Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (36 page)

Then there was Gilbert Kessler, the man visiting his cousin in Peru. He had been rescuing people, and while he mostly was successful at it, he had two women succumb to madness and jump out of his boat. On the first occasion, he was in a boat full of passengers, heading to the courthouse. The waves were rocking the boat pretty badly, and suddenly a woman stood up and wailed: “Oh, what is the use? We'll all be drowned anyway.”

She then jumped into the water, the unbalancing of the boat sending Kessler and another oarsman into the water but apparently leaving the rest of the passengers inside. Kessler saw a “slender arm” in the
water and tried to grab for it but couldn't, and then quickly turned his attention to climbing back aboard the boat. He was then able to row to the oarsman, who apparently had managed to grab on to a tree or driftwood, and save him.

It happened at least one more time, according to Kessler, who noted that most of his female passengers were as stoic as they came. But he brought with him a frantic woman who leaped into the water, figuring it was better off to die now than wait a little longer.

“The current swept around street corners with tremendous force, and only the most experienced oarsmen could propel the craft with any degree of success,” said Kessler of the flood. Which is why it may have been, as uncomfortable and dangerous as it was, that some people stranded on their houses were better off remaining there.

Late afternoon, Dayton

By 4
P
.
M
., the Beckel House crew was spread out over the Callahan Building, minus the four men who had managed to cross the river via the elevator cable. Judge Jones maneuvered himself between two rooms on the second floor of the Callahan Building, which had about twenty-five or thirty people in it as well as, improbably, a horse. How the horse got into the room, he never found out.

Everyone stood or sat about, grave, whispering, trying to figure out some strategy for survival. Jones watched a mother, sitting quietly, her features fixed in a serious-looking, desperate manner, clasping in her arms a boy who looked to be seven or eight years old. “The child clung to his mother and tried to be, and was, brave,” wrote Jones. “Once in a while a tear trickled down his face, but the mother never wept.”

Everyone could see the fire in the reflection of the river, but nobody was certain what it was doing or just how close it was to closing in on them. The only direction they received was what was shouted at them from some men on the roof of the Phillips Hotel, men who fortunately had some megaphones.

Megaphones were a device that Thomas Edison had invented in 1878, but these were makeshift megaphones that the Phillips guests had constructed out of cardboard and calendars.

It wasn't quite as good a system as seeing the fire for themselves, but it would do. The Beckel House guests learned that the Beckel House was still standing, although the fire was creeping closer to it, and by proxy, closer to where they were now. Anyone who offered up their opinion on the situation agreed that long before morning, everyone would be dead.

Chapter Fifteen

Jittery Nerves

4:30
P
.
M
., Columbus, Ohio

James Thurber, the famed author and humorist, recalled years later, in a classic short story, “The Day the Dam Broke,” that at least one neighborhood in Columbus was traumatized when everyone learned that a storage dam had broken and they were about to be engulfed by their own personal tsunami.

The West Side of Columbus was “under thirty feet of water,” wrote Thurber, but he explained that on the East Side, the flood waters would have had to have climbed another ninety-five feet to devastate the homes. But understandably, with public schools closed, at least four bridges in the city washed out, no running water working in the city anywhere, and people drowning across the state and in surrounding states, everyone was nervous on the East Side as well.

Thurber included. Eighteen years old and in his senior year at East High, Thurber spent part of March 25 on High Street, a lengthy street that effectively cuts through the center of the city, dividing the east and west portions of the community. Thurber and a friend, Ed Morris, came out of a store and into the cold rain and saw a couple of police officers on horseback who were shouting to everyone that
the dam had broken and that everyone should go east and find higher ground.

In his essay, Thurber would write, “There are few alarms in the world more terrifying than, ‘The dam has broken!'” Thurber didn't panic when he heard the policemen shout, but he didn't stick around to see if they might be wrong either. As detailed in the fine biography
James Thurber: His Life and Times
by Harrison Kinney, Thurber put a humorous spin on what happened next, but his account was absolutely factual—and when put in context with what newspapers reported at the time, the melee that broke out was simply incredible.

