Carried Disease as Well as Destruction : Great Floods of ’36 Led to Government Action

Zoo animals were washed from their cages and floated downstream like driftwood. Houses were “swinging and swaying.” Rescuers looked on with hopeless horror as victims’ “heads bobbed up once and they just disappeared.”

Destruction, disease and desolation reigned from the Ohio Valley to Maine 50 years ago, when the Great Floods of March, 1936, caused an estimated $270 million in damage and took at least 107 lives, perhaps scores more.

The disaster prompted the first general flood-control act in U.S. history, made flood prevention a federal responsibility, and led to scores of projects over the next five decades.

Since 1936, the federal government has spent $23 billion on flood control; the Army Corps of Engineers estimates that those projects have saved $150 billion in potential destruction.

100 Projects Installed

In New England alone, more than 100 local flood control projects were installed. A series of dams now restrains flood waters from the mighty Connecticut and Merrimack rivers.

Federal flood insurance laws now encourage local communities to severely restrict flood plain development as a way of preventing another disaster such as that of 1936.

Two separate periods of torrential rain teamed up with the melt from deep snow cover to send Northeastern rivers bursting over their banks to record flood levels.

Power was out from Pittsburgh to Portland, Me. Hundreds of thousands of people were homeless and food shortages were widespread. Rowboats ruled city streets.

“You could take people right out of second-floor windows,” said William Gass, 68, former mayor of Sunbury, Pa., on the Susquehanna River. “They could practically step right into the boats. That’s how high the water was.”

Other rescue efforts were not as successful.

Rescuers Lost

Three men tried in vain to reach occupants of a flooded house along the Androscoggin River in Topsham, Me.

“The minute they got out of the calm water, they were drawn into an eddy and they were just pulled,” said Doris Riendeau, then a young mother, who watched the rescuers become victims.

“Their heads bobbed up once and they just disappeared,” she said. “There was no way anyone could throw a rope or do anything to help.”

Rivers began rising on March 12, 1936, particularly in Maine and the Merrimack River Valley of New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Some flooding ensued before rivers receded.

Waters Receded

By the morning of March 16, as New England and the world focused on Adolf Hitler’s occupation of the demilitarized Rhineland, the flooding “danger was definitely over,” one newspaper said.

But the sighs of relief heard throughout New England were premature.

Concern shifted to Pittsburgh and Johnstown, Pa., while in New England “the flood danger was rapidly receding and the work of repairing the damage was under way,” another newspaper account said.

But more unrelenting rains arrived on March 18, ushering in four days of hell. Rivers peaked as spring arrived at 1:58 p.m. on March 20.

Modest Flood Toll

Flooding killed 15 in Johnstown, Pa., a modest toll in that unfortunate city, where at least 2,209 people perished in the great flood of 1889.

Hit much harder were the river valleys of New England, especially the Connecticut River Valley in Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut, and the Merrimack River Valley.

About 200 animals housed at the zoo in Manchester, N.H., drowned when they were swept down the Merrimack, which swelled to a record 16 feet above normal. A bear and two leopards clung to ice floes as they floated downriver.

“Manchester and Nashua got an awful beating from the Merrimack River,” said David Hayden, 58. “It moved buildings. It moved a lot of gasoline tanks.”

10,000 Refugees

In Hartford, Conn., the Connecticut River crested at 37.56 feet, six feet above the previous record set in 1927. One-fifth of the city was covered with water and 10,000 refugees packed schools.

“My house was swinging and swaying like Sammy Kaye,” said Philip Fazio, 76, of Providence, R.I., who worked as a banana salesman for the Mello-Ripe Fruit Co. “The water went into our place of business. Bananas were floating in the cellar. Over 2,000 bunches of bananas were ruined.”

Other losses took longer to tally.

“It was so different with disasters back then,” said Richard Mitchell, 68, of Brattleboro, Vt., then a newsboy who was much sought after for information. “You didn’t have television to tell you how bad it was, and it could be a week before you found out what was washed out.”

By month’s end, the rivers had fully receded.

A New Resolve

But when the waterlogged region wrung itself out, residents and politicians realized just how bad the flooding had been. That brought a new resolve to build long-needed flood-control projects.

“Much good may come out of the catastrophe,” said a Business Week magazine editorial published a week after the disaster. “It demonstrated, with almost mathematical exactness, the economic value of protective construction that has been planned for generations and never been done.”

Congress since 1874 had enacted flood control measures aimed at specific areas. After the new, widespread devastation, it swiftly enacted the Flood Control Act of 1936, the nation’s first general flood prevention legislation.

Signed into law in June by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the law gave the Army Corps of Engineers jurisdiction over flood-control investigation and improvement. The law authorized 250 projects and appropriated $320 million for construction and surveys.

Guidelines Set

Three significant provisions, still the law of the land, have guided flood-control efforts in the last half century: local communities must provide land and rights of way to the corps; the U.S. government will not be liable for damage or injuries caused by flood control projects, and local communities must maintain and operate projects after their construction by the federal government.

Sad signs of the 1936 floods remain, including discoloration lines high on buildings in downtown Pittsburgh. There are many other signs indicating that the lessons of 1936 were well-learned.

In Hartford, Conn., dikes and conduits have all but eliminated any semblance of the once-bustling Hartford riverfront.

“When I was a boy, I’d go down to the docks on the Connecticut River and ride the steamboats,” said Arthur Sweeton, who began working in the city engineering department in 1935. He said there is still some waterfront in Hartford, “if you know where to find it.”

Hartford’s is the largest of 100 local protection projects completed in New England by the Army Corps of Engineers since the 1936 floods.

Five Major Watersheds

The Army corps also has built 35 flood control dams in five major watersheds in New England. Sixteen of the 35 dams are in the Connecticut River Valley, operated as a system to curtail the flow of tributaries in order to reduce flooding on the river’s main stem.

“We started building dams and watersheds in the late 1930s, in response to the floods of 1936 and the hurricane of 1938,” said Joe Finnegan, chief of the reservoir control center in the Army corps’ New England headquarters.

“The area did not experience serious flooding in urbanized areas until 1936. The federal government then decided it was time to take care of a problem the local communities could not.”

The corps now has 45 data collection platforms along New England rivers to measure water flow and transmit data by satellite to its regional headquarters in Waltham, Mass.

Although the comprehensive flood control act followed the 1936 floods by just months, legislative efforts to address flood insurance and zoning were not so swift.

Flood Insurance

Congress passed the Flood Insurance Act of 1956 but never appropriated money for the program. That law was replaced by the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968. Additional legislation was enacted in 1973.

Under the laws, federally subsidized flood insurance is available only to people whose communities participate in a federal flood control program, requiring adoption of zoning requirements limiting new construction on flood plains.

“The most disturbing factor of the flood problem is the disposition of New Englanders to accept floods as an annual toll to be put up with,” the head of the newly formed New England Regional Planning Commission said 50 years ago.

And although that mood of quiet desperation is gone, nobody is ruling out another mammoth punch sometime in the future.

“The existing system of reservoirs and dams does not provide protection from every type of situation,” said the Army corps’ Finnegan. “We control only about 15% of the drainage area of the entire Connecticut River watershed. On the Merrimack River watershed, dams control 35% of the drainage area.”