In Winsted, for example, where the Mad and Still Rivers join, the town's Main Street, with all its utility lines, was scoured out to a depth of 10 to 15 feet.

But the worst industrial damage was inflicted directly on the factories by the streams, in some cases by very small ones. A half-mile southwest of the town of Winsted and 100 feet above it is Highland Lake, dammed up a century ago to provide industrial waterpower. About a dozen factories once generated their power from the little millstream that runs down from the lake and empties into the Maw River. Highland Lake itself is hardly a square mile in area, and has a very small watershed. Yet the rains of Thursday night and Friday morning raised its level some 4 or 5 feet; and such a torrent ran over the spillway that the little mill brook gouged a new channel up to 75 feet wide and 30 feet deep down the hillside, tearing through whatever stood in its path.

One factory in its path was Winsted Hardware Manufacturing Co., a Dynamics Corp. of America subsidiary that makes Waring blenders and travel irons. The stream roared past one side of the company's main building and through one of its warehouses, carrying away the bulk of its finished inventory. Just below Winstead Hardware stood Son-Chief Electrics Corp. (small appliances), which less than a year earlier had built a new one-story addition to house its stamping presses. The stream ran directly through the main plant, and boulders as big as jeeps buried the new addition and its machinery under 10,000 tons of stone. On the other side of Winsted, meanwhile, the Still River gutted two Gilbert Clock Corp. warehouses, wrecked the firm's office building, and carried away its power substation.

THE THREE WRECKERS

In the whole Naugatuck Valley, the raging waters inflicted an estimated $55 million of damage on 127 plants. The damage was of three main types:

Structural-One of the hardest-hit plants was Plume & Atwood Manufacturing Co., near Thomaston, specialist in brass and bronze fabrication. Plume & Atwood only last March had dedicated a $1,300,000, one-story plant of 150,000 square feet, located so that its floor would be 3 feet above the highest river level ever recorded. At the height of the August flood, 11 feet of water roared through the new plant, whose northeast section was ripped off by 2 houses that struck it as they careened downstream.

Platt Bros. & Co., a small producer of zinc strip and wire, located just south of Waterbury, was assaulted from two directions: the upstream end of its buildings took the full force of the main current, while water pouring through a longabandoned power canal struck the center of the plant from the east. The plant stretches 500 feet along the east bank of the Naugatuck, and over 300 feet of that length was stripped down to the bare concrete floor; even the 5,000-pound rolling mills were swept into the river, and had to be snaked out by cranes.

Some of the structural damage seemed almost freakish. Seymour Manufac turing Co. (primary forms of copper, brass, and bronze) had several unused old water wheels located under the floors of its main buildings; and the floodwater that forced its way through the abandoned flume so undermined the floors that much of the old apparatus had to be dug out and the rest buried under new fill. At Torrington, the plant of Anaconda's American Brass Co. subsidiary lies a few hundred yards downstream from Hotchkiss Bros Co., a millwork concern. Some 32 carloads of Hotchkiss' lumber came roaring down the river to jam into a bridge; and this impromptu cofferdam diverted the current against the brass plant's foundation, which in places was undercut to a depth of 12 to 15 feet.

Electrical. The most crippling damage in the flooded plants was the complete loss of electric power-temporarily through lack of electricity itself, but for a much longer time because of damage to internal electrical systems. Every flooded motor, generator, and transformer had to be taken apart, cleaned, baked dry, and often rewound; every power substation, control, panel switchboard, and power cable had to be dried, tested circuit by circuit, and rewired where necessary. The magnitude of the job may be judged from the fact that American Brass Co. alone had to dismantle some 8,000 electric motors, about 1,000 of which were large motors ranging from 50 to 1,500 horsepower.

