History of the Johnstown Flood / Including all the Fearful Record; the Breaking of the South Fork Dam; the Sweeping Out of the Conemaugh Valley; the Over-Throw of Johnstown; the Massing of the Wreck at the Railroad Bridge; Escapes, Rescues, Searches for Survivors and the Dead; Relief Organizations, Stupendous Charities, etc., etc., With Full Accounts also of the Destruction on the Susquehanna and Juniata Rivers, and the Bald Eagle Creek.

by Willis Fletcher Johnson

“After a charge of dynamite had shaken up a portion of the wreck in front of the middle arch, men went to work with long poles, crowbars, axes, saws, and spades. All the loose pieces that could be got out were thrown into the water under the bridge, and then, beginning at the edges, the bits of wreck were pulled, pushed and cut out, and sent floating away. At first the work of an hour was hardly perceptible, but each fresh log of timber pulled out loosened others and made better progress possible. When the space beneath the arch was cleared, and a channel thus made through which the debris could be floated off, a huge portable crane, built on a flat-car and made for raising locomotives and cars, was run upon the bridge over the arch and fastened to the track with heavy chains. A locomotive was furnished to pull the rope, instead of the usual winch with a crank handle. A rope from the crane was fastened by chains or grapnels to a log, and then the locomotive pulled. About once in five times the log came out. Other times the chain slipped or something else made the attempt a failure. Whenever a big stick came out men with pikes pushed off all the other loosened debris that they could get at. Other men shoveled off the dirt and ashes which cover the raft so thickly that it is almost as solid as the ground.

“When a ten-foot square opening had been made back on the arch, the current could be seen gushing up like a great spring from below, showing that there was a large body of it being held down there by the weight of the debris. The current through the arch became so strong that the heaviest pieces in the wreck were carried off readily once they got within its reach. One reason for this is that laborers are filling up the gaps on the railroad embankment approaching the bridge in the north, through which the river had made itself a new bed, and the water thus dammed back has to go through or under the raft and out by the bridge-arches. This both buoys up the whole mass and provides a means of carrying off the wooden part of the debris as fast as it can be loosened.

“Meanwhile an attack on the raft was being made through the adjoining arch in another way. A heavy winch was set up on a small island in the river seventy-five yards below the bridge, and ropes run from this were hitched to heavy timbers in the raft, and then pulled out by workmen at the winch. A beginning for a second opening in the raft was made in this way. One man had some bones broken and was otherwise hurt by the slipping of the handle while he was at work at the winch this afternoon. The whole work is dangerous for the men. There is twenty feet of swift water for them to slip into, and timbers weighing tons are swinging about in unexpected directions to crush them.

“So far it is not known that any bodies have been brought out of the debris by this work of removal, though many logs have been loosened and sent off down the river beneath the water without being seen. There will probably be more bodies back toward the centre of the raft than at the bridge, for of those that came there many were swept over the top. Some went over the arches and a great many were rescued from the bridge and shore. People are satisfied now that dynamite is the only thing that can possibly remove the wreck and that as it is being used it is not likely to mangle bodies that may be in the debris any more than would any other means of removing it. There are no more protests heard against its use.”

Bodies continue to be dug out of the wreck in the central portion all day. A dozen or so had been recovered up to nightfall, all hideously burned and mangled. In spite of all the water that has been thrown upon it by fire engines and all the rain that has fallen, the debris is still smouldering in many spots.

Work was begun in dead earnest on Wednesday on the Cambria Iron Works buildings. The Cambria people gave out the absurd statement that their loss will not exceed $100,000. It will certainly take this amount to clean the works of the debris, to say nothing of repairing them. The buildings are nearly a score in number, some of them of enormous size, and they extend along the Conemaugh River for half a mile, over a quarter of a mile in width. Their lonely chimneys, stretching high out of the slate roofs above the brick walls, make them look not unlike a man-of-war of tremendous size. The buildings on the western end of the row are not damaged a great deal, though the torrent rolled through them, turning the machinery topsy-turvy; but the buildings on the eastern end, which received the full force of the flood, fared badly. The eastern ends are utterly gone, the roofs bent over and smashed in, the chimneys flattened, the walls cracked and broken, and, in some cases, smashed entirely. Most of the buildings are filled with drift. The workmen, who have clambered over the piles of logs and heavy drift washed in front of the buildings and inside, say that they do not believe that the machinery in the mills is damaged very much, and that the main loss will fall on the mills themselves. Half a million may cover the loss of the Cambria people, but this is a rather low estimate. They have nine hundred men at work getting things in shape, and the manner in which they have had to go to work illustrates the force with which the flood acted. The trees jammed in and before the buildings were so big and so solidly wedged in their places that no force of men could pull them out, and temporary railroad tracks were built up to the mass of debris. Then one of the engines backed down from the Pennsylvania Railroad yards, and the workmen, by persistent effort, managed to get big chains around parts of the drift. These chains were attached to the engine, which rolled off puffing mightily, and in this way the mass of drift was pulled apart. Then the laborers gathered up the loosened material, heaped it in piles a distance from the buildings, and burned them. Sometimes two engines had to be attached to some of the trees to pull them out, and there are many trees which cannot be extricated in this manner. They will have to be sawed into parts, and these parts lugged away by the engines.

250,000,000 FEET OF LOGS AFLOAT IN THE SUSQUEHANNA.