THE PEOPLE BELOW THE DAM WERE BUSY COPING WITH THE worst flooding they’d ever known. This coping was going on not only in Johnstown but in all the towns down the steep course of the Little Conemaugh: the mountain town of South Fork itself, elevation 1,480 feet; then Mineral Point, elevation 1,375; East Conemaugh at 1,309; and down at the bottom, in the hole, Woodvale and Johnstown itself, at 1,142. Getting word to all of them that they were in danger from something worse than any flood, that 20 million tons of water might soon be rushing down the valley at them all at once, had become an urgent priority to the men up at the dam.
But this late effort to give warning was to meet with a string of complications. Some of those complications arose from what had gone on, that long morning, up at the dam; from Unger’s refusal to face reality, his misguided effort to save the lake and the fish without giving any real thought to people. Some, however, arose from the way people in the valley had become accustomed to thinking about—and not thinking about—danger.
Colonel Unger’s first move was to get the bad news to the nearby mountain town of South Fork. From there, he hoped, a warning could travel almost instantaneously down the valley by telegraph: to Johnstown, lying so exposed at the bottom, and also to Pittsburgh, where Robert Pitcairn, the railroad executive and one of the most important members of the club, would need to be alerted.
The club had a direct telephone line to South Fork. But it was still shut off for the winter. So Unger asked John Parke to ride over to town as fast as he could and give the warning and get the telegraphy going.
Parke lost no time in mounting up, and he urged his horse over a wet and slippery road almost washed out in places by the flooding. Arriving down at South Fork in only about ten minutes, at around 11:30 A.M., he was riding as fast as he could in the river that Railroad Street had become, approaching the train station and the telegraph tower. Seeing a small crowd of South Forkers gathered in the high water in front of a hardware store across from the station, Parke addressed the group urgently.
Water, he told them, was running across the top of the dam at the lake. There was very great danger of its giving way.
People listened politely. But they didn’t know this man, and he seemed awfully young. Anyway, the club member Mr. Bidwell, having been dropped off by Boyer at the station earlier that day—Bidwell was there now, waiting for floods to subside and trains to run—had insisted that there was no danger at all.
Still Parke pressed his case with all the urgency he could, and he asked one or two men to go to the telegraph tower next to the station and have the operator there alert Johnstown, the other towns along the valley, and Mr. Pitcairn in Pittsburgh. Then the young man turned his horse back up the valley toward the club, to help as best he could. By now, he fully expected to be met on the way with a wall of water unleashed by the dam.
From the train station, Mr. Bidwell had been watching Parke’s exhortations. It all seemed a bit much to the dynamite executive. As Parke rode off, some of the people came in to tell Bidwell there was word of danger from the lake. He reminded them jovially that there was really nothing to worry about.
One man did, however, go to the telegraph tower and climb up to the office. Towers were still in use as telegraph offices: once needed to relay manual semaphore signals and flashing-light codes among high points, the towers had long since been converted to the electrical wire system demonstrated by Samuel Morse fifty years earlier and since adopted as a standard. The telephone, in use for more than a decade, had by no means replaced the telegraph: phones had the advantage of being installed in homes, but they could be inefficient, requiring manual exchanges, with operators patching calls from one party to another. Telegraphy could be performed nearly instantaneously, and a message could go to multiple recipients. The telegraph office was one of the most important places in any town, and South Fork was no exception.
That noontime, Emma Ehrenfeld was working in the South Fork telegraph tower. All the long morning she’d been receiving orders to hold and reroute trains because of the flooding. Now a man she barely knew, with a name she’d always been unsure of—Wetzengreist or some such—was in her office excitedly spouting off about big danger from the dam. Emma knew only that this Wetzengreist wasn’t somebody people around South Fork took seriously, nor was he giving her a message to send. He was just ranting about danger and the need to alert people down in Johnstown.
Edward Bennett, the engineer for the No. 1165 freight, was in Emma’s tower, sheltering from the rain and chatting. Exhausted railroad men stuck at South Fork had been coming in for some time now, their trains stopped by rain, trying to figure out what was what. There was a coal stove on the ground floor of the tower, and Bennett was taking cover there with his conductor, S. W. Keltz, and trying to get dry while this strange-seeming man raved on about the dam.
