CHARLESTON, GALVESTON, JOHNSTOWN--OUR AMERICAN DISASTERS.
BY TRUMBULL WHITE.
=Earthquake Shock in South Carolina--Many Lives Lost in the
Riven City--Flames Follow the Convulsion--Galveston Smitten by
Tidal Wave and Hurricane--Thousands Die in Flood and Shattered
Buildings--The Gulf Coast Desolated--Johnstown, Pennsylvania,
Swept by Water from a Bursting Reservoir--Scenes of
Horror--Earthquakes on the California Coast.=
Our own land has experienced very few great convulsions of nature.
True, there have been frequent earthshocks in California, and all
along the Western coast, and occasionally slight tremors have been
felt in other sections, but the damage done to life and property has
been in almost every instance comparatively light. The only really
great disaster of this class that has been recorded in the United
States since the white man first set his foot upon the soil, occurred
in 1886, when the partial destruction of Charleston, South Carolina,
was accomplished by earthquake and fire.
On the morning of August 28, a slight shock was felt throughout North
and South Carolina, and in portions of Georgia. It was evidently a
warning of the calamity to follow, but naturally was not so
recognized, and no particular attention was paid to it. But on the
night of August 31, at about ten o'clock, the city was rent asunder by
a great shock which swept over it, carrying death and destruction in
its path.
During the night there were ten distinct shocks, but they were only
the subsiding of the earth-waves. The disaster was wrought by the
first. Its force may be inferred from the fact that the whole area of
the country between the Atlantic coast and the Mississippi river, and
as far to the north as Milwaukee, felt its power to a greater or
lesser degree.
Charleston, however, was the special victim of this elemental
destruction. The city was in ruins, two-thirds of its houses were
uninhabitable. Railroads and telegraph lines were torn up and
destroyed. Fires burst forth in different sections of the city, adding
to the horror of the panic-stricken people. Forty lives were lost,
over 100 seriously wounded were reported, and property valued at
nearly $5,000,000 was destroyed.
A writer in the Charleston News and Courier gave a vivid account of
the catastrophe. Extracts from his story follow:
"It is not given to many men to look in the face of the destroyer and
yet live; but it is little to say that the group of strong men who
shared the experiences of that awful night will carry with them the
recollection of it to their dying day. None expected to escape. A
sudden rush was simultaneously made for the open air, but before the
door was reached all reeled together to the tottering wall and
stopped, feeling that hope was vain; that it was only a question of
death within the building or without, to be buried by the sinking roof
or crushed by the toppling walls. Then the uproar slowly died away in
seeming distance.
"The earth was still, and O, the blessed relief of that stillness! But
how rudely the silence was broken! As we dashed down the stairway and
out into the street, already on every side arose the shrieks, the
cries of pain and fear, the prayers and wailings of terrified women
and children, commingling with the hoarse shouts of excited men. Out
in the street the air was filled with a whitish cloud of dry, stifling
dust, through which the gaslights flickered dimly. On every side were
hurrying forms of men and women, bareheaded, partly dressed, many of
whom were crazed with fear and excitement. Here a woman is supported,
half fainting, in the arms of her husband, who vainly tries to soothe
her while he carries her to the open space at the street corner, where
present safety seems assured; there a woman lies on the pavement with
upturned face and outstretched limbs, and the crowd passes her by, not
pausing to see whether she be alive or dead.
"A sudden light flares through a window overlooking the street, it
becomes momentarily brighter, and the cry of fire resounds from the
multitude. A rush is made toward the spot. A man is seen through the
flames trying to escape. But at this moment, somewhere--out at sea,
overhead, deep in the ground--is heard again the low, ominous roll
which is already too well known to be mistaken. It grows louder and
nearer, like the growl of a wild beast swiftly approaching his prey.
All is forgotten in the frenzied rush for the open space, where alone
there is hope of security, faint though it be.
"The tall buildings on either hand blot out the skies and stars and
seem to overhang every foot of ground between them; their shattered
cornices and coping, the tops of their frowning walls, appear piled
from both sides to the center of the street. It seems that a touch
would now send the shattered masses left standing, down upon the
people below, who look up to them and shrink together as the tremor of
the earthquake again passes under them, and the mysterious
reverberations swell and roll along, like some infernal drumbeat
summoning them to die. It passes away, and again is experienced the
blessed feeling of deliverance from impending calamity, which it may
well be believed evokes a mute but earnest offering of mingled prayer
and thanksgiving from every heart in the throng."
