NEW BETHLEHEM \u2013 Former New Bethlehem police officer and fire chief Barry Fox woke to an emergency call on the morning of July 19, 1996 \u2014 the Brookville Fire Department needed assistance and his community would soon be in jeopardy.<\/p>\n
Unbeknownst to Fox when he turned in during the early morning hours after his shift, neighboring Jefferson County had received six to nine inches of rain in less than 12 hours, causing Red Bank Creek to swell.<\/p>\n
\u201cI worked the night till 2 o\u2019clock [in the morning] and it was raining, it wasn\u2019t anything bad. I went home and went to bed,\u201d Fox recounted. \u201cAt 6:30 [a.m.] the fire whistle blew and control called me and I said, \u2018What\u2019s going on?\u2019 Dispatch said, \u2018Brookville needs your boat and some manpower, they\u2019re getting flooded.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI said, \u2018If Brookville is getting flooded we\u2019re going to be getting flooded.\u2019 The dispatcher goes, \u2018Aren\u2019t you underwater yet?\u2019 I said, \u2018No, it\u2019s nice outside.\u2019 The sun was shining, it was getting hot.\u201d<\/p>\n
Knowing New Bethlehem would feel the effects of what was happening upstream, Fox and members of the fire company undertook the task of notifying the unsuspecting town.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went down to the fire hall, rounded up our boat, put it on a truck, and a crew headed up to Brookville,\u201d he relayed. \u201cThen we went out; it was a hot, muggy, miserable day. When we started telling everybody, the sun was shining. We knew it [the flood] was coming down.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe went out and we warned people and they just looked at us, \u2018You\u2019re a bunch of drunk firefighters. What are you talking about? There\u2019s nothing going on.\u2019 They didn\u2019t heed the warning, a lot of them, you really can\u2019t blame them \u2014 we had no cell phones, people didn\u2019t have scanners, they didn\u2019t know what was going on up in Brookville or Summerville.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fox also began seeing some worrying signs, \u201cI went down to the creek, right at Gumtown Park, and the creek was lower than it ever was, it was just low. We [the late Bob Stahlman and Fox] stood there for an hour and all of a sudden the creek got muddy and it started coming up and it just kept coming up.<\/p>\n
\u201cStarting about 8:30 [a.m.] it really started coming up. The creek got muddy and everything else, but everybody kept saying, \u2018It\u2019s never got this high,\u2019 and it just kept coming up. It wasn\u2019t like a flash food. We had time to get to people and once they realized it was coming up, they started moving [to safety]. That\u2019s the Godsend, it was slow.\u201d<\/p>\n
The rise of the creek trapped some who delayed evacuation, including those renovating the high school who had to be rescued from the building\u2019s roof by helicopter.<\/p>\n
For Fox, rescuing the Evans family from their home at the corner of Lafayette and Water streets was personally memorable.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey got trapped and we ended up going down there. Mr. Evans was hanging on to his dog, hanging on to the side of the building, his wife was still in the house. I was in waist deep water because we couldn\u2019t get a boat in, it was too swift.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got him and we went in and got her out, and while we\u2019re doing that the control center calls me and says, \u2018There\u2019s a tornado in your area [Shannondale].\u2019 I said, \u2018What do you want me to do about that? I\u2019m waist deep in water.\u2019 There\u2019s not much you can do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eventually flooding submerged much of the town, including the Broad Street business district, with some buildings swept away. Despite this, no lives were lost.<\/p>\n
The bridge crossing the creek on Route 66 remained standing, the superstructure catching debris coming downstream.<\/p>\n
According to Fox, that proved to be a blessing, \u201cThe bridge acted like a dam, that really helped New Bethlehem because all the debris stayed in the main channel \u2014 all the logs, all the poles, all the houses, everything stayed in the main channel.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had electricity the whole time because the debris stayed in the channel. The debris would have come down along [Route] 28 and wiped out all the power poles, the houses, the buildings would have been flattened. It made a mess [in the town], but it was all muddy water.\u201d<\/p>\n
Contrary to rumor, none of the flooding that day in New Bethlehem could be attributed to Brookville\u2019s dam failing.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone said, \u2018Oh, the dam broke in Brookville, that\u2019s why we got the water.\u2019 No, we didn\u2019t get the water from the dam in Brookville [failing],\u201d Fox noted. \u201cI had a meeting with the Army Corps of Engineers [later], the dam in Brookville is the same as we have down here, it doesn\u2019t hold a whole lot of water back.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was all the water coming into the Red Bank Valley basin from Brockway, Punxsutawney was getting it, and everything else there was all those little tributaries come down, and it just was a wall, you know, a wall [of water that went over the top of the Brookville dam].\u201d<\/p>\n
By late afternoon\/early evening, the creek had crested and water began receding, revealing the extent of the damage, notably a layer of mud coating everything.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce the flood went down, the real work started of trying to get the place back where people could actually live; get the town opened up so people could travel through,\u201d Fox commented.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had several fire companies coming in to help us. After it started receding, they just walked, just kept moving up, hosing things down, the streets.\u201d<\/p>\n
The subsequent clean-up and recovery, which in some instances took months to accomplish, was, per Fox, a testament to the community\u2019s solidarity.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis town came together like you wouldn\u2019t believe.\u201d he observed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI mean, everybody has their own problems, but during that time of the flood, nobody had a problem. Everybody worked together.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW BETHLEHEM \u2013 Former New Bethlehem police officer and fire chief Barry Fox woke to an emergency call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250221,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[153,155,154,21450,103593,28891,35651,9059,106981,9057,9056,28,6592,5693,106980,1133,38414],"class_list":["post-250220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem","tag-bethlehem-headlines","tag-bethlehem-news","tag-bridge","tag-brookville","tag-dam","tag-debris","tag-flood","tag-fox-broadcasting-company","tag-natural-disasters","tag-natural-hazards","tag-pennsylvania","tag-storms","tag-stream","tag-vortices","tag-weather","tag-weather-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250220\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}