Travel was resumed up the valley of Conemaugh Creek for a few miles
about five days after the flood, and a weird sight was presented to the
visitor. No pen can do justice to it, yet some impressions of it must be
recorded. Every one has seen the light iron beams, shafts, and rods in a
factory lying in twisted, broken, and criss-cross shape after a fire has
destroyed the building. In the gap above Johnstown water has picked up a
four-track railroad covered with trains, freight, and passengers, and
with machine shops, a round-house, and other heavy buildings with heavy
contents, and it has torn the track to pieces, twisted, turned, and
crossed it as fire never could. It has tossed huge freight locomotives
about like barrels, and cars like packing-boxes, torn them to pieces,
and scattered them over miles of territory. It has in one place put a
stream of deep water, a city block wide, between the railroad and the
bluff, and in another place it has changed the course of the river as
far in the other direction and left a hundred yards inland the tracks
that formerly skirted the banks.
Add to this that in the midst of all this devastation, fire, with the
singular fatality that has made it everywhere the companion of the flood
in this catastrophe, has destroyed a train of vestibule cars that the
flood had wrecked; that the passengers who remained in the cars through
the flood and until the fire were saved, while their companions who
attempted to flee were overwhelmed and drowned; and that through it all
one locomotive stood and still stands comparatively uninjured in the
heart of this disaster, and the story of one of the most marvelous
freaks of this marvelous flood is barely outlined. That locomotive
stands there on its track now with its fires burning, smoke curling from
the stack, and steam from its safety valve, all ready to go ahead as
soon as they will build a track down to it. It is No. 1309, a fifty-four
ton, eight driver, class R, Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive. George
Hudson was its engineer, and Conductor Sheely had charge of its train.
They, with all the rest of the crew, escaped by flight when they saw the
flood.
The wonders of this playground, where a giant force played with masses
of iron, weighing scores of tons each, as a child might play with
pebbles, begins with a bridge, or a piece of a bridge, about thirty feet
long, that stands high and dry upon two ordinary stone abutments at
Woodvale. The part of the bridge that remains spanned the Pennsylvania
tracks. The tracks are gone, the bridge is gone on either side, the
river is gone to a new channel, the very earth for a hundred yards
around has been scraped off and swept away, but this little span remains
perched up there, twenty feet above everything, in the midst of a desert
of ruins--the only piece of a bridge that is standing from the railroad
bridge to South Forks. It is a light iron structure, and the abutments
are not unusually heavy. That it should be kept there, when everything
else was twisted and torn to pieces, is one other queer freak of this
flood. Near by are the wrecks of two freight trains that were standing
side by side when the flood caught them. The lower ends of both trains
are torn to pieces, the cars tossed around in every direction, and many
of them carried away. The whole of the train on the track nearest the
river was smashed into kindling wood. Its locomotive is gone entirely,
perhaps because this other train acted as a sort of buffer for the
second one. The latter has twenty-five or thirty cars that are
uninjured, apparently. They could move off as soon as that wonderful
engine, No. 1309, that stands with steam up at their head, gets ready
to pull out. A second look, however, shows that the track is in many
places literally washed from beneath the cars. Some of the trucks also
are turned half way around and standing with wheels running across the
track. But the force that did this left the light wood box cars
themselves unharmed. They were loaded with dressed beef and provisions.
They have been emptied to supply the hungry in Johnstown.
In front of engine 1309 and this train the water played one of its most
fantastic tricks with the rails. The débris of trees, logs, planks, and
every description of wreckage is heaped up in front of the engine to the
headlight, and is packed in so tightly that twenty men with ropes and
axes worked all day without clearing all away. The track is absolutely
gone from the front of the engine clear up to beyond Conemaugh. Parts of
it lie about everywhere, twisted into odd shapes, turned upside down,
stacked crosswise one above the other, and in one place a section of the
west track has been lifted clear over the right track, runs along there
for a ways, and then twists back into its proper place. Even stranger
are the tricks the water has played with the rails where they have been
torn loose from the ties. The rails are steel and of the heaviest weight
used. They were twisted as easily as willow branches in a spring
freshet in a country brook. One rail lies in the sand in the shape of a
letter "S." More are broken squarely in two. Many times rails have been
broken within a few feet of a fishplate, coupling them to the next rail,
and the fragments are still united by the comparatively weak plates.
Every natural law would seem to show that the first place where they
should have broken was at the joints.
There is little to indicate the recent presence of a railroad in the
stretch from this spot up to the upper part of Conemaugh. The little
plain into which the gap widened here, and in which stood the bulk of
the town, is wiped out. The river has changed its course from one side
of the valley to the other. There is not the slightest indication that
the central part of the plain was ever anything but a flood-washed gulch
in some mountain region. At the upper end of the plain, surrounded by a
desert of mud and rock, stands a fantastic collection of ruined railroad
equipments. Three trains stood there when the flood swept down the
valley. On the outside was a local passenger train with three cars and a
locomotive. It stands there yet, the cars tilted by the washing of the
tracks, but comparatively uninjured. Somehow a couple more locomotives
have been run into the sand bank. In the centre a freight train stood on
the track, and a large collection of smashed cars has its place now. It
was broken all to pieces. Inside of all was the day express, with its
baggage and express cars, and at the end three vestibule cars. It was
from this train that a number of passengers--fifteen certainly, and no
one knows how many more--were lost. When the alarm came most of the
passengers fled for the high ground. Many reached it; others hesitated
on the way, tried to run back to the cars, and were lost. Others stayed
on the cars, and, after the first rush of the flood, were rescued alive.
