The year 1996 will be known as the "back-in-my-day" year to my future grandchildren. I saw a 32" snowfall and a horrible, icy river flood. I thought it was all over when that horrible winter had ended...
It was Wednesday, June 12th. I was just going to make a card for my dad for fathers day and then go to my parent's place to do laundry and have dinner. When I got home from work at 5:15, it looked like a thunder storm was headed our way. It had just started to rain a little and I figured I'd wait until after it was over to leave for my parent's place. While I was working on the card (fortunately not on the computer), the lightening really started up and the power went out. The storm sounded pretty nasty, but storms like this appear almost every day in the summer when it's really hot. I looked out the front door to see what the storm was like, and it was raining so hard that I was getting soaked despite the porch and screen door. Already in the first ten minutes the power was out and the tree next door had been hit by lightning, knocking a big part of it down. Then it started hailing. The hail continued for about half an hour, which was pretty unusual because it usually only hails for a minute and then stops. Meanwhile, the street started forming a huge puddle between my house and my neighbor's house, (right near my car), that seemed to be getting deeper by the minute.
By about 6:00, the storm had not let up from its intensity of constant lightning and heavy rains. Our neighbor's power lines were down in front of our house because of another falling tree branch. The water in front of my house so deep that the wake of passing cars was making my car bob up and down, so I went outside to see if I could move it somewhere higher. The neighbor across the street told me to move it onto his driveway, which I did without getting any water inside of it, and I went back into the house. Even with an umbrella, my clothes were saturated with water. The puddle grew and grew to amazing size until it covered part of my lawn and the path up to the house. By this point, the street was a muddy river that came up to my knees. The storm seemed to slow down a little, and it seemed that the water was receding, so I relaxed little.
After a brief lull, the rain began once again, this time getting worse than it had been before. The rains were so hard that it was coming in over my window frames and around the panes. I stood at the window with a lasagna pan trying to catch as much as I could as it poured in and I quickly ran out of dry towels. It was at this point that my credit card company called me with an exciting new offer. I told the guy to call back after the flood and I hung up on him.
By 8:00, it was getting pretty dark in my electricity-free apartment. The rain slowed down a little so that it was no longer coming in through my windows anymore. I checked outside to find that the "puddle" in the street was so deep that it was up to the steps in front of my outside door (see photo). My car was submerged up to the top of the tail lights, even on the driveway across the street. I found this quite alarming. I moved all of my paintings upstairs to my neighbor's apartment and tried to move all my other belongings up to high shelves as I periodically checked the quickly rising water level. The rain still continued, but not as hard as it was. I waded across the street to see that my car had eight inches of water in the bottom of it and that all the seats were saturated. My neighbor yelled that the Delaware Canal, which I live a block away from, was overflowing and that was where all the water was coming from. Big logs and all kinds of debris were floating down my street. The water was almost up to the top of the step outside my door (this means it was about a foot from coming into my apartment) and it was pouring under the porch into our basement. The back yard was a lake as well, and water is passing on both sides of the house in streams. The cellar door was partially submerged. It was now up to the top of the tail lights of my car.
By 10:00 the rain had slowed to a drizzle, and the water level seemed to be falling a little. I could see more of my tail lights than I could before. My upstairs neighbors and I passed the time in the darkness by playing cards by candlelight. We also kept smelling gasoline outside, perhaps from the submerged cars, or perhaps from the gasoline cans we saw floating around in the five-foot-deep basement water. At 11:30 the fire department came around in a boat to see if everyone was OK, and when they learned about the downed power lines and the gasoline smell (which, for some reason, they repeatedly referred to as a "gas leak"), they made us evacuate, telling us that there was another storm coming (there wasn't). After a I waded along side of the boat through my neighborhood until we came to a bridge that wasn't underwater, me and my neighbors tried to get rides, but all the roads into and out of town were closed because all the bridges had been washed out by the water.
The next day I returned to find the water gone, but everything covered with several inches of foul-smelling mud. This smell became a constant in my life for the next few weeks, and I still get a whiff of it every once in a while. It was tracked all over my apartment, because it was impossible to walk anywhere without covering your shoes with it. It clogged up our water heaters and furnaces, deposited itself in thick layers on top of people's lawns, and generally made things slippery (for the first three days) then dusty (for the next two weeks) on my street.
As it turned out, we got 10 inches of rain in 3 hours from a storm that stalled right over my town. I guess I'm lucky that I didn't try to go anywhere during the storm because one guy in my town died when he tried to cross a bridge that was washed out and he didn't realize that it was already gone (top of page).
My car was destroyed (as were dozens on my street)-- there was water in the oil, the fuse box and the glove compartment. The whole electrical system was shorted out, and it smelled terrible, mainly because of the thin layer of mud all over the interior. After I had it towed to my service station, they worked on it for several days, but it just wouldn't start.
Bucks County (where Yardley is located) was later declared a federal disaster area. A survey of the town showed why-- large sections of road were gone anywhere near the streams. In the canal, there was a mountain of debris that included fence parts, chunks of asphalt, bricks, slabs of sidewalk, cinder blocks, golf balls, signs, pieces of wood, shoes and patio furniture. One house on Main Street had lost it's lawn- all the ground around the front of the house had washed away. There were scores of trees that had come up out of the softened ground, roots and all, and had fallen on whatever was next to them.
Several weeks later, my life was back to normal. I have a new car and I finally got a settlement for the old car from the insurance company. I moved in with Mary, my girlfriend, who has a nice place near the top of a hill. In the meantime, every time it starts to rain I get kind of nervous and move my car up the street to the higher part.
