The images come flooding back
Come the middle of this month, it will be 70 years since the rivers around here got bloated, lost control and overflowed their banks in a spectacular and terrifying show of force. It was the big one: Pittsburgh's Great St. Patrick's Day Flood of 1936. It was our Katrina, our Andrew, our earthquake, our landmark disaster.

Never before or since have the rivers crested so high: 46 feet at the Point, 21 feet above flood level, submerging all that's now Point State Park, inundating downtown, swamping much of the North Side, the Strip, McKees Rocks, and lowlands all around this area.

It all started on March 17, but the worst was on the 18th, when water levels peaked. Everything shut down. Roads and bridges were closed. Power failed. No trains. No phone service. People worked frantically to move stuff to upper floors at work and at home. But thousands had to flee their homes. The death toll was estimated at 69. Many more were injured and nearly 110,000 were homeless. Pittsburgh was a mess.

There was no TV news back then. But people took pictures and movies and wrote down their experiences. Lots of Pittsburghers still have newspapers (printed in Washington, Pa., and other surrounding towns during the flood) and other mementos.

For a while, I've had two suitcases of 16mm home movies that Judy Heinsberg lent to me. These cans of old movies include family scenes, holidays and a copy of the widely sold silent movie about the Pittsburgh Flood. I'd seen this film before but realized Judy's copy had an extra sequence about the Flood in McKees Rocks.

This "extra" includes unforgettable images from the disaster such as people in a boat trying to rescue a horse that's scared and trapped in the doorway of a beauty shop. Also, there's a man with a raft rescuing so many people from second-story windows that the raft nearly sinks before they get to safety. There's also an incredible scene where a man cuts a hole into the roof of a building and pulls out two people who had been trapped inside. Then, the film ends abruptly.

Alice Ginser from Carrick invited me to see the Pittsburgh Flood scrapbook that belonged to her late great-uncle William Patterson of the South Side. No longer bound, the scrapbook is a crumbling beauty with leatherette covers and big pages of black construction paper filled with newspaper clippings, postcards, letters from businesses and photos documenting the flood. The scrapbook also shows the struggles of one company: the Miller Printing Machinery Co. on the North Side.

A Miller employee, Theo R. Foster, drove across the Ninth Street Bridge at 2 a.m. March 18, to deliver emergency supplies. Floodwaters on the bridge had already climbed above the car's floorboards so Mr. Foster was required to get a special permit from the Department of Public Safety to drive into the city. Photos of the car and the actual permit are pasted carefully in the scrapbook.

Undoubtedly, the best place to sit and contemplate the Flood is at the counter of Klavon's Ice Cream Parlor on Penn at 28th Street in the Strip.

Thousands of people lived around here in the 1930s, and when the Allegheny River moved into the neighborhood on March 17 and 18, it stayed for several days, leaving the place a soggy, smelly, muddy nightmare.

Ray Klavon says his father and a cousin were left to guard this old drugstore as the waters started to rise. But the flood waters were stronger and higher than expected, and overnight, the two young men had to climb atop the wooden phone booths by a small window until they were saved by someone in a boat. Ray and his sisters put a blue high-water-line on the wall by the window. Sitting there with a sundae, you find it hard to imagine all that water.

Photos top to bottom: Newspapers chronicled the anxiety caused by the flood; downtown trolley cars immersed in water; businessmen in a makeshift boat; flooded buildings on Liberty Avenue; firefighters battle a blaze in waist-high flood waters.

Thanks to Alice Ginser for loaning her family's scrapbook.