(thoughtful music) - [Andrew] Our River, Susquehanna, the legend is it floods every 14 years.

That's what the geologists tell us, the hydrologists tell us.

This goes back to the times where Indigenous peoples were using this river.

It's also a really flood-prone river in terms of its geology.

So if you look over at the Delaware or the Hudson River, those river beds are super deep.

And when waters come down and rush in, in rain events, the waters can scour the bottom and rip away at sediment and carve out space for waters to go down rather than up.

But the Susquehanna is very shallow.

And as soon as you go down a little bit beneath that sediment, you hit hard rock.

So when water comes in, it just stacks.

It can't penetrate the hard bedrock underneath.

So there's a geological context to our flood risk here, in addition to that kind of social memory of we're gonna be facing another flood like we did with Agnes.

(somber music) (rain pattering) (thunder crashes) - The hurricane that was coming up from the Caribbean was Hurricane Agnes, and it got downgraded over Georgia, and that was gonna be the end of it.

And we read a story saying that Tropical Storm Agnes blows out over Georgia.

We were done with it.

- You look at something like old satellite images of Agnes.

I mean, it really did stretch in the atmosphere across a huge geography.

Like many tropical storms, it came up the Atlantic Coast, kind of cut in through New York, and then sat over Pennsylvania.

- Agnes occurred in June, and it was a little bit of a different kind of storm, right?

(rain pattering) (thunder crashes) A week or so beforehand, there was a lot of water, lot of rain.

And so when Agnes the Hurricane, or remnant tropical storm, came through, the ground was saturated and the water levels were already high.

- [Andrew] There was another cold front coming from the west, which made the tropical storm stall over PA and grow.

(rotors chopping) The full story of Agnes is an American story, but the lasting impact of Agnes, how people's lives were upended, (siren wailing) how waterways were completely transformed, how towns were destroyed and then had to build back, that's a Susquehanna story.

That's a Pennsylvania story.

(shutter clicking) (intense music) Its property damage was $3 billion, but $2 billion of that was in Pennsylvania.

And that's 2 billion in 1972 money.

120 people died because of Agnes, 50 of those in Pennsylvania, the most of any state.

200,000 people in Pennsylvania were rendered homeless from Agnes.

70,000 structures uninhabitable.

So we really feel that impact of Agnes right here in the Susquehanna.

(tornado siren wailing) - We have an early guesstimate of a perhaps 28,000 homes leaning throughout the State of Pennsylvania.

- [Andrew] So many of these towns have an imprint of Agnes on them.

(birds chirping) - When Pennsylvania was really developing in the 1700s, transportation at the time was rivers and streams.

- [Andrew] The river was the old highway.

The river was the center of trade and transport for hundreds of years.

- [Lara] And so some of what you see for our flood vulnerability (boat horn honking) was set in place in the 1700s, 1800s, and later.

- Selinsgrove is an interesting town because it symbolizes our deep history on the Susquehanna.

Isle of Que is the center of all of that.

The Isle of Que is a stretch of houses and buildings that can't be any closer to Penns Creek and the Susquehanna River.

- 1972 changed the Isle of Que forever.

It was tragic, but a year later, it was a better place.

(mouse clicking) I have folks, even in Selinsgrove that say, "Oh, why don't you people just move?

Why don't you get outta here?"

This is my life.

I mean, it sounds goofy, but we literally were on lawn chairs sitting on the front porch here during the flood, and watching all the stuff go by, and you sit there and think, "Okay, God, (laughs) hey, you got this one.

There's absolutely nothing I can do about it."

If you live on the Isle of Que, you can choose to be a representative of resentment of flooding, or you can choose to be a representative of resilience of flooding.

So as a result of 1972, I have never left this house in any of the floods.

- I'm trained as a historian, and I love stories about the past and how we got to where we are today.

If you could only go to one place in the Susquehanna watershed to tell the story of Agnes, you'd have to go to Wilkes-Barre.

- [Reporter] Unbelievable.

South Wilkes-Barre, completely inundated with water.

The water is cresting at the first floor of many and many of the homes.

- The TV news programs were in Wilkes-Barre, and they traveled to Wilkes-Barre nationally.

So you have national coverage, images streaming into TVs all across the United States in Wilkes-Barre.

- I've not seen this sign before.

President Nixon had said this was the worst natural disaster up until that time that hit the United States.