Some of the freight cars were loaded with lime, and this leaped over the
vestibule cars and set them on fire. All three of the vestibule cars
were burned down to the trucks. These and the peculiar-shaped iron
frames of the vestibules are all that show where the cars stood.
The reason the flood, that twisted heavy steel rails like twigs just
below, did not wipe out these three trains entirely is supposed to be
that just in front of them, and between them and the flood, was the
round-house, filled with engines. It was a large building, probably
forty feet high to the top of the ventilators in the roof. The wave of
wrath, eye-witnesses say, was so high that these ventilators were
beneath it. The round-house was swept away to its very foundations, and
the flood played jackstraws with the two dozen locomotives lodged in it,
but it split the torrent, and a part of it went down each side of the
three trains, saving them from the worst of its force. Thirty-three
locomotives were in and about the round-house and the repair shops near
by. Of these, twenty-six have been found, or at least traced, part of
them being found scattered down into Johnstown, and one tender was found
up in Stony Creek. The other seven locomotives are gone, and not a trace
of them has been found up to this time. It is supposed that some of them
are in the sixty acres of débris above the bridge at Johnstown. All the
locomotives that remain anywhere within sight of the round-house, all
except those attached to the trains, are thrown about in every
direction, every side up, smashed, broken, and useless except for old
iron. The tenders are all gone. Being lighter than the locomotives, they
floated easier, and were quickly torn off and carried away. The engines
themselves were apparently rolled over and over in whichever direction
the current that had hold of them ran, and occasionally were picked up
bodily and slammed down again, wheels up, or whichever way chanced to be
most convenient to the flood. Most of them lie in five feet of sand and
gravel, with only a part showing above the surface. Some are out in the
bed of the river.
A strange but very pleasant feature of the disaster in Conemaugh itself
is the comparatively small loss of life. As the townspeople figure it
out, there are only thirty-eight persons there positively known to have
perished besides those on the train. This was partly because the
buildings in the centre of the valley were mostly stores and factories,
and also because more heed appears to have been paid to the warnings
that came from up the valley. At noon the workmen in the shops were
notified that there was danger, and that they had better go home. At one
o'clock word was given that the dam was likely to go, and that everybody
must get on high ground. Few remained in the central part of the valley
when the high wave came through the gap.
Doré never dreamed a weirder, ghastlier picture than night in the
Conemaugh Valley since the flood desolated it. Darkness falls early from
the rain-dropping, gray sky that has palled the valley ever since it
became a vast bier, a charnel-house fifteen miles long. The smoke and
steam from the placers of smouldering débris above the bridge aid to
hasten the night. Few lights gleam out, except those of the scattered
fires that still flicker fitfully in the mass of wreckage. Gas went out
with the flood, and oil has been almost entirely lacking since the
disaster. Candles are used in those places where people think it worth
while to stay up after dark. Up on the hills around the town bright
sparks gleam out like lovely stars from the few homes built so high.
Down in the valley the gloom settles over everything, making it look,
from the bluffs around, like some vast death-pit, the idea of entering
which brings a shudder. The gloomy effect is not relieved, but rather
deepened, by the broad beams of ghastly, pale light thrown across the
gulf by two or three electric lights erected around the Pennsylvania
Railroad station. They dazzle the eye and make the gloom still deeper.
Time does not accustom the eyes to this ghastly scene. The flames rising
and falling over the ruins look more like witches' bale-fires the longer
they are looked at. The smoke-burdened depths in the valley seem
deserted by every living thing, except that occasionally, prowling
ghoul-like about the edges of the mass of débris, may be seen, as they
cross the beams of electric light, dark figures of men who are drawn to
the spot day and night, hovering over the place where some chance
movement may disclose the body of a wife, mother, or daughter gone down
in the wreck. They pick listlessly away at the heaps in one spot for
awhile and then wander aimlessly off, only to reappear at another spot,
pulling feverishly at some rags that looked like a dress, or poking a
stick into some hole to feel if there is anything soft at the bottom. At
one or two places the electric lights show, with exaggerated and
distorted shadows, firemen in big hats and long rubber coats, standing
upon the edge of the bridge, steadily holding the hose, from which two
streams of water shoot far out over the mass, sparkle for a moment like
silver in the pale light, and then drop downward into the blackness.
For noise, there is heavy splashing of the Conemaugh over the rapids
below the bridge, the petulant gasping of an unseen fire-engine, pumping
water through the hose, and the even more rapid but greater puffing of
the dynamo-engine that, mounted upon a flat car at one end of the
bridge, furnishes electricity for the lights. There is little else
heard. People who are yet about gather in little groups, and talk in low
tones as they look over the dark, watchfire-beaconed gulf. Everybody in
Johnstown looks over that gulf in every spare moment, day or night.
Movement about is almost impossible, for the ways are only foot-paths
about the bluffs, irregular and slippery. Every night people are badly
hurt by falls over bluffs, through the bridge, or down banks. Lying
about under sheds in ruined buildings, and even in the open air,
wherever one goes, are the forms, wrapped in blankets, of men who have
no better place to sleep, resembling nothing so much as the corpses that
men are seen always to be carrying about the streets in the daytime.
[Illustration: THE DÉBRIS ABOVE THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD BRIDGE.]