The first man to run looked to be a businessman, speculated Thurber. “It may be that he had simply remembered, all of a moment, an engagement to meet his wife, for which he was now frightfully late,” wrote Thurber. “Whatever it was, he ran east on Broad Street (probably toward the Maramor Restaurant, a favorite place for a man to meet his wife). Somebody else began to run, perhaps a newsboy in high spirits. Another man, a portly gentleman of affairs, broke into a trot. Inside of ten minutes, everybody on High Street, from the Union Depot to the Courthouse, was running.”

As Thurber described it, “Two thousand people were abruptly in full flight.” They were shouting, too: “Go east! Go east! Go east!”

Among the throng were George Smallwood and his colleagues, nineteen-year-old Gus Kuehner and Bill McKeanan,
Columbus Dispatch
reporters who had just a short while earlier found their car, dangerously close to being swamped at the Town Street Bridge. They had just parked it on higher ground when they heard someone cry, “The dam has broken,” and they, too, broke into a feverish run. Kuehner, thinking he was being helpful, quickly stopped to free some animals in a livery stable and, between two white horses, ran up the hill on Town Street.

It was pandemonium, according to Thurber, who reports that his aunt was in a theatre on High Street at the time, and that the panicked crowd stormed out into the street, the male patrons behaving the worst. “And east they went,” wrote Thurber, “pushing and shoving and clawing, knocking women and children down, emerging finally into the street, torn and sprawling.”

Indeed, Thurber was in the midst of a full-fledged panic, one that actually engulfed both the east and the west side. Thurber treated the incident with his usual whimsy but at the time, it was quite serious; and looking back, oncoming floodwaters aside, it's amazing that nobody was killed in this particular mad rush to get out of the way of the oncoming water. People ran downstairs, jumped and climbed out of windows, sprinted through alleys, and pushed others out of their path, as a throng of terrified people did everything they could to escape what was obviously a tidal wave chasing them. Policemen darted into stores, screaming at customers and shopkeepers, “Flee for your lives, the dam has burst!”

They fled.

Children on roller skates, delivery wagons and heavy trucks, automobiles, women pushing baby buggies, peanut vendors with push carts, and even one man on horseback—they all raced down High Street and to Third Street, heading away from the river.

Telephone operators, hearing the news, started calling people on the East Side who hadn't heard the news, warning them to get ready to run for their lives. Mothers, fathers, and children panicked, preparing their house for an onslaught. Word got out to newspapers in nearby cities. The
Lima Times Democrat
put out a bulletin, getting the time of day wrong: “With a great roar, the levee at the foot of Broad Street let go shortly before 11 o'clock today, sending a deluge of water that swelled the Scioto River covering a great area.”

Some rescue workers left their posts, heading toward High Street to help with the onslaught of this new flood.

Early versions of what would become the ambulance siren had only recently come on the market, and some drivers were having fun hooking up “automobile sirens” to their cars. But in this instance, drivers turned on their sirens and sped down the street at top speed, trying to get out of harm's way.

One woman left her house and then screamed that she had left her cat on the second floor. “I won't go without it,” she shouted and turned to run back in the house. The journalist who took down this scene in an account of the panic admitted, “The reporter was in a hurry himself and didn't stop to see whether she saved her pet or not.”

Mothers led sobbing children through the sidewalks and streets, hurrying and hoping to outrun death.

One policeman tried dragging a woman, described by one paper as a “little foreign woman,” out of her home on Scioto Street. “But I have a—” she started and then was cut off by the officer screaming at her to run.

“I will not go without my baby,” she shouted back and, good for her, raced back for her infant.

Another parent wasn't quite as responsible. One man, carrying a baby wrapped in pink, stopped another man—who turned out to be a reporter for the
Ohio State Journal
—and said, “Either I must drop this baby, or I will drop myself.” He then gave his baby to the reporter and fled. The reporter, bewildered, held on to the baby and also continued running.

