Published: July 14, 2007 11:15 pm      

Faces of the Flood: Some victims were never found

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood

The rains were relentless on the day that Kimberly Keck and her two toddlers left their Hornerstown home to go to her mother’s place at a trailer court in Seward.

A party was planned for that night – July 19, 1977. Other relatives came from Mineral Point and her husband joined them after work.

It was a fateful decision.

Within hours, the roaring floodwaters hit, wiping out the entire trailer court and carrying away nine members representing four generations of one family.

Their bodies later were found, except for little 2-year-old Michelle, the youngest. Thirty years later, she still is officially listed as missing.

“She was just a little bit of a thing, and they never found her,” said Rudy Keck, her grand-uncle, who lives in Seward.

“I think about that all the time,” Keck said. “She was one of my godchildren.”

Killed in the flood were Kimberly Keck, 23; her husband, Vincent, 28; son Michael, 3; and, presumably, little Michelle.

Also killed were Kimberly’s mother Thelma Ressler, 52, who was the hostess for the party that night, and Ressler’s son, Larry, 16.

Also at the party, and killed in the flood, were Thelma Ressler’s parents, Harry Teeter, 74, and his wife, Lula, 70, of Mineral Point.

It is a cruel irony that the Kecks’ house in Hornerstown, on Pine Street, was not damaged in the flood. Neither was Harry and Lula Teeters’ home in Mineral Point.

But it is the missing – such as little Michelle with her sweet smile – that Rudy Keck, now 70, thinks and wonders about.

She is one of eight people whose bodies were never found, along with the 80 people who were confirmed dead in the 1977 Flood.

“She’d be 32 years old now,” he said.

“I think about what she’d be like, what she’d be doing, who she’d be with.

“I wonder what actually happened to her that night.”

Keck, an outgoing and talkative building salesman, speaks softly as he recalls the movements of his nephew’s family on the night of the flood.

“Vincent was working 3 to 11 at Bethlehem (Steel Corp.), and he took the bus down after his shift,” Keck said.

“People in Seward who lived there for years would get ankle-deep water every year, and they thought ‘this is the worst it will get.’

“I just hope they never knew what hit them, but I don’t know. The firemen who did rescue work said they heard people screaming, but the water was too swift.

“They found Vince and Kimberly hanging onto an electrical tower,” he said, “and it went over.

“The next morning was sunny and bright, and you’d never know what had happened the night before. We stayed all day at the ballfields, where they brought everyone in with helicopters. Then we went down to the fire hall and finally found the three of them, but not Michelle.

“It was a bad time.”

It was heartbreaking for Rudy Keck’s brother and little Michelle’s grandfather, Ralph Keck, who has moved to Pittsburgh.

Anna Keck, Ralph’s wife and Michelle’s grandmother, has died.

The toddler was one of 18 flood victims initially listed as missing. Those numbers diminished, one by one, as bodies were found.

One victim was discovered as late as May 1978, almost a year after the flood.

“A lot of bodies washed down to Westmoreland or Indiana county,” said Cambria County Coroner Dennis Kwiatkowski. “Some were found in the woods, by hunters, a while later.”

Dennis Johns, a deputy coroner in Westmoreland County since 1974, thinks he has a good guess at where tiny Michelle may have ended up.

“That night I was called out because there was a flood in Seward,” Johns recalled. “I rode up there and it was still storming. The flood had swept through a trailer court, and that was my initial entry into this whole situation.”

For the next few weeks, Johns and others worked with firefighters and police as they recovered bodies, under a governor’s order allowing Westmoreland, Cambria and Indiana counties to work together.

“We were working out of Richland High School, and one day a guy came up and said they found some bodies in Conemaugh Dam,” Johns said.

The dam is between Blairsville and Saltsburg, Indiana County, about 15 miles downriver from Seward.

“They brought in an Army helicopter, and me and a state trooper flew down there,” Johns said.

“Three bodies emerged under the rubble, and the dam was backed up. The bodies were popping up and down, and the dam looked like it was totally covered with debris. I figure it’s possible that other bodies got caught up on the way, because if three bodies made it to the dam, how many didn’t make it that far?

“That tiny little girl could have been one of them.”

He and Rudy Keck have a hard time talking about the little ones who died, or even speculating about what they might have gone through.

“Yeah, it leaves a lasting impression,” Johns said. “I was only 31 years old at the time.

“Being a deputy coroner, you have to have a certain personality, and in a way this was more numbers than graphic horror. It’s just that there was so many of them, and some of the bodies that emerged later on hardly looked human. I just had to handle it the best I could.”

Keck said it’s still hard for him to deal with.

“It’s not easy to talk about it,” he said. “But otherwise it’s so easy for people to forget, and I don’t want that.”