One of the most awful tragedies of modern times visited Galveston,
Texas, on Saturday, September 8, 1900. A tempest, so terrible that no
words can adequately describe its intensity, and a flood which swept
over the city like a raging sea, left death and ruin behind it.
Sixty-seven blocks in a thickly populated section of the city were
devastated, and not a house withstood the storm. The few that might
have held together if dependent upon their own construction and
foundations, were buried beneath the stream of buildings and wreckage
that rushed west from the Gulf of Mexico, demolishing hundreds of
homes and carrying the unfortunate inmates to their death.
A terrific wind, which attained a velocity of from 100 to 120 miles an
hour, blew the debris inland and piled it in a hill ranging from ten
to twenty feet high. Beneath this long ridge many hundred men, women,
and children were buried, and cattle, horses and dogs, and other
animals, were piled together in one confused mass.
The principal work of destruction was completed in six short hours,
beginning at three o'clock in the afternoon and ending at nine o'clock
the same night. In that brief time the accumulations of many a life
time were swept away, thousands of lives went out, and the dismal
Sunday morning following the catastrophe found a stricken population
paralyzed and helpless.
Every hour the situation changed for the worse, and the mind became
dazed midst the gruesome scenes. The bodies of human beings, the
carcasses of animals, were strewn on every hand. The bay was filled
with them. Like jelly-fish, the corpses were swept with the changing
tide. Here a face protruded above the water; there the foot of a
child; here the long, silken tresses of a young girl; there a tiny
hand, and just beneath the glassy surface of the water full outlines
of bodies might be seen. Such scenes drove men and women to
desperation and insanity. A number sought freedom in the death which
they fought so stoutly. A young girl, who survived to find mother,
father and sisters dead, crept far out on the wreckage and threw
herself into the bay.
During the storm and afterward a great deal of looting was done. Many
stores had been closed, their owners leaving to look after their
families. The wind forced in the windows, and left the goods prey for
the marauders. Ghouls stripped the dead bodies of jewelry and articles
of value. Captain Rafferty, commanding the United States troops in the
city, was asked for aid, and he sent seventy men, the remnant of a
battery of artillery, to do police duty. Three regiments were sent
from Houston and the city was placed under martial law. Hundreds of
desperate men roamed the streets, crazed with liquor, which many had
drunk because nothing else could be obtained with which to quench
their thirst. Numberless bottles and boxes of intoxicating beverages
were scattered about and easy to obtain.
Robbery and rioting continued during the night, and as the town was in
darkness, the effort of the authorities to control the lawless element
was not entirely successful. Big bonfires were built at various places
from heaps of rubbish to enable troops the better to see where
watchfulness was needed. Reports said that more than 100 looters and
vandals were slain in the city and along the island beach.
The most rigid enforcement of martial law was not able to suppress
robbery entirely. Thirty-three negroes, with effects taken from dead
bodies, were tried by court-martial. They were convicted and ordered
to be shot. One negro had twenty-three human fingers with rings on
them in his pocket.
An eye-witness of the awful horror said: "I was going to take the
train at midnight, and was at the station when the worst of the storm
came up. There were 150 people in the depot, and we all remained there
for nine hours. The back part of the building blew in Sunday morning
and I returned to the Tremont house. The streets were literally filled
with dead and dying people. The Sisters' Orphan Hospital was a
terrible scene. I saw there over ninety dead children and eleven dead
Sisters. We took the steamer Allen Charlotte across the bay, up
Buffalo bay, over to Houston in the morning, and I saw fully fifty
dead bodies floating in the water. I saw one dray with sixty-four dead
bodies being drawn by four horses to the wharves, where the bodies
were unloaded on a tug and taken out in the gulf for burial."
Mr. Wortham, ex-secretary of state, after an inspection of the scene,
made this statement: "The situation at Galveston beggars description.
Fully seventy-five per cent. of the business portion of the town is
wrecked, and the same percentage of damage is to be found in the
residence district. Along the wharf front great ocean steamers have
bodily dumped themselves on the big piers, and lie there, great masses
of iron and wood that even fire cannot totally destroy. The great
warehouses along the water front are smashed in on one side, unroofed
and gutted throughout their length; their contents either piled in
heaps or along the streets. Small tugs and sailboats have jammed
themselves into buildings, where they were landed by the incoming
waves and left by the receding waters.
