In order to prevent the spread of the pestilence which is feared, fires were late last night started among the wreckage. Thus, in order to save valuable remaining lives, it has been deemed necessary to destroy by the other fearful element the festering debris, even if the bodies underneath have to be cremated with it. It is the only manner in which the health of the locality can be sustained.
THE THREE HUNDREDTH BODY.
If Johnstown suffered, Cambria City was almost entirely wiped out. The work of repairing the wreck in this place will be short, as the flood did the most of it. Nowhere in all the fifteen-mile course of the fearful torrent was the surface of the earth swept more clean than in that place. Cambria City was a borough organized separately from Johnstown, and lying below it on the opposite side of the river. It began just below the railroad bridge, and extended for a mile down the river. The Conemaugh below the bridge makes a long curve from the mountains, and a flat a mile long, with a curving front half a mile wide at its widest point, is left. Cambria City was built upon this flat. There were 600 houses and about 3,000 inhabitants. Most of the houses were small frame buildings very lightly built. There were a few large stores, a small brick brewery, street car lines, electric lights, and other substantial improvements above ground.
The plan of the town in a general way, was of four broad streets running across the flat lengthwise, with numerous cross streets at right angles. The first wild dash of the flood, when its advance wave was shattered against the bridge, was turned aside into the Cambria Iron Works, across the river from Cambria City. Passing through these from end to end, the outer half of the flat upon which Cambria City was built lay straight before it. The flood with a front of twenty feet high, bristling with all manner of debris, struck straight across the flat, as though the river’s course had always been that way. It cut off the outer two-thirds of the city with a line as true and straight as could have been drawn by a surveyor. On the part over which it swept there remains standing but one building, the brewery. With this exception, not only the houses and stores, but the pavements, sidewalks and curbstones, and the earth beneath for several feet, is washed away so that the water mains are laid bare. The pavements were of cinders from the iron works, a bed six inches thick, as hard as stone and with a surface like macadam. Over most of the washed-out portions of the city not even the broken fragments of these pavements are left. Along the edge of the river much of the land was made ground built up of these cinders. The mass of them was so great, and the surface afforded so little hold for the flood, that the land here is two or three feet higher than further inland, where the ground yielded easier. But even here the water left its mark. Beside the sweeping away of all buildings upon the surface of the land itself, the hard cinder mass is torn, split and corrugated, as if chiseled and cut by some convulsion of nature.
Of the 600 houses of Cambria City nearly 400 stood upon the part of the flat which the first rush of the flood covered. If all the debris, not only of the houses, but of logs, timber and other driftwood that the flood left upon that mile long short cut across the bend in the river, were piled into a heap it would not make a mass as large as a single one of all the buildings swept away. There are not half a dozen wheelbarrow loads of earth or sand left upon the surface of the flat. The rush of the water left nothing on top except the heavy rocks and stones, and these were tossed about so thickly that they cover the whole surface, distributed as though some volcano had covered the earth with a shower of rocks.
Aside from the few logs and timbers left by the afterwash of the flood there is nothing remaining upon the outer edge of the flat, including two of the four long streets of the city, except the brewery mentioned before and a grand piano. The water marks on the brewery walls show that the flood reached twenty feet up its sides, and it stood on a little higher ground than the buildings around it at that. Jacob Greener, the owner, with his family and workmen—nine men and two women in all—were caught in the building by the flood. They took refuge in the attic over the store-room and were saved. The brewery was completely wrecked and will have to be torn down, but the main walls remained standing. The piano was built by Christie & Son, New York, and was numbered 6,609. Its legs are gone and its cover is missing. The keys seem a little out of order, and two or three of the wires are broken.
Of the 200 houses that were not swept away by the short cut of the flood across the flats, there are not half a dozen that are uninjured. Fully half of them are wrecked completely. The value of those that can be repaired would not pay for the cost of removing the others. As far as property is concerned, it would have been cheaper if the flood had made its clean sweep over the whole of Cambria City. It would surely have done so had not the bridge checked it and turned it aside.