We were trying to get people to fill sandbags and try to stop the water.

And we had the volunteers.

They came out and they worked as hard as they could.

- Wyoming Valley got the reputation of being the valley with a heart.

It has always had that reputation.

It started in Agnes.

- Eventually we learned it was gonna be a losing battle.

The water upstream was just too high, and you can always tell what's going to happen downstream by what's happening upstream.

And so the word finally came out and I was told by General Townend, get on the air and tell people to evacuate.

And I went on the air and said, "Get out, get out now."

Probably in all my years in broadcasting, I'll be remembered most for, "Get out, get out now."

People came back, and their house may have been destroyed completely.

But the thing that they most missed was the personal mementos that they did not take with them.

The wedding albums, the family photo albums.

Homes could be rebuilt, but wedding albums could not be replaced.

- The most important thing, as far as Wilkes-Barre, Kingston, all these areas are concerned, is what you feel in your hearts about your future and the future of your town and the future of your state and the future of your country.

(door handle clicks) (light switch clicks) - So this is our $40,000 water rescue craft.

It's one of two boats.

You'll see, there's some sonar on this boat.

This one actually is from the National Weather Service.

This will predict where the water, the Susquehanna River water, will go.

This is Wilkes-Barre here, okay?

This is the technology that we actually have to work with today that we didn't have back in 1972.

I had a good conversation with Senator Bob Casey's staff.

I mentioned to him, don't cut funding to the National Weather Service.

They track all this data, realtime data, to tell us how much water is gonna fall.

The general public may not think, well, what does National Weather Service have to do with flood protection?

The scientific data they collect for us and they get to us so we can use it in preparation for what might come is hugely, hugely important.

- [Andrew] And if you look at the numbers, Wilkes-Barre got hit hardest, $500 million of damage in Wilkes-Barre, but it's certainly not the only town that experienced Agnes.

(reflective music) - If you look closely here, you can see the water line in this paneling here.

It took me quite a couple years to put these books together, but I tried to figure out how to best present the history of Milton, and up until '72, where we kind of defined another moment in history where the community was very much destroyed by flood.

- People were not prepared.

They didn't think...

It was just gonna be another rising river.

The forecast was misrepresented, and the official reports didn't make it sound as bad as what it did become.

- [Vic] What is happening at this moment may turn out to be one of the worst disasters to hit the WMLP listening area.

- [George] WMLP Radio Vic Michael is threatened with arrest because they said that he was alarming the public.

- [Vic] I would, again, urge that everyone in the area takes all of the necessary steps to protect their homes and property and their own lives.

- He was a hero.

There were many people that took his advice.

- "Boys," he said, "They're making fun of me," but he said, "I sincerely believe that this flood's gonna be a major event to hit our community and our valley.

Take my advice," he said, "Take everything out."

We took everything out of the store but the carpet.

He saved our store and our business.

Today, my daughter still has a business.

- What we're doing next year is the Agnes flood 50-year anniversary.

We're gonna have a community celebration, week-long.

Look at what we've accomplished since then.

(traffic humming) - The doers of each town had to grapple with the impacts of Agnes.

How are we gonna build back?

How are we gonna get back to what we are as a community?

- The Luzerne County Flood Protection Authority has done a really good job to make sure the funding is in place to keep our levee accredited, solid.

- In 1972, as a result of the Agnes flood, the Wyoming Valley was destroyed.

There occurred a levee raising project, the Wyoming Valley levee Raising Project, which raised the level of protection at three to five feet in the Wyoming Valley.

This is a map of the current Wyoming Valley flood protection system.

And together it's approximately 16 miles.

You see a highlight here in blue.

That was the flood extent from the Agnes flood.

That's how wide the flood plane occurred from that flood event.

- There had always been a levee here, but it was much, much lower.

Supposedly this in its present state would certainly contain an Agnes-size flood and perhaps a little bit more than that.

As a matter of fact, we've had water come up higher than Agnes in the area on at least one occasion.

- If the levee-raising project did not occur, the Wyoming Valley would've been destroyed two times in a generation.

- You didn't see a big storm like Agnes again until 2011, when Tropical Storm Lee came through.

- This is Susquehanna Avenue in West Pittston.

It is a war zone.

It is worse than the Hurricane Agnes flood in 1972.

