Memories pour in from 40 years ago
Debbie McCanna and a few friends had just finished the pizza they ordered at Bradys Bend Hotel on Thursday, Aug. 14, 1980.
“Someone looked up and said, 'There's water coming in the door,'” McCanna recalled.
Little did the patrons at the hotel or its owners, the late Thelma and Tony Puzzitti, know that the relentless rain that had been falling for several days was about to create a life-threatening flash flood in Bradys Bend Township, East Brady and Petrolia where the borders of Butler, Clarion and Armstrong counties meet.
According to a Butler Eagle report on Aug. 15, 1980, up to four inches of rain fell in the area before the flood that washed out roads and bridges, downed trees and power lines and damaged hundreds of homes. Evacuation centers were set up at the Bruin and Parker fire halls and at Karns City High School.
Four days later, the Eagle reported total damages at $42 million and more than 500 families affected.
McCanna's first concern as the floodwaters receded was her new Pontiac Trans Am in the parking lot, which the 28-year-old had bought about 10 weeks earlier.
Because of the swift and rapidly rising floodwater in the lot, she was unable to move her car, which the insurance company eventually totaled.
“I found little green peppers below the windshield wipers from someone's garden,” McCanna said. “It was weird.”
The Puzzittis, who served as bartender and cook at their business, hustled their employees and customers up to the second floor of the building when it became apparent that the water was rising at a seemingly impossible rate.“It was lapping at the windowsills on the second floor,” McCanna said. “It rose 12 feet in 12 minutes.”The terrified group remained on the second floor as huge railroad ties that had been removed from nearby tracks crashed into the building one after the other.“The water picked them up and threw them against the hotel,” McCanna said. “You could hear the thump and feel the shake.”Luckily, she said, the power never went out in the two hours the group prayed and cried in the hotel's second floor as floodwaters raced down Route 68.“One girl with us had just found out she was pregnant,” McCanna recalled. “She was determined she was going to live through it.”
The muddy water receded as quickly as it rose, and McCanna's goal became checking on a male relative two doors away from the hotel who was an amputee with only one leg.“We were so worried about him, so we went to see if he was OK,” McCanna said.Once she determined her cousins were safe, she used their phone to call the fire department and road crew.“But they couldn't get in because at least half of each bridge was washed out,” McCanna said.She managed to reach her father at the former Koppers in Petrolia, where he was working the night shift, to tell him she was safe and would stay at her cousin's home that night.“It was dark and we couldn't figure out how to get home because it looked like alien landscape,” McCanna said of the debris-strewn neighborhood. “But my dad came to get us that night.”McCanna and her father listened to the 11 p.m. news on the radio that night in hopes of learning what had happened, but no report of the flooding was included in the broadcast.“Nobody knew what happened,” she said. “It was so localized.”It was the next day when the family learned that two of their neighbors had been killed in the flash flood. Eventually nine area residents or visitors were laid to rest as a result of the freak incident.
The next morning, McCanna's father and a group of men began cutting through downed trees to reach various houses to check on their neighbors when her father found a deceased young woman entangled in the limbs of a tree.The car in which she was a passenger had been swept up in the floodwaters; her boyfriend, the driver, survived by climbing to the top of another tree.“I don't know if they ever found that car because a number of cars were swept into the river and never seen again,” McCanna said.Her father's group also found bodies in the ceiling of a home, where they had drowned after being swept by the raging waters.McCanna said the death toll would have been worse if not for Thursday night bingo at the local fire hall, where most of the ladies in the community were engaging in their weekly activity.“It was all over by the time bingo was done,” she said.Also, scores of camps along the river — many of which were swept away — would have been occupied 24 hours later on Friday.McCanna recalled that a group of ladies returning from a bridge tournament were caught in the raging waters and climbed onto the roof of the car they were riding in.A man named David Palmer and his poodle, Buster, rescued the women.“They weren't spring chickens, either,” McCanna recalled.To do her part after the flood that devastated her neighborhood, McCanna allowed families to drop their laundry off at her home in garbage bags labeled with their names.Neither the laundromat in East Brady nor most affected properties had water in the weeks after the flood, unlike McCanna's home a short distance away.“I dragged a ringer washer into the driveway and kept running clothes through it and hanging them on the clothesline,” McCanna said.She would begin the chore after arriving home from work and eating dinner and stop when it became too dark to see.The next morning, McCanna would take the dry clothes down from the line, fold them and return them to the bags they had come in.“I did that for a week or so,” she said.
