Ruthless Tide by Al Roker

Author:Al Roker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The Night of the Johnstown Flood

EVERYWHERE IN JOHNSTOWN THAT AFTERNOON, SOME VERSION of the nightmare was playing out. Compared to Mineral Point or even Woodvale, there was a lot of Johnstown to play with: this was an industrial city with lots of buildings and thousands of people, and it was at the bottom, on that plain in a deep hole. The waters having arrived, they wouldn’t fall away as fast as they had from the towns above, and the surging destruction went on and on, giving plenty of time for a multitude of horrors to occur.

At first things went pretty fast. When the water hit Johnstown, it had taken about an hour to travel the fourteen valley miles from the former dam site. But that doesn’t mean it hit Johnstown at a speed of 14 miles per hour. The great, tumbling, mountainous wave had achieved wildly varying velocities on its journey. Its huge freight of trees, houses, earth, and wreckage had caused the long pause up at the viaduct, and there were other such temporary halts, where the water would be driven back, spray would shoot fifty feet into the air, the surface of the water would boil furiously. Then whatever blockage would let go, and the mass would roar on down the valley, its pent-up fury released at amazingly high speed. Meanwhile, the narrowing and widening of the valley’s turns allowed for speed and relative flattening at some points of the big, overflown channel, and rising and relative slowing at others.

Arriving at Johnstown, the wave hit the city with full force at high speed right in the center of town, where the streets had already flooded deeper than they’d ever flooded before, eight to ten feet in some places. Unlike Rev. Beale’s house, most of the big brick buildings in that part of town subsided in an instant, slamming into one another in the water, dropping all their brick to the bottom, throwing people who had been cowering in attics under the water and under the wreckage, the houses’ frames and roofs soon bobbing to the surface and racing around.

That was the wave’s first move: for about three square miles around the banks of the Conemaugh River, with its banks already deeply drowned, everything simply disappeared. Mercifully, perhaps, a lot of people never even knew what hit them. Knocking down pretty much everything in the center of town took the wave about five minutes.

But now the wave started to divide. It found multiple paths. One part of the flood, a smaller part, broke through a row of brick buildings, and like something hunting, actually seeking to injure and destroy, it ran through that opening and hurled itself as hard as it could against a big Methodist church. The church held up—that’s where Victor Heiser did his jumping and dodging routine—so the wave split itself again, with a new section whirlpooling across what had been the city’s small, rectangular Central Park. This section of flood spread itself out here, obliterated an entire street of fancy homes, and demolished buildings on Market Street.

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