Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.
With a Digital Only subscription, you'll receive unlimited access to our website and e-edition. Our digital products are available 24/7 and are accessible anywhere, anytime.
If you have any questions or need further assistance, please call our customer service team at 716-372-3121 or email nfinnerty@oleantimesherald.com.
As a current print subscriber, you receive 24/7 access to our website and online e-edition at no additional charge. All you have to do is activate your access. To activate digital access, you will need your account number. You can find your account number on any recent subscription notice or bill.
Sorry, no promotional deals were found matching that code.
Promotional Rates were found for your code.
Please log in, or sign up for a new account to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Welcome! We hope that you enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in or create an account to continue reading.
Thank you for reading! On your next view you will be asked to log in to your subscriber account or create an account and subscribe purchase a subscription to continue reading.
Thank you for signing in! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Thank you for reading! We hope that you continue to enjoy our free content.
Checking back? Since you viewed this item previously you can read it again.
Sunshine and clouds mixed. High 79F. Winds W at 5 to 10 mph..
Mostly cloudy. Low 56F. Winds light and variable.
Waters from the Allegheny River flooding of June 1972 rose high enough up Front Avenue in Salamanca to nearly reaching Broad Street. Rescue efforts for marooned residents were underway from the lawn of the United Church of Christ, now Riverside Chapel.
Water pours across the Main Street bridge connecting the two halves of Salamanca’s business district. White pillars of the old City Hall rise out of the murky brown flood waters.
Waters from the Allegheny River came all the way up Main Street to a sandbag blockade at Broad and Clinton streets.
Probably one of the most photographed houses was the Babcock house located in the dip in Clinton Street where water reached the top of the front porch. Much floating debris collected in this backwater area.
Two officers carry a woman out of her River Street apartment during the height of the flood waters.
Water rushes across the southern end of Main Street, flooding businesses. “Sean Connery as 007 in Diamonds are Forever” & “Hangem High” is on the marquee of the Seneca Theater.
The Rev. Gerald Cobb, pastor of United Church of Christ at Broad Street and Front Avenue, uses a rubber raft to inspect the church kitchen where water was over his head the day before.
A school bus plunges underneath Main Street’s Erie-Lackawana underpass where water rose to a level covering the elevated sidewalks more than knee-deep.
Waters from the Allegheny River flooding of June 1972 rose high enough up Front Avenue in Salamanca to nearly reaching Broad Street. Rescue efforts for marooned residents were underway from the lawn of the United Church of Christ, now Riverside Chapel.
SALAMANCA — Fifteen minutes into the morning of Friday, June 23, Mayor Keith L. Reed and Civil Defense Director Paul Formica notified the local news media that they had been in contact with the National Weather Service.
The original NWS prediction — that the water would crest “at about midnight” just short of going over the dikes — had been woefully incorrect.
Arguably the most significant event in Salamanca’s history is the aftermath of Hurricane Agnes and its ensuing floods that rocked the Eastern Seaboard and all communities along the Allegheny River during the last week of June 1972.
The Saturday, June 24 issue currently hanging in the entryway of Salamanca Press offices may not have aged well in the past 50 years, but its bold, black type still jumps off the page as a vivid reminder of the devastation suffered by the city and its residents:
Similar headlines crossed the front pages of the week’s following editions, summarizing the aftermath in equally powerful ways: “Gigantic cleanup job begins as record flood recedes here;” “Cleanup job continues as river drops;” “Loss in flood here may top $6 million.”
Water pours across the Main Street bridge connecting the two halves of Salamanca’s business district. White pillars of the old City Hall rise out of the murky brown flood waters.
THE DAY before the flood, Salamanca’s $3 million federal flood protection system was put to its first real test. Residents up and down the Allegheny River were warned by official forecasters to prepare for the river’s worst recorded flooding in history.
The dikes and flood wall were built to be 1,380 feet above sea level — about five feet above the expected crest around midnight Friday. The previous record flood occurred in March 1956, with the river surging at 1,374.5 feet above sea level, or 15 feet from the bottom of the river off the Main Street bridge.
At noon Thursday, June 22, Mayor Reed, along with Police Chief John Kowalski and Paul Formica, ordered the Main Street bridge closed as a precaution. The river had risen nearly 10 feet in under 48 hours.
“Thank God for those dikes,” Reed said. “As far as we know, there are only two families in the city who are facing any flood threats.”
Waters from the Allegheny River came all the way up Main Street to a sandbag blockade at Broad and Clinton streets.