- The wall that's put up in the Market Street Bridge, I mean, there was just enormous pressure at the bottom of just water shooting out.

- We constructed like an earthen dam right up against, as close as we can get 'em to the flood gates without pressuring the wall, 'cause they're designed for some give as the river level increases.

- There was a big difference between 2011 and 1972.

- In Agnes, it was the water came up, flooded everything, and the water went down.

But in the 2011 storm, the water rushed through whole neighborhoods, doing serious structural damage to a lot more property.

- For our area, I would say Lee was probably as comparable to Agnes.

The fire department pumped a lot of basements.

We lost all of our furniture.

We have severe damage to the building.

- You estimate $1 million damage.

- Mm-hmm.

- In '72, they had a foot and a half on the first floor.

So that was kind of our benchmark, too.

We moved things up three feet high, on countertops, on tables.

Well, it didn't help.

It went totally over that.

We had four and a half feet.

(scrap materials clattering) - [Reporter] Do you wish there was a dike?

- Oh, yeah, sure.

- [Reporter] Well, you've got a beautiful, like everyone else on the street, magnificent view.

Would you sacrifice it?

- Oh, absolutely.

I mean, the dike down in Forty Fort, it looks wonderful.

- Mitigation efforts were started because of Agnes, and the shortcomings of some of those mitigation efforts were found because of Lee.

How do you test a levee?

You can't test a levee until the water comes up to a certain point.

I'm exceptionally confident in the ability of that levee behind me to protect the residents of Forty Fort.

(traffic humming) (birds chirping) We are on a bend in the river.

So you have in a high water event, you have all that pressure of the water pushing on that levee and the bend in the river.

- Everyone knows Forty Fort.

You think of Forty Fort, you think of the cemetery.

- We used to have quite an operation here in terms of the cemetery, quite a healthy endowment, but post Agnes, all of that dissipated, and we were left penniless.

Well, we come over here and, because people don't understand this green space out here, and they're pretty much amazed to think it was all cemetery at one time.

Everybody in Wyoming Valley had this book.

- My mother-in-law, my wife's mother, died of cancer in October of 1970.

And my wife and I went to her funeral and internment in the Forty Fort Cemetery.

She was buried alongside my wife's grandparents.

- I think the biggest part of our history, quite frankly, was the losing of those grave sites.

- The Forty Fort Cemetery was protected by a flood wall.

The river topped the flood wall.

- A soaked ground, and the water table is right at the surface of our earth.

There's nowhere for the water to go.

It spreads outward with its pressure, and anything that's buried is gonna pop up.

- And in some cases, in many cases, the caskets just opened, and voided the remains of the deceased.

They had hardly come to terms with the death of my mother-in-law when suddenly she and her own in-laws are missing in the river.

Finally, after a week or two, a number of bodies had been identified.

And so I called the funeral home, identified myself, and she checked her records.

And she said, "Yes, we have Mary Jane with us."

And I felt really great relief.

And I said, "How many other bodies have you been able to identify?"

And she said, "38."

And that was out of more than a thousand.

- The fact is that we are gonna be flooded again at some point.

And this is the weakest link in the whole levee chain coming down the river.

- Flood resistance structures, like walls and levees, they don't always equal flood resilience.

So flood resistance, moving, keeping the water out of my town, sometimes that just pushes the water down to another town.

- In 2011, when that river was coming up, it never had been tested to 42.66 feet.

There was a great amount of concern.

It's never gone this high.

Are we gonna be okay?

- Back in 2011, I was the county director for Luzerne County.

It was many sleepless nights.

I think I didn't sleep for six days straight.

It was probably one of the most scariest times of my life.

- [Police Radio] Go ahead, Steve, go ahead.

- I had the lives of probably 40,000 people in my hands.

- We were actually at the top of the levee.

At Market Street, you could put your hand right over and touch the river on the other side.

- Wilkes-Barre was protected during Tropical Storm Lee, but in a major town right down on that same branch of the Susquehanna, Bloomsburg was destroyed.

- Flood mitigation efforts actually started about 1973 in Bloomsburg.

As a result of Agnes, a committee of citizens got together.

It was called the Fernville Scottown Survival Committee.

And they prodded local elected officials to get involved in trying to provide some protection.

And the seed was planted then, but it took from 1972 to 2013 to put something together that could happen.

