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Yes, we are grateful that we and our family members in the area were so untouched by the flooding. None of us was in an area that was near enough a creek or river to put any of us in immediate danger or harm. Had I gone by my usual route from Pittsburgh back to my town Friday afternoon, I would have been in serious danger, but I had a feeling from seeing how high the waters had risen earlier on my way into Pgh that another route home would be wiser (even if it did take almost two hours longer to get home!).

The slight inconvenience of some water in the basement and a temporary loss of electricity and telephone was the worst of it for us, while others saw their entire homes swept downstream, businesses were destroyed, and one deaf man in the Pittsburgh area who couldn't hear his potential rescuers calling to him lost his grip on the tree to which he had been clinging and was swept away to his death.

We knew we would get a lot of rain Friday, but the intensity of it, the suddenness with which the waterways rose and the eventual depth of the water took a lot of people by surprise. Some people literally barely got to higher ground with just the clothes on their backs.