Published: July 09, 2007 11:59 pm            

Faces of the Flood: 'Things you'll never forget'

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood

As the on-call caseworker for the American Red Cross, Tom Kurtz spent the night of July 19, 1977, fielding calls for help with flooded basements and other routine rainy-night matters.

The power went out, but constant lightning allowed him to continue jotting down notes until the phones quit working.

“I got my last call about 2 o’clock in the morning,” Kurtz recalled at his administrative office at Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown, where he holds the position of Conemaugh Health System vice president for clinical services and special projects.

“We were talking about setting up some emergency shelters,” he said. “At that time, nobody knew the extent of anything.”

Daybreak on July 20, 1977, told the grim story. After putting on a tie to head to work at the Vine Street office, Kurtz, then 27, soon realized he was not going to get there from his hillside home in the West End. But he also knew the Red Cross’s real work was not in the office that day.

“My first exposure to the flood was in Tanneryville,” Kurtz said, recalling the grisly duty recovering victims’ bodies.

Survivors commandeered some damaged trucking company trailers to use as a temporary morgue.

Water from the collapsed Laurel Run Dam had rushed down through the valley like runoff in a rain gutter, “swishing” back and forth as it made its way down the valley, Kurtz recalled. Homes on one side of the valley were untouched, directly across from areas of total devastation.

“It was like a surreal scene, on a bright sunny day,” Kurtz said.

Kurtz joined the grim recovery work, helping volunteers improvise for supplies. A picket fence section became a stretcher, and bed sheets became shrouds.

The aroma of fabric softener in wet material still can trigger the memory of the makeshift morgue. “To this day, my wife can’t use fabric softener on my sheets,” Kurtz said.

Later, Kurtz made his way downtown and connected with Red Cross Keystone Chapter employees and volunteers who were setting up communications through amateur radio clubs.

“This was toward the end of the first day and the beginning of day two,” Kurtz said. “We never stopped.”

Soon he was manning the Red Cross temporary headquarters in a Pitt-Johnstown classroom. With most communication lines down, the Keystone Chapter set up an information center.

Using index cards, the staff recorded identities of the dead, along with the health status and housing arrangements for thousands of survivors identified at shelters. Kurtz and his colleagues fielded nonstop calls from people looking for their loved ones.

Sleeping in shifts, Red Cross workers kept the center running around the clock. It was at least five days before Kurtz got back to his home.

“We had workers coming in from all over the country at this point,” he said.

“We were there providing for the immediate assistance in the form of shelter. We started doing vouchers for food, clothing – anything we could do to get a victim back into his home.”

Johnstown strained Red Cross resources, bringing every disaster worker available.

Tragedy took its toll, psychologically, on both rescue workers and victims, he said. Symptoms now identified with post-traumatic stress disorder were evident in both groups.

“Even the workers – it has a profound effect when you are out there picking up bodies of young people,” Kurtz said.

“Then ... just the smells and the things you’ll never forget. It happened 30 years ago, but it was like it was yesterday. For the first three days, I remember every detail ... and I wasn’t a victim.”

Kurtz went on to join the national Red Cross disaster response team, traveling to the 1978 blizzard in Boston, a hurricane in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands and flooding in West Virginia. He spent several years as executive director of the Westmoreland County Red Cross chapter before returning to Johnstown as an executive for UPMC Lee Regional.

He continues as a volunteer board member for both American Red Cross Keystone Chapter and Greater Alleghenies Blood Services Region.

        

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