(gentle music) - To build this kind of structure, you have to remember to build it to a certain predetermined level.

That's usually a foot and a half above the base flood elevation.

This system is built a little higher than a foot and a half above base flood elevation, because we had information relating to the Tropical Storm Lee event in 2011, that was determined to be, eh, close to a 500-year flood.

So there are sections of this wall that are two and a half to three feet above that base flood elevation.

- Some people I met from Bloomsburg, they call that town Floodsburg.

- Well, I think the one thing that Agnes did, and the subsequent floods, 'cause we've had numerous other floods since Agnes, was that it demonstrated Bloomsburg's vulnerability economically.

- So yes, this was the first section, because we primarily wanted to protect these businesses.

The reason that we started the flood control project in the first place was primarily to protect these two major employers that affected not only the town and the county, but the region overall.

In a community the size of Bloomsburg, you lose 300 jobs, you've lost a meaningful, significant part of your economy.

- You need this relief valve of this area back here for the water to come out of the banks of the park and sit here in the flood plain, and then go back down when it goes down.

You have that storage area for high water events so you're not just pushing the water downstream to the next area that doesn't have flood protection and causing a problem for them.

- But to this day, homes are still in jeopardy.

And I know you've seen the flood wall that has been built largely to protect the industries and protect our school facilities.

But there are still a lot of homes in danger of flooding.

And if, and when, not if, but when another flood occurs, the damage will be repeated.

- It was a time where communities that aren't protected by levees, West Pittston, Jenkins Township, Pittston City, Shickshinny, Plymouth Township.

I knew people were going to have catastrophic damage, and their lives were gonna change forever.

- In 1972, when the levee broke in Wilkes-Barre, the water had some place to go, and that's what saved West Pittston from the devastation, because it stopped and spread out.

What happened in 2011, the levees along the Susquehanna, they proposed sections to be added.

One was the West Pittston Exeter section.

- The scope of work and design of the Wyoming Valley levee raising project essentially occurred from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties.

And at that time, a levee or flood-protection system was being proposed in West Pittston.

- The Exeter portion was built.

They cut out West Pittston because it would save $24 million.

That's why we flooded in 2011, because there is no levee.

- It became apparent that they were somewhat resistant against a flood protect system being in West Pittston.

- Everybody is saying that we didn't get a dike because we didn't want it.

- And I know there were rumors going back and forth that the residents of Susquehanna Avenue voted at one time that they didn't want a dike.

- There was no voting, it was not a vote.

- I certainly would like to have a dike in front of my house.

- And as the project evolved and the project costs started to escalate beyond what was originally allocated by Congress, the Corps of Engineers was looking to reduce the scope.

- And I approached somebody from the county, and they said, "That's absolutely not true.

The Army Corps of Engineers said it was not cost effective to put a $50 million dike up when only 130 homes were damaged during Agnes."

- Bottom line is in order to spend federal dollars on constructing a project, the economic benefits of the project have to outweigh the costs.

So the economic benefits are the reduction in future flood damages.

The benefit/cost ratio is what we call it, the BCR, has to be greater than one in order for the federal government to pay for our project.

So for West Pittston, I know the Corps actually looked at a levee when the original Wyoming Valley levee project was being designed.

And the benefit/cost ratio was 0.37 at that point.

Also, in order for the Corps to build a project such as that, it has to be environmentally acceptable and supported by the community.

- Well, this is a newspaper clipping from 1989.

The headline here says, "Some West Pittston residents oppose levee project," kind of a headline right here, "West Pittston residents voice opposition to plan."

Well, this is historic information.

It's archived information.

How often do you have a $200 million flood protection system being built in your community?

By having this vocal opposition from the community saying that they don't want it, well, I think they kind of supported the Corps of Engineers' decision to remove it from the overall Wyoming Valley project.

The design scope of work, it occurred over a long period of time.

And during that time, costs just increased with time, and the cost started to surpass what was originally allocated by Congress.

And so the Corps was forced to look at ways to reduce costs, to get it more in line was with what was allocated.

(water rushing) - Now the cost of a levee is $57 million.

The move is to follow what Bloomsburg did and finance it ourselves, in the sense of we will get the grants to piece it together.

- I sat in a number of meetings about a levee in West Pittston, and I get it.

I mean, they got pounded.

There was no question, 2011, they really got beat up.

I think it was two years ago with the ice jams.

