The Johnstown Flood (11 page)

“When this high water come down, there was all kinds of debris, stumps, pieces of logs, and underbrush and it started to jam up those screens under the bridge. The bridge was well constructed of heavy timber. There was a man named Bucannon up there, John Bucannon, who lived in South Fork. Well he kept telling Colonel Unger to tear out that bridge and pull out that big iron screen.

“But Colonel Unger wouldn’t do it. And then when he said he would do it, it was too late. The screens wouldn’t budge, they were so jammed in by all that debris.”

When John Parke came up onto the dam on horseback, he did what he could to exhort Unger’s men to dig harder and faster, riding back and forth along the breast, shouting orders and moving men from one place to another when he thought it would do some good. But by eleven o’clock it was apparent to everyone that the lake was still advancing as fast as ever before. In fact, by eleven, the water was about level with the top of the dam and had already started to eat into what little had been thrown up by the plow and shovels. On the outer face, near the base of the dam, it looked as though several serious leaks had developed.

At this point, Colonel Unger decided that perhaps something ought to be done to warn the people in the valley below. The only way was to send a man down. There was a telephone line from the clubhouse to South Fork, but it was used only during the summer season and had not as yet been put in working order.

With all the rain there had been, the road to South Fork was in very bad shape, but John Parke made the ride in about ten minutes. Parke’s relative youth, and the fact that he was not well known in the area, may account for the marginal success of his mission.

Furthermore, the first people to come from the dam to South Fork that morning, Boyer and Bidwell, had already told everyone that there was no danger of the water running over the top. So when Parke came splashing up Railroad Street with his warning, the news was both unexpected and perhaps seemed somewhat questionable. According to testimony made later by Bidwell, Parke stopped in front of George Stineman’s supply store, which was across the street from the depot, and where a small crowd had gathered.

“I saw him come down there,” Bidwell said, “and make a statement to the people standing about that the water was then running over the top of the dam, and there was very great danger of it giving way.” Parke also told two men to go to the railroad’s telegraph tower next to the depot and tell the operator to alert Johnstown. But soon after they left, Bidwell, according to one witness, began telling everyone that there was really nothing to get excited about.

The operator at South Fork that Friday morning was Miss Emma Ehrenfeld. She had come on duty at seven o’clock. It was about noon, she would later estimate, that a man came up into the tower “very much excited.”

“Notify Johnstown right away about the dam,” he said. “It’s raising very fast and there’s danger of the reservoir breaking.”

“Who told you all this?” she asked.

“There’s a man came from the lake,” he said.

Emma was not quite sure how much to believe of his story. She had seen the man around town and thought his name was Wertzengreist, though she was uncertain about that too. But she said later, “He is a man that people generally don’t have much confidence in, and for that reason, I scarcely knew what to do under the circumstances.”

She was also hampered by the fact that her lines west were open only as far as the next tower, four miles down the river at Mineral Point. Beyond Mineral Point there seemed to be a break somewhere and so she had no direct contact with Johnstown.

The operator at Mineral Point, W. H. Pickerell, was an old hand along the Little Conemaugh, having been there at that same tower for some fifteen years. Emma decided to “talk” it over with him on the one good wire she had. She tapped out her problem and waited for an answer. Pickerell told her that the break to the west was caused by the poles falling into the river, and that though he had no way of getting Johnstown, he thought “it was a thing that there oughtn’t to be any risks taken on.” He said he would take the message and send it on to East Conemaugh by foot if someone should happen along the tracks below his tower.

So the two of them worked out a message addressed to the yardmaster at Conemaugh and to Robert Pitcairn in Pittsburgh.

“I wrote the message up,” Pickerell declared weeks after, “and repeated it to her and asked her if that would do, and she said that was splendid—to send it that way. I doubled the message and waited and waited.”

After a while a trackman came by. He had been sent from East Conemaugh to flag a landslide at Buttermilk Falls, to the west of Pickerell’s tower. Pickerell gave him the folded message and sent him on his way back down the tracks. At Buttermilk Falls, the man, whose name was William Reichard, turned the message over to his boss, the foreman of the division, L. L. Rusher, who set out for East Conemaugh after telling Reichard to go on back up to Mineral Point, in case there should be any more messages.

As it turned out, Rusher had only to go as far as what was known as “AO” tower, which was about a mile and half from Mineral Point and better than a mile upriver from East Conemaugh. From “AO” tower west the lines were still clear. Rusher gave the message to operator R. W, Shade, who sent it on immediately. And it was his message which was received by J. C. Walkinshaw at East Conemaugh and by agent Deckert in Johnstown sometime between noon and one o’clock.

In Pittsburgh, operator Charles Culp, at the Union depot later said he was the one who had received the message there and that he took it right over “and laid it on Mr. Pitcairn’s table in front of him.” Within an hour Robert Pitcairn, who had a special interest in the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad, was sitting in his private railroad car on his way to Johnstown.

But the telegram drafted by operator Pickerell and Emma Ehrenfeld was only the first of three warnings sent down the valley by way of the Pennsylvania’s telegraph system.

About twelve thirty, or sometime very shortly after John Parke reined up in front of Stineman’s store, another rider was sent from South Fork to check the condition of the dam. His name was Dan Siebert. He worked for J. P. Wilson, who was superintendent of the Argyle Coal Company in South Fork and an old friend of Robert Pitcairn’s. Wilson had been asked by Pitcairn some three years earlier to notify him at once if ever he saw any signs of danger at the dam.

Siebert borrowed Wilson’s horse and was up and back from the dam inside of twenty-five minutes. He had stayed only long enough to see that near the center of the dam a glassy sheet of water, fifty to sixty feet wide, had started over the top. But Siebert did not seem especially concerned over what he had seen. He was, in fact, according to one witness, “perfectly cool about it.”

