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 itself--wretchedly built of mud and
boulders--saturated 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 he 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 out-break 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 God's 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."