Click here to continue to Part 2 - Hitting the benchmark



BAD THINGS COME IN THREES

"They say bad things come in threes. And unfortunately, those three things in this case they got worse with each one. The earthquake was kind of a big nothing, Irene was certainly nothing to sneeze at, a pretty serious storm, but Lee was now the storm of all storms, a storm that beat Agnes, which I thought would never happen," says Dave Skutnik.

"I was really concerned that this could be a history, a benchmark in the history of disaster where people for the first time in a long time might say to themselves do I really want to live near this river," said Andy Mehalshick.

"Living in Swoyersville, it had consumed me when we bought the house that '72 had roared through there and had just turned people's lives upside down. And I was thinking, I had went through this in '06, this time felt a little different because it was still raining outside," recalls Joe Holden.

"I guess I was a little worried because we've already seen a fair amount of rain from the previous storm, from Hurricane Irene. And we saw some of the damage it did, it was mostly trees coming down, that sort of thing. But, you knew the ground was soggy, you knew we had some rain, and you wondered how streams, creeks and ultimately the river would take. But, I didn't think in anybody's wildest imagination that they thought that what would happen actually happened," Mark Hiller remembered.

And what happened was the result of days of wet weather. Riding on the backs of an earthquake and a hurricane, the remnants of lee would pack the most serious punch, and would ultimately deliver a knock-out blow to thousands of people along the mighty Susquehanna.

"We knew we were getting a lot of rain that week. We knew somebody was going to get an ungodly amount of rain. We just didn't know where it was going to be and how much it was going to be," said Meteorologist Dave Skutnik.

Chief Meteorologist Josh Hodell added, "I guess it all started Wednesday night. It's raining, it's raining and it just wouldn't stop raining. You'd get a little break for an hour or two and then you'd get more rain. All of this rain, you have the flash flooding, reports of streams and creeks coming out of their banks. You've got people talking about flooded roads. So then you wake up Thursday morning and you turn on the television and you hear the county is thinking, and deciding on, an evacuation. Here we go, a mandatory evacuation is imminent."

"Looking back on it 4:00 was entirely too late. Probably everybody should have been out of the Valley by 11 am, maybe noon at the latest. And we had seen some pictures of some water rescues in West Pittston at 10 in the morning some of those places were under water. So just how fast the whole thing unfolded was crazy," Skutnik said.

When it was all said and done, more than 100,000 people along the river would be asked to evacuate. National Guard troops set-up shop in Wilkes-Barre, while neighborhood after neighborhood left their homes not knowing what was next.

Officials mentioned hurricane Agnes by name. They said the flooding would most likely mirror that fateful event back in 1972.

For many people, that struck a cord. Joe Holden said, "What was a neighborhood thing quickly became a west-side thing. And we got to the Cross Valley that quickly became an area thing and when we got to 81 it seemed like the entire Northeastern Pennsylvania community was in this together."

Meanwhile people downstream waited as areas up north took-on a soaking assault. "Rain just pounded Bradford County, Susquehanna County and the Binghamton area, some places had a foot of rain on Wednesday alone. All that water is coming here. We knew it. We just didn't know, A, how fast it was going to get here and, B, how high it was going to get," said Skutnik.

"You're looking at Waverly and Sayre, Conklin and New York. It's already flooding, people's homes are under water. You start hearing that kind of stuff upstream and you start to think, what the Hell is going to happen down here," Hodell added.

All eyes were on the river in Wilkes-Barre. Within days the Susquehanna morphed into watery monster seemingly growing by the hour, becoming frighteningly unrecognizable to even the most familiar locals.

"You know I've been at that spot, when the river was at normal level, many times before, but I almost couldn't remember what it looked like because that water was so high. I mean it was covering the Market Street Bridge, a bridge I drive every day," remembered Monica Madeja.

The questions remained. Will the levees hold? Will the flood walls do their job? Are we on the brink of an epic disaster?

"This is one big, mean river and we're going to do our best to contain it in between these walls, but, Mother Nature doesn't care about a wall. That river is going to go as high as it wants to go," said Skutnik.

"We knew the levees were going to break in 1972. And they did. We didn't know if that was going to happen. There was so much uncertainty," Mehalshick recalled.


Click here to continue to Part 2 - Hitting the benchmark