Webber then laid his complaint before the Mayor of Johnstown, not more than a month before the catastrophe. He told him that the spring freshets were due, and that, if they should be very heavy, the dam would certainly give way. Webber says the Mayor promised to send an expert to examine the dam then, and if necessary to appeal to the State. Somehow the expert was not chosen, the appeal was not made at Harrisburg, and the calamity ensued.
For three days previous to the final outburst, Webber said, the water of the lake forced itself through the interstices of the masonry, so that the front of the dam resembled a large watering pot. The force of the water was so great that one of these jets squirted full thirty feet horizontally from the stone wall. All this time, too, the feeders of the lake, particularly three of them, more nearly resembled torrents than mountain streams and were supplying the dammed up body of water with quite 3,000,000 gallons of water hourly.
At 11 o’clock Friday morning, May 31, Webber said he was attending to a camp about a mile back from the dam, when he noticed that the surface of the lake seemed to be lowering. He doubted his eyes, and made a mark on the shore, and then found that his suspicions were undoubtedly well founded. He ran across the country to the dam, and there he saw the water of the lake welling out from beneath the foundation stones of the dam. Absolutely helpless, he was compelled to stand there and watch the gradual development of what was to be the most disastrous flood of this continent.
According to his reckoning it was 12:45 when the stones in the centre of the dam began to sink because of the undermining, and within eight minutes a gap of twenty feet was made in the lower half of the wall face, through which the water poured as though forced by machinery of stupendous power. By 1 o’clock the toppling masonry, which before had partaken somewhat of the form of an arch, fell in, and then the remainder of the wall opened outward like twin-gates, and the great storage lake was foaming and thundering down the valley of the Conemaugh.
Webber became so awestruck at the catastrophe that he was unable to leave the spot until the lake had fallen so low that it showed bottom fifty feet below him. How long a time elapsed he did not know before he recovered sufficient power of observation to notice this, but he did not think more than five minutes passed. Webber said that had the dam been repaired after the spring freshet of 1888 the disaster would not have occurred. Had it been given ordinary attention in the spring of 1887 the probabilities are thousands of lives would not have been lost. To have put the dam in excellent condition would not have cost $5,000.
EXPERT SAID THE DAM WAS NOT STRONG.
A. M. Wellington, one of the most noted engineering experts in the United States, said of the dam after the flood:
“No engineer of known and good standing could possibly have been engaged in the reconstruction of the old dam after it had been neglected in disuse for twenty odd years, and the old dam was a very inferior piece of work, and of a kind wholly unwarranted by good engineering practices of its day, thirty years ago.
“Both the original dam and the reconstructed one were built of earth only, with no heart wall and rip-rapped only, on the slopes. True, the earth is of a sticky, clayey quality; the best of earth for adhesiveness, and the old dam was made in watered layers, well rammed down, as is still shown in the wrecked dam. But the new end was probably not rammed down at all; the earth was simply dumped in like an ordinary railway filling. Much of the old dam still stands, while the new work contiguous to it was carried away.
“It has been an acknowledged principle of dam building for forty years, and the invariable practice to build a central wall either of puddle or solid masonry, but there was neither in the old nor in the new dam. It is doubtful if there is another dam of the height of fifty feet in the United States which lacks this central wall.