"The flood disaster that has befallen our state is of such magnitude in loss of life and human suffering that I respectfully urge upon your honorable body the importance and propriety of making an appropriation for the succor of those in distress.
"May I further suggest that it be of such size and made with such dispatch as to reflect the great heart and resource of our commonwealth?"
THE EXTENT OF THE DISASTER
On Thursday it was apparent that the part of the city between Central and Sandusky Avenues was almost wiped out, and estimates of the death toll of the flood in this city ran into the hundreds.
It was not until Thursday when the waters began to recede, and after two nights of horror, during which hundreds of people clung to the housetops, while others sought safety in trees, that the fact dawned upon the inhabitants that their city had been visited by as great a calamity perhaps as that which had fallen upon the Miami Valley.
The bodies of 200 persons lay huddled in the United Brethren Church on Avondale Avenue, according to O. H. Ossman, an undertaker, who explored the flood district in a rowboat.
He said this report was made to him by a man who said he had been able to reach the building and look through the windows. Police who sought to confirm the story were unable to reach the church because of the current.
Ossman said nineteen bodies had been taken to his undertaking rooms and that he has been asked to be prepared to care for sixty-nine other bodies. He said he counted fully two hundred bodies in wreckage on West Park Avenue.
Members of searching parties who were able to explore the west side of the city, south of Broad Street, for the first time reported that that section was a scene of vast desolation for a great area, much of it being still under water.
The names of more than a half hundred persons were placed under the caption "known dead," while the list of probable dead was too great to be collated at that time. The number of missing and unaccounted for, it was said, would reach far into the hundreds.