CHAPTER III.
Friday, May 31st, 1889. The day before had been a solemn holiday.
In every village veterans of the War for the Union had gathered;
in every cemetery flowers had been strewn upon the grave-mounds
of the heroic dead. Now the people were resuming the every-day
toil. The weather was rainy. It had been wet for some days. Stony
Creek and Conemaugh were turbid and noisy. The little South Fork,
which ran into the upper end of the lake, was swollen into a raging
torrent. The lake was higher than usual; higher than ever. But
the valley below lay in fancied security, and all the varied activities
of life pursued their wonted round.
Friday, May 31st, 1889. Record that awful date in characters
of funereal hue. It was a dark and stormy day, and amid the darkness
and the storm the angel of death spread his wings over the fated
valley, unseen, unknown. Midday comes. Disquieting rumors rush
down the valley. There is a roar of an approaching storm approaching
doom! The water swiftly rises. A horseman thunders down the valley:
To the hills, for God's sake! To the hills, for your lives! "They
stare at him as at a madman, and their hesitating feet linger
in the valley of the shadow of death, and the shadow swiftly darkens,
and the everlasting hills veil their faces with rain and mist
before the scene that greets them.
This is what happened:
The heavy rainfall raised the lake until its water began to pour
over the top of the dam. The dam itselfwretchedly built
of mud and boulderssaturated through and through, began
to leak copiously here and there. Each watery sapper and miner
burrowed on, followers swiftly enlarging the murderous tunnels.
The whole mass became honeycombed. And still the rain poured down,
and still the South Fork and a hundred minor streams sent in their
swelling floods, until, with a roar like that of the opening gates
of the Inferno belching forth the legions of the damned, the wall
gave way, and with the rush of a famished tiger into a sheepfold,
the whirlwind of water swept down the valley on its errand of
destruction
"And like a horse unbroken,
When first be feels the rein,
The furious river struggled hard,
And tossed his tawny mane,
And burst the curb, and bounded,
Rejoicing to be free,
And, whirling down in mad career,
Battlement and plank and pier,
Rushed headlong to the sea!
According to the statements of people who lived in Johnstown
and other towns on the line of the river, ample time was given
to the inhabitants of Johnstown by the railroad officials and
by other gentlemen of standing and reputation. In hundreds of
cases this warning was utterly disregarded, and those who heeded
it early in the day were looked upon as cowards, and many jeers
were uttered by lips that now are cold. The people of Johnstown
also had a special warning in the fact that the dam in Stony Creek,
just above the town, broke about noon, and thousands of feet of
lumber passed down the river. Yet they hesitated, and even when
the wall of water, almost forty feet high, was at their doors,
one man is said by a survivor to have told his family that the
stream would not rise very high.
How sudden the calamity is illustrated by an incident which
Mr. Bender, the night chief operator of the Western Union in Pittsburgh,
relates: "At 3 o'clock that Friday afternoon," said
he, the girl, operator at Johnstown was cheerfully ticking away
that she had to abandon the office on the first floor, because
the water was three feet deep there. She said she was telegraphing
from the second story and the water was gaining steadily. She
was frightened, and said many houses were flooded. This was evidently
before the dam broke, for our man here said something encouraging
to her, and she was talking back as only a cheerful girl operator
can, when the receiver's skilled ear caught a sound on the wire
made by no human hand, which told him that the wires had grounded,
or that the house had been swept away in the flood from the lake,
no one knows which now. At 3 o'clock the girl was there, and at
3:07 we might as well have asked the grave to answer us."
The water passed over the dam about a foot above its top, beginning
at about half-past 2. Whatever happened in the way of a cloud-burst
took place in the night. There had been little rain up to dark.
When the workmen woke in the morning the lake was full, and rising
at the rate of a foot an hour. It kept on rising until 2 P.M.,
when it began breaking over the dam and undermining it. Men were
sent three or four times during the day to warn people below of
their danger. When the final break came at 3 o'clock, there was
a sound like tremendous and continued peals of thunder. Trees,
rocks and earth shot up into mid-air in great columns and then
started down the ravine. A farmer who escaped said that the water
did not come down like a wave, but jumped on his house and beat
it to fragments in an instant. He was safe on the hillside, but
his wife and two children were killed.
