Published: July 02, 2007 11:49 pm            

Faces of the Flood: ‘I’ll never forget the thunder and the lightning’

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood



What started as a relaxing evening for a Hornerstown family watching a ballgame ended with them fleeing their home as it was surrounded by swift-moving flood waters.

David and Leona Hunter had lived along Messenger Street near the corner of Ash Street for only two years.

But David had spent some of his teenage years in the house that had been owned by his father since 1940.

“We had just fixed it up with new windows and siding,” David Hunter recalled.

The possibility of a flood had never entered their minds.

“There never was a flood in this area, and I wanted to be close to the school and church,” Leona Hunter said.

She was a teacher’s aide at Meadowvale Elementary School and a member of the nearby Trinity Lutheran Church.

But beginning on the evening of July 19, 1977, thunderstorms moved in, and soon the normally placid Solomon Run began overflowing its banks. Floodwaters soon ran down the hill in front of the Hunters’ home.

“I’ll never forget the thunder and the lightning. It was like continuous daylight,” David Hunter said. “They said that three storms met over Johnstown.”

Soon the water was coming into the basement.

“I started bailing it out, but it was too much,” he said.

Soon the basement windows buckled under the pressure of the rising water.

Before the family knew it, water was coming into the kitchen, and Hunter said he nailed the door shut in an effort to keep out the flood.

“It was raining heavy and steady, and about 1 a.m., I said we had to get out of here,” he recalled. “The front porch was gone and cars were floating by. I realized the danger when I started smelling sulfur.”

At the time, he was working at the Johnstown Plant of Bethlehem Steel Corp. He retired from there in 1983, after 351/2 years of service.

The sulfur apparently was mine acid waters that poured out of old mines along Solomon Run when the floodwaters broke the mine seals, he said.

He placed a ladder over the racing waters, stretching it from the banister of his back porch to a neighbors’ porch. Hunter, his wife, their sons, David, 20, and Gordon, 16, and their 18-year-old daughter, Rebecca, crawled across the ladder.

From there, Leona Hunter and her children were able to make it uphill to the Golde Street home of David Hunter’s brother, Daniel.

They were walking in hip-high water, Leona Hunter said, and “my two sons had to hold me. All I remember is that they were bobbing me in the water.”

David Hunter remained at the home of the neighbors – Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Piurkowsky – to assist them.

Mrs. Piurkowsky was feeling ill but didn’t want to leave, even when city firefighters came by.

“We could see the debris building up, (and it) kept the water from coming in,” Hunter said. “We could hear the stuff in the basement bobbing up against the ceiling.”

From the neighbor’s house, he said, “we could watch our dining room fill with water, and by 2 a.m., half of the house broke away and was gone.”

He remembered seeing debris collecting against a corner telephone pole along Messenger Street.

It created a “waterfall, with water at least 20 feet deep coming over it. It undermined the foundation of the house.”

When daylight came, he was able to make his way to his brother’s home, too.

The Hunters lived temporarily at a house they owned in the Roxbury neighborhood and then stayed at a friend’s house in Southmont from September until their new, modular home was ready for them at the Messenger Street location. They moved back on July 4, 1978.

It has become their retirement home.

David Hunter is now 82, and Leona, 80.

For the longest time after the flood, Leona Hunter recalled, “I couldn’t go to sleep at night. I put precious things near me that mean a lot to me. I keep them close to me so in case it rains, I can grab them.”

She remembers how she wanted to get a red leather coat – the first leather coat she ever owned – before crawling over the ladder to the neighbor’s porch.

Looking at her husband, Leona said, “He told me, ‘Leave it.’ I learned that (such things) don’t mean anything.”

Leona said that the day after the flood, “We got the bad news – our niece, Sharen Stoner and her husband, Sheldon, died in Tanneryville. She had gone back to get her Bible, and then their car was washed away.”

        

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