50 years later, Agnes flood still worst on record in Berks

Jun. 20—George McGovern had just won the New York Democratic Party primary and the Wednesday June 21, 1972, front page of the Reading Eagle also reported that summer had arrived and forecasters believed that Tropical Storm Agnes, an early season storm, was going to bring about 2 inches of rain to Berks County but be pushed away by a cool front.

No one was worried about the Schuylkill River.

There was a hint that trouble might be ahead: Above normal rainfall in April, May and to that point in June with streams in Berks feeding into the river and all were slightly above normal. With so much rainfall, farmers were worried about the potato crop.

The rain had begun falling earlier on June 21. A flash flood watch was issued. That was mainly for streams that fed the river, the Eagle reported.

Agnes had briefly been a hurricane and killed 15 people in Cuba and Florida, but had been downgraded to a tropical storm and was barely that as it meandered northward along the coast. It made a second U.S. landfall as a tropical storm.

But it wasn't the wind. It was the rain.

Things got ugly June 22, 1972, as a flood emergency was declared for Reading and all of Berks with conditions rapidly going from bad to worse. The cool front only made the rain cold.

The top of the Reading Eagle June 22 front page featured a photograph of a morning groundbreaking at Second and Penn streets for a Holiday Inn. The dignitaries in the photo were holding umbrellas and seemingly undeterred by the onslaught of rain, and they were standing in a spot that would soon be under water.

One of them was Councilman Joseph P. Kuzminski, who a few hours later declared the emergency in the absence of Mayor Eugene L. Shirk, who was out of town.

There were 18 babies born that day in the Berks hospitals, probably three times the number born daily in 2022.

Berks employers dismissed workers, stores closed, roads were closed, manhole covers in Reading had been pushed off the holes and residents had been told to stop driving around.

Danger lurked.

The river rose rapidly, as it had 30 years earlier in May 1942, and by the afternoon rising by feet every hour as the downpour continued with Agnes coming to a stop over the region, the storm wringing itself out.

The greatest flood on record in Berks and many other spots in the region had begun. There wasn't much to do but watch, wait and bail.

Day of danger

William H. Rehr III, who would one day be the chief of the Reading Fire Department, was just a volunteer with the city in June 1972, and had been for 13 years. He would get a full-time job a few months later.

He was working full time at Carpenter Steel and the plant was closing, like so many other employers, at noon on June 22 because of the rising danger of floodwaters.

There was a fire station nearby at Front and Exeter streets and Rehr walked to it. Soon a call came in for vehicles stuck in the water at the nearby Reading Municipal Stadium, which is now FirstEnergy Stadium.

He and a crew raced over there and came to a halt at the parking lot.

"There was nobody trapped in cars, but what people saw were 55-gallon drums that were floating down from Glidden's," Rehr said, referring to the paint manufacturer's nearby facility.

The storm sewer had backed up because the river was well over its banks by then, and manhole covers were lifted off the street.

"Everything that was supposed to be flowing underground was flowing overground," Rehr said.

Rehr drove to his house in Centre Park, which was on higher ground, and got in touch with Fire Chief Russ Mogel. The chief welcomed an extra hand.

"That's how we got to Dauberville," Rehr said.

National Guardsmen were trying cross the raging river in a 2 1/2 -ton military truck to get to a farmhouse where a family was stranded. But the vehicle was swept away and the two Guardsmen were left hanging in tree branches that were formerly well above the water.

There were some attempts to get to the men, and someone at the scene decided to call the city to ask for the use of an aerial truck with a 100-foot telescoping ladder.

"It was a 1939 aluminum alloy ladder," Rehr said. "You shouldn't be operating at a horizontal angle, but at a vertical angle."

Rehr rode along to Dauberville. The ladder couldn't be lowered enough for the Guardsmen to grab onto.

Mogel's next plan was to tie a ladder that would hang vertically onto the end of the telescoping ladder, and maybe the men could grab on and be hauled back to land one by one. He was aware it was a risky proposition.

"He said, 'I know, but these guys are going to die,' " Rehr recalled.

The hanging ladder hit the raging river and twisted the entire telescoping ladder, rendering the whole rescue effort a failure.

"It (the 100-foot ladder) had to be cut apart after the flooding," Rehr said.

The men continued to hold on.

Rehr said a man from Leesport pulled up with a speedboat, got it into the water and gunned it upstream against the raging current to the men hanging in the trees.

"It sounded like a plane trying to take off," Rehr said. "He was keeping as close to the riverbank as he could. You could hear him banging into trees, and we thought he was going to die."

The attempt was a success. The men got into the powerful boat and all made it back to dry ground alive.

Rehr said that 50 years later, the memories are like it happened yesterday.

Concrete evidence

Jeffrey R. Stoudt — who would go on to become a meteorologist, document weather statistics earlier than government measurements in Berks and oversee dozens of weather observers — had just finished 11th grade at Wilson High School in June 1972.

He already had a strong interest in the weather, but it would still be a Penn State education and 11 years before he would install weather-measuring equipment at the family home in Lincoln Park and establish the Berks Area Rainfall Networks.

"I wish I had starting logging precipitation much earlier than I did, even back into the 1960s," Stoudt said recently.

But in June 1972, his family was getting concrete work done out back.

