STORM CLEANUP GETS UNDERWAY
Chainsaws, sump pumps, generators busy in the wake of Isaias A PECO crew gathers to begin work on replacing electrical infrastructure on Walnut Street Wednesday in the wake of flooding from Tropical Storm Isaias. Rich Lisowski, who owns the 20-acre farm o
The day after summer flooding hit the greater-Pottstown area, many residents found themselves in a familiar role — cleaning up.
“Remember what you wrote around this time last year? Just copy and paste it,” Andrea Bray told a questioning reporter as she hosed down and brushed off the mud-caked sidewalk in front of her Walnut Street home in Pottstown Wednesday.
Thirteen months after a swollen Manatawny Creek swept into their street and their basements, residents of the zero block of Walnut Street were facing yet another clean-up.
This was the fourth time for Darryl Awer, who has lived in his home for 32 years.
“Oddly enough, both times they were back to back,” Awer said of his flood experiences on Walnut Street.
The water that rushed into his basement stopped “two steps shy of the first floor.”
That may have saved his first floor, but not his furnace, hot water heater or electrical box.
“And all of those were replaced after last year’s flood,” he said.
The water came just as the veterans knew it would. Even though the rain had stopped around 1:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jack Applegate knew the water rushing into the Manatawny and its tributaries upstream would arrive in a few hours.
He was right.
“So over it!” his wife Lisa posted on Facebook, along with photos showing residents being evacuated in the darkness.
Krista Detweiler was no veteran.
She has only lived on the flood-prone street for six weeks.
“I came home at five and saw the water in the park and didn’t think anything about it and I went in and took a shower,” she said Wednesday.
“A while later, I heard a banging on my door and I came out and the water was up to the top of the wheel wells on my car,” she said. She hopped in and backed it all the way up Walnut Street through four feet of water to higher and drier ground. “It was scary,” she said. John Chaney, who has only lived on the street for five
months said his landlord warned him not to keep valuables in the basement. “There are broken washers and dryers still down there from last year,” he said.
The water filled Bray’s basement. “It touched the floorboards, but never came through,” she said.
Having been through it last year, she knew the drill.
“The house doesn’t matter. Grab the kid, grab the dog and leave,” she said, as her 2-year-old son Gideon watched from the front door as she hosed more mud off the sidewalk.
Most said the water began to recede again just before midnight.
Just upstream, while Walnut Street residents and PECO crews surveyed the damage, the damage was evident and familiar to the baseball fields that lie between the creek and street, both named Manatawny.
Although Pottstown Little League’s Novak field seemed to have escaped the broader damage of last year’s flooding, the smaller Grimm Field behind it, and lower-lying Sundstrom Field adjacent were a familiar scene.
Mud was everywhere, as was the debris caught in the flood-ravaged fencing.
Across the still swollenbut-receding Schuylkill River, the hilly woodlands of northern Chester County were buzzing with the sound of portable generators and chainsaws Wednesday.
Although creeks there had also flooded, the area was suffering from a bumper crop of fallen trees, blow off their rain-soaked roots by the blustery winds of Tropical Storm Isaias with reached 75 miles per hour.
A drive through North Coventry, South Coventry, Warwick and East Nantmeal was not an easy thing to accomplish given how many roads were closed due to fallen trees.
One tree on Chestnut Hill Road was laying atop wires and some cars, including a low-lying Honda Civic that didn’t even bother to slow down, slipped beneath the branches to continue on their way.
Not so a larger Federal Express delivery van whose driver balked at trying to make the squeeze.
Rick Lisowski was out with a small tractor and a chainsaw with an extension pole.
He was trimming branches from a pine that was laying across wires at the intersection of Jones and Harmonyville roads. “I’m just trying to take some of the weight off their wires,” he explained when he was finished and had removed his noisedeafening headphones.
The tree was one of several that line Lisowski’s 20-acre farm and “tend to come down whenever there’s a storm,” he said.
It was also one of several down on and still leaning-over Jones Road.
By noon, some had been partially cleared while others, more precariously perched, awaited the expert hand of utility workers on snorkel trucks.
As of 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, PECO reported 51,000 were still without power in Chester County. Another 7,400 were still powerless in Montgomery County
Trees also closed a more traveled road, Route 100, which was closed between Route 401 and Fairview Road.
Traffic was diverted through Nantmeal Village, but one tractor-trailer trying to thread the needle of a one-lane bridge failed in the attempt and as the traffic stacked up, drivers went even more afield in an attempt to reach their destinations.