The 22-year Flood

This was the week of the flood. Well, almost. It would have been a flood had not the dikes been raised after Agnes, and it was bad enough. The Wyoming Valley was evacuated (mandatory), and there were plenty of roads torn up and scares about a dam collapsing and washing away Luzerne. When I went to work today on the campus of Wilkes University, it was about deserted, which is not to say that it didn't take me over an hour to get there - because the expressway narrowed down to one lane at the rock cut because a creek had eroded the right lane. I stayed home yesterday, but the day before - Wednesday - I went in and got some work done. Then I went out to the dike for a look at the river, but I got chased off by a Luzerne County sherriff who was probably in diapers when I was slogging around the streets of Wilkes-Barre in the wake of Agnes in 1972.

Back at home on Wednesday night, the water level in the lake was still about a foot and a half below the deck of the boathhouse. This concerned me because I have carpet and electrical things near floor level. On Thursday morning, however, the lake had risen that much in about 12 hours. I cannot recall such a dramatic rise. I put everything of value up on the futon. Later that afternoon, the fridge was emptied with the expecation that I would turn off the electrical, but I never had to do so. By Friday morning (today) the water had receded about an inch and a half, and down another 4 inches tonight.

So it was a minor distraction for me, compared to 1972, when I spent three days on the third floor of my grandmother's stately home on South Franklin Street with two grandmothers and another octogenarian who had no other place to go. It was ugly, especially when my dad radioed to me to tell the ladies not to flush the toilets.

The odd thing is that, in the 1936 flood, my dad was 22 years old. In the 1972 Agnes flood, I was 22 years old, and in this, the 2006 flood wanabe, my son, Michael, is 22 years old. If the trend holds, in three decades or so, Michael's son will be 22 years old, and Wyoming Valley will once again head for higher ground. Do three points on a line define the fourth? Stick around - we'll see.