Remembering 1955 Delaware Flood

In 1955, I had just turned seven years old and finished first grade at Solebury Elementary with classmate Billy Tinsman, who—as I write this 56 years later—is probably moving lumber out of the way of the latest episode of flooding in Lumberville, Pennsylvania, at his family's centuries-old lumber business. Billy lived up the river a couple of miles from where I lived, just up the hill from Cuttalossa Inn, where I often played and where I loved to sneak into the bar and steal olives.

Terror is what I felt when, the day after a massive storm drenched the northern mountains, I walked down the hill on Armitage Road to see what appeared to me like an endless ocean of boiling brown water stretching from the second floor of the Inn, across the submerged canal, and way past the banks and over the railroad tracks on the other side.

The most fearful part was the speed with which the water flowed. I have never seen anything like it, until I watched the tsunami unfold in Japan last March. Just like the tsunami, the ocean seemed to have risen up and was violently scrubbing the earth bare of every living and man-made thing.

Debris, including an entire house, flew past—a flash of white and then gone. What few people knew at the time was that the bodies of dozens of people were flowing past as well, some of them children who'd been attending a summer church camp way up river and were washed away in the middle of the night by a flash flood on a tributary.

When I returned to Bucks County four decades later, I vowed never to live along the river—as beautiful, as lush, as bucolic as it is. I have friends who do and I can't imagine what it must be like to live with the constant reality that a puff of hot air blowing off the Sahara could turn into a monster with the ability to destroy the physical evidence of their livlihood and even their lives.

It has been a luxury the way we humans have been able to squat at the edge of dry land, see our homes and businesses swept away, and rebuild until the inevitable next time, hoping it won't happen until we've moved or are gone from this life. In this way, humans seem to share an instinct with ants. Pour a bucket of water on an anthill and you won't have to wait long until they've cleaned out the mud and begun to rebuild.

Whether or not you think the earth is warming, the seas rising, and the weather more destructive, you cannot argue with the fact that a lot of human beings have been setting up shop during the past century in places where disaster is guaranteed to strike again, within a generation. In California it's earthquakes, in Texas it's wildfires, in Florida it's hurricanes. You have to wonder if it's really worth the risk and the cost, which we all pay in one form or another. And you have to wonder how much of this flooding has been caused by poor management of the land and waterways. Are we, as the saying goes, like bees drowning in honey?

If there's a silver lining to this latest round of weather-related disasters—Hurricane Irene and the remnants of Lee—maybe it will be that people begin to doubt whether the pleasures of living near water are worth it, and pressure on the environment caused by over-development and over-paving will lessen. In the meantime, we could learn a few lessons from some of those cultures we read about in publications like The National Geographic—if you choose to live where it might flood, build on stilts or move uphill.

NOTE: For those curious about the 1955 flood, a terrific, dramatic telling will be found in "Devastation on the Delaware: Stories and Images of the Deadly Flood of 1955," written by Kintnersville, Upper Bucks author Mary A. Shafer. You won't be able to put it down, even if you lived through it. Photos with the article are some that appeared the book.