Bennett had gone through a hard night. He’d been taking a night train of iron ore from Bolivar to East Conemaugh, and when the rain started, he’d tried to back the train onto what they called the “horn” at the East Conemaugh station, when three of his four cars jumped the track. He waited, while the wreck force was called in, but it had started raining incredibly hard. The crew didn’t reach him until around 2:30 in the morning. It couldn’t even get his cars back on the track until between 5:00 and 6:00 A.M.
So Bennett pulled up on the siding to move out of the way of the No. 2 freight and a passenger train, then got off the siding and followed them up to the South Fork station, stopped there, and waited for orders. By then Emma had begun holding trains because of the amazing flooding. Seeing that there was a train already on the middle siding, Bennett backed his train in behind the office, left it there with his fireman and flagman on the locomotive, and went into the tower with Keltz the conductor to warm up and find some company.
The flooding had risen so high now that Bennett was telling Keltz that if the dispatchers would move the Limited up—it was sitting on the track in the way—he would try to save his engine by running it up the valley to higher ground.
But now the man Wetzengreist was raving at Emma about the dam at South Fork, and Emma was trying to explain that the telegraph poles west of the next tower, at Mineral Point, had already subsided into the flooding: she couldn’t get anything past Mineral Point, couldn’t send anything at all directly through to Johnstown, or to Pittsburgh.
Still, Emma found the man very insistent. She wasn’t sure what to do.
So she tapped out a message to the more experienced operator at Mineral Point, asking him for advice. Telegraph operators had these tap-tap-tap conversations all the time, adeptly translating code into text; long-distance code romances had even sprung up between bored operators in far-flung outposts. The Mineral Point operator tapped Emma back a suggestion that they err on the side of caution. As the poles west of his office were in the water, he should write down a physical message on paper, saying something about news of danger at the dam, and send it by foot to the railroad station boss at East Conemaugh, who might send a man or two down to Johnstown.
Emma tapped back agreement. But she and the Mineral Point operator had no real information, no official message they were charged with sending; they didn’t want to be alarmist. Together they (tap-tap-tap) whipped up and (tap-tap) mutually agreed to wording that relayed what Emma had heard. The Mineral Point operator wrote the message down on two pieces of paper, hoping to increase the odds of delivery by getting the note into the hands of two separate couriers.
But he couldn’t leave his post. So now the Mineral Point operator had to wait and hope somebody would come along and agree to carry the message down the line.
Eventually someone did, and that message, amazingly enough, made it all the way down to Johnstown. It got there not only on foot, in the end, but also by wire. Handed by the Mineral Point operator to a soaking-wet trackman, coincidentally sent up from East Conemaugh to check a flooded-out landslide on the rails, the message was handed by that trackman to his own boss, who carried it in his pocket toward East Conemaugh, then stopped on the way at another telegraph tower. That office turned out to still have a working westward line. And so this message, having begun as tapped-out electrical impulses, then converted to jottings on paper, and now returned to electrical impulses, was tapped almost instantly to the telegraph office at the East Conemaugh rail yard, and from there not only to Mr. Pitcairn’s office in Pittsburgh but also to the railroad telegraph office in what was fast becoming the underwater town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
The message from Emma arrived around 1:00 P.M. As received at last by the Johnstown telegraph office, it went something like this: “South Fork dam is liable to break: notify the people of Johnstown to prepare for the worst.” And it was signed, as Emma and the Mineral Point operator had agreed, only “Operator.”
Frank Deckert was the Johnstown station’s telegraph boss. When informed by a subordinate that this message had come in, Frank didn’t read it or give it much thought. The message wasn’t exactly authoritative. It had no source, no sender. “Notify the people of Johnstown” was a vague and sweeping suggestion; “prepare for the worst” was the stuff people said about that dam every spring. When an assistant ticket agent showed the message to a couple of men hanging around the station, they broke up laughing.
Such was the response to the earliest warning to make its bumpy and circuitous way from those anxious men up at the dam to the busy people of Johnstown. First John Parke on horseback, then the excitable Wetzengreist, then Emma in her tap-tap-tap with Mineral Point, then the railroad men by rail and foot, then another telegraph operator, and finally the yardmaster at East Conemaugh: together, they all did manage to send word, and in only about an hour’s time, all the way down to Frank Deckert in Johnstown. But Deckert wasn’t the only person in town too busy preparing for what he and everybody else thought of as the worst flood they’d ever had to live through to give much attention to the news of the risk posed by the dam.
