The Tempest

In the Eastern U.S., the dreadful summer of 1955 will be remembered for a long time to come. Beginning in July, the region was withered by drought and a heat wave, the worst on record, with temperatures in the 90s for a large part of the month. The heat wave had hardly ebbed when Hurricane Connie, the first damaging tropical storm of the season, delivered a lethal swipe from South Carolina to Lake Erie, leaving 43 dead. Last week the waterlogged Northeast was stricken with the worst calamity: a record-shattering rainfall and floods which brought destruction to six states.

Isolated Towns. The floods were mothered by another hurricane, Diane, which swept toward the U.S. from the mid-Atlantic. But Diane turned out to be a weak sister, and soon after hitting the Carolina coast she became a mere squalling rainstorm. When the fading Diane hit the hot and humid Northeast, she released a torrent of rain--the moisture that Diane had sucked out of the ocean when she was still a whirling hurricane. For 24 hours the rains fell from burst clouds, filling rivers and streams, inundating large areas of Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England (see NEWS IN PICTURES).

The worst single disaster struck Stroudsburg, Pa., in the Pocono Mountains, where the usually gentle Brodhead Creek rose 30 terrifying feet in 15 minutes, left more than 50 dead. At Camp Davis, a religious retreat, 31 of 40-odd campers, nearly all of them women and children, were dead or missing. Mrs. Jennie Johnson, a survivor, described it.

After a "regular wall of water" hit her bungalow and started to rip it to pieces, she and her children rushed to a more solidly built house on higher ground, where about 35 others at the camp had fled. As the water rose, the refugees retreated to the second floor, finally to the attic.

"We were terrified, but we couldn't do anything but watch the water coming up toward us. It kept getting higher and higher. When it reached the attic floor we felt the house give a shudder and the whole house collapsed. It just fell apart and all of us went tumbling into a jumble of water, boards and screams . . .

"It must be awful to drown. I went down, down, down and I guess I kept waving my arms trying to fight back to the surface. But I don't know what happened after that. All I know is that something must have hit me in the head and knocked me out." When she came to, Mrs. Johnson discovered that she and a small girl had been cast up on a heap of debris. In the morning Mrs. Johnson learned that her daughter had been saved but that her two sons and 29 other campers were dead.

Floating Cabins. In Winsted, Conn, (pop. 9,000), the serene little Mad River suddenly smashed through the town and isolated it for two days. In Farmington, Conn., little Patricia Ann Bechard drowned when a rescue boat capsized while her horrified mother, Mrs. Leon Bechard, clung to her baby daughter and watched helplessly. A Farmington fireman lashed five-year-old Linda Bartolomeo to a tree, was washed into the floodwaters himself, and later rescued. Red Cross officials found the child safe, 30 hours later. In Seymour, Conn, and Woonsocket, R.I., the floodwaters ripped through cemeteries, uprooted coffins and sent them bobbing downstream.

Probably the most frightening effect of the flood occurred at Putnam, Conn, (pop. 8,200), where the flood destroyed a magnesium plant, setting off white-hot fires. All through one terrifying night, the citizens of Putnam cringed in their homes while hundreds of barrels of burning magnesium floated in the streets, sending geysers of white-hot metal 250 feet in the air.

In his vacation headquarters at Fraser, Colo., President Eisenhower declared six Eastern states disaster areas and ordered federal relief. Swarms of helicopters and Army amphibious "ducks" were pressed into action. In one dramatic helicopter rescue, a fleet of whirlybirds rescued 235 passengers on a stranded Lackawanna Railroad train in the Poconos.

This week, as the Northeast mopped up, the 1955 flood went down in Weather Bureau records as one of the most disastrous in U.S. history. The toll of dead and missing passed 250 and was still rising (the worst on record: the Johnstown Flood of 1889, when more than 2,000 perished), and last week's damage was estimated at well over $1.5 billion.

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