Flooding Threat Shifts in Pennsylvania

Tens of thousands of evacuated residents in northeast Pennsylvania started returning to their homes late Saturday after dikes held back rising waters in the Susquehanna River, officials said.

The threat of flooding--prompted by heavy rains and melting snow during unusually warm weather Friday and Saturday--moved downstream, however, to the state capital of Harrisburg and the surrounding region.

Gov. Thomas J. Ridge’s family fled the governor’s mansion when water surrounded the home. Other evacuations were underway in the city Saturday evening.

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Hundreds of roads and bridges were closed by high water, along with some water and sewage plants. Barges and pleasure boats broke from their moorings and drifted on the Ohio River and its upper tributaries.

In Tompkins, N.Y., five family members died after a roadway collapsed Friday night, sending four cars tumbling into a rain-swollen reservoir.

A sixth person was missing, and three others were rescued. State police said it appeared a culvert washed out under the road, causing it to topple.

In Wilkes-Barre, Pa., a former coal mining center of 47,500 people, the river crested by 4:30 p.m. EST at 34.4 feet, below the river’s levee of 39 feet, according to an official at the Luzerne County Emergency Management Agency.

Within half an hour officials lifted a regional evacuation order that had affected 100,000 people for about 10 hours.

Many residents were expected to return to their homes Saturday night, but some hospital patients and nursing home residents who had been evacuated to higher ground would be returned today, emergency officials said.

Fearful of a repeat of deadly 1972 floods, officials had ordered the evacuations from flood-plain areas of Wilkes-Barre and surrounding communities.

Buses, ambulances, trucks and vans were used to carry residents to Red Cross shelters in schools and town halls, said Luzerne County emergency official Al Bardar.

Pennsylvania State Police and the National Guard were still operating under an emergency declaration issued Jan. 7, when a blizzard piled up much of the snow that melted into this weekend’s floods. Roughly 1,000 Guard troops were on flood duty.

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Across the state in Pittsburgh, an emergency order was issued Saturday after flooding swept parts of the city, washing out businesses, putting streets underwater and forcing residents in some parts of the city to flee.

Pittsburgh police knocked on doors of the Three Rivers Plaza senior citizen apartment building early Saturday, rushing residents to pack and get out.

Downstream, the Ohio also was flooding along West Virginia’s northern Panhandle and authorities urged 7,500 people to get off Wheeling Island, a low-lying urban enclave connected by bridge to Wheeling, W. Va.

Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel Corp. shut down two blast furnaces and other plants in the region because of flooding. At Leetsdale, Pa., along the Ohio just northwest of Pittsburgh, a furnace at a copper factory exploded when it was hit by the cold water, spraying molten metal around the evacuated plant.

About 400 families were evacuated from Port Jervis, N.Y., as the Delaware and Neversink rivers rose out of their banks.

And downstream on the Delaware along the New Jersey shore, hundreds of people were evacuated in Warren County after an ice dam broke and released an 8-foot surge of water, authorities said.

In Trenton, N.J., the recently renovated Statehouse annex and its parking garage were flooded by the Delaware. It was not immediately known if any documents were damaged.

The Red Cross said it opened 80 shelters for people forced out of their homes in Pennsylvania. Another 30 were open in West Virginia, 29 in New York and 11 in Virginia.