By now the town at the bottom of the valley was in a state of constant activity, and immediate tasks seemed far more real than worries about something that had never happened. People’s basements had long since gone underwater. Many of the ground floors now had inches of water, with more coming, and in the lower part of town, things were even worse. The water was many feet high and rising.
This flood wasn’t just water. It was full of mud and waste, and everybody with carpets was pulling them up; those with nice furniture were hoisting it upstairs. Farmers meanwhile were leading as much livestock as possible up and away from the rivers onto high ground. In the flood that had occurred in 1887, quickly turning now into the second-worst flood ever seen in Johnstown, the waterline had topped out at about a foot above the floorboards of the ground floors in the lower part of town. This one would obviously be higher, although nobody could say how high. At offices and in homes, people sought one way or another to get important papers, books, and beloved objects well above that line. The idea was just to hunker down in the dark—all electricity could be expected to fail—and wait out the flood.
Other residents, however, were leaving, mainly in concern about the novel intensity of this flooding. Hundreds of people had come out into the muddy, flowing streets, some wading on foot, others getting their horses to pull wagons with wheels partly underwater. People loaded up food and valuables in parcels and were carrying them above the rising waterline, some simply holding the stuff high over their heads, others with packages lashed to wagons, others guiding boats and improvised floats like boards along the water’s surface. Children and pets were piling out of windows into rowboats.
Only some part of this exodus was toward higher ground. Other people were hoping to check into downtown hotels. Among those thousands who were staying home, some looked up from their preparations and rolled their eyes at these long lines of burdened, fearful refugee families.
In the office of the Johnstown Tribune, the editor George Swank had decided to live-report the worst flood ever seen in town. Swank didn’t know when he’d get his next edition out, but whenever he did, he wanted it to include his minute-by-minute log of the wild events of May 31, 1889. He was an old-time newspaperman, having worked for the great editor Horace Greeley. He’d been wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg; he didn’t scare easily.
Swank was watching out his office window, and at noon he reported that the streets up and back as far as Jackson were running with a yellow, devastating flood. He recorded what he’d learned from people telephoning him: the Poplar Street bridge had fallen. One man said that a cow had been standing on a dislodged pier of that bridge, and had then fallen into the Stony Creek. The bridge from Millville to Cambria City had collapsed into the Conemaugh, and at 1:30 a man called to say he was standing in water up to his middle on the first floor of his house.
While all this frantic work of preparation and exit of refugees went on, two more messages of warning from the men at the dam would get down to flooded Johnstown, later in the day. Finally some in town would start taking them more seriously. But by then, many people were ensconced in their upper stories and attics, prepared to wait out the flooding in the dark. And by the time the last warning arrived, there was little that could have been done anyway.
When John Parke got back to the dam, after pleading with the citizens of South Fork to seek safety and get word of imminent disaster to other towns down the line, it was about noon. The dam hadn’t broken. But the men at the dam were now watching a sheet of water slide right over the center of the broad top of a dam now mostly obscured by a surging lake looking to pour down the other side.
The new material thrown on top of the top was gone: it had done nothing. The new, ad hoc spillway was letting water out across twenty-five feet, but it was shallow and had no discernible effect on the steadily rising water level.
Colonel Unger had finally changed his mind about removing the fishguards from the original spillway. It was very late to make that decision. At least he did make it. Men were therefore up on the trestle bridge above the impeded waters at that exit, trying to rip out bridge floorboards. Down below, others were trying to get at the angled, nail-studded logs and the hanging iron with the wire mesh.
It was no use. So much debris choked the whole fishguard apparatus, pushing with such great force against the big drain, that the screen and iron and logs were all tangled and choked with tree limbs and even with entire small, uprooted trees. Given all that, and the force of the water itself, there was no way even to move the heavy guards.
And the workers were now refusing, sensibly enough, to go along the dam’s top: with the inner face all basically underwater, the structure was manifestly insecure. Alone, John Parke walked out on the road on the dam’s top. About 100 feet of the dam’s 270-foot-long top was now six inches deep in water. He splashed along that wide, submerged surface to its very center. Here the water was deepest. That fact suggested to Parke that there had been a sag, invisible but significant, exactly above the place where the old culvert had once run and had then been filled in. He looked out over the valley below. He peered down at the dam’s outer face. Water coming over the top and down the outer face had already carved gullies in that face. The rock coating wouldn’t last long.
