The Johnstown Flood (12 page)

It would have been a terribly bold decision, and one which Parke alone would have been in no position to make. It would also be, he concluded, a foolhardy decision. Frightful damage would be caused for certain, and they would be responsible; furthermore, there would then be no way to prove that the dam had been about to break and that they had been left with no other choice. Indeed, Parke decided, there was no certainty at all that the dam was going to break. At which point he hurried to the clubhouse for his dinner.

When he returned to the dam, Parke found things had taken a decided turn for the worse.

Several big rocks on the outer face had washed away, and the water pouring across the top had cut a hole into the face about ten feet wide and four feet deep. As the water kept pounding down into this hole, he could see it slicing away at the face, a little more every minute, so that the hole began to take the form of a huge step.

There was absolutely nothing anyone could do now but watch and wait and hope. Parke, Unger, all of them, just stood there looking at the water and the valley stretching away below.

The rain-drenched crowd gathered on both hillsides had grown considerably since early morning. The news of trouble had spread fast and wide.

Some men had more or less smelled trouble hours before. George Gramling, who had a sawmill on Sandy Run, started off for the dam about eight in the morning, along with Jacob Baumgardner and Sam Helman. The Gramling mill was operated by a small dam which had broken about seven. If a small dam washed out that early, the men reasoned, what might a big dam do later on? But mostly people were just curious. The Reverend G. W. Brown, pastor of the South Fork United Brethren Church, for example, like nearly everyone else in the neighborhood, had heard rumors of trouble all day and decided finally to go up to see for himself. When he arrived at the dam it was about ten minutes to three. There was no one actually out on the dam then, just at the ends, and the water was pouring over the breast.

Minutes later he saw the first break. He said it was “about large enough to admit the passage of a train of cars.”

John Parke said that the break came after the huge “step” had been gouged back into the face so near to the water that the pressure caved in the wall.

Ed Schwartzentruver called the first break “a big notch.”

“It run over a short spell,” he said, “and then about half of the roadway just fell down over the dam.

“And then it just cut through like a knife.”

Colonel Unger said the water worked its way down “little by little, until it got a headway, and when it got cut through, it just went like a flash.”

Unger’s man Boyer said, “It run over the top until it cut a channel, and then it ran out as fast as it could get out. It went out very fast, but it didn’t burst out.”

John Parke said, “It is an erroneous opinion that the dam burst. It simply moved away.”

According to Ed Schwartzentruver, “The whole dam seemed to push out all at once. No, not a break, just one big push.”

The time was ten after three.

1

There were men on the hillsides near the dam who had seen what the force of water could accomplish in mining operations, how a narrow sluice could scour and dig with the strength of a hundred men. Actually anyone who had lived in the area long enough to have seen even the spindliest of the local creeks in April had a fair idea of hydraulics at work. But no one who was on hand that afternoon was prepared for what happened when Lake Conemaugh started for South Fork.

“Oh, it seemed to me as if all the destructive elements of the Creator had been turned loose at once in that awful current of water,” Colonel Unger said.

When the dam let go, the lake seemed to leap into the valley like a living thing, “roaring like a mighty battle,” one eyewitness would say. The water struck the valley treetop high and rushed out through the breach in the dam so fast that, as John Parke noted, “there was a depression of at least ten feet in the surface of the water flowing out, on a line with the inner face of the breast and sloping back to the level of the lake about 150 feet from the breast.”

Parke estimated that it took forty-five minutes for the entire lake to empty, but others said it took less, more in the neighborhood of thirty-six or thirty-seven minutes. In any case, later studies by civil engineers indicated that the water charged into the valley at a velocity and depth comparable to that of the Niagara River as it reaches Niagara Falls. Or to put it another way, the bursting of the South Fork dam was about like turning Niagara Falls into the valley for thirty-six minutes.

A short distance below the dam stood a farmhouse belonging to George Fisher. Fisher, who had been warned that the dam was about to go and had managed to escape from the house with his family only minutes before, saw everything he owned vanish in an instant.

Huge trees were snapped off or uprooted one after another and went plunging off in the torrent. When the flood had passed and the hollow was still again, the hill opposite the dam had been scraped bare for fifty feet up. Every bush, vine, every tree, every blade of grass, had been torn out. All that remained was bare rock and mud.

The water advanced like a tremendous wall. Giant chunks of the dam, fence posts, logs, boulders, whole trees, and the wreckage of the Fisher place were swept before it, driven along like an ugly grinder that kept building higher and higher.

