CHAPTER XVI.
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 ruinsthe
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 debris 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 fish-plate, 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 equipment.
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 passengersfifteen certainly, and no one knows
how many morewere 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 debris 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
debris 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 debris, 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 footpaths 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.
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