'Overkill is OK' when it comes to heeding flood warnings, McCandless father says

After about 100 Girl Scouts were evacuated June 17 from a North Park cabin, some people made light of the move.

“Water was ankle deep. Get real people,” wrote a South Greensburg man, commenting on the TribLive story about the incident posted on Facebook.

It spurred other commenters to marvel how people survived without modern safeguards.

The Rev. Brandon Cooper wasn’t among them.

Cooper, of McCandless, is an Episcopal priest who serves in multiple churches in the diocese. He’s also a father of two girls, one of whom was among those rescued from the flooding. Kristen Cooper, 15, was working as a leader for the scouts.

While teaching an archery class, she saw the water rising from Pine Creek, her father said.

“If it had continued to rain, they really could have been in trouble,” Cooper said. “Overkill is OK in this situation because the danger posed if you don’t take it seriously is so great.”

That danger was made evident in recent days as rescue crews search for survivors and casualties of flash flooding in Central Texas.

Nearly 90 people, including 27 girls who were at Camp Mystic, were killed in flash flooding on July 4. Camp Mystic is an all-girls summer camp along the Guadalupe River about 80 miles northwest of San Antonio.

This is at least the second deadly flood in the region since 1987, when 10 teens attending a church camp were in a bus swept away by Guadalupe River floodwaters, according to The New York Times.

The area is known as Flash Flood Alley, according to the Times, and officials talked about developing a warning system for years before but balked at the cost.

More recently, in the Pittsburgh region, five people were killed during torrential rain June 13 that caused flooding in Wheeling, W.Va.

In 2011, a Plum woman and her two children and an Oakmont woman were killed in Washington Boulevard flooding in Highland Park. Families received $1.5 million from government agencies to settle lawsuits spurred from the flooding.

Safety measures including flood gates were put in place afterward.

The last Westmoreland County residents to die in a flood lived in Seward during the 1977 Johnstown flood, county public safety spokeswoman Cassandra Kovatch said.

But flooding is a recurring problem throughout the region, as it is across the U.S.

The National Weather Service says flash flooding is the deadliest type of weather.

Deluges documented

Other noteworthy floods in the region include:

• June 6, sections of Murrysville and Penn Township near Turtle Creek were flooded when between 3 and 6 inches of rain fell in the region. Cleanup efforts continue.

• Aug. 5, 2022, flooding of the village of Dorothy in Unity Township that affected all 42 homes in the tiny neighborhood south of Latrobe.

• Floods of Girty’s Run in Pittsburgh’s North Hills suburbs in 2018 and 2019.

• In 1972, remnants of Hurricane Agnes flooded Freeport and other areas.

Flood control projects in the Pittsburgh region have also been discussed for decades, although few have been completed.

“Obviously, our region is no stranger to flooding,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Colton Milcarek.

It’s the reason Milcarek urged people to heed weather warnings.

June and July are the peak time for flash flooding. The risk of flooding remains with scattered rain in the forecast this week, Milcarek said.

It’s a risk Cooper said he takes seriously.

“Thankfully it didn’t happen here. The measures they took prevented that,” Cooper said. “I can just imagine now what the families must be going through down there for days — I had it for an hour.”

“This is really a big issue,” he said.