The Buffalo River and Cazenovia Creek had both overflowed their banks with a rush at ten o'clock in the morning, and the dwellers in the South Park section of the city had no chance to escape.
Hundreds of homes were soon flooded. Firemen were sent out in boats to rescue those who desired to leave. Hundreds of workers were marooned in distant parts of the city, unable to reach their homes.
Within the city limits of Buffalo big manufacturing plants suffered $150,000 of damage. Many big oil tanks were overturned and crashed against buildings. Train service throughout the city was practically at a standstill, and miles of track east and south of the city were washed away. The main line of the Erie Railroad, between Buffalo and New York City, was washed out in many places.
THE PLIGHT OF ROCHESTER
Not since 1865, when Rochester, then a city of 50,000, suffered immense damage by floods, has the city faced such a serious situation as it did on the night of Friday, March 28th. Half the business section was under water, which in some sections was five feet deep.
Water commenced to pour into Front, Mill and Andrew Streets early Thursday evening, and all through the night merchants worked to get their goods to higher ground. The big warehouse of the Graves Furniture Company in Mill Street was flooded so quickly that thousands of dollars damage was done to the goods. The following morning it was impossible to get through these streets except in boats and rafts, and the work of salvage was continued in this way.
The newspaper offices of the Post Express and Democrat and the Chronicle had their basements flooded and the presses put out of commission. The Pennsylvania line into Rochester, which uses the bed of the old Genesee Canal, was put out of commission. The Erie and Lehigh Valley lines to villages to the south were blocked by the floods for several days.
The only fatality of the flood occurred at six o'clock Sunday evening, when a boy who was paddling over the flooded meadow of the Genesee Valley Park was carried out into the river. The canoe was swept over the dam at Court Street.
VALLEY OF THE GENESEE PARALYZED
The whole valley of the Genesee was more or less paralyzed. As early as Wednesday the villages of Mount Morris and Dansville, in the Genesee River Valley, were under several feet of water, and the terrified folk who lived in the lowlands were hurrying to places of safety, abandoning their homes.