There's a lot that needs to go into the thought process of levees.

- In our great Commonwealth, a lot of decision-making goes right down to the township.

So how do the individual towns sacrifice for the greater good of the region?

How do different regions sacrifice for the greater good of the watershed?

Water doesn't care about these things.

Rain doesn't care about these things.

This is a human concern.

And it's one that floods bring to the surface, that we need to address, if we really do care about the greater good.

- The flood map was revised this year.

They're expecting a six-inch increase in the river level because of all the flood mitigation that's taken place north of us.

There used to be, when the river came over the bank here, at our house, you used to have eight hours to do whatever you were gonna do.

Unfortunately, in 2011, that didn't happen.

We had like a two-hour window.

- You know, the physical construction of the Wyoming Valley Levee Project, it's long been complete.

However, there's a mitigation component of the project That we are still trying to execute.

And as part of the mitigation program, there was a flood reduction program with five counties, and each county was allocated funds for them to execute mitigation projects.

- We've taken control of the river at the expense of other people.

And they will be quick to say, "Oh my gosh, Snyder County got compensated for it."

Well, yeah, they did.

But that compensation is okay, we gave you this money, but for the rest of time, (laughs) you guys are gonna have more water.

You won't pay us that every year?

But it doesn't work that way.

It's like a one time payment.

Oh, well, we're gonna compensate you.

And folks up north will be quick to point that out.

"Oh, you got compensated."

But the compensation doesn't even come close, in my opinion.

- In my opinion, the impact probably is not as significant as most people think it is, because once it leaves that area that is protected by the wall or levee, it has the opportunity to spread out.

Now, certainly right outside, or just below where the wall or levee ends, the impact is higher.

But based on the experiences that I've had over the last 32 years of being an emergency manager, I don't know if it's as significant as people believe it to be.

- No, it's not, resentment isn't the right word.

I believe that the land that they have protected that isn't gonna flood, somewhere a like amount of land should be open to flooding.

- How do you stop the flooding?

Answer is you can't, but you can address the impacts of the flooding.

- If some of the decision makers after Agnes were here, they would be so concerned that we're talking about flood resistance structures as the major method for protection of flood communities.

- The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was very much a, we will build a gray concrete structure to protect against this.

There's been a fundamental shift now to really think of how do we live with the water.

- Flood protection systems or flood mitigation systems are, I'm not gonna say a thing of the past, but you're not gonna see as many of them put in anymore.

It's now mitigating, let's buy the property that's now in the floodplain and make it a park.

- We've bought out approximately 30 homes.

People were willing to take the buyout packages and relocate.

That area becomes what's called green space.

That area can never be built on with permanent structure again.

- If I have a house that regularly floods, and I take it down and remove it from being flood-prone, I've lost part of my tax base.

- If you think about all these small towns, Milton, Lewisburg, Sunbury, Selinsgrove, their major tax base is in the flood plain, right?

This is how they draw on operating budget to operate their towns.

And if you're asking small towns to evacuate the floodplain, what kind of footing does that put them on financially?

- The municipality that agrees to take ownership of that land knows that that is no longer going to be on the tax rolls.

They don't have to go and do pumping operations if the basement is flooded , no longer having to pay response costs for going to that home and potentially rescuing individuals.

So there is a cost savings, but it may not necessarily equate to what they would receive in tax compensation.

- Is sandbagging still... - We used to have to put out thousands and thousands of sandbags.

Now in place of them, we have log wall structures and roller gates.

All the old fashion stuff's basically gone away.

- The amount of labor involved to not only fill and place the sandbags, but you have to get volunteers.

And I was thinking, why are we relying on 1930s technology to protect the valley?

There's gotta be a better way.

- Again, there's no new solution out there.

I think that's what you're getting at.

Is there something new we can do?

It's... - One of the things that people have suggested for many, many years is dredging of the river.

- It always comes up.

It always comes up.

Just dredge the river.

We'll never have to worry about it again.

Well, it's not quite that simple.

- Unfortunately, dredging of the river is not a cost-effective measure, because ultimately within three to five years, all of that sediment would be back in place.

Walls and levees, at this point, for the most highly populated areas are currently the best option.

- 40%, more than 40% of the damage from Agnes in Pennsylvania came in communities that did have levees.

So as the waters got over top, people had a false sense of security.

