PARKE AND THE OTHERS STOOD THERE HELPLESS, ON THE BANKS of the former lake, with Colonel Unger overcome by emotion on the wet ground, watching in horrified amazement as the event went on, mercilessly sudden, pitilessly long. The water rushed, as tons of pent-up water will, when so abruptly released from a great height, as if it had conscious will, fury, desire. With a force beyond anything they could have imagined before seeing it, the lake was emptying into the valley at an incredible rate and an amazing decibel level, tumbling over itself to get down there. Nobody could do a thing about it now.
They looked out over the valley and saw what the great, mucky, roaring, misting, rolling wall of water was doing with astonishing speed. Hundreds of great trees below them were ripped from the waterlogged ground, some uprooted instantaneously, others cracked off just as quickly, the whole forest on both sides of the monster pulled into the current and downhill with it.
But the land wasn’t just being stripped of trees. The water was scouring the terrain of grass, turf, and soil. It was leaving only muddy, bare rock.
Just below the dam site was a farmhouse, and those observing from the hillsides watched that house, too, disappear before you could blink, its fallen boards added to a huge cauldron of moving debris that the flood was already picking up: fencing, vegetation, lumber, rocks, all swept into the torrent as it moved down the valley. Next they saw the flood take down Lamb’s Bridge, just as easily as it had cut down the forest and the farmhouse. With the broken bridge added to the mighty tonnage of debris, the water turned with the valley. It disappeared from the view of the men at the site of the former dam.
The monster was on an accelerating rampage now, heading for the towns below. Having seen what they’d seen, they could only imagine the violence of the destruction about to occur. Below them, where the water had traveled, were no trees, no farmhouse, no bridge, the land itself stripped of all vegetation and soil, just Allegheny rock slicked by muck. The whole emptying process had gone on for a little more than half an hour. That’s all it took—some said more like forty-five minutes—for the whole lake to be gone and out of view. During the exit, there was no way for those gathered by the original spillway with the prostrate Unger to get back to the clubhouse. They couldn’t cross the racing water, and the road to South Fork was underwater now, too. So they stood where they were until it was over.
With that towering, misting wall gone elsewhere now and still moving, they knew, still raging and destroying, all was strangely quiet at the former dam site. The rain still poured, but nothing but acres of mud stretched far and wide below the hills where minutes before the lake had been. A stream wandered on the bottom, far below the hillsides, at high speed, through a vast, low expanse of muck. That was the South Fork Creek.
Prize sport fish were flopping around down in that mud. As a gentleman’s pastime, black-bass fishing was pretty much over for good here. Members of the work crew, fishermen not for pastime but for survival, climbed down into the mud and started gathering up those jumping, struggling fish.
John Parke and others lifted the dazed Colonel Unger. He was still in shock, not functioning at all. They began helping him toward the clubhouse and to bed. Parke, having tried to warn the people of South Fork, believed he might have been successful. But he knew there was no way of telling what might have already happened to that town by now, or whether word had ever gone from South Fork down the valley.
A little after 3:00 P.M., the freight engineer Bennett was still up in Emma’s telegraph tower by the railroad station in South Fork, along with conductor Keltz, when they saw people running like mad. There was no time to gawk in astonishment: from the tower’s height the two men got an ideal view of something they’d never seen before, and couldn’t understand, as it rushed down from the heights and entered the town.
Bennett and Keltz were yelling to Emma. They started charging down the stairs. Emma looked out the window and saw something like a moving mountain, coming straight for the tower and getting close.
People below were running. Some yelled up at her to move.
Without even stopping to get her hat—that’s how scared she was—Emma ran down the stairs. She flew across the tracks to the steps of a coal tipple—a building storing coal, with a chute for sending coal down to an engine. She ran up those steps and turned to look back across the tracks at her telegraph tower. She watched the moving mountain sweep the tower clean away.
