Published: July 17, 2007 11:38 pm      

Faces of the Flood: ‘Show me the way out’

Latest in a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood



When Sara Noon looked out the window of her home at 215 David St. in Dale Borough on the night of the 1977 Johnstown Flood, she knew she needed a miracle.

Floodwaters were within three steps of the second floor, where she was trapped with her 3-year-old daughter, Heather, and 6-month-old son, Shawn.

Hours earlier, Sara’s husband, Don, had taken his Jeep to assist a priest whose vehicle had slid into a ditch. He hadn’t returned.

“I looked out the window and the water was running like a wild river,” Sara recalled.

“There was just no way to get out.”

For reasons she can’t explain now, the terrified woman knew she had to leave the house and somehow take her children with her.

“There was never a thought of leaving the children and going for help,” she said. “My thought was: ‘If I leave, the kids go with me.’

“I can remember praying, ‘If you show me the way out, I’ll do the rest.’ ”

Then Sara noticed that a three-car garage in the back yard had collapsed and that the roof of the structure had washed up against the back of the house. The water was running underneath and it provided a “bridge” to the porch of the neighbor’s house.

“I thought ‘Wow, if I could just get down there ...’ ” she recalled.

Her first obstacle was a double pane of glass in the bedroom window.

A can of paint she threw at the window bounced off and showered her with paint. But eventually she was able to break through the thick glass.

Sara did her best to remove most of the sharp edges and covered the sill with a towel.

Then she took a dining room chair that was sitting in the bedroom and dropped it out the window.

“It wedged itself between the house and a car that had washed up there,” Sara said.

“It was kind of bolted in there kind of sturdy.”

The young mother awoke her little girl and tied a sheet around her waist and lowered the child out the window and onto the chair below.

Heather did not protest or even scream.

“She just went,” Sara said.

“She just sat there.”

She repeated the procedure with her baby boy.

He landed beside his sister and fortunately did not wiggle off of the chair.

Now her children were unprotected just feet from the rushing water and she had no idea how to get down to them.

“Seeing them laying there, (I knew) I had to get out of there,” she recalled.

In desperation, Sara hung on the edge of the window.

“I just let go and dropped right beside them,” she said.

She grabbed her children and walked across the collapsed roof to the neighbor’s house, which was not heavily damaged.

From there, firemen took them to the Dale fire hall, where it was discovered that four of Sara’s fingers were nearly severed in the fall from the window.

She was bundled onto an ambulance bound for Windber Hospital, and the children were left with caregivers at the fire hall.

The ambulance was on the Route 56 bypass when the driver decided not to go any further. The road was nearly gone in some spots.

They sat there until everyone moved into a big truck because it was thought to be a safer haven than the much-smaller rescue vehicle.

Several other refugees joined the party huddled in the truck, where they spent the remainder of the night.

“It seemed the minute the sun came up the rain stopped,” she said. “It was beautiful. It was gorgeous.”

She was transferred back to the ambulance, which made its way to Somerset Hospital.

Doctors and nurses there could not comprehend what the battered woman told them.

“They kind of thought I was loony when I told them that Johnstown was flooded,” she said.

Almost 24 hours later, Noon was reunited with her husband and two children.

When she eventually made her way back to her old neighborhood, she was stunned by what she saw.

“There was nothing there,” Noon said.

“No house. No porch. Nothing. It was just unbelievable. There were four cars where the basement used to be.

“You wouldn’t have known there was a house there.”

Sara doesn’t spend much time dwelling on what might have happened if she hadn’t made the difficult decision to drop her children from that broken window.

“They are adults now,” she said. “I can’t imagine life without them.”