They were trapped.

- '72, our levee system wasn't as high as it is now.

We didn't have the pumping stations and the closure apparatuses we have in place today.

So '72 was devastating to the town.

They took motor boats up the main street of town.

- And then in 2011, we were very fearful that we were going to experience the same thing, and suddenly the water stopped.

Not in the basements, but on the street level, the water just stopped rising.

And it was because of the flood mitigation projects that had been implemented, and this area was safe.

But the folks on the other side of the railroad track, the school, the businesses in that area, they weren't as fortunate.

- We had flooding downstream on Mahoning Creek because that part of the project wasn't completed yet.

And now that is, and hopefully we have enough devices in place if it gets that high again, we don't have any problems other than running pumps.

- When people complain about investments in things like flood mitigation, it would be great if they could see the results of those projects in action, because that's what we witnessed here in 2011.

I don't know if you're familiar with Sunbury.

Do you know Sunbury?

- [Interviewer] Yes.

- Their wall protected them in Agnes.

It held, which everybody was fingers crossed that that concrete wall was going to hold.

It did.

And it saved them.

(shutter clicks) - One criticism that we received at the newspaper is that our coverage during that week was Sunbury-heavy, but Sunbury wasn't flooded.

Well for us in Sunbury, the story was, wow, look.

Look at this close call we're having.

People in Sunbury really disliked the wall.

It spoiled their beautiful view of the river.

Since June 24th, 1972, I've not heard anybody say that.

We were ordered by the mayor to evacuate the city, and everybody, because the water was so high on the wall.

And we went down by the Fabridam, and we looked up, and I remember looking up and seeing the water lapping over the wall.

And I say to myself, "My God, if that wall were to break right now, we're dead."

I'd never seen so much water in my life.

It was right here.

And I started taking pictures.

(shutter clicks) - This is an iconic photo in our region of Hurricane Agnes.

This is the flood wall in Sunbury.

And look at the water level.

This is right at the top here.

This is taken by John Moore.

- Well, this is part of my legacy.

Reporters really live for the big story, and don't let any of them kid you, they do.

And suddenly when you have one, and it's not the kind of story that you want to be a part of, well, you embrace it.

You do what you have to do.

The wall was never designed to withstand the pressure that it held against in '72.

Now that it's so many years older, I have no idea how safe it is.

(truck door thunks) (engine stirs) - A few years ago, we did what's called ultrasonic guided wave testing.

We hooked some probes to the interlocking pilings, which is the steel pilings that were driven down that the wall is built on.

And we were able to access some and did these ultrasonic guided waves to test the integrity of it, to find out how good everything is that you can't see underground.

And everything seemed to be fine.

Anytime there's cracks, anytime there's holes, spalling, they're repaired immediately.

If you go up and down Front Street and look, you'll see, you won't find a crack in there, because we keep it well maintained.

I live in the flood, an area that could possibly be impacted, and I feel confident in it.

(gate clunks) With our flood mitigation system surrounding us, it creates like a bowl effect, where the water comes in, and then with the levee and walls in place, there has to be a way to get that water out of the city, out into the waterways.

So then the pumps come into play.

(water trickling) (lever clicks) (pump roars) (door clanks) (water gushes) (door clanks) Very few people have flood insurance in the community.

I don't personally.

- [Interviewer] In Sunbury?

- In Sunbury.

Yeah, yeah.

- The advertisements in some of these papers that came out after the storm, there's many more advertisements for insurance.

Here's one right here.

This one's about relief insurance.

There was only three insurance policies across the entire Susquehanna watershed prior to Agnes.

No one had flood insurance.

- I have flood insurance, - [Interviewer] But that doesn't do that much for you, does it?

- No, it doesn't.

- I know the insurance companies will probably really, really give us a hard time on giving us the full 250, even.

- [Interviewer] I'm wondering about flood insurance in this are.

Is it... (man laughs) - It sounds like it's a big... - The National Flood Insurance Program across the country didn't exist.

It was a program that was implemented by the federal government, which allowed individuals to go out and purchase federally-subsidized flood insurance.

- A federally-backed mortgage requires flood insurance if you're in that flood zone.

That may be a bill they're just never expecting.

So there's a number of different ways that this is catching people by surprise in Pennsylvania.

- The federal government and FEMA has new flood maps that project where the Susquehanna River will go.

