Long before Hurricane Agnes became the flood against which Reading measured all others, another disaster overwhelmed the Schuylkill Valley.

In August 1933, Reading residents watched the Schuylkill climb higher and higher until water poured across railroad tracks, entered homes and businesses, surrounded entire blocks and brought normal life along the riverfront nearly to a halt.

The surviving pages of the Reading Times from August 24, 25 and 26, 1933, reveal far more than statistics. They describe people escaping through second-story windows, boats traveling city streets, railroad stations disappearing beneath water, families wading shoulder-deep toward their homes and thousands of spectators standing on bridges watching the swollen Schuylkill race beneath them.

The newspaper's front page on August 24 announced:

A day later the story had become even more dramatic:

Reading was experiencing one of the great floods in its history.

The storm did not begin anywhere near Reading.

It originated in the tropical Atlantic and became what is now generally called the Chesapeake–Potomac Hurricane of 1933. The storm passed near Bermuda, approached the North Carolina and Virginia coast, crossed Norfolk on August 23 and moved toward Washington before continuing through central Pennsylvania.

By the time the storm reached Pennsylvania, the greatest danger was no longer coastal storm surge.

It was rain.

The water draining from hills, fields, creeks and tributaries throughout the Schuylkill watershed began converging on the river.

Reading was directly in its path.

The situation deteriorated quickly.

The August 24 Reading Times, reporting on the previous day's conditions, described a storm of “tropical intensity” spreading havoc through Reading and Berks County.

At Northmont, particularly around Delta and Raymond avenues off the Kutztown Pike, floodwaters became deep enough that the city dispatched boats and built temporary bridges to help residents reach flooded homes.

The Fifth Street underpass flooded. So did Richmond and Bern streets. According to the newspaper, conditions became so bad that motorists could not enter or leave the northern part of the city by the usual routes.

Water Street along the Schuylkill was flooded.

Police, street-department workers and other city employees were sent throughout Reading in raincoats and boots, equipped with axes, shovels and ropes. Fallen trees were cut apart, blocked streets were reopened where possible and dangerous flooded areas were closed.

Even ordinary mistakes became dangerous.

At Delta Avenue, two young women drove a light coupe into floodwater and stalled in the middle. They opened the doors and stepped into water nearly to their hips before two men waded out and helped push their automobile to higher ground.

Meanwhile, the Schuylkill continued rising.

Reading already had a benchmark for disaster.

It was the Flood of 1902.

As darkness fell on August 23, railroad workers watched the river at the Penn Street Bridge. A flashlight directed toward the bridge pillars revealed that the Schuylkill was only about three feet below the high-water mark left by the 1902 flood.

The old mark had been painted onto the bridge structure.

Railroad workers told the newspaper they expected the rising river might reach it within hours.

Water had already overflowed the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks near the station.

The calm Schuylkill Reading residents knew had disappeared beneath what the newspaper described as swirling, turbulent water.

And the river was still rising at midnight.

Thursday, August 24, became the defining day of the flood.

By 3 p.m., according to the Reading Times, the Schuylkill reached 19.7 feet.

The newspaper described it as the highest the river had been in 31 years.

The river, hour by hour

Schuylkill River at Reading, as reported by the Reading Times. Bars scaled to the 19.7-foot crest.

Aug. 23after dark~3 ft below 1902 mark

Aug. 243 p.m. — crest19.7 ft

Aug. 25midnight8.7 ft above normal

Aug. 26morningback in its bed

The highest the river had been in 31 years — the greatest since the Flood of 1902.

The city and county could no longer simply prepare for flooding.

They were in it.

Nearly 50 Reading city blocks were underwater by approximately 6 p.m.

The worst flooding centered around the Penn Street and Bingaman Street bridges, but entire sections of the southern and western riverfront were affected.

Water entered first floors.

Furniture and household belongings were ruined.

Boats appeared on streets that automobiles had traveled only hours earlier.

The disaster was not preserved only in newspaper photographs.

Remarkably, surviving motion-picture film from 1933 shows the flooding along the Schuylkill River in Reading, giving us a moving glimpse of the city during the disaster.

The footage, seen today in a colorized version, shows a landscape almost swallowed by water. Trees stand deep in the flood, normally dry riverfront ground disappears beneath the swollen Schuylkill, and buildings sit surrounded by water. At several points the camera looks across broad expanses where the river has spread well beyond its normal banks.

A bridge and nearby structures can also be seen with floodwater dominating the landscape around them.

For anyone familiar with the modern Schuylkill through Reading, the film is especially striking. Instead of simply reading that the river reached 19.7 feet, or looking at a single frozen newspaper photograph, the viewer can actually watch the water moving through the flooded riverfront.

The film provides a visual counterpart to what the Reading Times was describing on August 24 and 25 — nearly 50 city blocks inundated, railroad property flooded, homes surrounded and the Schuylkill occupying areas that normally belonged to streets, yards, businesses and transportation facilities.

The footage also conveys something statistics cannot: the sheer width and power of the flooded river.

More than 90 years later, that surviving film allows us to look through the camera of someone who was there and see, for a few moments, Reading during the Great Flood of 1933.

One of the most remarkable photographs published after the flood shows boats moving along a Reading street surrounded by rows of houses.

The caption explains where some of them came from.

Boats from the lake at Carsonia Park had been commandeered for flood duty.

They were now being used to reach residents stranded in flooded homes.

Elsewhere, canoes, rowboats and improvised rescue craft moved among houses and businesses.