Parke wondered whether they should try cutting yet another spillway, this time right through the earthen dam itself, a deep wedge cut from the top over at one end, where things were more stable. The earth of the dam was far more cuttable than the rock of the hillside.
But such a cut would send a terrible amount of water downhill all at once. It would probably eventually collapse the whole dam. Still, the ploy might do somewhat less damage than if the whole dam collapsed at once.
No. That would be playing God—doing active, violent damage to life and property in hopes of doing, on balance, less than if the dam broke on its own. There was still at least a chance that the dam wouldn’t break. . . .
By about 2:30, however, with a large crowd now gathered on the hillsides in the rain to watch the lake slide across the road at the top of the dam and cascade down the other side, Parke, Unger, and Boyer were just standing there, too. Watching and hoping was literally all anyone could do. Observing the outer face of the dam, they saw the big rocks begin to peel away into the rushing stream below and fall down the valley.
And they saw something else: the water going over the top of the dam and sliding down the outer face was cutting great slices of earth from the face, thus digging a kind of hole in the dam. Water was slicing a big step, about ten feet wide and four feet deep, out of the mighty earthwork, and with more water always coming, deeper slices kept getting cut off, and the big, carved-out step kept getting larger as everybody gathered there just kept watching. It was ten minutes to 3:00.
George Johnston, a lumber merchant from Pittsburgh, had come to Johnstown to place orders. At about 3:00 P.M., he’d just arrived in the flooded town and noticed a bulletin, posted in front of the telegraph office. A crowd had gathered around it. George pushed his way into the crowd and read the news: the dam above would soon give way.
He got it. He knew Johnstown. His life, George thought, wouldn’t be worth a snap once that dam gave way. And yet the people reading the notice seemed unconcerned.
Not George. He canceled appointments and started splashing for the train station, seeing the upper stories of houses fill with people and wagons piled with furniture pushing through the water in the streets. Some were heading for the surrounding hillsides.
Editor Swank was still typing.
Two more messages of warning had come down the mountain, and Frank Deckert, in the telegraph office, had begun to realize the situation up there was serious. Frank picked up the telephone and called the Western Union office. Mrs. Ogle, the telegraph operator at Western Union, was sitting in a room whose waters were high. Hetty Ogle felt she was needed, however, and so she stayed, tapping out the news she received of washouts and train reschedulings. When she got word from Frank Deckert that the dam was in danger, she relayed the message to editor Swank at the Tribune.
By 3:00 P.M., Unger, Boyer, Parke, and all the workers and local bystanders were standing on the hillsides and staring, transfixed by anticipation, at the dam. They could tell what was about to happen. It wasn’t the amazing weight of the high water rushing into the lake behind the dam that would break it, as if pushing so hard that the dam couldn’t withstand the pressure. It was the water that, having now fully topped the dam, was running down its outer face. That water was knocking off the rocky outer coating on that face and cutting off the earthen core in great slices, opening a widening hole, letting water out in increasing volume. The cutting would make the whole dam give way.
And as the people on the hillsides watched, the dam didn’t seem to break. Having been cut open, the dam at last seemed simply to leave, to step away, to lower, all at once.
After the long, gradual slicing away of the core, there was a sudden, awful sound, rising quickly to a deafening roar. The dam was gone. That sound was the rush of the entire long, wide, deep lake heading out and down into the valley.
To Colonel Unger, that sound and sight were like a visitation of the vengeful, almighty God Himself. He fell to the ground.
At 3:15, editor Swank, having heard from Hetty Ogle at Western Union that the dam up the mountain was in danger, noted the information in his ongoing live-reported log. The editor considered, while pecking on his typewriter, the impossibility of imagining what might happen to Johnstown if the lake up at the club came down the valley.
He didn’t know, as he typed that strange thought, that a towering, misting wall of water had been unleashed about five minutes before, didn’t know the tower of water was roaring toward him, and toward all the people in Johnstown, on a twisting, fourteen-mile course.
Over at Western Union, Mrs. Ogle was pretty much done for the day. The water had now risen to the table where her keypad and machine sat: the wires were about to be grounded, the system soon to fail. There was nothing else she could do, so she tapped these words to the stations down the line to the west:
“This is my last message.”
She meant her final communication of the day. She went upstairs to wait for the floodwaters to stop rising and start to subside.