- Flood insurance is a big deal.

We're going through a problem right now with flood insurance because FEMA is redrawing the flood maps based on 1955 data.

- Forty Fort, they've infested a lot of money in their stormwater infrastructure, with regard to pumps, increased pipe sizes, to get the water from the streets to our pump stations, and the preliminary maps don't reflect that investment in infrastructure.

And I've been frustrated by the Corps' response, and we approached them about a year ago.

- We've done a lot of information sharing with FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers, but they don't have the budget to review the information.

So unfortunately, flood insurance rates are gonna go up.

- Our levees that we have in Wilkes-Barre, like the Brookside levee, we're going through accreditation, and it's expensive to get our own levees accredited.

- All flood protection systems now have to be certified through FEMA.

What certification is, it proves that your protection system will handle a 100-year event without any adverse effects on the community.

If it's not certified, the federal government, insurance companies, all look at it as if there is no flood protection system here, and everybody's paying through the nose.

- I have had individuals come in telling me they're paying $3,000 a year for flood insurance.

Our borough has the Hospital Run Upper Susquehanna Levee.

There is a Lower Susquehanna Levee.

There's a Mahoning Creek Levee.

And then we also have a Seckler Run Channel System.

The Upper Susquehanna Hospital Run is certified, but unfortunately none of the other systems are currently certified.

Even though the levees work, they are not acknowledged on the FIRM map, which determines insurance rates for individuals living in those areas.

The reason that our systems aren't certified is because the proper permitting was never submitted to FEMA for prior review before the systems were built.

After we appealed to FEMA for the remapping, they basically changed the name of our flood protection system, indicating that the system works now as a whole.

So in my opinion, that to me is a green light that there's a good possibility of our, acknowledgement of our system.

- We were interviewing people in the borough of Muncy, and somebody said, "I can live with flooding.

I can't live with flood insurance."

- Flood insurance prices have increased dramatically, because there have been so many floods.

- We have three large pumps, diesel powered engines that are capable of pumping 100,000 gallons of water a minute, each pump.

And we've already had a flash flood where these three pumps couldn't keep up to it, and it came over the wall.

- Since I think the fifties or sixties, we've seen a 55% increase in the heaviest storms.

Those are the storms that are 1% chance or more of occurring, where you have just a huge amount of rain come down at a time.

- The frequency of our high velocity rain events, first and foremost, has definitely increased.

I mean, we coordinate that information with the weather service out of Binghamton.

I mean, we know that we will, at some point this summer, I have no doubt in my mind that we will have a rain event where we get severe thunderstorms, these high velocity rainstorms, that will dump 3, 4, 5, 6 inches of rain in a couple hours.

And once that happens here with as steep as the terrain is, all bets are off.

- It's very difficult to design a project that can prevent flooding with that type of a situation.

- And then it was starting to be curious like, well, what is happening with flooding in Pennsylvania?

Oh, wow.

This is a really big issue.

And it's getting worse.

- Flooding in Pennsylvania is our number one threat.

- We had one in 2016, we had one in 2017.

We had two in 2018.

We didn't have any in 2019, which was an off year.

We had one in 2020, and we had one in 2021.

I've lived here my entire life, and I don't ever remember having them that frequently.

- These, what were hundred year events, are now 40-year events, are now every-10-year events that we're going to be seeing.

- We have a lifestyle that in many ways creates conflict with what nature's going to impose upon us.

- I'm a believer in climate change.

- The climate is definitely changing in Pennsylvania.

(gentle classical string music) - I mean, if you believe in global warming, we're seeing more frequent and intense storms.

And so we are trying to make the existing flood-protection system as resilient as possible.

- We've always considered the climate change, no matter what the administration was saying.

It was something that we looked at, we evaluated in all of our studies and projects.

- Another way to think about it is, is global weirding.

We're just seeing odd things.

(house crashes) - [Man] Oh my God.

- Since 1998, approximately 94% of the flood reports that have been issued to the National Weather Service by the general public have occurred outside of the special flood hazard area.

- We can keep an eye on the Susquehanna River.

We can take a look three days out.

The problem that we have in Wyoming County now is our creeks and streams of Wyoming County have been, in the last 50 years, have expanded wider and shallower.

- Where we get the bulk of our issues are actually not the river anymore.

Of course it was during Agnes.

