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Pennsylvania Railroad Company History of the Floods of 1936 and 1937 HC
Pennsylvania Railroad Company History of the Floods of 1936 and 1937 HC
PRR History of the Floods of March, 1936 and January, 1937
Hard Cover
By Chas W. Garrett
Copyright 1937
150 pages
Includes several fold-out maps
Unexpectedly, with very little warning, the flood which followed the rainfall of March 17th, 18th and i9th, 1936, overwhelmed the cities and towns and country-side in all the river valleys of Pennsylvania and parts of adjoining States. In many of them the water was higher, swifter, more destructive, than had been experienced in all their history.
The unprecedented runoff was due to a chain of events, many of them unusual, which will be described in the first chapter of this account. The meagre warning in this case was due to the early destruction of telegraph and telephone lines in the region of earliest and heaviest precipitation-the Appalachian divide and the mountain slopes on either side. Everyone knew that such a rainfall must be followed by floods, but in the absence of knowledge of the amount of stored-up water which would be released by an early warm rain, no one had any appreciation of the heights which would be attained by the streams. Nor did anyone have reason to expect what had never before happened, that all the streams would rise almost simultaneously and by their confluence bring their united waters to new heights, as for instance at Pittsburgh, Sunbury and Harrisburg, Pa.
Twice before had there been a comparable rainfall over the territory* of the Great Appalachian divide; once on May 31-June I, 1889 (popularly called the Johnstown flood) and again on May 18-20, 1894. But a rainfall in March with remnants of the winter's snow ready to assist in flooding hills and valleys frozen into a solid watershed, is immeasurably more destructive than the same rainfall coming a few weeks later in the year, when the forest floor, the fields, and even steep hillsides, absorb a large portion of the rainfall and permit another large portion to sink into the underground water reservoirs, to seep gradually into the streams, or to be otherwise useful to nature and to man.
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