Hell in the Highlands

Sloping up from the narrow Atlantic coastal plain, the Eastern U.S. rears abruptly in the great earth-wrinkles of the Appalachian Highlands, stretching northeast to southwest from New England to Alabama. When early U. S. settlers pushed out from the coast into this rugged region, they built their towns, for purposes of commerce, on the narrow-valleyed rivers which flow east from the Appalachian slopes into the Atlantic, west into the Gulf of Mexico or Great Lakes. Power from these rivers helped make the northern Highlands the great manufacturing region of the U. S., where dwell 28% of the nation's population in 5% of its area. But in many & many a spring the friendly rivers have turned into roaring engines of destruction, wiped out what they had--helped men to build.

Last fortnight hard rains scattered spring freshets throughout New England, New York, New Jersey. Last week a huge low-pressure centre, heavy with moisture from the Gulf, formed over Texas, moved slowly northeast over the Appalachian Highlands. The moisture cooled, fell in torrents on a land just emerging from one of its severest winters on record. Its hillsides were blanketed with wet snow, its streams and rivers jammed with thawing ice. The soil was deep-frozen, rock-hard. . The melting rains coursed off the Appalachian hillsides as if they had been sloping tin roofs. Monstrously gorged rivers roared like millraces, burst their narrow channels. From Maine to Kentucky a vast, swirling chaos enveloped the valley towns and cities.

As the rampant rivers tossed off their bridges, gulped in railway roadbeds, swamped highways, transportation throughout the region was practically at a standstill. Railroads canceled many a train, sent others chugging cautiously over competitors' tracks. Hardest hit was the Pennsylvania, whose four-track main line cuts through the heart of the Alleghenies. Pennsylvania canceled all service on its own tracks west of Lancaster, Pa. The last break, near Altoona, Pa., was not repaired and through service resumed until three days later. B. & O. stopped all trains west of Washington.

Most bus lines had quit cold. Air lines put all available planes into service, worked overtime flying passengers, mail and freight between Newark and Pittsburgh. One TWA plane carried nearly a ton of rubber boots, another some 5,000 telegrams. But even airplanes were forced to quit at night when electric power failures put airport lights and radio beacons out of commission.

American Telephone & Telegraph, Western Union and Postal Telegraph rushed armies of troubleshooters into the field to unscramble their wrecked wires and poles. After 24 hours A. T. & T. reported more than 351,000 telephones still dead. Newspaper plants were awash; broadcasting stations went silent for lack of power as operators scampered to higher ground (see p. 59). Hampered in their movements, forced to guess wildly at the extent of death and damage, overwhelmed newshawks sent reports marked by the breadth and sweep of war dispatches.

As usual, greatest suffering fell to the poor folk living down by the river banks, greatest loss to the prosperous hill-dwellers whose business centre is commonly in the valley. Everywhere thousands of terrified people took to second floors, to rooftops, to treetops, to the hills. Everywhere there were some who fled too late, some who lost their footing in swift currents, some who went down as small boats overturned. Everywhere drenched, shivering refugees huddled in schools, churches, armories, dance halls. Everywhere as stores were wrecked and goods waterlogged, police, National Guardsmen and vigilante committees stood guard against mean-spirited looters. Everywhere power plants went dead, stopping most of the machinery of life at a stroke. And everywhere the floods receded leaving inestimable loss, streets coated with silt and heaped with wreckage, polluted waters threatening disease.

New England, groggy and soggy, had just begun to repair the damage of the previous week's floods when fresh rains sent its little rivers smashing bridges, bursting dams, flooding mills, isolating small towns. The famed Gloucester, Mass, fishing fleet sped lifeboats, dories and speedboats inland by truck to the rescue. At Deerfield, Mass., Eaglebrook School boys spent an exciting night in canoes salvaging cats, dogs and valuables from flood-lapped houses; their pet polo pony, "Pinto," swam five people from a second floor to safety. The Merrimack River drowned 200 animals in Manchester, N. H.'s zoo, rolled on to swamp the great textile towns of Lowell and Lawrence, Mass.

The Connecticut River drove all 1,500 citizens of Hadley and Sunderland, Mass. to refuge in the gymnasiums of Amherst and Massachusetts State Colleges. In Springfield, where 16,000 citizens fled their homes, thieves in rowboats pilfered scores of houses before Guardsmen arrived. At Hartford, the Connecticut reached a record stage of 37 ft., rolled over 2,500 acres of the city, including the Colt Arms plant. A rescuing Coast Guard cutter, which had plowed up the river, turned, sped down again between floating barns and houses in a frantic chase after two 55,000-gal. tanks of gasoline. Early this week New England estimated its dead at 24, its homeless at 77,000, its damage at $277,000,000. Connecticut ordered 30,000 citizens inoculated for typhoid.