It's from those feeder creeks that go into the Susquehanna.

- 1972 With Agnes, Fishing Creek backed up because of the river rise.

But in the 2011 flood, Fishing Creek flooded by itself with torrential volumes that came down.

- This is the Borough of Berwick.

This creek floods every time.

- A lot of our flooding, we have a lot of streams that come.

We have a huge watershed that eliminates through Seckler Run.

- That's kind of our biggest issue.

It's the items that are falling into the creek from previous storms and trying to get those creek beds cleaned back out.

- We don't have the technology in those creeks.

Myself and my deputy have gotta be out there on the road, keeping an eye on.

You know, what is it?

Where is it, that we could get into a situation?

- Because that's what this is.

It's an emergency operations coordination center.

We coordinate a lot of the activities.

If somebody needs something somewhere, they let us know.

We go find it wherever we need to.

This is where we actually can sit here and chat with the folks up at the National Weather Service.

This is real time data.

This just came in at 11:06 here, and we can go anywhere.

Here's the river gauge in Towanda.

Typically what happens is whatever Towanda sees, it'll affect us about eight hours later.

- They didn't have that warning system.

They didn't have the technology that we have today to say, "You know what?

This is gonna go bad."

I think we're safer if the information is utilized and correct actions are taken.

There are people out there that don't want to pay attention to that information.

- If you live, especially here on the Isle of Que and you don't have a boat, if you don't have access to a way off the Isle of Que, do not stay.

- And all of a sudden they're hit with a flood.

They're on their kitchen cabinets, dialing 911, saying, "We need to be rescued."

That's dangerous.

- I said that I stay here.

I do stay here.

But I have a flat bottom boat.

I can motor across the field over to the bypass, which is, what, 250 yards out my back door.

And I can walk to safety.

If somebody has to come to get you during the flood, then please, go over town.

- I mean, now we're putting crews.

Now we're putting crews out on the water, out on swift water with debris, and making an attempt to rescue these people, which if they had plenty of warning, why didn't they leave?

That's dangerous.

That is very dangerous.

And I mean, in '72, I was a young member of a fire department then, but we were bringing in National Guard helicopters and rescuing people off of roofs.

We were flooded throughout Wyoming County, Tunkhannock.

(shutter clicks) - You feel for all these businesses and stuff downtown here to have to go through that again, because, just like like Groundhog Day, it just keeps going over and over and over, it seems, you know.

It takes a community to put a place like this back together again, and all these stores, it really does.

It's not just the owners themselves.

It takes a lot of people to help out.

And that's one of the things that did happen.

- One of the sad things is that you realize that with the passing of 50 years, a lot of the people who were so instrumental in doing kind things and helping people and making this community realize there would be another day, are gone.

If there's anything to celebrate during that awful period, it's how wonderful people were to each other.

- Once people saw the disaster, they also saw their neighbors facing the same disaster.

- [Reporter] How do you feel about so many young people turning out to assist in this?

- It's great.

Everybody's helping, and everybody's working together.

- It nurtured a sort of we're-all-in-this-together feeling.

And that led to a feeling of we can all beat this, working together.

- What we saw was people helping people there.

Will that happen today?

Yeah, I think so.

- There are good people in this valley.

There are good people in this commonwealth.

If this would ever occur again, yes, we will be the valley with the heart again.

And we will do what's right for our neighbors, our family, and our friends.

- For a few days, political animosities would be submerged, and they would help each other.

But then the animosities would return very quickly.

- These communities are worth protecting.

These communities are worth investing in, and we'll keep coming back to them.

'Cause we're gonna have floods.

There's gonna be some damage.

Hopefully it's not the scale of Agnes.

And after those floods, there might be a question in our minds: do we give up?

Do we just write off on this community and relocate, move out?

You'll hear that.

But you'll also hear people say, "No, these places are worth investing in.

They're worth protecting and rebuilding again."

♪ All my life, I've heard stories of '72 ♪ ♪ Hurricane Agnes brought the river up to 32 ♪ ♪ Feet ♪ ♪ Well, I thought that that record would stand ♪ ♪ For all of my life ♪ ♪ But the river might hit 32 later tonight ♪ ♪ The river looks angry ♪ ♪ After four days of rain ♪ ♪ She's gonna remind us ♪ ♪ Who's in charge again ♪ (guitar soloing) (harmonica soloing)