susquehanna River broke through the dike in Forty-Fort, PA, and gutted the Forty-Fort Cemetery on June 23, 1972. My parents, along with my younger brother and sister, lived a few miles from there. Our house was flooded to the second floor. The flood level was officially recorded as sixteen feet. Imagine that.

I always think of death in the summer – as well as during the other seasons of course – but especially in the summer, because of what I saw in this cemetery. 

Sometime in July, 1972, maybe during the second week, the National Guard allowed us, along with thousands of other residents, back to our homes, to begin the cleanup. This was after then President Richard Nixon famously choppered over the devastation, which resulted in millions of dollars of disaster relief aid. You can read all about those trying times in the links at the end. A cinematographer has created a new video documentary called “Agnes 50th Anniversary,” a 90-minute film, which premiered at the F.M. Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre on June 23, 2022 – the fiftieth anniversary of the day of the flood. (DVD can be purchased at this link: https://www.wbpreservation.org/store/p/agnes-50th-anniversary-documentary-dvd”)

At the time, the Hurricane Agnes flood was considered the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. Though like the Hurricane Katrina flood of New Orleans in 2005, it was really a disaster exacerbated by poor engineering. Yes, the hurricanes started the process, but it was the flood control systems built by humans that failed. In 1972, Wilkes-Barre, in the Wyoming Valley of northeast Pennsylvania, was the hardest hit of all areas affected on the east coast. I’ve not seen the new documentary yet, but it no doubt avoids the cemetery carnage. That part of the story is not for the faint of heart. Books and photographs rarely depict any detail of it, but you can see some photos on the blog I posted in 2020, “Corpse Recovery and Cadaver Bags” (link at end).

It is true that the living were more concerned about their own plight, that of the living, than about the dead, during that disaster - at least at the time we all had to evacuate. But after it was made public that Forty-Fort Cemetery had been decimated, I would imagine that many people who had loved ones buried there were crushed. Did they go to the cemetery after the flood waters receded to see the devastation? Did they want to know – and see – that their family plot had been spared? What of then recent burials like the one below? They wouldn't know until the day break, and the shadows flee.

For many weeks – maybe months – after the waters went down, sheets of plywood blocked the view of the cemetery from the roadway. Behind that barricade, the Army Corps of Engineers filled in the chasm left by the raging Susquehanna River. Whatever grave markers were left in that area of 2,500 unearthed burials were likely buried. THOUSANDS of bodies and coffins that were torn out of Forty-Fort Cemetery and deposited in various locations throughout the region had to be collected. This was done, for the most part, before the public was allowed back into the many affected cities and towns – Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, Forty-Fort, Plymouth, Nanticoke, Swoyersville, and so on. There were coffins lodged on peoples’ porches.

If any of my readers were involved in the cemetery cleanup and reinterment at Memorial Shrine Cemetery in Carverton, PA, please get in touch. I’d like to hear your story (I can be reached privately at mourningarts@yahoo.com). 

Forty-Fort Cemetery office, Forty-Fort, PA.

Four acres of land (including burials) were torn from the center of Forty-Fort Cemetery and washed away. The chasm was about ten feet deep. I doubt anyone was around at the time to see this occur. Supposedly before the dike broke apart, the caretaker was wading through knee-deep water carrying books of burial records from the office to somewhere safe. There were people sandbagging on the dike (myself and my father included), but we all ran when the flood waters started shooting out of the storm drains in the streets. As the river rose over the dike, the dike gave way. Think about the Led Zeppelin song, “When the Levee Breaks” and think about what occurred in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (which occurred in August of that year).  

Cenotaph inscription

“Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

No, cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good

When the levee breaks, mama, you got to move …” 

- From the Led Zeppelin song, “When the Levee Breaks”

Sometime toward the end of July, I believe, my cousin Albert and I explored the gutted cemetery (we slithered under the plywood in a washed out area). You can read about what we saw in the introduction to my book, “The Cemetery Traveler.” I won’t go into those details here, but suffice it to say that you don’t want to read that right before bedtime. In the photo below, you can see the area of fence at the Wyoming Avenue side of the cemetery under which we gained access. (You may purchase the book from Amazon, if you are interested: https://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-Traveler-Selections-blog/dp/1717885950)

Fence we climbed under, on Wyoming Ave.

