Agnes, Revisited: methods and principles for community-engaged research on historic flood disasters

Stories—and story-tellers—can build resilience. A body of interdisciplinary research demonstrates that personal stories collected and shared in the immediate wake of a flood disaster can improve disaster preparedness and engagement in flood management. This article explores methods and principles for community story-sharing about destructive floods that are not as recent. Agnes, Revisited is a multi-disciplinary, mixed-methods study of the history of Tropical Storm Agnes (1972) in the Susquehanna River Valley (Pennsylvania, United States). “Agnes” was the costliest natural disaster in US history at the time ($3B in 1972; $91B in 2023) and the Susquehanna River Valley withstood catastrophic flooding. Working with partners on and off campus, we wrote an original play based on 48 interviews with storm survivors and archival research on state records, historical images, and historical newspapers. The play both represented a multi-vocal account of Tropical Storm Agnes and catalyzed continued story-sharing about flooding—in the past, present, and future—including an hour-long documentary on Pennsylvania public television and a book with a regional newspaper. This article details the methods we used to devise and execute the play, as well as pursue opportunities for public scholarship that arose because of the play. We highlight seven principles for community engagement that we followed across the project. In support of broader, community-level flood resilience efforts, we encourage scholars to identify anniversaries of historic flood disasters approaching in the next 3 to 5 years and design community-engaged research projects to meet them.