McCanna said the community, which is on the banks of the Allegheny River, was accustomed to winter flooding caused by ice forming in the river.“We all knew the dangers of that, but we never dreamed of this,” McCanna said.Florence DeBacco, 88, lives in the same house that is partway up a small hillside beside St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Bradys Bend, where she endured the flood of 1980.DeBacco's sister, who lived nearby, called that Thursday evening to ask if her basement was flooding.“I opened the basement door and the water was already up to about the fourth step,” DeBacco recalled.Before she knew it, 35 neighbors had made their way through the dangerous deluge to her home for safety. All their homes along Route 68 were level with the road and had flooded.“We had two babies here and no diapers,” DeBacco said. “I used my tea towels and all kinds of pins.”One couple making their way across Route 68 to her home had four children, and the father held his two babies on his hips as he forded the dangerous current.As the water rose, he moved the babies higher and higher on his body. DeBacco said as the family stepped on her front porch, the water gushed to a level that would have overtaken them.Another woman had gotten stuck in silt up to her waist in DeBacco's yard and had to be pulled out by some of the men taking refuge there.“I had to find her clothes to wear,” she said.A couple named Robinson, who had escaped their flooded home with their grandchild, asked if they could park in the DeBacco's driveway. The rapidly rising water soon chased the family from their vehicle.“Just as they got up on the porch, the water took their car,” DeBacco said. “It took our car, too.”To the community's horror, it was discovered that of the many Robinsons who lived in the area, only the ones who ended up at DeBacco's house that night had survived the flood.
After the water began to recede, it became apparent that none of the neighbors' homes were inhabitable and the crowd would have to stay overnight at DeBacco's house.She and her husband did their best to accommodate their neighbors by emptying their cupboards and refrigerator of food, making pot after pot of coffee, and providing clothes, blankets or anything else that could make them more comfortable in the distressing communal situation.The fire department called the DeBaccos on Thursday night in an effort to determine who had survived the flood.“I had to give all the names of the 35 people who were here,” DeBacco said. “It was just horrible.”DeBacco's nephew, the late Carl Stimac, had been injured in a 1978 high school football accident and was a quadriplegic. Those at his home a few doors down had to carry him to the second floor when the water began its swift vertical rise, as the young man would have been helpless had he remained on the first floor.Stimac died Oct. 21 of that year, two years to the day from the time of his football injury, DeBacco recalled sadly.In the hectic days and weeks after the flood, DeBacco and many others worked at St. Patrick's Church to provide hot meals for volunteers and those working to restore their homes and businesses.Churches of other denominations brought food and provided members to help cook.Local residents and groups as well as those from Butler, Kittanning and other surrounding communities brought roasters full of corn, soup, lasagna and many other dishes to feed the hungry volunteers and flood victims each day.“It was just beautiful,” DeBacco recalled with a cracking voice.She said the Red Cross and Salvation Army immediately set to work providing food and supplies to comfort those affected by the flood, and stayed until residents could fend for themselves.DeBacco said many residents in the area who suffered, provided assistance, or lost loved ones during the flood will no doubt relive the tragedy and ensuing triumphs that emerged after the muddy water leaked back into the river on Aug. 14, 1980.“We have a motto in Bradys Bend since the flood,” DeBacco said as she gazed back over 40 years. “We bend, but we do not break. That's how we got through it.”
