Click here to subscribe today or Login.
The present-day Wyoming Valley levee system was more than 70 years in the making, with initial construction begun in 1938 after the Valley experienced the worst flooding to date two years earlier.
“That was the impetus to really get things started,” Jim Brozena, executive director of the Wyoming Valley Flood Protection Authority, said of the flood of 1936.
At the time, federal dollars funded flood control work, but that work soon halted after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941 and the focus of the Wyoming Valley and the rest of the country turned to World War II.
Flood-control work on the areas of Forty Fort, Wyoming and Exeter was not addressed until the mid-1950s, Brozena said.
“Then the thing pretty much sat there with nothing happening to it until 1972,” Brozena said.
That was the year the Wyoming Valley was hit with the worst disaster to date – the flooding that occurred in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Agnes. The Susquehanna River crested at 40.6 feet.
Following the flood of 1972, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers came to the Valley and completed a great deal of remedial work on the levee system. But it wasn’t until 1996, when the present-day county flood protection authority was created, that the bulk of the work on the levee system received funding necessary to complete the job.
The federal government funded 75 percent of the cost of the nearly $150 million project, with the state and local governments splitting the remainder. That funding would create the approximately 15 miles of flood control systems.
But additional protection was needed to defend the more than 50 communities in five counties that would be affected by the Wyoming Valley’s protections.
The Valley’s levee system would cause a backup of high water in communities downriver and upriver from the Wilkes-Barre area.
The additional protections in place today total more than $200 million.
Still, the Valley isn’t fully protected. The ongoing Solomon Creek project will cost another $60 million. The county is waiting for $10 million to $12 million in additional federal funding to move that project forward, Brozena said.
“When all is said and done, this thing is going to be a quarter of a billion-dollar project,” Brozena said.
And while the massive flood-control project is designed to protect the Valley and surrounding floodplain areas from water levels on par with the flood of 1972, Brozena said there’s really no guarantee of complete safety.
“Obviously, we designed it for the storm of record, but you never bet against Mother Nature,” he said.