the flood of 1957

The flood of 1957 was a severe autumn storm that struck Derry, Maine, causing widespread flooding and power outages, and directly precipitating the murder of six-year-old George Denbrough by Pennywise the Dancing Clown. The flood's aftermath—swollen gutters, a broken stormdrain, and the town's collective amnesia about its recurring disasters—created the exact conditions for George's fatal encounter, making the flood the proximate catalyst for the entire twenty-eight-year cycle of terror that follows.

Causes and Course of the Flood

In the fall of 1957, steady rain fell on Derry for a week, followed by two days of high winds that knocked out power to most sections of the town. The Kenduskeag Stream crested just below its banks in the Barrens and bare inches below the concrete sides of the Canal that channeled it through downtown. A gang of men, including George and Bill Denbrough's father, Zack Denbrough, worked frantically to remove sandbags they had thrown up the day before, believing the worst was over. The flood recalled the disastrous 1931 flood that had cost millions of dollars and almost two dozen lives; one victim had been found twenty-five miles east, in Bucksport, with his eyes, three fingers, his penis, and most of his left foot eaten by fish, and a Ford steering wheel still clutched in what remained of his hands. The Denbrough house, high on Witcham Street near the crest of the hill, escaped the worst of the flooding, but standing water still seeped in through the old rock foundations, intensifying the cellar's damp, rotten smell that George associated with the monster he imagined lurking there.

The Flood and George Denbrough's Death

On the afternoon of George's death, the rain had slackened but the streets were still full of runoff. Witcham Street was blocked to motor traffic by smudgepots and orange sawhorses stenciled with "DERRY DEPT. OF PUBLIC WORKS." Beyond them, the rain had spilled out of gutters clogged with branches, rocks, and piles of autumn leaves, first prying fingerholds in the paving and then snatching whole greedy handfuls. By noon of the fourth day, big chunks of the street's surface were boating through the intersection of Jackson and Witcham like miniature white-water rafts. George ran cheerfully beside the newspaper boat his brother Bill had made, chasing it down the left side of Witcham Street. The water in the gutter was cascading into a stormdrain that was still open—a long dark semicircle cut into the curbing. A stripped branch shot into the stormdrain's maw, hung up for a moment, and then slipped down inside. George's boat followed the same path, disappearing into the drain. When George peered into the stormdrain, Pennywise the Dancing Clown was waiting there, holding George's boat in one hand and a bunch of balloons in the other. The clown seized George's arm, pulled him toward the darkness, and tore his left arm off. Dave Gardener, who had stayed home from his job at The Shoeboat because of the flood, was the first to arrive, but George was already dead, his body turning over in Gardener's hands with the left side of his yellow slicker bright red and blood flowing into the stormdrain from the tattered hole where the left arm had been.

The Flood's Aftermath and Symbolic Resonance

An hour after George's death, while his mother was being sedated at Derry Home Hospital and Bill sat stunned in his bed listening to his father sob, George's newspaper boat shot out through a concrete loophole and ran at speed down a sluice-way into an unnamed stream, eventually joining the Penobscot River. The boat, waterproofed by the two brothers with paraffin, did not sink; it passed out of the tale forever, still afloat. The flood itself receded, and Zack Denbrough expressed confidence that the new Bangor Hydro dam would cease the threat of future floods. But the novel notes that "in Derry such forgetting of tragedy and disaster was almost an art," a pattern of collective amnesia that Bill would come to discover in the course of time. The flood thus serves as a recurring motif: it is the literal water that carries George to his death, the symbolic force that Derry habitually forgets, and the environmental condition that, twenty-seven years later, during the Canal Days Festival of 1984, still shapes the town's geography and its vulnerability to the cycles of violence that Pennywise embodies. The flood of 1957 is not merely a backdrop but an active agent in the story's machinery, linking the natural world's indifference to human suffering with the town's willful blindness to the evil that thrives in its drains and sewers.