Seventy years ago this month, Hurricane Diane shocked the Lehigh Valley, leading to major flooding perhaps never seen before and certainly not since.
Roads, bridges and railroads were twisted by rushing water and heavily damaged. Flooding destroyed the wooden covered bridge built in 1831 between Portland and Columbia, New Jersey. The Northampton Street Bridge between Easton and Phillipsburg was torn apart, and part of it collapsed.
Leading up to mid-August, much of the summer of 1955 had left the region parched from extremely hot weather, when the temperature soared into the 90s and stayed there. Hurricane Connie seemed to bring some relief Aug. 12: Heavy rain saturated the dry ground but did not cause any major flooding.
Then followed Diane, which inundated rivers and tributaries along the eastern seaboard Aug. 18 and 19, causing devastation and death.
The storm was estimated to have caused 184 to 200 fatalities and between $832 million and $1 billion in damage in 1955 dollars, according to hurricanescience.org. Today, that would be about $10 billion to $12 billion.
Diane, which formed off Puerto Rico around Aug. 7, was one of the most erratic storms weather forecasters had ever tried to track, according to a Morning Call story at the time.
The weathermen suggested Diane could dump a downpour on the region, or maybe just some brief showers.
“But if Diane flies off the handle, there is no telling where she will end up, and Thursday and Friday [Aug. 18-19, 1955] are likely to be fair in this section,” the newspaper account added.
On Aug. 18, Morning Call readers saw a weather story promising that Diane would gradually lose force over the next 24 hours. Residents and visitors along the Delaware River watershed had no reason to expect what was about to happen to them.
But later that day, the storm made itself felt in the region. It hit the small streams north and west of the Lehigh Valley, including the Brodhead, Scotia, Bushkill and McMichael creeks. The water had no place to go except into the already flooded Delaware, Lehigh and Schuylkill rivers.
It marked the beginning of the worst natural disaster to hit the Lehigh Valley.
Lives were changed
George Kreitz still lives in the home on South Delaware Drive in the Raubsville section of Williams Township that has been in his family since 1872.
On a recent day, Kreitz, 84, invited two former river neighbors, Ken “Jerry” Wyant of Plainfield Township, and Carol Stahley of Coopersburg, to his home to reminisce about life along the Delaware River and its neighboring canal.
They talked about other neighbors and the times of their youths, when the river and Delaware Canal were all they knew for fun growing up.
“The river was our playground,” Kreitz said, “but you had to learn how to respect it.”
“It sure was,” Stahley said, “that and the canal. We didn’t have amusement parks to go to.”
They also vividly remembered the monster storm they all lived through 70 years earlier.
In 1955, Wyant’s family lived in a two-story building; on the first floor, they ran the Royal Manor, a sort of precursor to a Wawa or Sheetz that sold food and gas.
Wyant, 86, said floodwater from the Delaware River uprooted the structure — it ended up on Route 611, where it later had to be bulldozed away. The family eventually had a new home built on higher ground on Royal Manor Road, he said.
When the water rose from the river into the canal, he said, his mother called the bridge commission.
“The commission would always let you know when [the Delaware] was going to crest,” Wyant said. “They absolutely couldn’t tell her nothing, because they didn’t know.”
“It had never happened before,” added Kreitz, noting the water was rising 3-4 feet per hour at the height of the storm.
Stahley, 85, who lived in a bungalow with her family between the canal and the Delaware, was in Somerville, New Jersey, tending to floral arrangements for her sister’s impending wedding when the storm hit. She couldn’t make it back for two weeks, arriving to find a totally blown-out home.
The house was rebuilt and later sold, she said.
She recalled one of the stories of the community pulling together in the aftermath.
“The wedding store in Easton, Sigal’s, donated a wedding gown to my sister, because she lost it in the flood,” Stahley said.
More than 6 feet of water flooded into Krietz’s home, but the family escaped to higher ground. He appeared in a pictorial book published later in 1955 by The Easton Express; he is in the background behind one man with other men walking along undermined Route 611 after the flooding subsided.
In Monroe County, death and destruction
Monroe County saw some of the worst destruction and death toll. More than 40 people alone died there from the flooding, nearly all from one summer camp.
Linda Kelso and Brian Farris vividly recall the ordeal.
Kelso, 83, who was Linda LeCropane in 1955, used to visit a Poconos church camp at Pinebrook Park every summer for a decade, beginning at age 3.
Nearby, campers stayed at a place known both as Davis Cabins and Davis Camp, filled with out-of-towners who visited Pinebrook for a Bible conference and the cooler summer beauty of the Poconos on both sides of the Brodhead Creek, near Analomink.
“It was 10 years of heaven on earth,” Kelso said. She grew up in Brooklyn, and her mother, a schoolteacher, used to take her and her sister Sara to the camp.
On the night the flood hit, Kelso, her sister and a friend had left the cabins to enjoy the night at Pinebrook, across the creek. It was that decision, Kelso said, that saved them.
The waters quickly rose, making it impossible to return; by morning, everything had been washed away.
Thirty-seven people, mostly women and children, died at Davis Cabins, including Linda Kelso’s great-aunt and great-uncle, Henry and Lillian Hartig.