At Lamb’s Bridge, the little bridge itself as well as George Lamb’s home were destroyed as swiftly as everything else. Lamb had been afraid of the dam but had not fled to higher ground until he heard the roar of the flood bearing down on him. He made a frantic effort to save two pigs but gave it up and got to the hillside with his family in time to see his house climb the face of the water, which, because of the narrowness of the valley at that point, was about sixty feet high. He watched the house roll and toss momentarily; then it was flung against the near hill and smashed to splinters.

From where they were the men at the dam could see all this happening as the water raged through the immense gash below them. But just beyond Lamb’s Bridge the valley turns sharply to the right and disappears. So now they could only stand there, the rain beating down, and imagine, as much as that was possible, the things taking place beyond that turn.

The road to South Fork had disappeared, and with most of the dam gone, there was no way back to the clubhouse except the long way, clear around the lake, through flooded woods and fields where the mud would be impossible. So they stayed on, watching the level of the lake sink rapidly down and down, until there was nothing to see but hundreds of acres of dark ooze cut through by a violent yellow stream.

Colonel Unger lasted only a short time after the dam failed. He collapsed and had to be carried to his house and put to bed. His work crew, which had been hanging back nearby, waiting for his next orders, then climbed down to where the lake had been and with blankets and baskets and cold bare hands began scooping up the fish that were flopping about in the muck.

2

Emma Ehrenfeld was sitting with her back to the window in the telegraph tower just down from the South Fork depot. She was talking to H. M. Bennett, engineer of the 1165 freight from Derry, and S. W. Keltz, the conductor. The men had left Derry, halfway to Pittsburgh on the main line, the evening before and had been up all night, delayed first at East Conemaugh until five that morning, then held at South Fork since eight.

Tired, cold, rain-soaked trainmen had been coming in and out of the tower most of the day, climbing the stairs to ask about news from up the line or just warming themselves by the coal stove on the first floor.

Miss Ehrenfeld had held the
Chicago Limited
west of the bridge, on the other side of the Little Conemaugh, according to the orders she had received that morning; but with all the talk going around about trouble at the dam, the engineer had grown uneasy about his train standing over there, right where the flood might come. There had been a number of opinions on what to do, and then, after noon, the engineer got up and said he was going to bring the
Limited
across, orders or no orders.

After that there had been more speculating about the bridge. The conductor on the
Limited
had noticed cracks in one of the piers. The division foreman had been sent for, and when he came down from his house up the tracks and said the piers had looked that way for some time, they cut the
Limited’s
helper loose and ran it across first, very slowly, just to be sure. The
Limited
followed after and pulled up past the tower and the depot, a half mile or so. By the time that was done with, it was shortly before three.

Very soon after, Emma Ehrenfeld went downstairs to see about the stove. The men had been firing it up so that her little room upstairs was growing uncomfortably warm. The
Limited’s
engineer had come in again and was sitting there having a smoke, trying to dry off some. She passed the time with him for a few minutes, banged shut the door, and went back up the stairs to her desk.

From where he was sitting beside her, H. M. Bennett could see the northeastern corner of town neatly framed by the rain-spattered window. In the immediate foreground were the Pennsylvania tracks; just beyond them was Railroad Street, with Stineman’s store to the left and the big Stineman house and Pringle’s drugstore on either side of it. To the right was the turn where Railroad became Lake Street and headed uptown and out of sight, toward the road to the dam. And way over to the right, on the other side of the coal tipple and the planing mill, he could see South Fork Creek, flooding across the lowlands, through the trees, and reaching among the houses nearest its banks.

Suddenly Bennett noticed distant figures racing toward the hill. He jumped up and rushed to the window.

“Look at the people running!” he said. “I wonder what’s wrong?”

The other two went immediately to the window and noticed that several people going by in the street below seemed to be shouting something.

As Miss Ehrenfeld later recalled, Bennett said something about the reservoir and that they ought to get out. Then they saw it coming, spread across the full width of the valley.

Situated as they were, only a few hundred feet from where the creek emptied into the Little Conemaugh, they were in about as good a place as any to see up the valley; but even so, they could not see very far because the abrupt hillside to which the town clung blocked off most of their view. When the water came into sight, it looked very close and enormous.

“It just seemed like a mountain coming,” Emma Ehrenfeld said.

Conductor Keltz described it as more like a large hill rolling over and over. He judged it was about a hundred feet high.

The two men turned and dashed down out of the tower. Miss Ehrenfeld was right behind them (“without waiting to get my hat or anything”). She raced down the tracks, crossed over to the stairs that led to the coal tipple, ran to the top, and from there followed the crowd running toward the back alleys that led to higher ground.

Bennett and Keltz had started for the hill with her, but remembering the fireman and brakeman, who were asleep in the engine of their train on a siding on the other side of the river, they turned and ran for the bridge.