Muck, silt, and debris.-Even the electrical damage, however, was less dismaying than the gruesome deposits the Naugatuck River left in every flooded plant. Whole trees got inside of factories (and could not be removed without being sawed in several pieces). Telephone poles, scraps of buildings, household furniture, tank trucks, and other debris were churned into a goulash with the plants' own machinery and supplies. Scattered through the wreckage were dead

animals and even human bodies, though only one life was lost among employees on the job.

The muck and silt (frequently topped with a light frosting of fuel oil) were everywhere, often piled waist deep on factory floors and deeper still in basements and machinery-service pits. The silt forced its way into machine bearings and through the oilholes into lubrication lines and oil tanks. The lower factory floors, which usually contained the heaviest machinery-the great rolling mills and extrusion machines of American Brass and Chase Brass, Farrel-Birmingham Co.'s roll grinders, and United States Rubber's Banbury mixers were all flooded. None of these huge machines was damaged beyond repair; but their sheer mass made dismantling and cleaning them a prodigious job.

Cleaning up this mess has been very costly. President J. M. Schaffer, of Waterbury Farrel Foundry & Machine Co., which grosses some $12 million a year in rolling mills, cold-heading machines, and similar heavy equipment, estimated his reconditioning and cleanup tab at $300,000 for labor alone. United States Rubber's footwear division at Naugatuck figured its plant rehabilitation cost at about $2 million, including such items as cleaning and washing (by hand) 130,000 pairs of aluminum shoe and boot lasts that were stored in its basement. Damage to raw materials, inventories, and supplies varied greatly. Copper and brass producers like Chase Brass suffered little damage to raw materials and not too much to finished inventory (though the river did wash away a 20,000ton Chase coal stockpile). On the other hand, Son-Chief Electric's stock of thin steel strip was completely ruined by rust. And while Plume & Atwood sustained some $300,000 in structural damage to its new Thomaston plant, it suffered more than twice as great a dollar loss through water damage to such fabricated brass items as lipstick and compact cases, and kerosene-lamp parts.

Could this catastrophe have been averted-or the industrial damage minimized? New Englanders are a prudent breed, and the industries along the Naugatuck, Farmington, and other New England rivers are no strangers to floods. Yet, quite naturally, they had prepared for the future in terms of the past and when the future arrived on August 18 and 19, it so far exceeded expectations as to render all preparations futile.

For example, Thursday night the watchmen at American Brass' Torrington plant forehandedly removed the bottom draws of filing cabinets and placed them atop the files-from whence they later floated away. The night shift at Winsted Hardware looked carefully for roof leaks in a warehouse that later was almost totally destroyed. Several companies laboriously hoisted big electric motors from their pits to avoid flooding-only to have the water cover motors, hoists, and all.

Many

As the flood's magnitude frustrated all precautions, so its speed left little time for "industrial heroism." Things happened too fast-in several cases so fast that there was not even time to pull the main power switches in flooded plants, with the result that transformers blew up when the water hit them. plant managers and other top executives could not be notified of the disaster, as most telephone service was out; others were stopped by washouts when they tried to reach their factories. "And so," says Treasurer M. F. Fitzgerald of SonChief Electrics, “I sat on the hill across the river and watched the stuff sweeping out of my plant."

One plant manager who got to his factory was W. E. Bittle of United States Rubber Co.'s footwear division at Naugatuck. "At 4:30 Friday morning," he recalls, "we were still O. K., but in a little while parts of the first floor were under maybe a foot of water. The next shift was due to start at 6 o'clock. My supervisors asked me what we were going to do about working, so I said we'd go right ahead and work. Obviously we weren't going to have a full, working plant, but I told the supervisors to put men in some of the departments on upper floors where we needed extra production. That was shortly before 6; and just to show you how fast that water came up, by 6: 10 we were getting people out of the plant as fast as we could. The north end of the plant ended up under 14 feet of water."