THROUGHOUT THE city, in bars, stores and kitchens, the constant topic of discussion was the question, “Will the water go over the dikes?” One young Allegany Street couple felt they would be laughed at by their neighbors when they rented a U-Haul van to carry their belongings to higher ground.
A newscaster for WGGO radio drew an elaborate chart to demonstrate, to his fellow news people, that the water “can’t possibly come up.” A Main Street businessman put up $10 that his store would “never see any damage from a flood.”
The residents of low-lying areas recalled the time when, at the dedication of the dikes a year before, Salamanca Common Council members stepped to the rostrum to tell them the dikes would protect them “from virtually any flood imaginable.”
Although the discussion was heated, most Salamancans — especially those in the low-lying areas — could not see the signs of impending danger Thursday night.
By 4:50 a.m. Friday, water was already filling the basements of several Main Street businesses.
Probably one of the most photographed houses was the Babcock house located in the dip in Clinton Street where water reached the top of the front porch. Much floating debris collected in this backwater area.
ONE WOMAN who watched the flood begin from the Main St. area described the scene at the Sycamore Avenue retaining wall saying that “it looked like Niagara Falls by 4:45, but at first it was an irregular flow — every time there was a wave in the river, the water splashed over and down. The waves became more and more regular until it was a constant flow.”
Although businessmen and residents of the affected areas were up most or all of the night, many other Salamancans were shocked upon waking up Friday morning to discover the extent of the damage, and to realize that Salamanca was undergoing the worst disaster in its history.
The fact that the flood took so many people by surprise drew large numbers of sightseers to the flood zone. One policeman described it as “about a hundred persons standing just by the sandbags at Main and Clinton. They stayed there for hours, and no matter what time you went by there, there were always the same people, doing nothing but looking at the water. They were dumbfounded.”
Veterans of many previous floods admitted that they “never saw so much damage” from a flood. The sight of houses flooded to their second floors — and above — was not uncommon. For the first time in history, water was gushing over the railings of the Main Street bridge.
Two officers carry a woman out of her River Street apartment during the height of the flood waters.
PARTS OF the community took years to recover — some never did. Water Street, which used to run parallel to the river south of River Street, has disappeared altogether.
“We would have gotten out, but all the officials told us there wasn’t going to be any problem. Even the weatherman said that the water wouldn’t go over the dikes. We didn’t have any way of knowing,” said one elderly flood victim, adding angrily, “I would have had all my furniture up if they only told us the truth. But then again, maybe they didn’t know either.”
Water from the Allegheny River flooding over River Street came within 2 inches of the front door of the Salamanca-Republican Press, which had been protected with sandbags Thursday night. Although no water actually seeped onto the main floor of the press room, several feet of water ran into the basement, flooding the boiler and storage rooms.
The flood brought the Republican-Press to a standstill for the first time since its reformation from the Cattaraugus Republican in 1904. Regardless, press employees worked throughout Friday, putting out an issue Saturday with nearly 30 pictures of the flood’s effect on the city.
As the waters receded, the deluge of news and photos increased in Monday’s and Tuesday’s editions. Aerial photos were captured by James Weber thanks to pilot the Rev. Gerald Cobb, whose First United Methodist Church was underwater.
One of the most recognized pictures in the Press archives shows a flooded Main Street looking north and the Seneca Theatre in the foreground. “Sean Connery as 007 in Diamonds are Forever” & “Hangem High” is on the marquee. It was the last movie shown there for 41 years.
Water rushes across the southern end of Main Street, flooding businesses. “Sean Connery as 007 in Diamonds are Forever” & “Hangem High” is on the marquee of the Seneca Theater.
RUINED FURNITURE was strewn throughout the flooded area; papers that had originally rested in a desk drawer were hanging in branches of trees along the riverbank; homes that only three days before were in perfect shape were now covered with dirty mud.
On Saturday, June 24, Salamanca homeowners and businessmen got their first good look at the damage done to their property by the flood waters of the Allegheny River.
Garbage and debris were scattered from one end of the flood zone to another. Main Street, which was closed to all but businessmen, apartment owners and newsmen, was strewn with broken cement, glass, ruined merchandise and mud. The sidewalks were so badly undermined that most persons were afraid to walk on them.
The residents of the unaffected areas wondered how the flooded homeowners could return. One flood victim expressed the sentiment of many others when he said, “This was our first really bad flood. We often used to see water in the cellars but had never gotten it on our first floor — not even in 1956. Besides, this is a good, friendly neighborhood. I’ve lived here all my life, and I like it here.”
