First of a series on the 1977 Johnstown Flood



In the early morning darkness of July 20, 1977, Ray McCombie and the rest of his ambulance crew turned onto Route 56 and headed toward Johnstown.

They were well aware that heavy rain had been pouring down for most of the night.

But they were not yet aware that Johnstown had been hit by a major flood that would claim 85 lives and ravage communities across the region.

Their ambulance slowed to a crawl as they encountered the first signs of a disaster that had ravaged the valley below.

"We noticed rocks as big as the ambulance, or close to it, with whole trees uprooted and washed out on the road," McCombie said.

The team of medics and firefighters from Richland Township were trying to transport a patient to a Johnstown hospital.

They would not make it that far. Rushing water had destroyed parts of Route 56, and the road ahead seemed to disappear.

"The bypass was completely undermined, all four lanes," McCombie said. "You could see right in underneath the highway. And we're thinking, 'What do we do now?' "

The ambulance turned around, but McCombie and another man decided to stay behind. It was clear that there was a crisis at the nearby Solomon Homes.

"You could hear people crying for help," McCombie said.

On foot, McCombie descended into the housing project, where the city's rescue workers had begun an evacuation. Torrents had roared through the apartments, leaving a trail of devastation.

"Cars were turned upside down, stacked on top of buildings - you know, up against the second or third floor of some of those buildings," McCombie said. "It was nothing like I'd ever seen in my life."

Some of the structures were "cut in half," McCombie said, recalling a harrowing door-to-door search.

"When I kicked a door open," he said, "I'm about 40 feet off the ground, looking into mid-air."

Crews used a rescue line attached to the hillside to move residents to higher ground, a job that took several hours. McCombie later hitched a ride back to Richland.

The next day, he began a task that was much more grim: Recovery of bodies in West Taylor Township's Tanneryville neighborhood, which had been slammed by water from the broken Laurel Run Dam.

Nearly half of the Johnstown area's flood fatalities occurred in Tanneryville.

"It just toppled those houses right off their foundations, just annihilated them," McCombie said.

He joined others encamped at West Taylor's fire hall. The gruesome work continued for several days.

"We were just going through what was left of houses and cars and garages, just wherever you could look for people."

Workers stayed busy and tried their best to remove emotion from an undeniably emotional assignment. It is the same challenge that any emergency responder faces when arriving at a horrific traffic accident or a burning home.

As a veteran firefighter, McCombie has seen his share of tragedy. But he never will forget Tanneryville in July 1977.

"That was a heck of a way to die - in the middle of the night in a raging river."