1972 Flood & The Grisly Tale Of Flood Exhumed Bodies

On June 23, 1972, Hurricane Agnes dumped 7 inches of rain on the Wyoming Valley causing the river levees to be topped and creating the worst natural disaster in the country up to that time having displaced eighty thousand people. The 50th anniversary is being observed. There are many stories related to the event, but the following is the most grisly from the Times Leader newspaper.


The corpses numbered 2,500.

Ancient bodies tumbling in the muddy Susquehanna River, tossing in the streets, landing in residents’ porches and yards.

Some were in caskets, others were skeletons dislodged from their resting places.

Joe Shaver, Luzerne County’s chief deputy coroner, a congenial man accustomed to the brutal finality of death, stoic at the sight or smell of a corpse, had never imagined a scene as gruesome as this.

But the 1972 Agnes Flood showed no respect for the dead.

The Susquehanna’s raging flood waters tore through the oldest part of the Forty Fort Cemetery along River Street, stealing bodies and caskets from eight feet underground and discarding them with careless abandon.

The U.S. Government and its military, prepared for virtually any disaster, was not prepared for this.

Never before had a cemetery washed away.

The Luzerne County Coroner’s Office, though not responsible for bodies previously buried, took responsibility. No one else would.

Hours earlier, on the morning of June 23, 1972, Shaver and his neighbors clustered on the dike in Wyoming.

“We were concerned. The watermark was only two feet from the top of the gauge, but it dropped and we thought the river crested. Then whoosh. The river was coming the wrong way. It was coming north toward us, and we couldn’t comprehend it. Someone yelled ‘look at the logs,’ and I was straining my eyes to see. The waves were big and they were carrying something.”

A Navy helicopter circled above, then landed near Shaver.

Howard Richards, an engineer, climbed down. Richards had been standing two miles away on the dike in Forty Fort when the Susquehanna flushed.

“He’s the one who told us the river wasn’t carrying logs, it was carrying bodies. He thought there were 10.”

Shaver had no time to dwell on the news.

The out-of-state helicopter pilot shouted to him to jump aboard — he needed help finding his way through Forty Fort to rescue flood victims stranded on roofs and chimneys.

A funeral director by trade, Shaver didn’t like flying.

He hunched in the rear seat, shouting directions. “Turn right, that’s Culver Street … OK, turn left, that’s Walnut.”

They zoomed toward a roof and lowered a seat to 87-year-old Hazle Richards, who was leaning from her second-story window. She clutched her strongbox in one hand and the chains to the helicopter in her other as she was whisked away.

“She climbed in and hugged me,” Shaver recalls, amazed by the woman’s bravery.

They flew her to her husband, Howard, in Wyoming, then made countless other trips to Forty Fort and back.

By nightfall, as the river submerged the Midway Shopping Center between Forty Fort and Wyoming, and after Agnes left no doubt about the power of her destruction, Shaver knew the swirling cemetery bodies were corpses.

Late Saturday, under the direction of Coroner Dr. George E. Hudock Jr., he established a morgue at the historic Swetland Homestead in Wyoming, near a high grade on Wyoming Avenue where the flood water had receded.

“First there were 90 bodies, then 150, then 500. By the time we were through,” Shaver says, “there were 2,500. We had them lined up and down the avenue. Some had been buried since the 1800s in wooden caskets which the flood destroyed. A lot of them were in two-ton concrete
vaults which we couldn’t lift. People from all walks of life came to help.”

Some 40 local volunteers, many who’d never dealt with corpses, rode in Coast Guard boats searching for bodies and caskets. Howard Snyder, who owned a hardware shop in Wyoming, worked through the night welding heavy chains to lift the vaults onto tractor-trailer beds. The U.S. Marine Corps arrived with heavy equipment and manpower. Tobyhanna Army Depot sent body bags.

The stench of death overpowered many of the older volunteers, but they stayed to do paperwork and other chores.

Hudock and Shaver inspected the bodies, attempted to identify them and then placed them in bags. Of the 2,500 corpses, only 36 were ever identified.

“Family members kept stopping by,” Shaver says, “asking ‘Did you find my mother?’ ‘Is my brother’s body here?’ It was sad.”

The coroner’s office needed a burial site, and eventually federal officials contracted with Memorial Shrine Cemetery in Dallas where a mass burial was held.

Shaver, then 37, hadn’t slept for days.

He, Hudock and their volunteers, drenched in mud and grime and the noxious smell of decay, ate late at night at the Wyoming Methodist Church, where more volunteers cooked and fed them.

Arriving at his Wyoming home a week later, so exhausted he could barely stand, he encountered several dozen flood victims his wife had been feeding and clothing.

“So many people were desperate, but somehow we got through it,” he says. “There was an outpouring of help.”

Later, the federal government wanted to list Shaver as a national expert on cemetery floods.

“No,” he said. “Once was enough. I don’t think I could go through it again.”

 

I must be easily confused... Wyoming?? Susquehanna River?? Does not compute. Where is this?

 

We lived about two miles from the river at that time and were not affected. The Lackawanna River though, is a feeder stream of the Susquehanna which runs through town and it backed up since it had no place to empty and flooded parts of the lower part of town.

Wyoming, the state, gets its name from a green valley in northeast Pennsylvania originally purchased from the Iroquois by a Connecticut land company. An Ohio congressman in 1865 first proposed the name—but later, after he saw our dry, wide plains, he wasn’t so sure he’d had the right idea.