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Flash floods displace more than 100 residents

MARK NANCE/Sun-Gazette A home seems stranded as water flows from the mountain over Lower Bodines Road and into a field in Bodines Friday morning. The object on the far right is a hot tub.

More than 100 residents were forced to flee their homes overnight Thursday as flash floods caused both Lycoming and Loyalsock Creeks as well as a number of tributaries to overflow their banks.

“We’re talking anywhere between 100 and 150 people just in Lewis and McIntyre Townships alone,” Trout Run Robert Whitford said.

Among those forced to evacuate were Thomas and Vickie Murray, who tried to use a sump pump for the water that was filling up their garage at 83 Slacks Run Road in Lewis Township, but the pump just could not keep up.

Murray, carrying the couple’s 8-year-old Boston Terrier, Peanut, and his wife, holding onto a bag of medications and some cellphones, made their way to their car in the garage.

“We got into the car, which was full of water. Tom got it started and gunned it,” getting the vehicle through the flooded driveway and onto the road, which was not yet flood.

The Murrays were able to sit in the vehicle for a while, but then fled because “water was coming in behind us. It was really coming in all directions,” Vickie Murray said during a brief interview at the Trout Run firehouse on Route 14.

About four dozen people were temporarily evacuated to the the fire station, until they could be reunited with family members or friends, who were taking them in if they could not return to their homes, Whitford said.

An apparent “logjam” in Slacks Run compounded the flooding in the region, Whitford said.

“There was just a tremendous amount of water coming from the run. We’ve never had that before,” he explained.

“We had people trapped at the Cascade picnic grounds. It took forever to get in there, but it we finally got them out,” Whitford said.

MARK NANCE/Sun-Gazette Scott Leigey of Williamsport tries to clear debris from a pipe that drains water from one side of Slacks Run Road to the other in Bodines Friday morning.

MARK NANCE/Sun-Gazette A resident wades through a flooded Slacks Run Road in Bodines Friday morning.

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