Herbert Webber, who was employed by the Sportsmen's Club at
the lake, tells that for three days previous to the final outburst,
the water of the lake forced itself out through the interstices
of the masonry, so that the front of the dam resembled a large
watering pot. The force of the water was so great that one of
these jets squirted full thirty feet horizontally from the stone
wall. All this time, too, the feeders of the lake, particularly
three of them, more nearly resembled torrents than mountain streams,
and were supplying the dammed up body of water, with quite 3,000,000
gallons of water hourly.
At 11 o'clock that Friday morning, Webber says he was attending
to a camp about a mile back from the dam, when he noticed that
the surface of the lake seemed to be lowering. He doubted his
eyes, and made a mark on the shore, and then found that his suspicions
were undoubtedly well founded. He ran across the country to the
dam, and there saw, he declares, the water of the lake welling
out from beneath the foundation stones of the dam. Absolutely
helpless, he was compelled to stand there and watch the gradual
development of, what was to be the most disastrous flood of this
continent.
According to his reckoning it was 2:45 when the stones in the
centre of the dam began to sink because of the undermining, and
within eight minutes a gap of twenty feet was made in the lower
half of the wall face, through which the water poured as though
forced by machinery of stupendous power. By 3 o'clock the toppling
masonry, which before had partaken somewhat of the form of an
arch, fell in, and then the remainder of the wall opened outward
like twin gates, and the great storage lake was foaming and thundering
down the valley of the Conemaugh.
Webber became so awestruck at the catastrophe that he declares
he was unable to leave the spot until the lake had fallen so low
that it showed bottom fifty feet below him. How long a time elapsed
he says he does not know before he recovered sufficient power
of observation to notice this, but he does not think that more
than five minutes passed. Webber says that had the dam been repaired
after the spring freshet of 1888 the disaster would not have occurred.
Had it been given ordinary attention in the spring of 1887 the
probabilities are that thousands of lives would have been saved.
Imagine, if you can, a solid piece of ground, thirty-five feet
wide and over one hundred feet high, and then, again, that a space
of two hundred feet is cut out of it, through which is rushing
over seven hundred acres of water, and you can have only a, faint
conception of the terrible force of the blow that came upon the
people of this vicinity like a clap of thunder out of a clear
sky. It was irresistible in its power and carried everything before
it. After seeing the lake and the opening through the dam it can
be readily understood how that outbreak came to be so destructive
in its character.
The lake had been leaking, and a couple of Italians were at
work just over the point where the break occurred, and in an instant,
without warning, it gave way and they went down in the whirling
mass of water, and were swept into eternity.
Mr. Crouse, proprietor of the South Fork Fishing Club Hotel, says:
"When the dam of Conemaugh lake broke the water seemed to
leap, scarcely touching the ground. It bounded down the valley,
crashing and roaring, carrying everything before it. For a mile
its front seemed like a solid wall twenty feet high." The
only warning given to Johnstown was sent from South Fork village
by Freight Agent Dechert. When the great wall that held the
body of water began to crumble at the top he sent a message begging
the people of Johnstown for Gods sake to take to the hills. He
reports no serious accidents at South Fork.
Richard Davis ran to Prospect Hill when the water raised. As
to Mr. Dechert's message, he says just such have been sent down
at each flood since the lake was made. The warning, so often
proved useless that little attention was paid to it this time.
"I cannot describe the mad rush," he said. "At
first it looked like dust. That must have been the spray. I could
see houses going down before it like a child's play blocks set
on edge in a row. As it came nearer I could see houses totter
for a moment, then rise and the next moment be crushed like egg
shells, against each other."
Mr. John G. Parke, of Philadelphia, a civil engineer, was at
the dam superintending some improvements in the drainage system
at the lake. He did all he could with the help of a gang of laborers
to avert the catastrophe and to warn those in danger. His story
of the calamity is this:
"For several days prior to the breaking of the dam, storm
after storm swept over the mountains and flooded every creek and
rivulet. The waters from these varied sources flowed into the
lake, which finally was not able to stand the pressure forced
upon it. Friday morning I realized the danger that was threatened,
and although from that time until three o'clock every human effort
was made to prevent a flood, they were of no avail. When I at
last found that the dam was bound to go, I started out to tell
the people, and by twelve o'clock everybody in the Conemaugh region
did or should have known of their danger. Three hours later my
gravest fears were more than realized. It is an erroneous idea,
however, that the dam burst. It simply moved away. The water gradually
ate into the embankment until there was nothing left but a frail
bulwark of wood. This finally split asunder and sent the waters
howling down the mountains."
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