Thursday, October 25, 2012

Feel Free to Correct Us

This photo below shows the damage Hurricane Diane inflicted on the Delware, Lackawanna, and Western railroad tracks near Nay Aug Park. Many historians believe this was the death knell for the DL&W. Herein lies an interesting lesson. When this collection first went live, we erroneously stated that this was the Erie-Lackawanna right-of-way. A user of our collection pointed out that the merger between the DL&W and the Erie post-dated Hurricane Diane. We verified that the merger did indeed occur 1960, five years after the flood, so the information has been corrected. When we enter metadata for items in our collection, we work with the best information we have available at the time, but sometimes it is incomplete or incorrect so, if you know something we don't, feel free to correct us either by commenting on a blog post, commenting in the archives itself, or by sending an email to lvda@albright.org. We really appreciate your input.


Friday, October 19, 2012

Richter Avenue Flooding

 
 
The above picture is one of the many photos that can be found in the Hurricane Diane collection on the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives. This photo scanned from the collection of James Keenan shows the damage the Roaring Brook did to the area and especially the houses on Richter Avenue.  In the photo above, the water is flowing down what is left of the street.


Tuesday, October 9, 2012

WDAU-TV Footage of Hurricane Diane

Anyone who grew up in Scranton in the 1950s through the 1970s knows that WDAU-TV (Channel 22) was "the Scranton station" and WBRE-TV (Channel 28) was the "Wilkes-Barre station" until mergers and acquistions changed the landscape of the local TV market. Footage from WDAU-TV's nightly news program is stored in the basement of the WBRE building in Wilkes-Barre and is a tresure trove of mid-20th Century local history. Thanks to Jack Scanella, a retried WDAU photographer who maintains an index to the footage, and Tom Gregory, a current WBRE-TV photographer, we were able to find the reels pertaining to Hurricane Diane and have them digitized. This haunting, soundless footage records the devastion wrought by Diane in and around the Scranton area.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Hurricane Diane is now ONLINE!!


The Hurricane Diane collection is now available on the Lackawanna Valley Digital Archives website. The library is very excited about this collection because it contains video histories, recorded histories, and photos from our community and also from some of our original partners, which includes the Lackawanna Historical Society and Steamtown National Historic Site. The photo above is one of the many photos in this collection.  You will find 83 items which includes actual TV footage of the flood. Check it out!!