Some homes, of course, were beyond repair, including one in which the entire first-floor ceiling had collapsed under the weight of the bedroom furniture above. The sight of boys “bailing out” living rooms by pouring the muddy water out of picture windows was not uncommon. Nor was that of people using hip boots to gain access to their kitchens.
Volunteer and paid fire departments from throughout the area, along with the Salamanca Fire Dept. and Volunteer Fire Co., began the slow process of pumping out the water trapped behind the dikes.
The Rev. Gerald Cobb, pastor of United Church of Christ at Broad Street and Front Avenue, uses a rubber raft to inspect the church kitchen where water was over his head the day before.
A CARAVAN of no less than 17 volunteer fire departments from Chautauqua County alone, with 20 additional trucks carrying mobile pumps, rolled along Broad Street early Sunday afternoon, and within one hour the trucks were pumping water from the flooded areas. In addition, nine volunteer fire departments arrived from different parts of Cattaraugus County, as did the Springville Volunteer Firemen of Erie County.
The firemen, however, were not the only ones to volunteer their time and help. The Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Buffalo gave flood victims cleaning equipment, mops and brooms, while teenagers from the Boy and Girl Scouts, Great Valley Youth Camp, Catholic Youth Organization and countless other organizations aided the victims as did friends and relatives.
Capt. Robert Rhoads of the Salvation Army, who headed the clothing and food distribution center at one of the Fancher Furniture Co. warehouses, was swamped with food and clothing donated by local residents, as was Anna Mae Rowits at the Red Cross distribution center.
The food and coffee seemed to be abundant wherever volunteers were working. One unusual donation was a grocery bag full of cigarettes, donated to newsmen at WGGO by a local merchant, so that his friends at the station, in his words, “would have enough nicotine to last them through the flood.”
Meanwhile, the city water supply had become unfit for consumption, as it would be for the next two weeks. A beer company brought in several hundred gallons of pure water; a milk company donated 300 cases of water in milk containers; and Worster Motor Lines, a trucking firm, filled five tankers with water and stationed them throughout the city for the remainder of the disaster.
A school bus plunges underneath Main Street’s Erie-Lackawana underpass where water rose to a level covering the elevated sidewalks more than knee-deep.
CIVIL DEFENSE Director Paul Formica told the Press in 1973 that, to his recollection, “Salamanca never panicked during the whole flood, although there was some confusion during the first few hours. Once we got our leadership, though, we handled ourselves very well.”
Formica, who admitted to having had a total of 4½ hours of sleep — mostly cat napping for 10 minutes at a time — during the flood, praised the city for its self-control. “We had no major looting, no deaths and no vandalism, or none that I’ve heard of. Everybody did a good job.”
He added, however, that the floods don’t have to happen again. Raising the dikes by another two or four feet, investing in a hydraulic wall to be located at the bridge to handle the spillage there, dredging and clearing the river’s several islands from just east of the Clinton Street bridge to the west of the Center Street bridge, there are ways to better streamline the river’s flow.
Despite his feelings that more needs to be done in the area of flood protection, Formica said he was not bitter about June 1972.
“There was one good thing about the whole flood — people came together,” he said. “Neighbors that hadn’t spoken for years were working side by side, cleaning up first one’s home and then the other’s. People from outside the area became good samaritans and gave us all the flood and clothing they could spare. The volunteer firemen gave up their free time to come down and help drain the water from behind the dikes when the water receded.
“Everybody worked as hard as they could, usually for the good of somebody else,” he added. “It’s just too bad that it takes something like that to bring people together.”
(Editor’s Note: Portions of this story come from accounts published in the June 22-24, 1973 editions of the Salamanca Republican-Press written by Mike Collins. Contact managing editor Kellen Quigley at kquigleysp@gmail.com)
Please help local businesses by taking an online survey to help us navigate through these unprecedented times. None of the responses will be shared or used for any other purpose except to better serve our community. The survey is at: www.pulsepoll.com $1,000 is being awarded. Everyone completing the survey will be able to enter a contest to Win as our way of saying, "Thank You" for your time. Thank You!
Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.
Error! There was an error processing your request.
Would you like to receive our breaking news? Sign Up Today!
Want to receive notice about our circulation promotions and contests? Sign Up Today!
Get the latest local and national updates.
Would you like to receive our weekly headlines? Sign Up Today!
Get our expert short-term forecast, summary of the weather details and news of any severe weather.
Would you like to receive our latest obituaries? Sign Up Today!
Would you like to receive our sports news? Sign Up Today!