Stories from the Port Carbon Flood

Michael Johnson-Ponce, Editor|October 25, 2018

During the middle of August, Pottsville was hit with a devastating storm. Roads were closed, basements were flooded, and even band camp was cancelled. While a lot of people felt the effects of the flooding, no one felt it harder than Port Carbon. Many different people have different stories from the day, and these are some of them.

 

Courtesy of Emma Smith
Aaron DeLeon, a senior, is a resident of Port Carbon. He said, “Well, it only affected us a little compared to others. When I woke up, the water was knee level in our basement. The playground across the street was covered, and people on our block closer to the river got hit worse. People on the one block by the river lost a lot, even a bunch of stuff on their first floor. After the first day we had a few power outages that week, and there were dumpsters on a few streets for the people that got hit the hardest.”
Courtesy of Emma Smith
Other students, like Victoria Oswald, don’t live in Port Carbon themselves but were still affected because of their relatives. She said, “My sister lives in Port Carbon, and her apartment building was flooded so the power was out. The issue was that she has a bearded dragon who needs a heat lamp, so we went in a government truck through the flood water as close to her building as we could get. Then I waded through the water to her apartment to take her lizard somewhere warm. It was a wild time.”
Courtesy of Emma Smith
Mr. Schuttler, the middle school’s librarian, is a volunteer firefighter. He said, “We got called down to the station. We were going around … house to house trying to get to people who had been affected by the flood, out of the flood. Once the water receded, then we switched to pumping out basements. We pretty much just set up teams going house to house trying to get to get the water out of their basements, and we did that for the rest of the week. It was a flash flood, so the water came up, flooded, and then dropped again. So once everyone was safe, we had to switch to getting them back to together again. We had to set up a shelter. Some people were in the shelter for a few hours. They assembled a food pantry in town for the people who lost most everything in the flood. Once the basements were done, it switched to some workers coming in and cleaning up all the debris.”
Josh Hamilton, senior, is one of the many football players who volunteered to help clean up the streets of Port Carbon once the flooding had stopped. He said, “The town of Port Carbon was hit very hard by the storm. Many of the houses were under a couple feet of water and their possessions were destroyed. Our job as volunteers was to clear out the debris of destroyed household items and load the items into trucks. It is important to help these victims because it helps to speed up the recovery of Port Carbon.”