A little farther along is the relief headquarters for that part of the city, and the streets there are packed all day long with women and children with baskets on their arms. So great is the demand that the people have to stand in line for an hour to get their turn. A large unfinished building is turned into a storehouse for clothing, and the people throng into it empty-handed and come out with arms full of underclothing and other wearing apparel. At another building the sanitary bureau is serving out disinfectants.
The workmen upon the débris in what was the heart of the city have now reached well into the ruins and are getting to where the valuable contents of jewelry and other stores may be expected to be found, and strict watch is being kept to prevent the theft of any such articles by the workmen or others. In the ruins of the Wood, Morrell & Co. general store a large amount of goods, chiefly provisions and household utensils, has been found in fairly good order. It is piled in a heap as fast as gotten out, and the building is being pulled down.
About the worst heap of wreckage in the centre of the city is where the Cambria Library building stood, opposite the general store. This was a very substantial and handsome building and offered much obstruction to the flood. It was completely destroyed, but upon its site a mass of trees, logs, heavy beams, and other wreckage was left, knotted together into a mass only extricable by the use of the ax and saw. Two hundred men have worked at it for three days and it is not half removed yet.
The Cambria Iron Company have several acres of gravel and clay to remove from the upper end of its yard. Except for an occasional corner of some big iron machine that projects above the surface no one would ever suspect that it was not the original earth. In one place a freight car brake-wheel lies just on the surface of the ground, apparently dropped there loosely. Any one who tries to kick it aside or pick it up finds that it is still attached to its car, which is buried under a solid mass of gravel and broken rock. Several lanes have been dug through this mass down to the old railroad tracks, and two or three of the little yard engines of the iron company, resurrected with smashed smoke-stacks and other light damage, but workable yet, go puffing about hardly visible above the general level of the new-made ground.
The progress of the work upon the black and still smoking mass of charred ruins above the bridge is hardly perceptible. There is clear water for about one hundred feet back from the central arch, and a little opening before the two on each side of it. When there is a good-sized hole made before all three of these arches, through which the bulk of the water runs, it is expected that the stuff can be pulled apart and set afloat much more rapidly. Dynamiter Kirk, who is overseeing the work, used up the last one hundred pounds of the explosive early this afternoon, and had to suspend operations until the arrival of two hundred pounds more that was on the way from Pittsburgh. The dynamite has been used in small doses for fear of damaging the bridge. Six pounds was the heaviest charge used. Even with this the stone beneath the arches of the bridge is charred and crumbling in places, and some pieces have been blown out of the heavy coping. The whole structure shakes as though with an earthquake at every discharge.
The dynamite is placed in holes drilled in logs matted into the surface of the raft, and its effect being downward, the greatest force of the explosion is upon the mass of stuff beneath the water. At the same time each charge sent up into the air, one hundred feet or more, a fountain of dirt, stones, and blackened fragments of logs, many of them large enough to be dangerous. The rattling crash of their fall upon the bridge follows hard after the heavy boom of the explosion. One of the worst and most unexpected objects with which the men on the raft have to contend is the presence in it of hundreds of miles of telegraph wire wound around almost everything there and binding the whole mass together.
No bodies have yet been brought to the surface by the operations with dynamite, but indications of several buried beneath the surface are evident. A short distance back from where the men are not at work, bodies continue to be taken out from the surface of the raft at the rate of ten or a dozen a day. The men this afternoon came across hundreds of feet of polished copper pipe, which is said to have come from a Pullman car. It was not known until then that there was a Pullman car in that part of the raft. The remnants of a vestibule car are plainly seen at a point a hundred feet away from this.