Published: June 25, 2007 10:41 pm      

Faces of the Flood: ‘All I was thinking was hanging on to that tree’

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood

SEWARD — Thelma Ewel credits a tree with saving her life when waters from the 1977 Flood swept away the mobile home she shared with her husband, Oscar.

Ewel, 80, recalls with marked clarity even the smallest detail of that dreadful July night, which started out with a heavy rain and ended by turning her life upside down and instilling fears she has never overcome.

Now living on Route 711 near the Laurel Valley High School, Westmoreland County, Ewel remembers the feel of the bloody cuts on her legs after spending the night and much of the next day in the fork of a rough-barked wild cherry tree.

It was the only solid thing she could grab onto when the metal electricity tower – which provided her initial safety – buckled and fell into the rushing floodwaters.

When the tower tilted, Oscar was thrown into moving water 10 feet deep.

He grabbed a wooden skid and eventually was saved by passers-by.

“I’d always had a fear of heights since childhood. But I got up in that tree and held on,” Ewel said, recalling the events while at her kitchen table. “I hung on for all I could hang on and, when it came daylight, I realized I was holding on to a dead branch.”

At the time of the flood, Thelma and Oscar were living at the Howard Trailer Court, in one of a number of mobile homes in a low-lying area of Seward.

The rains started before dark and by bedtime the lightning was vivid – electrifying the sky.

Sleep came easy for the Ewels until 3 a.m., when the storm intensified, waters rushed in and the mobile home was shaken from its mooring.

Oil tanks ripped away from the back of the home. Cars floating by as the Ewels watched, stunned.

“I did not know the trailer was moving, you couldn’t feel it,” she said.

“It came to rest against an electric tower maybe a half- to three-quarters of a mile away.”

The couple climbed from the trailer onto the tower. But safety was short lived, and Thelma was soon in the water.

Ewel recalls getting her finger pinched – feeling as if it was nearly ripped off – and the hiss of escaping gas from propane tanks floating among the debris.

“I can’t swim, and a 2-by-4 (board) was floating by. So I got hold of it,” she said. “A man was hollering, ‘Get in the tree lady, get in the tree.’ ”

Ewel pulled herself into the tree branches and held on.

Someone else came along and told her to jump in the water and he’d save her, but Ewel wasn’t letting go.

She remembers watching a trailer go by with nine people on the roof and rejected a second life-saving attempt.

“After I got in that tree, I don’t think I had any thoughts,” she said. “All I was thinking was hanging on to that tree.”

As morning broke and the storm passed, Ewel clung to that cherry tree. She was there until about 4 p.m. on the day after the storm.

She eventually was rescued and received medical treatment for her wounds.

The Ewels were fortunate to have flood insurance, they said.

But replacement of the mobile home took about six weeks. In the meantime, they lived in a 19-foot camper.

Now long retired from the dietary department at Memorial Medical Center, Ewel spends her free time at a sewing machine, producing hand crafted stuffed dolls to sell at festivals and fairs in the region.

She now lives near the top of a hill – far from any rivers or dams.

And the 1977 Flood is usually far from her mind. But she admits memories rush back at times.

“For months rain bothered me,” she said. “That’s something that doesn’t leave you.

“Even now when I hear of a flood and people getting flooded out, that really gets to me.”