Residents in Centre County are still working Monday to clean up damage left behind by Thursday night’s storm.
“See these leaves here?” Dwight Kline said, pointing out a dip in the yard across from Ace Hardware Store in Milesburg. “The water was up to there, in here, the whole way back through there.” He pointed through the yard, past the house. “This was nothing but an ocean.”
The water has receded in Centre County since Thursday night’s flooding, but not everything is back to normal.
“Furnaces are ruined, oil tanks fell over, people have ruined wells, pumps,” Kline listed. “Everybody’s buying dehumidifiers and fans and cleaning supplies from us.”
“At last count, there were between 7 and 8 inches of rain that fell in some of the heavily hit areas,” said Centre County Director of Criminal Justice Planning and Disaster Public Information Officer Gene Lauri. “Milesburg was obviously the most heavily hit.”
Ace Hardware in Milesburg opened early Friday morning to help residents get what they needed to do damage control.
“People were waiting to come in to get sump pumps and hoses, and we really did a big business on that,” Klein said. “We were sold out of sump pumps by 9:30 a.m.”
Flooded basements are not the only remnants of storm damage. Some roads are left covered in mud and stone. Others look like Purdue Mountain Road in Benner Township, where half of the roadway is completely washed away into the creek below.
Excavation crews were working Monday morning to dig out the roadway, lay new tubing, and fill it back in with rock. They said then it would be up to Benner Township to fix the road. They expect the work to take a few days.
Centre County Emergency Management, PEMA, and FEMA were assessing damage Monday. Kline saw them make their way through Milesburg, past his store.
“Our shop here for Valley Homes, it was full of mud and water, and the water made it over here,” he said, pointing, “in our gate, our fence.”
Milesburg United Methodist Church donated Disaster Relief Buckets, free to those in need.
“There’s gloves and cleaning supplies, trash bags,” Kline said. “So if anybody needs cleaning supplies that got affected by the flood, we have these, and I know there’s going to be some at the borough building, too.”
Centre County EMA plans to host a meeting in Milesburg in the next few days (date and time TBD) to answer questions about flooding and costs.