Albert died on November 15, 2021. He was 64. We grew up together and I do regret not discussing these events with him later in his life. Different people have different ways of looking at things and I should have asked his perspective on our experience. During and after the flood, my family stayed for several weeks with his family, on the high ground outside the flood zone. While this was all going on, my closest friend George, who lived a few blocks from us, was having his own adventures with his family. George wrote me recently suggesting that I ask him about what he went through the day the flood hit. Maybe I never knew this. It dawned on me, that of course each and every one of the thousands of people who were displaced and affected by the flood had their own unique story. I am looking forward to hearing his soon.

August was spent clearing out the house, trying to figure out how to move forward, and not really wanting to begin my freshman year in high school at a new school. It’s August now, fifty years later. Its surprising how one can remember details of events this long after.

I visited my Mom and brother a few weeks ago, they both still live in the area, Kingston, PA, in an apartment building that was built in the flood zone, after the flood. Yes, people rebuilt and moved right back into the previously flooded areas. How much prescience was involved in THOSE decisions is a mystery. My parents fixed their house up as best they could and then sold it. We moved to higher ground. 

Memorial to the displaced, in Forty-Fort Cemetery

In the photo above, you can see the rebuilt green grassy dike in the background, keeping the river out of the Forty-Fort Cemetery. You can see a faint blue horizontal line following the top of the dike – this line is the tops of vertical steel piles that were driven into the ground through the miles of dike to provide support and additional height. That process took years. I took a drive and a walk through the Forty-Fort Cemetery, retracing the steps my cousin Albert and I took as we walked through it after the waters had receded. At left you see the tree that I refer to in the introduction to my book - the tree that had that object propped against. A woman who introduced herself as the caretaker of the property was busy cutting back bushes around gravestones. She obviously took great pride in her work. She didn’t look quite old enough to have been alive in 1972, so I just told her that I lived in the area back then and stopped by to visit.

Fifty people died in that flood in Pennsylvania alone (neighboring states were also affected), and 220,000 PA homes were flooded, including those of my parents, grandmother, and school friends. As I write this at the beginning of August, 2022, I’m listening to a radio interview with a victim of current flooding in Tennessee, in which 25 people died. He said something that struck me: “When the flood comes, there’s no talkin’ to it.” Having lived through such a catastrophe, I know what he means. There’s no stopping it. Whenever I hear about a flood somewhere, I know firsthand what those people went through. 

Cenotaph with dike in background - the Susquehanna River flows beyond

Humans can pretend they’re in control, but nature knows better. The cenotaph monument on the circular platform in the center of Forty-Fort Cemetery is a stark reminder of nature’s force. It commemorates the rude disinterments of those 2,500 bodies in 1972. What is now an unadorned grassy field, was once acres of graves and grave markers of all types. Now they’re gone. I imagine the markers that had not been washed away were simply buried here. The bodies and other remains were moved to a mass grave, miles away on much higher ground.

Further Reading:

My last blog about Forty-Fort Cemetery: https://thecemeterytraveler.blogspot.com/2020/06/corpse-recovery-and-cadaver-bags-after.html

https://www.fema.gov/press-release/20220607/reflecting-hurricane-agnes-50-years-later 

Ed Snyder's book, "The Cemetery Traveler:" https://www.amazon.com/Cemetery-Traveler-Selections-blog/dp/1717885950

Agnes 50th Anniversary Documentary DVD — Wilkes-Barré Preservation Society (wbpreservation.org):

https://www.wvia.org/tv/agnes-50/

Tennessee Flooding, July 2022 https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/07/31/Drenching-downpours-renew-flood-threat/9821659287913/

https://www.nucorskyline.com/globalnav/applications/levees-storm-protection

Washed Out Graves

Washed out graves caused by flood in Lawton, PA

I spent the last two days watching the news about the flooding in NEPA, Northeast Pennsylvania. I have kind of a morbid interest in it, like looking at an automobile accident. Not because I like to see people in pain, but because I lived through the Flood of 1972 in NEPA’s Wyoming Valley, caused by Hurricane Agnes.