“I believe the lord sent angels to push me down the lane to go to Pinebrook,” said Kelso, who now lives in upstate New York. She said they learned later that something akin to a 30-foot wall of water descended on the camp.
“The whole tract of land was obliterated, which is why so many people drowned,” Kelso said. “It’s just a part of my life that I can’t get back.”
Farris, 82, who lives in Jackson Township, near Route 611, grew up in a section of East Stroudsburg known as the Flats, in a lower-lying area near Brodhead Creek. The night the flood struck, he was helping at the local fire company’s bingo night.
He recalled a man approached the bingo caller and told him, “You might want to warn the people that water is coming up on the back streets, and they might have a hard time getting home.”
More than 100 people were playing bingo at the time, and Farris believes the man’s warning saved many lives. About a half-dozen people who were waiting for rides drowned in the building, which heavy rain and flooding destroyed, he said.
His family’s house sustained severe damage, with water up to 6 feet. Afterward, they had to shovel thick mud out of the home, he said.
“We didn’t go back to school until November, because all the bridges were out,” he said.
Farris and Kelso, with help from others, have kept memories from the flood alive in videos or written memoirs.
“I lived the thing,” Farris said. “It took me the longest time while I couldn’t talk about it without crying.”
Elsewhere in the Lehigh Valley
Less rain fell west of Easton, meaning flooding wasn’t as severe along the Lehigh River in Allentown, Bethlehem and elsewhere, The Morning Call reported. Still, water from the Lehigh inundated many low-lying areas.
Bethlehem Steel Corp. was forced to close its Bethlehem plant, as did Lehigh Inc. and Ingersoll-Rand in West Easton. Companies along the Little Lehigh Creek were similarly affected.
Emergency workers evacuated people who lived under or near the Hamilton Street Bridge in Allentown. The water rose under the Hill to Hill Bridge in Bethlehem, where workers placed loaded railcars on the trestle to help prevent the Lehigh’s waters from damaging the tracks.
The aftermath
It was weeks, if not months, before the damage from Hurricane Diane was cleaned up. But the storm left an impact that went far beyond the immediate death and destruction.
The great flood led the Army Corps of Engineers to begin a study for a dam across the Delaware. It eventually was to lead in the mid-1960s to plans for Tocks Island Dam. At a meeting in 1964 at Philadelphia’s Academy of Natural Sciences, the Corps used slides of the dead from Davis Camp to explain why the dam had to be built.
Although the Tocks Island Dam was never built, word of it led developers to see the Poconos, still largely a rural area, as a major tourist draw. Roads like Interstate 80 were built to open the region, and the real estate business boomed.
In the immediate aftermath, communities pulled together to help each other across the region and remember those who died.
Wyant said before the storm hit, neighbors helped the family haul food, soda and more upstairs from their store, expecting that their inventory would be spared. It wasn’t.
“I’ll never forget, my mom said, ‘There goes my screen door!’ ” Wyant recalled. “Somebody dove in the water, swam out and brought it back.”
As Farris’ family wheelbarrowed mud and damaged items from their home to the curb, fortunate to be able to open a garage door instead of shoveling out everything through windows, several men stopped by the house and asked if they could help.
“We were like zombies,” Farris said, recalling the hard labor.
He said the men cleaned out the home’s contents and put it on a loader to haul it away, then hosed down the remaining mud and smelly slime.
They were Mennonites, he said, and not the only members of that community in Pennsylvania to help. Many responded, according to the book “Devastation on the Delaware” by Mary Shafer. They traveled to hard-hit areas around Stroudsburg, Riegelsville and elsewhere to help however they could.
Kelso placed a bench with a plaque in the area where she spent her summers.
“I felt I had to put up something in memory of those who lost their lives,” she said.
COMING MONDAY: A look at changes in forecasting and flood prevention that help keep the region safe from another Hurricane Diane.
Contact Morning Call reporter Anthony Salamone at asalamone@mcall.com.
HURRICANE DIANE FACTS
- The storm that would become Hurricane Diane was first detected over the tropical Atlantic Ocean on Aug. 7, 1955. It hit land 10 days later in North Carolina as a Category 1 hurricane with winds of 74 to 95 miles per hour.
- Moving up the East Coast, it poured 10-20 inches of rain onto areas already soaked by the remnants of Hurricane Connie that passed through a few days before.
- The one-two punch from both storms caused flooding in Pennsylvania, New York and New England that led to nearly 200 deaths and about $1 billion in damage, in 1955 dollars.
- Pennsylvania lost more than 110 people to Hurricane Diane, including 70 in Monroe County alone. Among the local dead were 37 women and children who were at a religious retreat 5 miles north of East Stroudsburg.
- Flooding caused the mid-section of the 60-year-old free bridge between Easton and Phillipsburg to be ripped from its foundation. In Portland, the 86-year-old covered bridge, the last one over the Delaware River, was washed away.
Compiled in 2005 — on the 50th anniversary — by The Morning Call from its archives and other sources: National Hurricane Center, National Weather Service, Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry and “The Pennsylvania Weather Book” by Ben Gelber, 2002
This article has been updated to correct that the former wooden covered bridge from Portland to Columbia, New Jersey, had been used for traffic and was not merely a pedestrian bridge.
