Published: June 24, 2007 10:36 pm      

Faces of the Flood: ‘You were there when people needed you’

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood



Charles Jeffers stood at a busy steel-mill gate late on the night of July 19, 1977, trying to warn weary workers to avoid traveling toward Johnstown’s waterlogged Woodvale neighborhood.

Although floodwaters were rising, the city police patrolman was taking flak from some of the men. And as Jeffers turned his back, a worker in a tiny Volkswagen sped away toward Woodvale.

Days after the flood, Jeffers saw the same car filled with debris on Iolite Avenue.

“To this day, I don’t know if the guy survived,” Jeffers said.

Then 29 years old, a Vietnam veteran and a seven-year member of the city’s force, Jeffers was working 4 p.m. to midnight. He was at an accident scene, waiting in the rain for a tow truck at Railroad and Clinton streets, when he realized there was a problem.

Water had risen to ankle level. And the situation was worse when he finished directing traffic at the mill gate.

“By that time, water had really gotten up to around my knees,” Jeffers said, adding that his cruiser soon was swamped.

He started to walk to the nearby Public Safety Building, then was picked up by another officer. At police headquarters, it became clear that his was no water-line break, as Jeffers originally had thought.

“We got numerous calls about people’s basements flooding - just one call after another,” he said.

The midnight-to-8 shift had arrived, but no one from Jeffers’ shift was going home. They also were not going out on patrol.

“We tried to get around town, and were ordered to all come back to the building – those who could get back to the building,” he said.

Those who were supposed to protect the city could only watch from the Public Safety Building’s fourth floor as streets filled with water and cars floated like boats.

“We were helpless,” Jeffers said. “We were just unable to do anything.”

They began venturing out the next morning.

Looters were taking advantage of the situation, and Jeffers recalls people stealing from a fur store on Washington Street and taking guns from a Main Street business.

But the water remained high, and the department had few cruisers that had not been flooded.

“We tried (stopping looters). But getting around was a problem,” Jeffers said.

That changed as the water receded, and city police began making up for lost time, he said. Officers drove whatever vehicles were available; Jeffers commandeered a Jeep.

“We just had to get back to doing what we did as policemen,” he said.

Some officers looked for bodies, some watched for looters and others handled day-to-day police work. They all tried to direct help to those who needed the basics: First-aid, water and food.

The exhausted officers worked 16-hour shifts, then switched to 12-hour shifts.

“I think it was almost seven days before I actually saw my family,” Jeffers said.

While he still recalls the unbelievable force of the ’77 floodwater, he also remembers that summer as a “tremendous time of unity” when an army of relief workers pulled the city back to its feet.

“If there was a time when you could say, as a police officer, that you actually helped people and you were there when people needed you, it was that time,” Jeffers said.