They made it to the engine, cut it loose, and with the little steam they had, came rolling out of the siding and back across the bridge, heading directly toward the oncoming flood with what looked like no better than an even chance of making safe ground only a few hundred yards away where the tracks swung hard to the left past the station.

Contrary to Keltz’s estimate, the wall of water closing down on them was probably no more than forty feet high. It was moving straight for the bridge at a rate of perhaps ten to fifteen miles an hour and was driving before it a mass of debris that now included acres of trees, two or three small bridges, numerous mangled houses, dead animals, and rubbish beyond description.

About 200 yards from the bridge the water claimed its first human life. Michael Mann, an English coal miner and self-styled preacher who was known in South Fork as “The Reverend,” had ignored every warning to leave the shanty he lived in on the banks of South Fork Creek. His body was found a week later, a mile and a half downstream. It was half-buried in mud, stripped of all clothing, and so badly decomposed that it could not be moved. As a result the last remains of the man who would be remembered in the valley as “The First Victim” were put into a hole nearby, covered over, and left unmarked.

The flood crushed right through the planing mill, wrenched the bridge from its piers, bent it as though it had been built with an elbow in the center, and then plowed head on into the mountain on the north side of the Little Conemaugh.

Engineer Bennett’s locomotive meanwhile had escaped just about untouched. It had gotten almost to the station when another escaping freight pulled out of a coal siding and blocked the way. The next thing Bennett knew, a huge tree, evidently an advance fragment of the debris, smashed into his locomotive and pitched it halfway off the track. With the water almost on top of them, Bennett, Keltz, and the two others (they were both very much awake by now) jumped to the ground and scrambled onto the other train just as it started pulling away. Seconds later the full brunt of the flood roared past behind them.

But when it was all over remarkably little damage had been done in South Fork. Stacked on the hillside as it was, the town was almost entirely out of reach of the onslaught. Along with the bridge and the planing mill, some twenty other buildings and houses were destroyed. The bridge, which had been thirty-five feet above the normal water level, was dumped 200 yards
up
the Little Conemaugh, carried there by the violent backwash created when the water hit the mountainside. There were a few pieces of machinery to be found where the planing mill had been, but that was about all. There was a stone foundation marking where one store had been. A grocery and barbershop went sailing off. J. P. Wilson’s stable containing two mules, a horse, and a cow landed behind the depot with the animals unhurt.

Station agent Dougherty’s house was tossed into a gully, a total wreck. The depot itself had bobbed up several feet and swirled out over the tracks a ways. Then when the water rushed off downstream, it drifted back again and settled down almost precisely where it had been before, secured by a tangle of telegraph wires and only a little out of plumb.

The coal tipple was destroyed and so was the telegraph tower. And that was about the size of it, except that there had been three other deaths.

A young man named Howard Shafer had been helping clear the jam of rubbish that had collected under a small bridge on South Fork Creek. When the water came he was unable to climb the steep bank fast enough.

The other two lost were Thomas Kehoe and Thomas Henderson, another fireman and a brakeman on Bennett’s 1165 Derry freight. They had been asleep in the caboose when Bennett and Keltz had cut the engine loose to make their dash over the bridge. The caboose along with four other freight cars was carried away.

Past South Fork the water raged along the valley of the Little Conemaugh, between sharp, wooded bluffs that sent the riverbed swerving back and forth on its way west. A straight line from South Fork to Johnstown would be nine miles, but by the river route the distance was about four miles farther.

For the first mile or so beyond South Fork the valley runs on a comparatively even line and is nearly 1,000 feet deep. There were no houses, only the railroad, which skirted along the northern banks of the river about forty feet above the normal water level.

The flood ripped the railroad to shreds, tore out ties, twisted steel rails into incredible shapes, and swallowed up whatever equipment happened to be standing along the way.

A mile down from South Fork the valley narrows abruptly. There the rough hillsides squeezed the great mass of water so that its front wall grew to perhaps seventy to seventy-five feet high. Then, a half mile farther still, the river turns sharply south, traveling nearly two miles out of its way to form an oxbow which is only a matter of yards across. It was here, at the end of the oxbow, that the water smashed into its first major obstacle, a tremendous stone viaduct which had been built more than fifty years earlier to take the old Portage Railroad across the Little Conemaugh and which was still used for the main line of the Pennsylvania.

The viaduct was one of the landmarks of the country. It stood seventy-five feet high and bridged the river gap with one single eighty-foot arch. Even the biggest locomotives looked tiny by contrast as they chugged across it on their way up the mountain. Faced with a tawny-colored local sandstone, it was, as one engineer said, “a substantial and imposing piece of masonry,” which had been built by “an honest Scotch stonemason” named John Durno from a design worked out by the same Sylvester Welsh who had picked the site for the reservoir.