One Reading Times photograph shows a rescue party working near the Bingaman Street Bridge in the vicinity of the Reading Elevator Company.

Another photograph captured John Sweitzer and four helpers stranded atop the office of an automobile graveyard near the Eighteenth Ward approach to the Bingaman Street Bridge.

Around them were approximately 1,000 used automobiles, according to the newspaper.

Not one stood above the floodwater.

Sweitzer and his men simply waited for the river to go down.

The newspaper's description of the flooded neighborhoods provides a striking picture of what residents experienced.

Workmen were seen stripping down to their underwear, placing their dry clothing on their heads and wading through water that in places reached from waist to shoulder height.

On the bridges, meanwhile, another scene unfolded.

Thousands of people reportedly journeyed to the Schuylkill River bridges simply to see what was happening.

Photographs show crowds standing near the swollen river while debris-filled water rushed past below.

For Reading residents accustomed to seeing the Schuylkill confined to its banks, the sight must have been extraordinary.

Rail transportation was one of the flood's major casualties.

The Pennsylvania Railroad station at the foot of Penn Street was covered by approximately two to three feet of water.

Train service into the main station stopped.

Tracks were flooded.

Elsewhere in Berks County and throughout the region, washouts, damaged bridges and flooded roadbeds created additional problems.

Reading was a city built around transportation — railroads, bridges, canals and roads concentrated along the same low river corridor.

In August 1933, that geography worked against it.

The transportation network and the floodplain occupied much of the same ground.

Flooding was not limited to houses and railroads.

Some of Reading's most important infrastructure was threatened.

The city's sewage pumping station at the foot of Sixth Street was completely crippled.

The Reading Times reported that its large pumping motors had to be shut down as floodwater rose inside the station.

Cleanup and repairs would take days.

More troubling was what happened to Reading's drinking-water system.

At the Maidencreek water facility, pumps were submerged and filter beds became clogged with mud washed in by floodwater.

The filtration system could no longer operate normally.

The flood demonstrated that a disaster on the river could affect residents far beyond those whose homes actually went underwater.

Businesses along the riverfront also suffered heavily.

The Reading Times reported approximately $5,000 in losses at the Reading Wholesale Grocery warehouse at Front and Franklin streets — a substantial sum in 1933.

Food, merchandise and equipment throughout the flooded district were exposed to muddy river water.

Across the city, the newspaper estimated overall damage in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And Reading was not the hardest-hit community in Berks County.

Downstream, Birdsboro experienced some of the most dramatic flooding in the county.

The Schuylkill and local waterways surged into the community, flooding stores and homes.

At some locations, the newspaper reported water as much as 10 feet deep.

Residents were evacuated by canoe and flatboat.

Some families were removed from their homes through second-story windows.

The flood reportedly approached or reached levels associated with the catastrophic 1902 flood.

When the river finally began falling, Birdsboro residents faced the same exhausting work that waited in Reading: pumping cellars, clearing mud and trying to salvage whatever the water had spared.

Throughout Berks County the storm damaged the network connecting Reading with neighboring communities.

Scores of small bridges were washed out or overflowed.

Roads became impassable.

Telephone, electric and transportation service was interrupted at numerous locations.

The storm also brought down trees and utility poles.

Even buildings far from the river suffered.

The Reading Times reported that wind-driven rain penetrated portions of the Berks County Prison, covering floors in cell blocks and other areas.

The disaster was simultaneously a river flood, a flash-flood event, a windstorm and an infrastructure emergency.

The hurricane even left Reading with one peculiar reminder of its ocean origins.

After the storm, residents began reporting unusual birds rarely seen so far inland.

The Reading Times described gulls, plovers, sandpipers, terns, petrels and other coastal or ocean-going birds appearing around Berks County.

Earl Poole of the Reading Public Museum and Art Gallery investigated the phenomenon.

The apparent explanation was remarkable but simple: the powerful storm had carried some of the birds inland from the Atlantic coast.

By August 26, most had apparently begun their journey back toward the sea.

It was a small but extraordinary footnote to a hurricane that had transported a piece of the Atlantic all the way to Berks County.

By Friday, August 25, the immediate danger had passed.

The Schuylkill that had reached 19.7 feet Thursday afternoon was rapidly falling.

By midnight Friday night, the Reading Times reported the river at about 8.7 feet above normal, continuing to recede.

Saturday morning's headline reflected the change:

The newspaper described life beginning to return to its “workaday channels.”

Canoes and rowboats disappeared from the streets.

They were replaced by wagons, trucks, buckets, baskets, hoses and brooms.

Residents returned to houses coated with a thick layer of mud and fine coal waste.

Porches and stoops had been damaged or swept away.

Families shoveled muck from floors and yards.

Fire engines were used to pump water from cellars in Birdsboro.

At the Pennsylvania Railroad station, the Schuylkill had finally returned to its bed, leaving the tracks and station high and dry again.

Railroad service resumed.

Highways reopened.

But cleanup had only begun.

The newspapers of 1933 repeatedly placed the event in historical perspective.

It was described as the city's worst flood in 31 years — the greatest since 1902.

That comparison mattered because the people living through the disaster did not yet know the names that later generations of Reading residents would associate with catastrophic flooding.

They did not know about Hurricane Diane in 1955.

They certainly could not imagine what Hurricane Agnes would do in June 1972.

1. 1902the old benchmark
2. 193319.7 ft · 50 blocks
3. 1955Hurricane Diane
4. 1972Agnes · record

For them, 1902 was the great flood of living memory.

And now 1933 had joined it.