There are all sorts of instances of interesting timing in life, be they serendipitous, providential or tragic — or a mix of all three.

Examples of all three can be found in the story of a recently retired small business owner and Bradford resident’s newly published book, “The Brady’s Bend Flood of 1980: Tragedy in Western Pennsylvania.”

Brady’s Bend, a small community on a dramatic curve 

Lisa Olszak Zumstein is a native of Brady’s Bend, a small community situated along a dramatic curve of the Allegheny River in Armstrong County, just east of East Brady and not far from Butler on Route 68.

She grew up there; one of nine children born within 12 years to a now aging couple who both live with forms of dementia.

“It was such an emotional experience for me that I thought one of the ways I could deal with it was providing a gift to my family — my siblings — what it was like to grow up in Brady’s Bend in my family,” Zumstein said.

“We had two bedrooms, all these kids smashed into two bedrooms — my dad built a third one, but it was like sleeping in a closet,” Zumstein recalled. “It was a normal kind of experience — we were dirt poor.

“Anyway, I wrote the book and was just going to print it for my siblings, and I did that, but because I was printing it I asked around in Bradford if there was anyone who could edit this book for me, because I was thinking about putting some money into printing it.”

Zumstein is a transplant to Bradford, having met the love of her life and now husband, Bob Zumstein — while searching for timber rattlesnakes.

“We’re both timber rattlesnake conservationists,” she explained, adding they are involved in “a great deal of research in Pennsylvania tracking and monitoring the species.”

She said, “He and I are one of a handful in Pennsylvania who surgically implant radio transmitters into snakes to track them. His mother used to tease him that he wasn’t going to meet a woman under a rock and he did! Me!”

Then, “lo and behold,” Zumstein said, she was connected with Dr. Nancy McCabe at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, whom she had never met. An accomplished author, literary scholar and cornerstone of the university’s creative writing community, McCabe asked for a sample of what Zumstein had written.

‘Never in a million years’ 

Zumstein was 21 years old in 1980 when the catastrophic flood struck Brady’s Bend after 10 inches of rain fell in just 45 minutes — a cataclysmic amount of precipitation that killed seven people and “nearly erased” the author’s rural hometown.

The only member of her family who was not at home at the time of the disaster, Zumstein was away at summer school at Penn State University. So, she interviewed each of her siblings and made sure her questions and their answers about what a storm of that magnitude was like were included in her memoir, initially meant just for family.

“When (McCabe) saw it she said, ‘I’ll do it for you, Lisa; I’ll edit it,’” Zumstein recalled. “After she read it she said, ‘You know, Lisa, you could turn that into a book.’

“That had never in a million years occurred to me,” she declared, adding she was encouraged to undertake the considerable project when she began discussing the idea with people from her hometown.

“When I asked people in Brady’s Bend I got chills about their response, they were so excited about having that experience documented that I thought, ‘OK, I’ll write this book.’”

Zumstein said she went on to interview 65 people who lived through the storm or helped with the cleanup, in addition to more than two dozen experts such as hydrology engineers and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“The whole process has been one of peoples’ intense desire to have this local story told.”

‘Moving, powerful, emotional’ 

“As I was collecting all this information and recording peoples’ interviews,” Zumstein said she realized she was accumulating quite a lot of meaningful, historical data. She thought, “I’d hate to see it get lost after I write the book.”

Zumstein said, “People were telling me rich stories about this crazy event in their life. What I heard was moving, powerful, emotional.”

She realized their interviews, as well as the physical collections of hundreds of photos, scrapbooks and news articles they shared with her, should be preserved.

“Originally I thought about local historical societies,” Zumstein said, but worried about the organizations’ capacity to archive the material when so many are strapped for resources.

For several decades Zumstein owned an 18-employee consulting firm in downtown Pittsburgh on capacity building, mostly financial, for larger nonprofits and public outreach for civil engineering projects. Having spent so many years in the Steel City, Zumstein was familiar with the Heinz History Center, Pennsylvania’s largest history museum and an affiliate of the Smithsonian.

“The Heinz History Center had everything I was looking for in an organization with the capacity and systems for archiving,” Zumstein recalled, “so, I made a cold call. Their archivist was immediately interested.”

She said about 20 people who participated in her effort to write “The Brady’s Bend Flood of 1980” agreed to turn the material over to the Heinz History Center.

“I like to imagine that in 50 or 100 years someone’s great-grandchild will be listening to their great-grandparent’s story,” Zumstein noted. “The possibilities for how this information might be used are endless.”

‘A 100-year flood’ 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has built precipitation frequency data tables that help engineers, planners and emergency managers understand how often certain rainfall events are likely to occur in a particular location. They’re used in floodplain mapping and stormwater infrastructure design, and are where phrases like “a 100-year flood” come from.

Many in the media have used that phrase to describe the tragic flood that recently struck Kerrville, Texas, but Zumstein wasn’t sure why.

“The Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes,” she observed. “My guess is that it was much bigger than a 1-in-100-year storm.”

The NOAA tables consider events up to 1,000 years. In describing the Aug. 14, 1980, Brady’s Bend deluge, Zumstein speculated it was a 10,000-year flood.

“I came up with that,” Zumstein said. “What happened in Brady’s Bend was so far beyond that, it wasn’t on the charts — so much rain in such a short period of time. I don’t know if their tables go to 10,000 years; if they did, I never found them.”

Through her research of the event, Zumstein learned that multicell thunderstorms like the ones that flooded Brady’s Bend and Kerrville, cause greater damage even than hurricanes or their remnants. Smethport is actually the world-record holder for the greatest short-duration rainfall ever reliably measured. The area was pummeled with 30.7 inches of rain in just 4.5 hours on July 18, 1942, in an Appalachian corridor that is notorious for these types of storms.

In Brady’s Bend in 1980, Zumstein said, one north-south-moving storm met an east-west-moving storm and stalled. “That’s what created this mega amount of rain (in Brady’s Bend).

“Ten inches of rain in 45 minutes … what is that?” the author asked rhetorically. “That’s a nobody-would-ever-expect-or-be-prepared-for storm.”

Memoir to manuscript 

The tragic and devastating Kerrville, Texas, flood occurred July 4, just a few weeks before Zumstein’s finished book will be available for purchase through Arcadia Publishing on Amazon, Target and Barnes & Noble. Arcadia Publishing does not offer books for pre-sale so it will be available at arcadiapublishing.com on July 29.

Zumstein said McCabe was “both incredibly supportive and encouraging through the whole process,” adding she researched publishers on her own, not wanting to self-publish unless she had to.

“I like the idea of having that feel of approval from a reputable publisher,” she reasoned. “I identified seven publishers, picked the top three, sent out the proposal and within a week had a response from Arcadia publishing.

“I keep being surprised when people look at it and find it interesting,” Zumstein admitted. “I’m finding the reaction — I’m thoroughly blown over and pleased.

“Besides me writing the memoir (for her family) and Nancy McCabe saying I could turn it into a book, I never would’ve even considered it. I was kind of in the right place at the right time.”