Bennett had meanwhile begun carrying out his plan to save his locomotive. He’d said earlier that if they moved the Limited up, he would do so, and now the locomotive was in even greater danger—the mountain of water would take it away—and as Bennett started for it, he could see his flagman and fireman lying on the engine, asleep. They had to move the locomotive, and move themselves, or be drowned.
Bennett ran to the engine and jumped on. The other two, not only roused from sleep but instantly frantic, joined his desperate effort. Though low on steam, they fired up the engine, started it chugging, and pulled off the siding and began running the engine and its four loaded freight cars across the bridge, the flood roaring by on their left. If they could make the other side, they’d be farther from the moving wall of destruction, and they did make it, but just as they reached the far side of the bridge a gigantic tree, shot from the nearby flood, banged into the engine, knocking it partly off the track.
Bennett closed his eyes. It was all over, he figured. The engine, still moving forward but partly derailed, was about to go off the bridge and into the flood.
He opened his eyes. A local freight train was pulling out of a siding about twenty-five yards ahead of him onto the track, as Bennett’s engine kept limping forward. Bennett realized he was about to run right into that freight. He threw his engine into reverse, to get it to slow and avoid hitting the local freight, and when he came at last to a stop he yelled to his crew. They all jumped off the engine onto the tracks.
On foot now, the crew raced for high ground in South Fork, while Bennett started running up the railroad tracks toward the local freight still going slowly up the tracks on the other side of the bridge, also headed for high ground. Wading in three feet of water as debris surged past him, Bennett caught up to the moving freight train. He reached up for the second car from the caboose and hoisted himself aboard. He looked back at his own train.
When the wave hit his locomotive, it survived. But the whole train behind it was suddenly swept away, all four cars, the two of coke and the two of baled hay, before Bennett’s eyes. There was nothing left but the locomotive.
Yet in South Fork, that moving mountain of water had soon come and gone and done little damage, compared to what it was about to do elsewhere. Only as the water fell past that town, and tumbled downward and picked up speed and momentum, and more and more debris, did it begin to wreak havoc that would rarely be matched in the annals of American disasters.
Tracking the former lake’s movement from its dam site all the way down to Johnstown is like tracking the course of a crazed, gigantic, unimaginably powerful force. The thing seemed more like a visitation from a hostile otherworld than like a flood, a monster plowing a path, bent only on destruction, reducing everything in it way to nonexistence.
Its course followed a way carved over eons: the valley of the Little Conemaugh, beginning at the town of South Fork, where the South Fork Creek, so recently dammed, flowed into the Little Conemaugh. It continued along that course on a drop of nearly five hundred feet over about fourteen twisty miles. Along the Little Conemaugh had been built those towns, at points successively lower: Mineral Point, East Conemaugh, Woodvale, and finally Johnstown, laid out flat on the bottom, open to the worst hit. The gigantic, racing monstrosity naturally followed that course.
But just as naturally, the thing wasn’t contained by the banks of that course. Had the dam never broken, the day would have seemed epic anyway: a river already flooded beyond its banks to the point of stopping trains and destroying bridges had risen to fill the valley at a level higher than anybody had ever seen before. Such a river, flooded well beyond its own boundaries, could serve only as a general guide for the course of the huge, raging, new thing that now came crashing down on top of it.
As it accelerated down the valley, the thing was probably about forty feet wide at South Fork town, but its width was varying all the time it moved, determined by the varying widths of the valley itself, which also, by narrowing and widening, affected the height of the moving wall: the phenomenon swelled and flattened and rose and fell crazily as it came. It had begun by bearing great piles of debris along with it—at first the earthen architecture of the former dam itself—and as it came, scouring the land of everything growing or built in its way, that tonnage of debris grew, too, gathering even greater deadly force to drop on Johnstown at the bottom.
One of the most telling moments came early. A massive stone viaduct built by the railroad company stood high across the Little Conemaugh, just downstream from a big, abrupt bend in the river, an especially narrow stretch at normal times. Made of sandstone, the viaduct had been built as an element in the amazing portage segment of the old canal-rail system; in recent years it had been serving as a bridge for all trains passing through the town of South Fork. Its one, high, impressive arch at once let water pass beneath and connected the two high hillsides.
