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Analysis of track and rainfall total for Hurricane Agnes, June 19-24, 1972.
A front-page headline 50 years ago today on June 22, 1972, trumpets a record Roanoke River crest at 19.35 inches. This figure was later revised to 19.61 feet, and remains the second highest crest on record, exceeded only by the 23.35-foot crest in November 1985.
While this image is from James River flooding in Richmond in June 1972, the scene would have been similar near Jefferson Street from the Roanoke River’s flood resulting from remnants of Hurricane Agnes.
‘They went back to clean up and salvage what they could after the worst flooding in the history of the Roanoke Valley had left behind a path of destruction and millions of dollars in damage.”
The flooding caused by the remnants of Hurricane Agnes 50 years ago this week in June 1972 has since been eclipsed locally by the pre-eminent weather event of Roanoke Valley weather history 13 years later, the mighty Flood of ’85.
But at the time, it was a major disaster in its own right for the valley and nearby areas, and on a broader scale it is still one of the most catastrophic flooding episodes on record for multiple Eastern states.
The words quoted above, appearing in the June 23, 1972, issue of The Roanoke Times, connect through time to this column in the same newspaper a day short of 50 years later.
They were penned by reporter Joel Turner, a former colleague who I briefly supervised as an interim metro editor for two months in 2001 — including his writing the main story for our 9/11 extra edition — when our current editor Brian Kelley, then a metro editor, was on another assignment. Turner died in 2016 at age 74.
More than 1,000 homes and 120 businesses and industries were damaged in Roanoke, Roanoke County and Salem, Turner reported, by flooding in 1972. Damage totaled about $20 million in the three localities combined, which would translate to nearly $140 million, adjusting for inflation today.
The Roanoke River crested at 19.61 feet, as measured at the Walnut Avenue gauge, more than 9 feet above flood stage. (This is according to modern weather service data; it was reported as 19.35 in 1972 newspaper accounts, unclear what accounts for the slight discrepancy, which amounts to about 3 inches.)
At the time, that mark topped a 32-year-old record for highest Roanoke River flood.
Just six years later, a late April 1978 flood, related to a stalled upper-level low and coastal storm that also caused extremely late and deep snowfall along higher elevations of the Blue Ridge, came within a foot of the Agnes flood at the same gauge.
Then the November 1985 flood, caused by the remnants of Hurricane Juan combining with an inland low-pressure system and a stationary front, blew almost 4 feet beyond the 1972 record, to 23.35 feet.
Besides being even larger and more destructive than the 1972 flood, locally at least, the 1985 flood killed 10 people in and near the Roanoke Valley. “(T)here were no deaths or serious injuries in the Roanoke Valley” in 1972, as Turner reported in The Roanoke Times.
But the 1972 flood and 1985 flood were set up in much the same way, with a relatively weak Category 1 hurricane making a Gulf Coast landfall, then its remnant circulation interacting with other weather systems inland, spreading dense tropical moisture northward.
In both cases, Roanoke had experienced several days of lighter rain before the tropical deluge arrived. In 1972, it had rained five of six previous days in Roanoke, totaling almost 2 inches, before 4.75 inches fell on June 20 and 21. The 1985 flood had four inches over five previous days followed by 6.61 inches on Nov. 4. In both cases, there were heavier totals in some other areas around, especially in higher elevations draining into the Roanoke River.
While Hurricane Juan’s remnants proved worse locally in the Roanoke Valley, Agnes’ flooding had a much wider reach, with the worst occurring from Northern Virginia into Pennsylvania, as the combined tropical and baroclinic low-pressure system stalled for a couple days.
Agnes’ death toll totaled 128 and it was responsible for more than $2 billion in damage in 1972 dollars, making it, at the time, the costliest hurricane in U.S. history — even though it made landfall in the Florida Panhandle with only 85 mph winds, near the low end of the spectrum for hurricanes.
Agnes was more costly in total than Camille had been three years earlier, even though Camille had winds approaching 200 mph at its Mississippi Gulf Coast landfall and then unleashed its horrible second act of destruction in and around Nelson County in Virginia, with landscape-altering torrential rainfall measured in feet over a few hours.
Camille, however, was much deadlier, killing 259, split about evenly between the Mississippi Coast and central Virginia. Camille’s fury in Virginia, while more extreme than Agnes, was much more localized, with rather routine rainfall for the Roanoke Valley.
Agnes’ Virginia toll included 13 deaths and $126 million in damage, which adjusts to more than $850 million for inflation in 2022. The James River in Richmond reached its highest modern crest.
Reader Teresa Calhoun recalls the uncertainty the Agnes flood posed for her senior year at Alleghany County High School at Covington.
“I remember standing on the side of Interstate 64 across the Jackson River from my high school,” Calhoun wrote in an e-mail. “The Jackson was above flood stage and was flowing right through the front doors of my high school! All of that horrible, muddy water was raging through my school! You can probably imagine what my 17-year-old brain was thinking: Would my school be so damaged that I would miss my senior year? Where else could I go to school? Would I have to postpone college? Remember — when you are a teenager everything is all about you!”
It all worked out for Calhoun with a renovated school building that is still there today.
Francis Stebbins, a former religion writer for The Roanoke Times, recalls the problems the 1972 flood created for retrieving her son from a summer school in southwest Roanoke County.
“During the day, the river crossed the bridge on Virginia 419 and it was closed for several hours,” wrote Stebbins, who lived in Hollins at the time with her late husband Charles, a former business reporter for the newspaper. “A friend living near the summer school had to pick my son up and keep him at her house until the water receded enough for the road to be open again.”
Much of the 1972 flooding focus in the Roanoke Valley was the usual areas that are hit hardest any time the river and its tributaries rise over their banks: Riverside Drive and the Riverland Mobile Home Park in Salem, and the Jefferson Street area of Roanoke.
“Waters for the Roanoke River reached the lobby of Roanoke Memorial Hospital despite sandbagging,” reported another Roanoke Times icon, Ben Beagle, in the June 22, 1972, edition. The waters would go deeper into the hospital in 1985.
The modern-day Jefferson Street district features apartment complexes, medical offices and Virginia Tech-Carilion Medical School buildings with open atriums or parking garages on the first floor where future floodwaters might go without damaging residences or offices above them.
A $72 million flood reduction project completed in 2012 included bench cuts and more levees and floodwalls around the river, with at least circumstantial evidence of heavy rain events over the past several years coming up short of crests forecasted by models. The city of Roanoke has also acquired many flood-prone riverside properties.
An Agnes-like flood today in the Roanoke Valley might not be quite as destructive as it was in 1972, but it would probably be similarly disruptive, certainly no trifle.
Contact Kevin Myatt at . Follow him on Twitter .
Go to this story at roanoke.com to see a past story and photo gallery.
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Since 2003, Kevin Myatt has penned the weekly Weather Journal column, and since 2006, the Weather Journal blog, which becomes particularly busy with snow. Kevin has edited a book on hurricanes and has helped lead Virginia Tech students on storm chases.
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Analysis of track and rainfall total for Hurricane Agnes, June 19-24, 1972.
A front-page headline 50 years ago today on June 22, 1972, trumpets a record Roanoke River crest at 19.35 inches. This figure was later revised to 19.61 feet, and remains the second highest crest on record, exceeded only by the 23.35-foot crest in November 1985.
While this image is from James River flooding in Richmond in June 1972, the scene would have been similar near Jefferson Street from the Roanoke River’s flood resulting from remnants of Hurricane Agnes.
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