Published: June 26, 2007 11:48 pm            

Faces of the Flood: Wounds 'never will completely heal'

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood

Richard Thomas remembers spending a terrifying night with his pregnant wife and two children in Tanneryville during the night of the 1977 Flood.

But what he saw after sunrise was more horrifying.

Ten members of the Thomas family – all close neighbors – died that night in the rushing waters.

“Time has healed some of the wounds but, as deep as they are, they never will completely heal,” Thomas said. “My dad lost his brother, sister, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, nieces and nephews. He would never be able to talk to you about it, even now.”

Richard, his wife, Dorothy, and his daughter and son – Rebecca and Richard – retired early the night of July 19, 1977.

“The (Major League) All-Star game was on, and when the radio and TV went out, we went to bed,” Richard recalls. “My mother, who lives across the street on the hillside, called and said ‘Look out the window, your car is going down the road.’ I saw my car floating away and I was shocked.”

Richard later found that car – a brand-new 1977 Gremlin – smashed flat under another car not far down the street.

“It didn’t seem that scary at the time,” he recalls. “Who knew the dam was going to break shortly thereafter?”

The collapse of the breast of Laurel Run Dam immediately increased the danger for the Thomas family.

“I happened to be looking out at the backyard – the lightning was so intense it was just like daylight – and the water came down just that fast in one wall,” Thomas said. “But our house stood. It came pretty close to the first floor, but it didn’t come in. Had we been able to look out, we could have seen that there were no houses farther up the street. They were all gone. It seemed the water came to our house and split. There was a group of five or six houses that survived the flood and are still standing now. Ours was the first one.

“My dad had a tree he planted when he was little. In the morning, I saw that that tree survived and the debris piled up against the tree. The angle that the water came made all the difference.”

Thomas said his family realized they could be in danger, but there wasn’t anything they could do about it.

“We couldn’t go outside,” he said. “All you could do was keep moving upstairs, then downstairs. I remember even trying to talk to my wife in the same room, but there was so much noise that carrying on a conversation wasn’t possible. We had to scream at each other. We knew my parents were on the opposite hillside, and we could look up and see flashlights. But, we couldn’t talk to anyone. The noise was unbearable. I don’t know what to compare it to, but my dad said it was similar to sounds he remembers during war.”

The Thomases stayed up all night watching the floodwaters destroying their neighborhood.

They sat on the porch for a time, until part of a tractor-trailer swept the steps away.

“I remember watching houses passing by just as if we were driving past them in a car,” he said.

“They were all of our neighbors’ houses, but it just didn’t register because of the fear. It was quite scary.”

When daylight broke, Thomas’ first thoughts were to move his family to his parents’ house. But the street had turned into a swollen creek.

Eventually, they went to a neighbor’s house.

“I remember when we got out and went to the neighbor’s house, we sang hymns,” he said.

Later, as the waters receded, he crossed the street and climbed the hill.

“I looked down at the steel mill, the car shop, and saw everything just piling up against it,” he said. “The water was hitting and just pounding into the air like a huge fountain.

“My wife and I and my children were lucky to get out alive,” he said. “But I was also thinking of the people who did die right up the street from us, and the kind of night they must have gone through.

“I remember thinking ‘Five years from now, I’ll be looking back on this.’ It’s 30 years now and some memories do stay fresh after that many years – finding out that my mother and dad had survived, but that my dad’s brother and sister, who lived right up the street, had died. He was able to see all of this action because he was on the hillside through the night. In the ensuing weeks and months, there were heartaches and problems. Everyone went through that.”

As with most flood survivors, the experience left some indelible marks on Thomas.

“For the longest time after that, who could shut their eyes when it rained?” he said. “I remember, every time it rained for two years, I would stand at the window and watch all night long.”

The Thomases eventually moved from Tanneryville to Coopersdale, but they took a few reminders with them. One is an electric clock still stopped at the time the power went out that fateful evening. Another is an issue of The Tribune-Democrat published days after the flood that shows Richard’s father standing in front of his damaged house.

“He was exactly the same age as I am now – 55,” Thomas said.

The Thomas children – Becky LaPinsky and Richard – have grown up and still live in Johnstown. Carrie, born a few weeks later, now works as a GIS manager in Florida, making flood maps. Her husband does the same kind of work for a different company.

“One of the stories they had to study for their education was the Johnstown Flood,” Thomas said.

“I think that’s kind of unique.”

        

• Click to discuss this story with other readers on our forums.