Drag Irene's prunings to Spring Grove

While Vermonters are digging out from Irene's deluge of rain, most of York and the rest of the east were relieved to have Irene slide past with just a slap, not a punch.


Just the same, Irene pruned plenty of trees, uprooted a few more, leaving York Countians with a truck load of branches, leaves and sticks. If you live in York, you only have to keep yard waste until Saturday, since it's the first Saturday of the month, and that's the only time Yorkers can dump massive amounts of yard waste at the city site. Imagine if Irene happened this week-- you'd be stuck with piles of shrubbery until next month. Lovely.

And people wonder why they find piles of limbs and leaves dumped along the creek. Clean your yard, show you care for your neighborhood, and keep a pile around for a month. Something just isn't right. Of course, Yorkers can fill their yellow recycle cans once a week for collection, but that still might leave a pile the size of a small car.

Here's another idea-- fill your pickup or trailer as many times as you want and trek to Spring Grove's H & H Excavating and Construction. From sunset to sunrise, seven days a week, you can dump your yard waste (not grass clippings!) and watch the pile turn into mulch. Don't try to dump anything else there-- surveillance cameras are watching. You're rid of your unsightly pile of sticks, and H & H makes their pile a bit higher.

Everyone wins.

Hurricane Agnes, Irene and disaster somewhere else

      This weekend's Hurricane Irene killed at least 21 people in eight states. That number was relatively low, emergency personnel say, because officials from South Carolina to Vermont preached about the storm's danger all week. People apparently listened and got out of town. On Sunday, Route 30 was loaded with cars heading back home to New Jersey, Delaware and New York-- even more, it seemed, than normal tourist traffic.

This house  floated 5 blocks. 1972 Rapid City, SD.   USBS

      Throughout the northeast, people remember Hurricane Agnes, a 1972 disaster of historic proportions which killed 48 Pennsylvanians, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Agnes formed in Mexico, crossed over the US southeast and stormed over New York City, like Irene. But unlike Irene, Agnes stalled over northern Pennsylvania and southern New York. She just stood there and churned for days, dumping rain. Much of it went into the Susquehanna River watershed, flooding Wilkes-Barre, Harrisburg, York and everything along the way. Before it dissipated, Agnes had killed 130 people in the U.S.  

     River dams were beyond capacity; Conowingo Dam has never seen another week like that. Some experts predicted a dam failure, which would have destroyed much of what was down river.

     Even people who weren't here yet (like me) or too young know about Agnes. Awful, amazing and deadly Agnes.

     But--  Just a week before, a flood and dam break killed 238 people --nearly double Agnes' total-- in Rapid City, South Dakota, and it's generally lost in history to Agnes. Agnes was the Big News then, crawling up from Mexico, looking for the bulls eye that was New York City. Like Agnes then, Irene was on everyone's mind this week; millions of people were glued to various media to get the  up-to-date path of the storm. An estimated 65 million people were affected by Irene; there wasn't much news aside from Irene. Big news = big population.

      On the other hand, Rapid City is the county seat of Pennington County, the home of Mount Rushmore. Only 100,000 people live in the entire county, about a quarter the population of York County.  Not big potatoes, in the overall scheme of things.

     We were on a Colorado vacation at the time, and heard about the Rapid City disaster. Being in the neighborhood-- west of the Mississippi River-- we raced to Rapid City to photograph the event. Now, the disaster had little interest in the small town of Dixon, Illinois, where we lived. Because of all the news about Agnes and heavily populated northeast, no one cared about South Dakota. I shot it anyway. 

The Chapel Lane bridge above Canyon Lake was washed out.

      My photos and negatives shot at Rapid City have disappeared long ago, but I remember the stories. One man said he was coming home from work when he was met by a ten-foot wall of water. About 15 inches of rain fell in the mountains above Rapid City, and when the water hit the Rapid Creek Dam, it broke and exploded into the city. The wave picked up the man's truck, floated it downstream and set it down, almost gently, he said. He remembered a bulldozer being tumbled down the road like a toy. Houses were picked up off their foundations and set down again blocks away.
     Of course, those were the happy endings. We also remember piles and piles of rubble that were once homes. Rescue and recovery crews pulling bodies out of piles of debris. The wailing of orphaned and injured children and lonely parents. All were gone-- babies, adults, pets, homes, businesses and schools. The odors of diesel engines working, the musty smell of laying water. Five people were never found.  Three firefighters and three National Guardsmen died at work.

     The final tally told a horrific story, beyond the deaths. About 1300 homes were destroyed, and another 2,800 were damaged. Five thousand vehicles were destroyed. Remember, the town of Rapid City is just a bit larger than York.

     It was an unusual way-- macabre?-- to spend vacation, but a memorable one, nonetheless.  Irene was the big news this week because of the millions of people it affected.

     How do you think Irene would have been reported if it targeted Kansas or Wyoming?


     Both photos from http://sd.water.usgs.gov/projects/1972flood/photos.html

A calm man before the storm

Hurricane Irene might be taking aim at the eastern seaboard, and York County might have a bulls-eye on it, but it didn't stop Bob Stoner from a quiet afternoon  of catfish hunting on Susquehanna River at Wrightsville.

Irene's path changes often, it seems, and forecasters still aren't sure if York will get high winds and heavy rain or just a glancing blow of both. Either way, Stoner is making use of the time left here in York. Next month, he's headed to Florida to spend the winter.

Not an earthquake, more of a sway

Yorkers felt something--swaying, shaking, rather indescribable moving-- but nothing big here from the earthquake further south in Virginia.

Fewer days in the pool

As summer comes to an end, temperatures start to fall and those miserably hot days are behind us, making for shorter dips in the pool -- or maybe not at all. 

These photos were taken with an Olympus Tough camera in a Lancaster County residential pool.

Civil War museum at Penn Park

LAUREN WHETZEL -- The York Dispatch

Twelve-year-old Scott Cover learned about the Civil War in his sixth-grade history class last year.
But he said having the opportunity to tour an interactive traveling Civil War museum at Penn Park in York City Sunday afternoon was way more interesting than sitting in a traditional classroom setting.
Cover and his mother spent about an hour Sunday exploring the Pennsylvania Civil War Road Show, a 53-foot trailer that housed Civil War replicas that people were able to touch and handle.
The museum was divided into several sections and each area focused on different aspects of the the war. including the homefront, children's lives during the war and the state's war commemoration activities in the years since the war, said Joan Mummert, president and chief executive officer of York County Historical Trust.
The traveling museum is sponsored by the Pennsylvania Civil War 150 group, a statewide partnership of history organizations, which is traveling to each of Pennsylvania's 67 counties over the next four years.
More than 1,600 people visited the free museum between Friday and Sunday to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, said Mummert.

Plenty of lightning, but no rain

It was indeed, a dark and storm night... Photo taken with about a three to five minute exposure from near my home in York. From the top of the hill near Smith Middle School, down Belvidere Avenue, the photo shows the massive numbers of lightning bolts that lit up Thursday night into Friday morning after work.

The storm's rain apparently went south of us, and the neighborhood stayed dry.

By the way, as the TV shows say, don't try this at home. Standing on top of a hill with a metal tripod during a lightning storm is something you'd tell your kids not to do.