New York. To Washington early last week went a delegation of Binghamton, N. Y. citizens to plead for a $34,000,000 Federal flood control project. As they testified earnestly before the Army Engineers' Board on Rivers & Harbors, telephone and telegraph messages began pouring in informing them that the Susquehanna and Chenango Rivers were rising to new highs, flooding their homes and offices. Stopping only to point their arguments with this timely evidence, the witnesses kited for Binghamton. They found 500 families driven from their homes.

Elsewhere in New York, the Hudson and Mohawk Rivers and Onandaga Creek overflowed their banks, did minor damage in Albany, Syracuse, Troy, Kingston, many a lesser community.

Pennsylvania. Working at full capacity for the first time anyone could remember, huge automatic pumps churned vainly as water poured down the shafts of the great anthracite coal mines around Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Fifty thousand miners, wives & children fled their shacks. Those who waited too long were plucked from roofs and trees by 40 Coast Guardsmen who came with motorboats from Camden, N. J. Firemen swam to a blazing house, stood up to their necks in water with their hose lines connected in a building still above the flood. In Wilkes-Barre, Station WBRE broadcast message after message like the following: "Will the Browns who live on Main Street, Kingston please pay attention. Mary says that a boat will be there in half an hour."

Scores of other Pennsylvania towns were caught in the watery terror, but the plight of two--one by reason of its history and the other by reason of its size--overshadowed all the rest.

Johnstown, a steel and coal city of 67,000 population, lies at the end of a ten-mile bottleneck formed by the deep, rocky gorge of the Conemaugh River. In 1889 it had 30,000 people, who in ten years had grown weary of false alarms that a big earth dam, backing up a hunting club's reservoir two miles above the gorge, was about to break. Hence on May 31 of that year, though heavy rains had sent the Conemaugh and Stony Creek surging knee-deep through Johnstown streets, only a few hundred timid souls took to the hills when engineers sent word that the swollen reservoir might soon burst the dam.

At 3 p. m. the dam's whole centre gave way with a roar, sent a wall of water 40 ft. high and half a mile wide hurtling down the gorge. It reached Johnstown in seven minutes. Like battering rams its swirling burden of tree trunks, houses, steel bars, locomotives struck the town, piled up against the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge in a tangled mass which soon covered 60 acres. Water rushed back, met a wing of the flood which had been diverted around the town, formed a whirlpool three quarters of a mile wide which ground to bits buildings which had escaped the first impact. Clinging to bits of wreckage, hundreds of people rode the whirlpool all afternoon and night, while families and friends screamed helplessly on the banks (see cut). Hundreds more were roasted to death when the great, oil-smeared pile of wreckage against the bridge caught fire, burned for twelve hours. Johnstown never accounted for all its missing. Best estimate of the dead: 2,200.

Many an aging survivor of that disaster was still living in Johnstown when the Conemaugh and Stony Creek burst their banks last week. Fourteen feet of floodwater smashed and shattered the city, but most citizens' thoughts were on the Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s huge Quemahoning Dam twelve miles up Stony Creek. Time & again cries of "Run for your lives! The dam's broken!" sent crowds scrambling pellmell for the hills (see cut). When the floods receded 22 people had been drowned, but Mayor Shields thought property damage was far greater than in 1889. "Johnstown," said he, "will have to be rebuilt."

Pittsburgh. Aviators passing over Pittsburgh customarily see that No. 1 U. S. steel city through a grey pall of smoke. Last week for the first time the Smoky City stood out sharp & clear. The fires of its great mills and factories were banked or out.

On the "Golden Triangle" formed by the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers as they join to form the Ohio stand the skyscrapers, department stores, theatres and hotels of Pittsburgh's business district. At first, as the rivers swelled after 24 hours of pelting snow, sleet and rain, the city was vastly alarmed by a prediction that the water-level at their junction might rise as high as 34 ft.--close to the record set by the disastrous flood of 1907. Twenty-four hours later the junction stood at an all-time high of 48 ft., and in the Golden Triangle a swimmer could not touch bottom.

Though the rivers had risen steadily all one night, Market Street was dry at 8 o'clock the next morning as thousands of Pittsburghers went to work in the Triangle without getting their feet wet. At 10 a. m. Market Street was hip-deep in swirling water. Workers frantically rushed records and goods to upper floors or slogged for home. As plate-glass windows gave way, leaving rich stores open for looting, 1,500 National Guardsmen marched into the district, threw a khaki line from end to end of Grant Street, the Triangle's base. Up & up surged the dirty water until the marquees of stores and theatres were barely visible, and rowboats were bobbing over the tops of submerged automobiles. Two of the Duquesne Power & Light Co.'s major plants went dead in the morning, the third in midafternoon, leaving the city without power. Wrecked gas and steam, lines left radiators and cookstoves cold.