Now as that viaduct, in all its peaceful solidity, stood bridging the flooded river in the rain, there was a distant roar, louder and louder. Then, from around the abrupt turn just upstream, came the giant wall of water and debris, having hurtled out of South Fork, throwing itself toward the viaduct. By now the wave had passed out of a broader part of the valley and into a channel where the narrowing sides of the valley forced it to rise to about seventy-five feet as it raced. Coming around the tight bend about as high as the viaduct bridge, the towering thing hit the great stone structure with titanic force, pinning against the viaduct’s arch tons of ripped-up steel rail and huge trees and everything else it was carrying, blocking the arch, making the viaduct yet another dam.
For entire minutes, the monster paused furiously in its progress, booming and churning as more of the lake water rushed in behind the improvised dam of debris and masonry, rising to nearly eighty foaming feet, fighting and straining to move forward. The struggle went on. An irresistible force had met an object that, it turned out after a long pause, was not immovable. The great structure collapsed entirely. After all that resistance, the viaduct took only seconds to go. It jumped into the debris that had pushed it down, as the tower of water, suddenly set free, sprang forward yet again.
During those long minutes of pause and strain, the water of the former lake had been given time to collect itself, bring up its reserves from the rear, and pile up as a single, forceful entity. To whatever degree its power might have been slightly lessened by the fall through the valley, which did force the wall to spread out slightly and to throw off some of its energy in sideways destruction, now the thing had regrouped, coiled like a spring, and launched through the viaduct site like a second dam break, this time even more explosively, as if launching out of a new starting gate. With massive chunks of viaduct now sweeping down the valley, too, this rising, churning, plummeting, misting, roaring, battering force rushed on.
A sawmill and a furniture factory, some houses for the inhabitants, and a railroad station: that was Mineral Point, a small mill town of about two hundred people, with houses lining the riverbank. Then the settlement vanished.
One minute Mineral Point was standing there in the rain, its riverbank flooded unusually deeply. In a few minutes of churning, crashing, bewildering destruction there was no more Mineral Point. Because nothing here was big enough even to pause the water, change it, or resist in any way, the town simply dissolved in the time it took for people to take a few adrenalized breaths. Every railroad locomotive sitting on the tracks, every length of those tracks themselves, every one of the thirty or so houses that lined the riverbank, every backyard garden, the sawmill, the factory: it all washed down the valley as the moving mountain, having shown up out of nowhere, moved on just as quickly.
Yet only sixteen people died in Mineral Point that day. The sheer extent and height of the flooding had already scared a lot of people out. With their ground floors underwater and their outbuildings starting to float and bob, most of the citizens had gotten out of town and up on the sides of the mountains. That’s where they stood now, stunned, watching the wave crash down from above and wipe out their homes in a long instant before their eyes. And the water roared on.
Some of the Mineral Point residents had stayed in town. A man named Abraham Byers had wisely moved his wife and five of their six children out of their house onto high ground; his eldest, a son, got out on his own. But Byers’s mother-in-law had refused to leave, and his wife, terrified for her mother’s safety, returned to the house to plead with her mother to join the rest of the family. That’s when the wave hit, and both women were killed.
A man named Christopher Gromley, in his attic with his family only moments before, suddenly found himself riding his rooftop with only one of his sons: their rooftop-boat was randomly surfing the huge, moving, rolling wall of water. They went speeding and bouncing down the churning water until they saw a place to jump off to safety. Back in the attic in Mineral Point, Gromley’s wife and other children had been killed. The capricious monster, meanwhile, had moved on, down the valley.
In East Conemaugh, the next town on the flood’s path, some of the citizens did get warning.
By now the wave was making an amazing, even a unique sound. It was a roar, of course, a rush of water amplified, but out of that noise emerged deep groanings and grindings, as water and debris beat up and tore at and removed entire landscapes.
