Ice flood of 1 - 28 - 94

[Plokoon111]

Do I have a treat for this forum. My parents house sits on the Neshaminy Creek in Croyd Pa. We had our share of boats, floods from Floyd and Irene. But one year this flood happened! Mind you I was a year old in this event. But my dad taped this. We have been trying to find this tape for 18 years. Finally my neighbor had it. This video shows the ice jam destroying our steel gazebo which was made out of I beams. It has survived many floods due to its design about 50 years actually. And my parents moved here in 87. Enjoy!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4cBZ7FzovYg

Bonus points to those who can figure out the weather pattern and rain total during this event.

[KamuSnow]

Wow - amazing. Thanks for the link! Some of those chunks of ice were huge. Did you rebuild the gazebo?

[Plokoon111]

Well after that; My dad had to find a welder to torch the i beams down to railing height. He kept it like that because he feared if he built another one out of wood a flood would damage it. We actually recently built a deck on top and put up a canopy of sorts. That way We can take it down. It would have been expensive to rebuild it how it was. 

[Hurricane Agnes]

That was that damn ice storm month when the tristate area ran out of road salt (they sent caravans of trucks down from NY to try to restock this area) and stores ran out of consumer halite/ice melt.  I'm not sure what the Neshaminy Creek did a few years later in '96 during a similar warm-up but the '96 warm-up came after that record 30+" of snow and included quite a bit of rain too. If the gazebo had survived '94, it might have been swept way in '96.  I remember in that latter case, the Schuylkill river was so swollen that a huge tree trunk got wedged near the top of an arch on an old stone railroad bridge that went over the river.  Back then, I commuted to work every day on either of the river drives and noted that the tree trunk stayed there for months and months before they finally removed it.

[Mikeymac5306]

I remember this fairly well. We ran a few water rescues on the Brandywine River. One case, a UPS truck drove through the water on top of the bridge on Rt 926 and couldn't turn around. He was stuck there all night.  

[The Iceman]

Awesome video! i don't remember much about 93-94 because I was only 4/5 but I do remember going down to the neshaminy creek to watch the flood with my dad. One of the coolest sights, up there with the delaware river ice jam a few years ago. You a Neshaminy grad? 

[Plokoon111]

I graduated at tech in 2010. Yeah that ice jam 3 years ago was neat for sure!

[Lady Di]

Can't say for certain without looking it up but I believe the Brandywine 1994 ice jam flood is tops?  It is the one and only time in my life I  had to drive to DE via 202 S to Rt 141 (then 48 to 41) to cross it from West Chester to get home!!  Every other route was closed.  162, 842, 52, 926, & 1.

[Ralph Wiggum]

Thank you for sharing this! I wint ever forget that winter. It felt like ice storm after ice storm. I remember specifically 2 of them that hit which were larger and fairly destructive. Glaciers and solid ice around for weeks and weeks. Those icebergs show the magnitude of the deep freeze and duration of the cold. The sounds of the ice moving along grinding against each other and structures is just eerie. Again very cool of this video to surface and for you sharing it.