Too familiar: Residents near creeks, streams begin flood cleanup

Pamela Courie reached her breaking point Thursday when it began raining again.

She and her husband spent hours tearing apart and throwing away flood-damaged pieces of their Lowber home after Sewickley Creek overflowed its banks Wednesday and came rushing in.

“I want to move. I’m too sick to do this. I literally can’t do this again,” the 53-year-old Courie said while standing on her porch, stacked with flood-damaged property.

Her front yard was partially covered with what once was a white carpet.

“It took us a solid year” to recover from a flood in September 2018, Courie said.

The Couries joined numerous families living along Sewickley Creek in the Lowber area, along the Youghiogheny River in West Newton and along Loyalhanna Creek in Latrobe, devoting time and energy Thursday to cleaning up the mess that Mother Nature left behind after four days of rain swelled creeks and rivers in the region.

Towns across Westmoreland, from Ligonier and Latrobe in the east to Irwin in the west, were deluged with between 4.72 and 5.1 inches of rain from Saturday through Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service in Moon.

While others were lucky enough to have the damage limited to their basement, the water covered 2 inches of the Couries’ first floor. The house off Lowber Road was hit with water from a spring, a broken sewage pipe that spewed its putrid contents and, of course, the waters from the creek, Courie said.

J.D. Courie was a little more precise in his description of what the muddy waters did to the basement of his home, which was surrounded by water Wednesday.

“It’s like a dump truck backed up and dumped everything in the basement,” he said as he took a break from the behemoth task of making his house livable again.

A Lowber Road neighbor, Paul and Brenda Hermann and their family, were tearing apart drywall and insulation from what had been a finished basement before Wednesday.

“It came up 5 feet in the basement,” Brenda Herman said. It came up so fast that they didn’t have time to save much, other than family memorabilia. She was awakened by a neighbor at 4:30 a.m. who alerted her that the creek was rising.

Lowber Road residents who thought they were in what the government designated as a 25-year flood plain found out the hard way Wednesday the so-called experts were wrong.

“We thought we were going to be halfway safe,” she said. “This is the second time in almost six years.”

Along the Youghiogheny River in West Newton, Rick Boyd had a group of friends help him move belongings out of his basement to higher ground before the river crested its banks Wednesday afternoon. The river water ran over Collinsburg Road, cutting off access by the West Newton Trail Center.

He and friends were power washing the basement and stacking belongings, including his tools, in his driveway. Small furniture that was flood damaged is headed to the trash heap.

“Seven guys helped us,” Boyd said. “I’m too old to do it alone.”

Boyd, whose backyard opens to the river, said it was the fourth time he’s been flooded since 1984. As bad as it was on Wednesday, it did not cause as much damage as the flood of January 1997, he said.

When asked if it was enough to make him move, Boyd shook his head.

“We’re river people,” he said.

Down Collinsburg Road, Diane Heming was outside watching firefighters pump out some 6 feet of water from her home’s basement. The water ran back through her yard and into the Yough, from where it came Wednesday afternoon.

It was not as bad as in 2018, she said, when the water reached her porch.

Heming said she learned from previous floods to put appliances upstairs or on blocks. Her hot water tank hangs from the basement ceiling, kept above the floor by blocks. She said her furnace might get a new “home” — in her attic.

“There’s nothing of value that I lost,” Heming said.

She said there was only a few feet of water in the basement Wednesday until the pressure of the water broke her basement door. Then the water just came pouring in.

“There was stuff swirling around,” Heming said.

Like others, Heming has no plans to relocate to higher ground.

“I like it here,” Heming said. “People like that it is accessible to the river.”

The Couries, like some other residents, said they do not have flood insurance. The common reason is the cost.

“It was so expensive. We could not afford it,” Pam Courie said.

Residents in some low-lying areas of Ligonier Township were cleaning up from basement flooding.

About 30 homes had some water infiltration in the village of Darlington, as did others in the Green Acres neighborhood near the former Ligonier Beach resort, Township Manager Michael Strelic said.

On Wednesday, motorists had to be rescued from two cars in a flooded section of Route 381, Strelic said.

As of 3:30 p.m. Thursday, that section of 381 — between Route 30 and Club Stable Road — remained closed because of high water, PennDOT reported.

“That floods in much less rain than we had (Wednesday),” Strelic said.