John Hess, a railroad engineer running a work train out of the East Conemaugh yards, had been supervising a crew trying to take care of landslides on dangerous track nearly washed out by the flooding. They’d been working up near the telegraph tower at Mineral Point, to which Emma’s first message had come from South Fork, so they’d heard general warnings that the dam at the club was under strain. Now they were back down the valley, working on track only five hundred yards or so from East Conemaugh station, on the Mineral Point side.
That’s when they heard the sound. They looked up. It came from up the valley. They saw nothing, but Hess knew in a split second what that sound must be: close behind him and out of sight, a deadly wall of water. They were in its path, and they were the only thing between it and the whole town of East Conemaugh.
Hess knew what to do—maybe more accurately, he didn’t know what else to do. The crew jumped aboard, the fireman hit the steam box, and Hess chugged with everything he had into East Conemaugh, pulling his whistle open to a steady scream. As they went, he tied the whistle mechanism down so it wouldn’t stop and came blasting into town that way, ahead of the wave, screeching out what he hoped would be a warning. He thought he could stay ahead of the wave.
And Hess did manage to get his train and crew to safety, while doing all he could to give warning to as many people in East Conemaugh as possible. He never saw the wave behind him. He only heard it, and it was a sound he would never forget.
Nevertheless, as the gigantic wave came roiling into East Conemaugh it caught many people unaware and leveled the town, just as it had Mineral Point. Ahead of it, a wind now blew. Survivors thought the gust alone pushed houses off their foundations before the water even reached them. This was a weird thing: mist but no water preceded the gigantic thing. It really was a wall now, and aside from its foaming yellow crest, so high above, it didn’t even seem wet. It appeared solid, and yet its front was a conglomeration of trees, rocks, buildings, timbers, freight cars, all actually seeming to squirm as they advanced.
On a siding at East Conemaugh the Day Express had been stopped since 10:00 A.M. because of the flooding, along with two other passenger trains and a freight. Many of the passengers were outside in the rain, pacing up and down the tracks; others were inside, reading and looking out the windows.
As the day wore on, they’d seen the river working its way over their track. Their train pulled back and moved over to another track. The rails it had been on fell into the river. The train moved again. The second track fell into the river. Now it was late afternoon, and bridges had fallen into the river, and still they waited. There was nothing else to do.
Then they heard a shrill, long whistle, coming from some engine nearby. They looked up.
There it was: the huge mass of trees and debris and water coming on, looming over them only about two or three hundred feet away. The passengers on the trains fled the cars. Other trains were between them and safety, and some tried to go over, others crawled under.
Only one man rejected those options and started running down the track ahead of the wave to get around the whole set of four-car trains. He made it to the other side, jumped off the embankment with the wave now on the far side of the trains, fell into a deep ditch, landed on a plank spanning the ditch, and bolted for town. Looking back quickly, he saw most of the people trying to scramble over or under the trains, as well as those falling into the ditch, getting swept up in the wave. He turned and ran into the streets, turned back to look again, and saw houses floating away behind him and the flood chasing him.
He ran again, the water closing in on him, houses toppling over. Now the torrent seemed to be trying to head him off.
But he’d reached the hillside and started climbing. He was beyond the flood at last. Again he turned to look.
His train and the other trains were broken, swirling, cars loose and plunging downstream, two men on top, others still inside. Then all the trains started down the river. He yelled, in anguish. They flowed about five hundred feet, stopped strangely, and the engine of the train he’d been on reared up and came down on the engine of another train. Other mighty engines, pulled from the East Conemaugh roundhouse, were rolling against these trains now, the whole tangle of locomotives and cars backing up against a mass of trees. He could only stand there and watch.
Woodvale, the next town down the valley from East Conemaugh, was a different kind of place. Its fanciful, romantic name reflected the difference: the Cambria Iron Works had built Woodvale as a “model town” for its workers and managers, and the town was the pride of the company, a kind of faux New England village, with a woolen mill—owned by Cambria Iron, of course—and pretty, white-painted clapboard houses. And unlike in East Conemaugh, the people of Woodvale heard no blasting train whistle, nothing to warn them of what was coming.