"Two galvanized tubs, which hold about 10 inches (after correcting for slightly slanted sides), for cement mixing were on site," Stoudt said. "I emptied them and reasonably placed them Wednesday afternoon (the 21st). They were full by Thursday evening."

The family was fortunate.

"My family's house sustained only minor basement seepage, probably kept in check by bailing efforts," Stoudt said. "We soon gained complete control over our own minor problem. Then we spent the next few days helping other Lincoln Park residents who suffered moderate to severe house flooding."

He didn't yet have to decide what he wanted to go to college to study, but weather was a subject of interest and he watched the approaching storm intently.

Years later he learned more about Agnes.

"An unusually strong for mid-June mid-latitude upper-level trough moved southeastward from the Great Lakes and captured Agnes as it was moving up the East Coast and pulled it westward into north-central Pennsylvania, where it slowly dissipated, but prolonged wet weather," Stoudt said.

"My interest in weather had become rather intense, even pre-Agnes," he said. "Then Agnes and some more subsequent local significant weather events sealed it. However, I did not yet consider meteorology as a career. I enrolled at Penn State to study civil engineering. But the passion for making weather a vocation was simmering. And I eventually changed my major to meteorology early in my third year at Penn State."

Far from first time

Berks County historian George M. Meiser IX wasn't involved much in the Agnes episode, but he is quick to say that Agnes was preceded by several major floods of the Schuylkill River.

He was a small boy in 1942 when the river flooded a wide swath of the city, then receded rather quickly.

Another major flood occurred in February 1902 that was more significant along the river to the south of Reading, especially Birdsboro, Meiser said.

Extensive flooding occurred as well in 1869 during the transit of a major hurricane off the East Coast. The storm is known in lore as the Saxby Gale for the naval officer who forecasted weeks earlier that conditions in the Atlantic were ripe for a major hurricane.

The flow was ferocious and washed away a third of the Lancaster Avenue covered bridge, Meiser said.

"It tore loose from its moorings and a third of the bridge was floating down the Schuylkill," he said.

Officials sent a telegraph message downstream to be on the lookout for a bridge in the water, and someone downstream got the idea to pull it out of the current.

"I have no idea how they did it. They fished it out and put it in Douglassville, and it lasted until 1952," Meiser said.

It crossed the river near the Mouns Jones house, the oldest building in Berks in the Morlatton Village.

"They got this bridge out of nowhere," Meiser said.

The Saxby Gale produced the greatest stream flow on record of the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia in a database that reaches back to the Colonial era. There is no record of the Schuylkill River crest at Reading for the Saxby Gale.

Earlier still was the pumpkin flood of 1850, which washed out every bridge over the river in Berks as the high waters came downstream.

"It went bang, bang, bang," Meiser said. "It was a domino effect."

June 1972 remains the wettest month on record at 15.73 inches in the 143-year precipitation database for Berks County, but by only about an inch.

The Agnes episode of June 21-23, 1972, tallied 8.64 inches, second only to the tropical moisture episode that amounted to 8.89 inches on Oct. 7-8, 2005.

The more recent deluge did no damage because the blinding rainfall fell on parched ground when creeks and rivers in the region were very low after a dry and hot September that made history in its own right for consecutive 80-degree days and total 80-degree days.

The week of Agnes remains the rainiest on record at 11.64 inches.

The June 22, 1972, rainfall of 6.49 inches is the third-rainiest day in the 143-year record period after 6.75 on Oct. 8, 2005, and 6.73 on Oct. 3, 1869, in the Saxby Gale.

Possibly because of all the flooding that year, 1972 is the year with the latest first 90-degree day in any year in Berks, which was July 13. The temperature database begins with 1898.

And the winter that followed, 1972-73, had been been the leanest winter for snow until 2019-20 came along.

By 1972 the die was already cast in terms of the cold trend of the decade, and the 1970s would go on to be the coldest decade on record.

The postlude

The river crested at 31.3 feet on June 22, 1972, the highest crest in a record period that at least intermittently stretches to the Colonial era, and is 5 feet higher than the second highest crest in June 2006.

In the end, two people died in Berks, and sewage and water problems lingered for days as the infrastructure suffered a critical hit. The crop losses in Berks were extensive.

On June 25, City Council issued an order limiting drinking water to a half-gallon per day per resident to conserve the supply.

Politicians toured the devastated areas with Shirk going door to door in some areas, the Eagle reported.

By June 26, the city water system was back up and running and the immediate crisis had passed, but the cleanup would go on for weeks. City industries would be allowed to resume normal operations on the 27th.

Reading police on the 26th were continuing to look for a man who fired shots at Patrolman Anthony T. Manzolillo the night before. Manzolillo had been questioning the suspect at Schuylkill Avenue and Elm Street when the man broke free and ran, turning to shoot at Manzolillo, who was unharmed.

The man was last seen near Sunshine Brewery.

By June 26, the Agnes system had moved into Canada and disintegrated, the U.S. death toll from the storm was finalized at 128, and McGovern said he had enough delegates to win the party's nomination.

Top crests of the Schuylkill River at Reading

31.3 feet: June 22, 1972

26.3 feet: June 28, 2006

26.2 feet: Sept. 2, 1850

23.2 feet: Feb. 28, 1902

22 feet: May 23, 1942

21.3 feet: Aug. 24, 1933

20.7 feet: October 1786

18.06 feet: Aug. 19, 1955

Source: U.S. Weather Bureau/National Weather Service