Published: July 01, 2007 10:59 pm      

Faces of the Flood: ‘My safest place is up on the roof’

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood

On a night when his neighborhood and his neighbors were washed away, Donald Stoner’s home saved his life.

“I spent the night right over here by the chimney,” Stoner said, pointing to a photograph taken after Johnstown’s 1977 flood.

“I figured, well, if the house goes, I’m going to jump down,” he added. “But I didn’t want to jump unless I had to.”

Such a life-and-death decision would have been unthinkable on July 19, the day before West Taylor Township’s Tanneryville community was reduced to ruins.

Stoner’s wife, Mary, was in California visiting the couple’s daughter, and their two sons were not home. So he spent some time with his brother Charles, who lived nearby along Cooper Avenue.

“He had a swimming pool, and we were sitting around the swimming pool for a little bit in the evening,” Stoner recalled.

He decided to stop for a few beers on the way back to his home, but he nixed those plans when it was clear that foul weather was on the way.

“I looked up, and it was black,” Stoner said.

The storm began, and Stoner received a warning call from one of his sons, who was with a friend in Dale Borough. Stoner walked outside and checked Laurel Run.

The stream was running high. But Stoner was due at his steel-mill job at 6 a.m. the next morning, so he climbed into bed.

He was awakened by a second call from his son. By this time, water was cascading down Cooper Avenue.

Stoner walked out to his truck to retrieve a flashlight, then turned and walked back to his porch.

“I looked out and my truck started to float away, right in front of me,” Stoner said.

Unable to cross Laurel Run or Cooper Avenue, Stoner was trapped.

“I thought, well, my safest place is up on the roof,” he said.

Wearing only a pair of shorts, shoes and a T-shirt, Stoner clambered onto the roof with a spare tire that, he reasoned, might act as a life preserver.

He stayed there all night, shivering as the storm raged around him. But it was more than rain and rising water that would seal Tanneryville’s fate.

On the hillside above, Laurel Run Dam broke, sending a killer wave into the community.

“I could hear the roar coming down through the valley,” Stoner said.

He watched as one neighbor’s house was smashed. Another home was sliced by a giant pine tree.

“I could look in and see their furniture,” he said. “They weren’t in the house. Thank God for that.”

When the rain finally ended that morning, Stoner climbed down and stepped into what must have seemed like a different world.

His home had stood, but his back porch and garage were gone. His truck was lodged against a chimney in a neighbor’s basement. His yard was a mess of mud and debris.

“There was a tractor laying out in the yard,” he said. “It came from up the valley there someplace. So you could tell how strong the water had to be.”

Stoner’s home, which had taken years to build, was condemned by a government inspector. But the disaster took an even heavier toll on his family.

The afternoon after the flood, a neighbor notified Stoner that his brother Charles and sister-in-law Louella had perished, along with their son, Sheldon, and Sheldon’s wife, Sharen.

One witness recalled seeing flashlights near Charles Stoner’s house and speculated that the family tried to evacuate. But the lights suddenly had disappeared as water overtook the neighborhood.

“If they would’ve stayed in their house and stayed upstairs, they’d be here today,” Stoner said. “But they decided to go.”

Thirty years later, Stoner has stayed put. The family lived for a time in a government-issued trailer before constructing a new home perched on a hill in Tanneryville.

And the retired steelworker can speak matter-of-factly about the night he spent clinging to his roof.

“I don’t think I was actually scared, for some reason. I’ve never had a dream about it, a flashback,” he said. “I’ve never had any of that stuff.”