The big, mixed mass of water, with all the gigantic things it had collected, high above the normal river channel, poured right down on top of Woodvale. Stores, churches, and homes went fast, and chunks of buildings smashed against each other, drowning the people still trapped in crumbling attics or crushing them in tons of debris.
Some saw the towering wave sweep into town, looked up at it, looked over at the hillside, and saw that their way up was blocked by a long freight train sitting on the track below the hill. Desperate, they ran for the hillside anyway, threw themselves down on the track, and started crawling under the cars in hopes of getting to the other side and climbing to safety. The wave smacked the train. It started rolling. The people underneath were crushed to death by the train.
The woolen mill, meanwhile, started coming undone in the rush of water. Men in the mill kept climbing and moving from room to room as pieces of the place just fell apart. Some were left, at the end, clinging to the one, tiny corner of the building that still stood. And so they lived.
Yet it took less than ten minutes for the water to kill one out of three of Woodvale’s residents, more than three hundred people. From one stable alone, about ninety horses were swept whinnying and kicking into the waters to die, and of course the stable went too, along with all the rest of what had been Woodvale, the pretty New England–style houses, 255 buildings in total, a tanning factory, and all but the one corner of the mill.
The water moved on, carrying all that tonnage. Johnstown, connected to Woodvale by a streetcar, was next in its path.
The town of Woodvale had moved on, leaving only a broad mudflat where the town had stood. It wasn’t just that the buildings were missing. It was abruptly hard to believe that any buildings had ever stood here, or any trees or shrubs, that any track had ever been laid. Everything was gone.
Almost everything. Eerily, one piece of iron railroad bridge, no longer anchored to anything on either side, somehow loomed above the mud. Its bleak and lonely form was silhouetted against the sky, spanning nothing but the expanse of muddy emptiness and dead bodies that the flood had left.
And just north of Woodvale, a tiny town on the hillside, New Austria, with only about thirty houses, was left entirely intact. This was a game of inches. Where the wave destroyed, it did so utterly. Those just out of its path were untouched, but left to witness, amazed and horrified, all the mind-bending damage such a mass of water could do.
Having added Woodvale to its body, the monster just kept going.
Woodvale and Johnstown, almost overlapping on the map, were literally connected by a streetcar track from Woodvale’s main street into Johnstown. On what was effectively the border of the two towns stood the Gautier wire works, owned by Cambria Iron.
Thanks to the flooding, the factory wasn’t in full swing, but a skeleton crew was working and the boilers were making steam when the wave hit. A huge plume of steam was released into the air. Then the whole factory itself rose, for the moment still intact, into the wave and rode off on the water, lending its white, scalding mist of steam to the white, cold mist of the floodwaters. As the factory rushed along in the flow, it started breaking up. As the men caught inside began drowning in the churning water and getting smashed to death in the roiling debris, the factory added miles of barbed wire to the deadly mix of elements that the beast had become.
So it was that when the whole gigantic thing that had begun as 20 million tons of water, timber, rock, and an earthen dam, having picked up and brought with it whole forests of trees and boulders, a stone viaduct, bent steel rail, entire locomotives and train cars, a few towns’ worth of buildings and factories, dead animals and people, and now thousands of steel barbs strung along miles of wire, came roaring and misting and steaming and pounding and slashing into Johnstown, with all the force gained by a nearly five-hundred-foot fall, it had become an indescribable presence beyond any rational belief. If this had been only an amazing quantity of water, badly dammed and now unchained, that would have been enough for a disaster. But this water had carried down the valley’s entire industrial enterprise. The visible investment of the millionaires was swept forward on the wall of water, all the brick and iron and fire and steel that had generated those millions by drawing labor from the people who lived where the water now raged. Everything that had so changed the valley of the Conemaugh, in such a short time, had been not only destroyed but also weaponized for total destruction. And so the thing came into Johnstown.