Wilson, however, on hearing Siebert’s report, turned to C. P. Dougherty, the Pennsylvania’s ticket agent in South Fork, and asked him if he did not think that Mr. Pitcairn should be notified. When Dougherty hesitated, saying there was trouble with the wires downriver, Wilson took it to mean that Dougherty was reluctant to assume the responsibility of such a message and told him to sign his, Wilson’s, name.

Whereupon Dougherty went over to the tower, taking along another operator, Elmer Paul, who was more experienced than Miss Ehrenfeld and who Dougherty thought might have better luck getting a circuit. Paul tried the wire for a few minutes but without success.

So again a message was sent as far as Mineral Point, where it was received at 1:52 by operator Pickerell, who gave it to William Reichard, who walked it down the tracks to “AO” tower. From there it was put on the wire to East Conemaugh, Johnstown, and Pittsburgh. The message read:

It was no more than thirty minutes later that J. P. Wilson came up to the tower himself to have Emma Ehrenfeld send still another warning. The rain was beating down terribly hard by then, and outside they could see the water of the Little Conemaugh and South Fork Creek raging across the flats just below the station. Over near Lake Street, South Fork Creek had flooded the first floors of several houses and the aspens along the banks were whipping about wildly in the wind.

Wilson had just heard that a young South Fork boy named John Baker had ridden down from the lake and said that the water had now cut a notch in the center of the dam. Without taking time to write anything down, Wilson dictated a message to Pitcairn which Emma Ehrenfeld put right on the wire.

Wilson waited in the tower long enough to be sure the message had gotten at least as far as Mineral Point; then he warned Miss Ehrenfeld to be on the lookout up South Fork Creek and went out the door

The time was 2:25. By 2:33 the message had reached East Conemaugh. For some unknown reason, Pickerell this time had been able to get a circuit. Apparently, a wire that had fallen into the river lifted out somehow, and as Pickerell said, “All at once the wire came all right.”

The message was through to East Conemaugh in a matter of minutes, and on to Johnstown and Pittsburgh. Agent Deckert in Johnstown would later state that he had received this particular message sometime near 2:45. He also concluded upon reading it that this time he had best telephone its contents across the way to Hettie Ogle, who ran the central telephone switchboard and Western Union office, just across the river at the corner of Washington and Walnut.

Mrs. Hettie Ogle was a Civil War widow who had been with Western Union for some twenty-eight years. At one o’clock the rising water had forced her to move, with her daughter, Minnie, to the second floor of the two-story frame building. Sometime near three she notified her Pittsburgh office of the condition of the dam as reported by Deckert and said that that would be her last message, meaning that the rising water was about to ground her wires. Then she put through a call to the
Tribune,
where editor Swank was still keeping up his running account of the day’s events.

“At three o’clock,” he wrote, “the town sat down with its hands in its pockets to make the best of a very dreary situation. All that had got out of reach of the flood that could, and there was nothing to do but wait; and what impatient waiting it was anyone who has ever been penned in by a flood and has watched the water rising, and night coming on, can imagine….”

He described how the Stony Creek carried a live cow down from some point above Moxham and how she struck against a pier of the dislodged Poplar Street Bridge, where she managed to get a foothold for a while but finally, making a misstep, fell into the current and was carried off.

“At 3:15 the Central Telephone office called the
Tribune
up to say it had been informed by Agent Deckert, of the Pennsylvania Railroad freight station, that the South Fork Reservoir was getting worse all the time and that the danger of its breaking was increasing momentarily. It is idle to speculate what would be the result if this tremendous body of water—three miles long, a mile wide in places, and sixty feet deep at the breast at its normal stage—should be thrown into the already submerged Valley of the Conemaugh.”

But by 3:15 Lake Conemaugh was already on its way to Johnstown.

3

When John Parke had arrived back at the dam from his dash to South Fork, he was confident that his warning had been sent on down the valley. Along the way from South Fork he had passed two men struggling through the mud with a sewing machine, and one of them shouted to him, “We got the sewing machine out, if nothing else,” which Parke took to be a very good sign. At the dam he found the water had already started sliding over the top, at the center, right above where the old culvert had been. It had taken no time for the water to wash across the little earth ridge that had been thrown up. Now, as he rode his horse out along the breast, the water crossing over the road there was a good six inches deep and getting stronger every minute. Within minutes the sheet of water was a hundred yards wide. But it was all concentrated at the center, clearly illustrating, Parke noted, that the dam dished a little.

It was now shortly after noon. At the western end the emergency spillway was running about twenty-five feet wide, but only slightly deeper than before. At the main spillway, where the water was roaring through six feet deep or more, the men had started to tear up the floor boards of the bridge and were attempting to remove a V-shaped floating drift made of logs with nails sticking out of them, which had been set out in the water twenty feet or so before the spillway to deter the fish even from venturing toward the screens.

The men were afraid to go out on the dam now, and so Parke rode across the breast alone, studying the effects of the overflowing water on the face of the dam. He saw that little gullies had already been cut between the riprap, but the damage was not as bad as he thought it would be.

For a brief moment he gave serious thought to the possibility of cutting another spillway through the dam proper, where there would be no problem digging deep and where the water would do quite a lot of the digging for them. It would have meant the end of the dam, of course; the water, he knew, would bore through any such cut, ripping the dam in two in no time. But by making such a cut near one of the ends, where the pressure was far less than at the center, the water, as fast as it might escape, would still go out a far sight slower than if the whole dam gave way all at once at the middle. It would have meant the certain destruction of the dam, but also far less damage below, he figured.