Residents in Philly suburbs prepare for worst

• Philadelphia suburbs were hit by Irene last year
• Roughly 12 inches of rain expected by storm's end

HARLEYSVILLE, Pa. — Michaela Hilling, 15, grew up swimming in the Perkiomen Creek behind her parents' historic millhouse. Today she's watching it with trepidation, fully expecting the normally placid stream to overflow its banks and flood her home.

Like more than 5 million residents and emergency responders in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, Michaela and her family are watching the approach of Hurricane Sandy and doing what they can to prepare. In her family's case, that means renting a U-Haul moving truck, loading it with all their first floor furniture and parking it at a church on a hill a half mile away.

"I've seen it flood before and usually it turns out OK," Michaela said Sunday night. "Usually it goes back down, but this is supposed to be worse. It's a little nerve-racking."

Michaela's father, Mick, participated in a conference call with his financial services company, making plans for being out of work for the next few days because of the storm.

Meanwhile, her mother, Cathy, took visitors on a tour of the preparations around the home. The only furniture in the family room consisted of two lawn chairs and a rocking chair arranged in a semi-circle around the television, which sat on the floor. In the living room remained only a piano, too big to load on the truck, and the furnace they moved up from the cellar after the last time it flooded. On the porch, pet crates were prepared for the family's four cats. And crates of ice sat ready for the contents of the refrigerator, to be carted away in case the water rises.

On the second floor, Michaela's bedroom was strewn with china, silver, small pieces of furniture, guitars, and framed artwork removed from the now-vacant walls of the first floor.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time it's heaven down here," Cathy Hilling said, referring to the wooded lot by the water. "People pay for mountain cabins and shore houses, we have this all the time."

She showed off an historic photograph of the home pictured in a real estate calendar for the area, featuring a soldier in uniform standing out front, the mill still standing behind him, and in front a hitching post for the stagecoach that once made regular stops there.

Outside, Mick, now done with the conference call, pointed to signs of the ferocity that the barely audible Perkiomen can fetch. Multiple water lines inch up the side of the home's whitewashed foundation wall. The highest one, from Hurricane Irene in August 2011, is 1½ inches from the floorboards of the front porch, and the home's interior. A few yards away, on the edge of the mill chase that runs behind the house, a tree lodged in the notch of another tree about 12 feet from the ground, where it was deposited by the floodwaters produced by Hurricane Irene last year.

The creek floods with 3 or 4 inches of rain in a 24-hour period, but Hurricane Sandy is forecast to dump 12 inches of rain in that amount of time. Mick Hilling worries that will bring unprecedented flooding that his 125-year-old house has never seen, and an outcome he can't fathom.

"If the water comes in my house, say 2 feet of water on my first floor and stays for 36 hours, at what point do the health inspectors come in and say we can't live here anymore?" he asked. "I don't know. I've never been through this before, but that's how anxious I am."

Nearby, volunteer firefighters at the Schwenksville fire department who are on the Spring Mountain Water Rescue Team made last-minute preparations for what they expect to be a busy three days and near record flooding until the storm passes in this outlying suburb of Philadelphia, one of many where streams regularly overflow their banks in heavy rain.

Schwenksville Fire Chief Mark Brasch packed ropes into throw bags after a day of last-minute practice on the water, while chief engineer Ryan Ziegler unloaded groceries for the five or six swift water team members who will live at the firehouse for the duration of the storm.

"There are dozens of homes in low-lying areas along the creek that habitually flood," Brasch said.

Some of those residents may need to be rescued from their flooded homes, and others will try to drive across moving water and get swept away, also needing rescue, he said. The Spring Mountain team has two boats and equipment it started to purchase just a few months before Hurricane Irene, which swept through the area in August 2011. The rescuers spent nearly 20 hours straight pulling people out of the water, and this storm is supposed to be much worse, Brasch said.

That storm showed the team how little they knew about swift water rescue, so they spent the past year training, buying more gear and getting certified in the latest techniques, said Ziegler. The two men acknowledged the coming storm was causing them some anxiety.

Unlike a fire, moving water is "completely unpredictable," Brasch said.

"People don't anticipate the strength of the water," he said. "When everything's washing away — furniture, refuge, oils — you don't know what's in the water."

The men wear drysuits to protect them from unsavory ingredients in the water. They are equipped with strobe lights in case they get separated in the dark, ropes to pull themselves and others to safety, and knives for getting untangled. Despite all that, Ziegler said: "I'd absolutely prefer to go into a burning building than into the creek."

Ziegler said Hurricane Irene was the worst storm to hit the Perkiomen Valley in his 27 years living there.

"If Irene was the worst, and this storm is supposed to be worst than that, I'm nervous and anxious," he said.