"Houses are packed and jammed in great confusing masses in all the
streets. Great piles of human bodies, dead animals, rotting
vegetation, household furniture, and fragments of the houses
themselves, are piled in confused heaps right in the main streets of
the city. Along the Gulf front human bodies are floating around like
cordwood."
As time passed on the terrible truth was pressed home on the minds of
the people that the mortality by the storm had possibly reached 8,000,
or nearly one-fourth of the entire population. The exact number will
never be known, and no list of the dead could be accurately made out,
for the terrible waters carried to sea and washed on distant and
lonely shores many of the bodies. The unknown dead of the Galveston
horror will forever far surpass the number of those who are known to
have perished in that awful night, when the tempest raged and the
storm was on the sea, piling the waters to unprecedented heights on
Galveston island.
One of the great catastrophes of the century in the United States was
the flood that devastated the Conemaugh valley in Pennsylvania, on
May 31, 1889. Though the amount of property destroyed was over
$10,000,000 worth, this was the slightest element of loss. That which
makes the Johnstown flood so exceptional is the terrible fact that it
swept away half as many lives as did the battle of Gettysburg, one of
the bloodiest of the Civil War, and transformed a rich and prosperous
valley for more than twenty miles into a vast charnel-house.
Johnstown is located on the Pennsylvania Railroad, seventy-eight miles
southeast of Pittsburg, and was at the time mentioned a city of about
28,000 inhabitants. It was the most important of the chain of boroughs
annihilated; and as such has given the popular title by which the
disaster is known. The Conemaugh valley has long been famous for the
beauty of its scenery. Lying on the lower western slope of the
Alleghany mountains, the valley, enclosed between lofty hills,
resembles in a general way an open curved hook, running from South
Fork, where the inundation first made itself felt, in a southwesterly
direction to Johnstown, and thence sixteen miles northwest to New
Florence, where the more terrible effects of the flood ended, though
its devastation did not entirely cease at that point.
A lateral valley extends about six miles from South Fork in a
southeasterly direction, at the head of which was located the
Conemaugh Lake reservoir, owned and used as a summer resort by the
South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club of Pittsburg. In altitude this
lake was about 275 feet above the Johnstown level, and it was about
two and one-half miles long and one and one-half miles in its greatest
width. In many places it was 100 feet deep, and it held a larger
volume of water than any other reservoir in the United States. The dam
that restrained the waters was nearly 1,000 feet in length, 110 feet
in height, ninety feet thick at the base, and twenty-five feet wide at
the top, which was used as a driveway. For ten years or more this dam
was believed to be a standing menace to the Conemaugh valley in times
of freshet, though fully equal to all ordinary emergencies. With a
dam which was admitted to be structurally weak and with insufficient
means of discharging a surplus volume, it was feared that it was only
a matter of time before such a reservoir, situated in a region
notorious for its freshets, would yield to the enormous pressure and
send down its resistless waters like an avalanche to devastate the
valley.
This is precisely what it did do. A break came at three o'clock in the
afternoon of May 31, caused by protracted rains, which raised the
level of the lake. Men were at once put to work to open a sluice-way
to ease the pressure, but all attempts were in vain. Two hours before
the break came, the threatened danger had been reported in Johnstown,
but little attention was paid to it, on the ground that similar alarms
had previously proved ill-founded. There is no question that ample
warning was given and that all the people in the valley could have
escaped had they acted promptly.
When the center of the dam yielded at three o'clock, it did so in a
break of 300 feet wide. Trees and rocks were hurled high in the air,
and the vast, boiling flood rushed down the ravine like an arrow from
a bow. It took one hour to empty the reservoir. In less than five
minutes the flood reached South Fork, and thence, changing the
direction of its rush, swept through the valley of the Conemaugh. With
the procession of the deluge, trees, logs, debris of buildings, rocks,
railroad iron, and the indescribable mass of drift were more and more
compacted for battering power; and what the advance bore of the flood
spared, the mass in the rear, made up of countless battering rams,
destroyed.
The distance from Conemaugh lake to Johnstown, something over,
eighteen miles, was traversed in about seven minutes; and here the
loss of life and the damage to property was simply appalling.
Survivors who passed through the experience safely declare its horrors
to have been far beyond the power of words to narrate. After the most
thorough possible