I live in Philadelphia now, a geographic region not prone to natural disasters. Until recently, that is. I used to like that about Philly. Unfortunately, two weeks ago (the last week of August, 2011), we not only had an earthquake (5.8 in intensity), but a freakin’ hurricane in the same week! Jesus Christ on a toasted bagel! My kitchen ceiling leaks now and I am no longer a fan of the rain gods.

Flood waters gushing past levee (ref.)

Given a choice, however, I’d rather have ceiling leaks than live through another flood. I mean, imagine this scene at right (from a few days ago) being your home town. Led Zeppelin's song, "When the Levee Breaks" takes on a whole new meaning. You wake up to the television showing evacuation routes out of your city. I watch these poor people (and animals) in Wilkes-Barre (near where I grew up with my parents, brother, and sister) packing up their possessions and lashing them to the roofs of their cars – it brings back, well, a flood of memories. We had water up to within one step of the second floor of our house. We lost everything in the basement and on the first floor. My dad and I paddled a rowboat out to our house when the water was highest. Scraping the metal boat bottom on the roofs of cars is a sound I still remember.

My friend George, who lived a few blocks away, got it just as bad. He reminded me recently that the worst thing about having your house under water is the flood mud that’s left after the water recedes. River flood water is not clear water, it becomes muddy and brown as it rips up everything in its path. Look at the water in the photo above – its BROWN! It also stinks like fish. The mud dried on everything. I still have some in a little 35mm film container. People tried to hose out their TVs and other appliances, tried to salvage them, to no avail. Flooded cars got sold on the other side of the country, to the unwitting and the unlucky. 

My Mom said to me last night – and this gave me chills as I hadn’t thought about it for decades – “Remember we had to kick down the warped doors to get into our house after the water went down...?” 

Tomorrow, volunteers are needed to clean up the abandoned Mt. Moriah Cemetery in West Philly. At the same time they’re looking for volunteers to sandbag the dikes along the Susquehanna River north of here. I remember sandbagging on top of a twenty-foot-high dike in front of my grandmother’s house. It looked for all the world like her house would get washed away when the water came over the dike. Instead, it ripped through the dike a couple miles up river, gutting a cemetery in its wake. There were stories about the National Guard and Army Corps of Engineers collecting bodies and removing caskets that had jammed themselves onto the front porches of houses.

I wrote about walking through the devastated Forty-Fort Cemetery in a blog last year ("Cemetery Flood"), and the horrors and stench that greeted you if you were crazy enough to crawl under the boarded-up fence after the waters receded. (They shored up the levee at this point on the river last week.) Seeing these photos yesterday of exposed coffins and vaults in the Snyder−Rush Cemetery in Lawton, PA (photo at top of this article) brought back some of those memories. You think when an area is flooded, the water comes in, then goes away. Not so. There’s a lot of force involved. Cemeteries aren’t necessarily safe just because the bodies are underground.

Oak Hill Cemetery, Georgetown

In 2006, I visited Georgetown’s  (Washington, D.C.) Oak Hill Cemetery, an incredibly picturesque and beautifully landscaped Victorian cemetery. It was late spring and had been raining a lot. I checked in at the gatehouse and the caretaker, a little old lady, welcomed me. As I strolled down the wet slate walkway (that you see at left), she came out and yelled, “Be careful! The walk is slippery, but stay on it! The grass is even more slippery and you could fall into a sunken grave!” 

As I made my photographic way down the winding paths under the trees, I heard water below. Curious, I continued down the lovely terraced switchbacks until I could see Rock Creek down there through the trees. The landscaping is extraordinary here – the hills and dales provide a greater amount of acreage than you expect. What you see from the road (‘R’ Street) gives you the impression that Oak Hill is a rather small cemetery. However, the majority of its 22 acres is tree-covered and slopes down and away from the road toward Rock Creek.

