Neighbors were rescued from rooftops.
Cars and bridges were swallowed in minutes.
Houses were washed away.
Caskets were uprooted from cemeteries floated down the Naugatuck River.
This week is the 60th anniversary of the Floods of 1955, and the Derby Public Library has info sessions about the natural disaster scheduled for Tuesdays and Wednesdays this month.
The local history info sessions are from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Tuesdays and from 10 a.m. to noon on Wednesdays.
Derby resident Mary Bisaccia, the local history coordinator at Derby Public Library, has files filled with news clippings from 1955, when back-to-back August hurricanes wreaked havoc on the Naugatuck River Valley from Torrington to Derby.
A second storm on Oct. 16 caused additional flooding and destruction throughout the Valley, just as communities were starting to rebuild and recover.
At the library last week, Bisaccia sat surrounded by local history books and clips from the now-defunct Evening Sentinel of Ansonia, the New Haven Register, and other daily newspapers.
But she is hoping folks will stop by and chat about life 60 years ago.
“I’d love to hear some of their stories,” she said.
Click here for a flood retrospective on the floods from the Hartford Courant.
Ansonia Remembers
The City of Ansonia will host a ceremony commemorating the Flood of 1955 Aug. 19, the 60th anniversary of the worst natural disaster in the Valley’s history.
The ceremony will begin at 4 p.m. at Vartelas Park, at the intersection of Olson Drive and the Maple Street bridge.
Greg Stamos, a local attorney whose family once owned a grocery store at the site, will serve as master of ceremonies.
Rep. Rosa DeLauro is scheduled to attend and offer remarks, as is Mayor David Cassetti and Timothy Dillon, president of the Derby Historical Society.
Amazing Audio Story
The flood — which started late on the evening of Aug. 18 and became a disaster Aug. 19 — devastated the Naugatuck Valley, and killed almost 90 people across the state.
Connecticut suffered millions of dollars in property damage.
The flood has been memorialized in video documentaries, magazines, and newspaper articles.
In 2011, Shelton resident Chad Jansen and the Valley Indy uploaded to YouTube a radio documentary produced by Jubilee Records featuring reports from WAVZ radio in New Haven.
The “Flood of ’55” can be replayed in four parts below.
Note: Portions of Part 3 and Part 4 focus specifically on Seymour, Derby and Ansonia. They include interviews with police chiefs in Ansonia and Derby and the former mayor of Ansonia.
Voices heard on the record from New Haven’s WAVZ include:
- Tiny Markle, the program director and disc jockey
- George Lezotte, a radio reporter who did interviews from the emergency room at St. Mary’s Hospital in Waterbury
- Daniel W. Kops, the station’s vice-president and general manager who wrote the script
- George Phillips, the station’s news editor, who related information from the field to the public. Phone service during the flood was virtually non-existent.
Below is a podcast Jansen and the Valley Indy staff posted in 2011 after hearing the recordings for the first time:
