Edouard

[Miros1]

Randall and Dana remember Ms. Agnes quite well. But then they made her acquaintance up close and personal. If you check the Wikipedia article, she went stomping right up the east coast.

Western NY and western PA didn't get the wind part of the hurricane (thank you Allegheny Mountains), but oh, did it rain... and all the rain upstream had to flow downstream, naturally.

The Army Corps of Engineers built dams across major tributaries of the Allegheny River to protect the steel mills in Pittsburgh, causing worse local flooding.

The dikes in Olean nearly broke -- there were crews of people putting sandbags on top of it in the most likely places, but in other places, the only thing holding back the water was the grass on top.

Allegany didn't (and doesn't) have dikes, so everything south of the railroad tracks flooded, as well as the back yards of the houses on Main Street. The Five Mile Creek contributed to the problem by flooding the first block and a half of 1st Street and Maple Avenue past the intersection with 2nd Street.

My brother's house had water lapping at the floor joists, and my uncle's house had a foot of water on the first floor. He and several other farmers had to dump several days of milk production, because the truck couldn't come to pick it up!

A barn that was built by my great-grandfather circa 1900 (near my uncle's farm) had its central supports washed out requiring it to be torn down. I'm sure my great-grandfather would have laughed at both concepts... that it would stand for 70+ years, and that a hurricane would take it down.

[Greg]

Oh man! All that from a cat 1 hurricane!

I read the Wikipedia article about Agnes. It sounds like it was a real doozie, not so much because of high winds but because it danced all along the seaboard, moving a significant fraction of the Atlantic Ocean into the western slopes of the Appalachians.

Even around here, they say the worst thing that can happen is if the storm is moving slowly and worst of all if it gets stalled right at the coast.

Randall and Dana are farther east in Maryland so they probably saw the real fury of storm.

[Crystal]

I think I am glad I missed agnes!! Our neighhbors are older and they said they remember it but it was just on tv because the storm didn't get this far west.

[Greg]

Let's see... during the hurricane season in 1972, I was in college in Urbana, Illinois. Back then, if I heard about Hurricane Agnes at all, it would have just been an interesting thing on the television news.

[Crystal]

I wish I knew you then. I probably shouldn't say that but I do.

[Greg]

It was a different time in the history of the world, the end of the Apollo program, the end of all the big science programs, the end of megahorsepower muscle cars, the end of responsible news reporting, and the beginning of the downward slide into the darkest decade in the history of American culture.

True to form, I was completely out of synch with all that. I was looking forward to graduation from college and by January of the next year I was just starting out my adult life with a my first job in the aerospace industry, my first wife, and my first adventure of moving to a sparkling new city on the west coast.