Published: June 24, 2007 12:08 am      

Faces of the Flood: 'The water kept coming'

Fourth in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood



Francis Ozog felt confident that Johnstown was not going to have another flood – the city was supposed to be flood free.

He was wrong.

Sitting in his office on the second floor of the Francis G. Ozog Funeral Home Inc. on Broad Street in the Cambria City neighborhood, he recalled the evening of July 19, 1977, and the destruction he saw when the sun rose over the city the next day.

“I had an employee who lived in the West End tell me we were going to have a flood because an underpass by his home was flooded out. But I didn’t believe him,” Ozog said.

“We just put new carpets in the building, so there was no way that was going to happen.”

It soon would be clear that the carpets and pretty much everything else on the first floor in the funeral home would be destroyed.

Ozog and his family lived in an apartment beside the funeral home. Around 2 a.m. July 20, he got up and saw out his window that his neighbors were getting into a boat.

He decided then to alert his wife and go inspect the funeral home.

There were two viewings scheduled at the time, and Ozog was able to secure the caskets and get them out of harm’s way.

Just in time, too, because the pressure from the rising water broke the funeral home garage door and water began to pour into the establishment.

“The water kept coming and was getting higher and higher but we still had electricity because the electric box was on the second floor,” Ozog said.

“It was about 2 inches deep. But after the dam in Tanneryville broke, the water reached over 7 feet within two hours.”

As the water began to make its way up to the second floor, Ozog decided to take his family to the roof.

When the water receded, Ozog saw his once clean and orderly funeral home caked with 18 inches of mud.

“Everything was gone,” he said.

The cleanup began immediately. Ozog said the carpet was the worst part of the job, because it was so heavy with mud that it had to be cut up and removed in pieces.

“We had to strip everything down to the bare bones,” he said.

Fifteen caskets and four cars were lost. “One of those cars only had 240 miles on it,” Ozog said.

It took the funeral home four months before it could operate completely, but even the floodwaters didn’t stop business.

A total of 33 funerals, seven of them flood-related, were held during that time. Some were on the second floor, while others were held at various local funeral homes.

“Everyone from funeral directors to my venders were accommodating,” Ozog said.

Damage totals reached more than $185,000. Ozog had flood insurance, which he had purchased only a few months prior to the flood.

“Something told me to get it,” he said. “My insurance covered about $75,000.”

As Ozog looked over photos he took of the ravaged Cambria City area, he said he hopes to never see another flood.

But he knows you can’t stop Mother Nature.

“In one day, this fairly nice area was reduced to nothing,” he said. “It was destroyed.”