RENASCENCE

If the Naugatuck Valley's flood damage was startling, then the industrial response to it has been well-nigh incredible. Immediately, unanimously, with no apparent calculation of cost or thought of alternative, the valley's industries began to dig out and rebuild. Several companies in the valley-including United States Rubber-had "disaster plans" on paper. But the general experience in the flood was that the plans had to be discarded, either because keymen could

not be reached, or because the plan did not fit the disaster that actually occurred. Thus managements tended to fall back on improvisation, with the greatest emphasis on speed.

At the Waterman Pen Co.'s Seymour plant, for instance, the most critical loss was five injection molds essential to the production of a new model pen for the Christmas trade. The molds, some weighing 1,000 pounds each, had been carried out of doors from the mold shop and placed for safety on a high concrete ledge, from which the water eventually swept them into a silt-filled courtyard. "We got waders and searchlights," says Vice President E. R. Faust, "and at about 7 o'clock Friday night 8 of us started poking around in the silt for those molds. By 2 in the morning we had found them all. We smuggled a tow truck into town-only civil defense vehicles were operating then-snaked the molds out of the silt, and sprayed them with kerosene. All this by 4 a. m. Saturday, and Waterman Pen was back in business."

Not all the valley's industry was directly damaged by the flood. Scovill Manufacturing Co. and Torrington Co., the largest employers in Waterbury and Torrington, respectively, were so situated that their main plants were virtually unscathed; and both were back in production as soon as power, gas, water, and other public services were restored. But even some factories that were under 8 feet of water were producing again within 3 weeks-for example, Torrington Manufacturing Co. (not to be confused with the Torrington Co.), a producer of fan blades and related components with an annual volume of $11 million.

"WE LIKE IT HERE"

The rebuilding began so instinctively that most company leaders never seem to have even considered the possibility of moving. "Good grief, imagine our freight costs if we left our big customers and moved South!" exclaimed American Brass President John Coe. "Besides, we wouldn't think of moving. We've been doing business here in Connecticut for 140 years, and that's long enough to have a heritage." Plume & Atwood President Thomas Boak summed up thus: "Our people live right here we can't move them. We've been here quite a while: this plant was started in 1853 by Seth Thomas. We may be damn fools, but we're staying and we're going to be in business where our skilled labor lives and that's right here." Added a Gilbert Clock executive, "We couldn't hightail it out of a place that has been our lifeblood." President Theodore O. Rudd of the Kerite Co. in Seymour assured Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff that "we will be operating here a hundred years from now as our predecessors were a hundred years ago."

JOINT ATTACK

A contagious enthusiasm seems to have gripped the entire working population of the valley. Unions forgot all about job classifications, waived wage negotiations, accepted flat pay scales for cleanup work. Workers accustomed to cleaner jobs at better pay shoveled muck from the machine pits with positive good cheer, and salvage gangs searched energetically for things that could be saved. "We weren't going to try to salvage lined gumshoes (ordinary rubbers)," said one United States Rubber executive, "but the salvage crews decided they could be saved, so we're going to have about 80,000 pair whether we want them or not." For their part, managements of flood-damaged companies put into effect previously agreed wage increases that could easily have been deferred, and kept employees on the payroll by every pretext possible. One company head even refused the loan of mechanical cleanup equipment, explaining, "If we brought it in we'd need fewer men and would have to let some of them go. I just thought it better to keep the men.” Companies that were not hit freely lent equipment and supplies to companies that were. Industrial distributors and other suppliers offered special services at reduced prices, customers accepted postponed deliveries, "It might interest you to know," wrote Waterbury Farrel's President J. M. Schaeffer in a letter to his employees, "that one company offered to recondition all of our grinding wheels free of charge."

As a result of this tremendous effort, the Naugatuck Valley's recovery should be substantially complete by Christmas. Unemployment has been negligible since October 1, as the number of workers still flooded out of production jobs was balanced by extra employment upon cleanup work, road and street repair, etc. The valley's total payroll for the last 5 months of the year will almost surely exceed what it would have been without a flood-partly because of the number of electricians, millwrights, and other highly paid skilled workmen who