The floodwaters rose relentlessly in Carnegie, bursting the banks of Chartiers Creek in a roiling, brown torrent that filled Main Street shops with 4 feet of muddy water, trapped residents and rescue workers alike, and swept one man away to his death early yesterday morning.

	Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Jean Phillips tried to hold back tears while looking at the damage done to her business yesterday on East Main Street in Carnegie. "I've been crying all day," said Phillips, who started Linmar Galleries, a reupholstering and interior decorating business, two years ago. "I was OK yesterday [during the flooding], but when I saw this today..." Click photo for larger image.

In a flood that surprised many area residents with its speed and ferocity, Dennis Santiago -- a deaf 35-year-old man who could not hear the radio and did not have TV service -- was unprepared to find a safe place to wait out the storm. Sometime after 5 a.m., Carnegie residents stranded on a downtown rooftop heard a man police believe was Santiago screaming for help.

Rescue workers, who found him clinging to a tree in the raging creek, tried to get a boat to him, but they were turned back by the current, according to Carnegie Police Chief Jeff Harbin. They requested a helicopter, but it didn't arrive in time. After clutching the tree for at least 45 minutes, Santiago fell and was swept downstream as horrified rescue workers watched helplessly.

"We were just not able to reach him," Harbin said.

The death of Santiago, whose body still had not been found last night, was the only known loss of life in Allegheny County as a result of the flood. And though his death was the flood's most tragic result, residents throughout the town -- like those across the region -- suffered through what many described as a terrifying event that forced them to flee their homes and left behind a devastating, muddy swath of uprooted trees, broken shop windows, spoiled food, sodden furniture, drowned cars and ruined businesses.

Jeff Kennell of New Eagle said he lost about $500,000 worth of artwork, gift items and historical documents when water inundated his West Main Street art gallery, Black Swan Gallery. He had sunk everything into the business, he said.

"I'm out. I'm done. I lost it all," said Kennell, who opened the gallery's new location on Monday. "Unless the federal government has some money for us, I'll have to declare bankruptcy."

Like Santiago, many Carnegie residents were caught unprepared by fast-rising waters that sometimes cut off escape in unpredictable ways and that, rather than subsiding, rose through the night until much of the town lay under water.

The first sign of trouble, Harbin said, was when a small tributary to Chartiers Creek overflowed its banks just after 2 p.m. Friday and flooded Lexington Court and Railroad Avenue, forcing the evacuation of dozens of residents.

At about the same time, Santiago e-mailed his girlfriend, telling her that he planned to go to a gym on McKnight Road and then to see a friend. She warned him to be careful of the rain.

By about 4 p.m., the tributary had ebbed and was flowing between its banks again. Harbin, who had been helping residents get out, moved on to the Mansfield Boulevard Bridge, which spans Chartiers Creek and links the east and west sides of town.

And Chartiers Creek was coming up fast.

By 5 p.m., a sheet of water was running through the streets of downtown and, under the Mansfield Bridge, the creek had overrun its banks and pooled at either end of the four-lane bridge.

Drivers were stuck in traffic on the bridge as cars in front of them stalled out. Their owners, confused and beginning to panic at the sight of the rushing water, tried to push them out of the way, Harbin said.

But the creek moved too quickly for them, closing off either end of the bridge and trapping 18 people, including Harbin and three other police officers, on the bridge. They put out a call for boats.

Two officers and two civilians in a private boat made several passes at the bridge, only to be knocked away by the furious current. The boat's propeller caught on the tops of submerged cars, breaking it, and "by the time they got to us, the boat was sinking," Harbin said.

The four occupants made it onto the bridge, he said, but then the would-be rescuers needed rescuing, too.

Harbin and the others moved back toward the middle of the bridge and higher ground. As the creek rose higher, they moved back again and again.

"It just kept closing in on us," Harbin said. "It just kept coming."

By 7 p.m., the evening was growing dark and the creek, reaching the floor of the bridge, was beginning to crash in waves over the side, Harbin said. The 22 people on the bridge tied themselves to a rope and tried to hang on, he said.

After numerous attempts by three or four boats to rescue the people trapped on the bridge, a River Rescue boat -- from Johnstown, Harbin thinks -- made it to them. Rescuers took off the first three people, all women, and ferried them to Holy Souls Roman Catholic Church, 50 yards away.

There, they broke in a door, waded through water that already filled the church above the pews, and made it up the steps to a choir loft on the second floor.

Despite the short distance, each trip took 45 minutes to negotiate the floodwaters. Harbin and the others called for a Coast Guard helicopter, which can fly in inclement weather, in hopes of getting plucked from the bridge.

Then, everything just went dark, Harbin said. He could hear the explosion of transformers.

When the boat finally returned to continue carrying evacuees to the church, "it was eerie, because you couldn't see him until he was up on you," he said.

Around town, volunteer firefighters and emergency medical technicians had started the evening wading door-to-door through chest-deep water to evacuate residents. As the night wore on, they began commandeering every boat they could find to remove residents -- including dogs and cats -- out of windows and off roofs, and taking them to the Carnegie Borough Building.

Some people were afraid to leave their homes, afraid to step into water that might be electrified by downed wires. Others were panicking because they couldn't get out fast enough, said firemen and EMT Dan Ruscitto of Brookline.

"Some people were going nuts because they wanted to get out so bad," said Ruscitto, 19. "They were having a hard time breathing, yelling, screaming, arguing."

In Mike Riley's All-Pro Painting business, the water had overtaken the shop. Riley and his co-workers and helpers found a ladder and climbed up into a lofted area in the shop, where they called for help. Finally, at about 1 a.m. rescuers in an amphibious Army vehicle plowed over the two trees in the building's courtyard, pulled open a door in the direction of the current and dropped a ladder down for Riley and the others.

Riley and the others, tied to ropes, climbed to safety and then Riley turned back and saw the open door, with the contents of his business inside, poised to ride out on the flood.

"I said, 'That's 30 years of my life' and they shut the door," Riley said. "They jumped back down and shut the door."

By then, witnesses say, the flood had reached 5 feet in many parts of town, submerging cars throughout downtown, including several of the borough's police cars and its ladder truck. The force of the water rushing down Main Street upended massive cement flower planters, wedged Dumpsters against skewed cars and floated trees through the shopping district.

It smashed in the plate-glass windows of Izzy Miller Furniture, bowling over its gilded chairs and plush couches. Like an absent-minded shopper, it tossed loaves of bread and boxes of donuts into a shopping cart at Eagle Drug, then abandoned them.

Sometime in the early morning, Harbin said, he and the last officers were taken to the church, where they and the others would stay until about 4:30 a.m., when the amphibious vehicle rescued them.

And for some reason, Cindy Germaine said, her foster son Dennis Santiago apparently was out in that flood. So Germaine's heart sank yesterday morning when she heard news reports of a deaf man who had fallen from a tree into Chartiers Creek. Unable to reach Santiago at his Carnegie apartment, she called Carnegie police to say she might know who the missing man was.

She is still not certain that he was the man, and police told her not to give up hope that he might turn up alive. His speech is so impaired that only she can understand it, so if he was lost somewhere he couldn't easily contact her. Friends and family gathered at her Bellevue home yesterday, including a cousin of hers who is a Catholic priest.

"We have a very strong faith in our family. But this is unbelievable," Germaine said. "I can't imagine my life without him. I'm praying that he's okay."