At Cleveland scores of families were driven out of their homes by the greatest flood in the city's history. Many narrow escapes from drowning were reported from all over the city, where people were being transferred in rowboats by police and other rescuers.

One big bridge, in the heart of the city, used by the New York Central lines, went down. The steel steamer, "Mack," moored to it was unharmed. All traffic was kept off the bridge and no one was hurt. The loss exceeds $75,000. Other bridges were in danger. Boats broke from their moorings and battered the shore. Dynamite was used to open a way for the water into the lake. Great damage was done all along the Cuyahoga River through Cleveland, where hundreds of big manufacturing plants are located. Fifty thousand men were idle. The telegraph companies were crippled and many lights were out throughout the city, as the electric-light plants were partly under water. All the suburbs suffered severely.

All railroad traffic in Cleveland was suspended because of washouts and no trains entered or left. The Lake Shore Railroad tracks along the shore of Lake Erie were thought immune, but that road suffered along with the Big Four, Pennsylvania and Wheeling and Lake Erie.

Boston, Ohio, and Peninsula, Ohio, between twenty-five and twenty-eight miles south of Cleveland, on the Cuyahoga River, were submerged.

The dam of the Cleveland and Akron Bag Company went out at four o'clock Thursday morning, March 27th, dropping thousands of tons of water into the valley in which the two villages, with a total population of about four thousand five hundred, are located.

MAP SHOWING DANGEROUS RESERVOIRS IN OHIO

[link to high-resolution image]

AKRON