Another mother, trying to drag her two children down the street, was heard shouting, “Come, or I'll break your arms.”

Elizabeth Lewis, a resident of West Second Avenue, gathered all the cash, as well as some gold, that she had in the world—worth between $115 and $180, she would later estimate. She put it all in a black-bordered handkerchief and then joined some friends in the race to get the heck out of Dodge. Then, in the confusion, she dropped the precious cargo and presumably never saw it again.

Someone with the National Guard released fifty horses, allowing them to race for their lives, running east on Town Street toward High Street, where they almost ran down several people who were also fleeing for their lives.

An elderly woman, accompanied by a police officer, tried to run, but she couldn't, and so the police officer, terrified for his own life, left her behind.

Another woman slipped in the mud, and while two men stopped to carry her, they were so winded that they were forced to drag her down the street toward safety.

A soldier—probably someone from the National Guard—ran down the street with a screaming child.

In the midst of this madness, the teenaged Thurber ran, and at one point he was quite certain he was near death when an older man shouted, “It's got us.” Fortunately, Thurber soon learned that the sound the man had heard was the wooshing sound of roller skates, worn by a kid who was also trying to get out of the way of the oncoming wall of water.

But as Thurber fans who have read his short story already know, the dam hadn't broken at all. It was a false alarm.

It ignited, however, a city-wide panic so full-blown that a crowd gathered around the statehouse, clogging the entrances. Several men started climbing up the building, attempting to scale the dome. A bugle blew, and whistles shrieked, as a mob of people crossed the Rich Street bridge, running to the East Side, where the West Side people assumed it was safe. Many men and women collapsed at the other side, but then police officers urged them to keep running. One woman was seen on the side of the road, wringing her hands and praying.

Meanwhile, “all the time,” wrote Thurber, “the sun shone quietly, and there was nowhere any sign of oncoming waters. A visitor in an airplane, looking down on the straggling, agitated masses of people below, would have been hard put to it to divine a reason for the phenomenon.”

Thurber called it the Afternoon of the Great Run, and news of the mob racing for their lives was syndicated to newspapers across the nation. On the east side of the country and the west, both the
Washington Post
and the Los
Angeles Times
ran the Associated Press story that described the rumor gone out of control: “The scene that followed was one of wild panic in all parts of the city. Patrolmen, soldiers and citizens in automobiles, tooting horns, ringing gongs and calling through megaphones a warning to everyone to seek safety in the higher parts of the east side sent thousands in flight, while many, stunned by the supposed impending disaster, collapsed from fear or gave way to hysteria.”

“A panic was caused at Columbus, Ohio, Wednesday afternoon, when patrol wagons dashed through High Street, warning people to flee for their lives,” said a bulletin in the
Statesville Landmark
in Statesville, North Carolina. “The police had received a report that the storage dam, which furnishes the city its supply, had broken and was sweeping down upon the city billions of gallons of water. In the downtown district and throughout the city, the wildest excitement ensued until it was found the report was not true.”

It was more than an hour before the report was officially denied, the Associated Press observed, and stated that the police blamed a military man for getting the rumor going.

But the news of the Afternoon of the Great Run wouldn't break in Columbus's
Dispatch
for another year, Smallwood told Kinney, explaining, “There was silent agreement among us on the paper that the panic run was best forgotten. It wouldn't have done much for Columbus.”

It's amusing and understandable that Smallwood remembered it that way, but actually all three Columbus newspapers did report the panic. “Never before in the history of Columbus was there such a scene of panic, even consternation,” observed the
Ohio State Journal.
The
Columbus-Citizen Journal
echoed the same sentiment: “It was an experience without parallel in the history of the city.”
The Columbus Evening Dispatch
described it as a “frenzy of excitement,” and while Smallwood may, at the time, have wanted to forget about the wild rumor, his own paper observed that everyone knew about the incident: “By word of mouth and by telephone the word was thrown back and forth until the entire city became aware of it.”