Reaching the bottom of the cemetery, I was a bit shocked to see the muddy waters of the swollen creek licking at the bases of the monuments. The swift current carried tree limbs and other debris past the foothills of the cemetery. Everything was damp and mossy down there and I was overwhelmed with a very uneasy feeling, a feeling that I still get when I look at the photos I made that day (the ones you see here). I climbed back up the hill toward daylight.

I emerged from the dark woods and clambered up onto the base of a large marble obelisk to photograph its angels, when almost immediately, a police helicopter appeared directly overhead! (oddly, this is not the first time this has happened to me! (see my blog posting, "Bessie Smith's Grave.") I froze, and realized that the streets outside the cemetery were crawling with cops; roadblocks were set up on 29^th and R Streets where I was parked. Hey, whatever manhunt is going on here in the land of the living sure beats the creepy flooded graves down by the creek. So I just eased on out of there and headed for the nearest alehouse. I often wonder if anything ever gets washed away down there, off into the Potomac River. Who would know? Like the bodies – skeletons in old-time clothes – that got washed down the Susquehanna River and into the Delaware Bay in 1972. That river is like a running, open wound, a wound that never heals.

View other Flood News:

Volunteers Needed for Sandbagging
Shoring Up the Levee in Forty-Fort, PA
Flood photos at WNEP-TV's Facebook site
Susquehanna River Flooding
Hurricane Agnes: Here We Go Again  
Wilkes-Barre, Pa., Levees Under Extreme Stress after Record Crest
Cemetery Flood posting on The Cemetery Traveler 
Bessie Smith's Grave posting on The Cemetery Traveler
 Photo credit for top photo of washed out graves: ConservativeHideout.com
Book: A Portrait of Agnes

Cemetery Flood

My obcession with graveyards may have begun with a teenage dare. When I was fourteen (1972), Hurricane Agnes caused major flooding in Northeast Pennsylvania (or NEPA as they say). After sandbagging the Susquehanna River dike all day, the rising river water blew out of the street storm drains like geysers. This caused some minor flooding, but it wasn't enough to equalize the water pressure--the dike at the cemetery in the town of Forty-Fort blew out. Not only was the Wyoming Valley under sixteen feet of water for days, but the cemetery was gutted.

When the flood waters receeded, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers made some major repairs, facilitated a massive cleanup, and boarded up the cemetery. Rumors had it there were coffins everywhere! As a teenage boy, this is exactly the cool stuff you want to hear.

So after a couple weeks, residents were allowed back to their homes to facilitate their own massive cleanup. My cousin Albert and I wandered down to the cemetery, only to find 8-foot sheets of plywood attached to the existing wrought iron fencing. Hardly a deterrent, we went exploring. In not much time, we found a washed out space under one of the plywood sheets that was big enough for a boy to crawl under. Needles to say, that's what we did. Nothing could have prepared me for the stench!

As we walked around the grounds that day in the late June heat, who would've thought the experience would affect me for a lifetime? You had to mouth-breathe just to keep from passing out from the asault on the nasal passages. The fetid aroma was no doubt accentuated by the heat, but oddly, you couldn't smell it from outside the plywood fencing.

There were giant holes in the ground, with coffins and vaults sticking out of them every which way. These were either caskets that were not washed away or ones the Army had returned to the cemetery. Later, the disinterred coffins would be buried in a mass grave with a memorial marker. The dike was still non-existent, but the water level was back to normal, so the cemetery was an expanse of dry, baked mud. As we climbed through the mess toward the dike to see how high the river was, we passed a big oak tree with a casket propped up against it. The lid was open. I assumed it was empty and walked on by.

Moments later, Albert turned back around, let out a shriek, and threw up! I whipped around and saw that the casket was not empty! Inside was the partially decomposed body of a woman in a black gown, arms crossed over her heart, with two hunting arrows sticking out of her chest! Obviously some freakish archer had been there before us and used the corpse for target practice. Kind of wonder in retrospect, if the arrows were silver-tipped...

Did I photograph this atrocity? Of course not! But not because I'm above that sort of thing. At fourteen, I didn't carry my little Kodak 110 film camera everywhere I went but the experience certainly planted the seed for my interest in cemetery photography.