[PRCo] Re: 1936___Flood

[Fredbruhn at aol.com]

The 36 flood did indeed, as Titanium Fred suggests, go much further than the
Pittsburgh region.  Co-Op Transit in Wheeling was hit hard.  My grandparents
lived on the residential island in the Ohio River just one block from the 
route 70 North Island line.  My father used to relate that they had a row boat 
tied to the second floor window and after rowing over to North York St. pulled 
themselves along the trolley wire to get around.  
Wheeling folks were used to floods.  Any low area, which included the entire 
island, had mud floors in the basements and flooding was part of life for 
them.  When the water receded, they would bring the furniture back from the second 
floor, clean up the main floor of their homes and get on with it.  I helped 
remove wall paper once for my grandfather and can't remember how many layers 
were there, but that must have been the common fix to the main floor.

While 36 was the big one, after 1907, floods continued to hit Wheeling well 
after the end of trolley service and it was another flood in 1948 that ended 
the last service by a week prior to the scheduled shut down.  This was in April 
1948.

After that the US Army Engineers constructed containment reservoirs, 7 in 
all, in Ohio which flooded thousands of acres but today are recreational areas.