Death toll at least 16 for Northeast floods

‘Visions of Katrina’
At least 16 deaths in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and New York were blamed on the storms and the flooding. In New York’s Sullivan County, searchers found the body of a 15-year-old girl whose house collapsed as she stood on the porch waiting to be rescued.

Searchers also found the bodies of two Maryland boys, ages 14 and 16, who were swept away earlier this week after they went to look at a rain-swollen waterway.

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people in and around Wilkes-Barre began returning home. Officials said at least 50,000 people obeyed Thursday’s evacuation order, some of them because of Hurricane Katrina’s example, or the trauma inflicted in 1972, when the remnants of Hurricane Agnes caused 50 deaths and more than $2 billion in damage in Pennsylvania.

“I think we all have visions of Katrina in the back of our minds,” Hank Rodolski, director of the city health department, said as he guided senior citizens onto the school bus that would take them back to their apartments and nursing homes.

‘Dodged a bullet’
Officials said they did not expect the river to rise above the city’s new 41-foot flood barriers, but worried that the pressure might cause the levees to fail.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said the state had “dodged a bullet.”

“That evacuation was smart, it was proper, it was appropriate, it was made in the name of caution,” Rendell said. He said a levee failure could have resulted in a “New Orleans-type situation in Wilkes-Barre.”

Noting the success of the Wilkes-Barre levees, New Jersey’s governor suggested that a similar cure was needed along the Delaware. “Repeat problems demand some kind of action be taken, judgments made,” Corzine said.

Officials in Plymouth Township, Pa., a community of about 2,100 people downriver from Wilkes-Barre, estimated more than 100 structures were damaged. Many homeowners had fixed up their places after floods in 2000 and 2005.

“If we could get rid of this house and move, we’d definitely move to higher ground. No doubt about it,” Robert Dunn, the township’s emergency management coordinator, said as he pumped out his basement. “It’s not the way to live.”

‘Rackets and birdies’
In Johnson City, N.Y., the swollen Susquehanna dropped several feet, giving some residents a chance to survey the damage and start cleaning up.

Erin Davis and her boyfriend, Chris Newton, both 25, took a break with a short game of badminton in the waist-high water in the street.

“We were cleaning when I saw a table top float by with the rackets and birdies,” Newton said. “We’re just trying to make the best of a bad situation.”

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