![]() The storm might be the worst natural disaster ever to hit the Pa. Look back at how Tropical Storm Agnes hit York County. Photos: Tropical Storm Agnes arrived Jand flooding continued through the week In 10 days, the river discharged more sediment than it had during the preceding decade, researchers wrote in 1976. Sediment plumed out of the Susquehanna and traveled at least 100 miles down the bay - half the estuary’s total length. Records attribute 122 deaths to the storm, along with $2 billion in damages (equal to about $12 billion today). So much raw sewage gushed in that parts of the bay were closed to sports and shellfish harvesting. Thick tree trunks ripped up underwater grasses and threatened boaters’ hulls for weeks. The chocolate-brown Susquehanna River bubbled with debris and spewed into the upper Chesapeake.īuoys floated in, marked with New York placards. It was the worst flooding of the Chesapeake region in modern times. Roads, bridges and telephone lines electrical service and hastily built sandbag levees entire homes - they all fell to Agnes. The combined deluge funneled water directly into the bay's tributaries. ![]() The storm then clashed against a vigorous southbound weather system that had been dumping rain on western New York. It was June, and Agnes had stalled over a huge swath of the bay's watershed from central Virginia to south-central Pennsylvania. When Tropical Storm Agnes crawled up the East Coast in the summer of 1972, it smashed nearly every record for what a storm could do to the Chesapeake Bay. This USA Today Network special report explores solutions to deep threats that flow through New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland as the Susquehanna River feeds the Chesapeake Bay - with life and death.
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