As the flood waters struck hot boilers, explosions and fires flared through the city. An exploding tank car in the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroad yards burned three business houses, two homes, a municipal garage. A nut & bolt plant, two steel plants, an oil works blazed away while firemen sloshed and fumbled. In a suburban house some 30 refugees were rocked, showered with bricks, singed when their shelter exploded and caught fire.

Mayor McNair declared a legal holiday. Businessmen in the Triangle were told to lock what doors they could reach, turn the keys over to Guardsmen. Bread sold at 30-c- per loaf, candles at four for $1. As night fell on the lightless city the flood was still rising. In the Roosevelt Hotel water lapped the lobby ceiling. Above stairs 575 guests and employees were marooned without heat, food or water. Two cinema theatres were flooded to their balconies. Above the flood line, the William Penn and Pittsburgher Hotels were jammed. Guests ate by candlelight, toiled up stairs and found their rooms by flashlight, washed and shaved with bottled spring water. At the dry Nixon Theatre, Alfred Lunt & Lynn Fontanne played Idiot's Delight by flickering lights to a half-filled house.

At 9 p. m. the waters began to retreat. Pittsburgh stirred itself, started back to life. Some power was being piped in from the West. By midnight almost half the street lights were on, some trolley cars were running, electricity was flowing to hospitals, dairies, bakeries. But all next day, as the receding flood left an inch of slime on streets and sidewalks, banks, factories, stores, theatres, schools remained closed. It would be days before power generators, factory machines, water pumps could be dried out and set working. The dead were estimated at 57, the homeless at 135,000, the damage at $25,000,000.

Turning up unwashed and unshaved in Baltimore after being marooned in a Pittsburgh hotel, General Hugh S. Johnson told how he had lived for two days on beer and seltzer water, how one woman guest had taken a bath in three cases of ginger ale. Said he: "It was the most complete paralysis of a large city since the San Francisco fire."

West Virginia, Ohio. Thousands of families from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati fled to the hills before the advancing Ohio River flood crest. At Wheeling, W. Va. water reached 15 ft. on the main streets. The ten-mile residential island in midriver was totally submerged. Police ferried 6,000 citizens in rowboats to dry land. Thirteen people were drowned, four killed when a gas explosion blew their house to bits. Surging through the streets of West Virginia and Ohio towns on either bank, the crest rolled on toward Cincinnati and Louisville. But most downstream Ohio River cities, forewarned, experienced and well fortified with dikes and levees, viewed the flood with small concern.

Maryland. Twelve feet of white-capped water from the Potomac and Wills Creek swirled at 20 m. p. h. over five square miles of Cumberland, Md. One man died, of heart failure. The Potomac, two miles wide in places and looking from the air like a huge, clay-colored lake, rolled on to flood seven valley towns. Four spans of the old vehicular bridge at Harper's Ferry, entrance to the Shenandoah Valley, were swept away. At Anacostia the Navy got 35 planes off to Hampton Roads before the flying field went under. In Washington 1,500 WPA workers threw up a 19-ft. dike of earth, stone and sandbags to protect the Washington Monument and new Government buildings near the river. Residents of outlying Georgetown took to rowboats and canoes as the waters seeped up, flowed over Washington-Hoover and Bolling flying fields, swept away a few waterfront cottages, lapped the trunks of the famed Japanese cherry trees along the Potomac tidal basin.

Births. Life's biologic processes went on, hastened by the stress & strain of disaster. In Milton, Pa. a baby was born in a high-school biology laboratory. In Kingstown, Pa. a woman gave birth in a street car. In Wilkes-Barre two were delivered in rescuing Army trucks. In Brunswick, Me., as his wife and newborn son were rowed safely from their flooded home, grateful Emilien Racine named the child Moses. In Johnstown 653 people took refuge in a hilltop dance hall. Soon there were 656.

Death lists mounted as corpses were washed up, survivors expired of shock and exposure. Total known dead early this week: 171.

Relief. At mid-week President Roosevelt named the heads of the Army, Navy, Public Health Service, CCC and WPA to a National Flood Emergency Committee, put every Government agency at their disposal. Next day, postponing his Southern fishing jaunt (see p. 15), the President took what the Press called "personal charge" of the nation's flood relief. For the Red Cross, already in the field with its disaster specialists, he asked a minimum public subscription of $3,000,000 for food, clothing, medicine, shelter. WTA gave the Red Cross 1,000,000 garments, and Federal Surplus Commodities Corp. threw open its 37,000,000-lb. store of food. At week's end the President added $25,000,000 to the $18,400,000 of WPA funds allocated last month for repairing flood-damaged public property and utilities, directed Administrator Hopkins to mobilize an army of 250,000 repairmen. WPA workers were also authorized to repair private property where health or life were endangered.

Crying for Federal help like the rest, Massachusetts topped other states' efforts to help themselves when its Executive Council empowered a State Flood Relief Administrator to seize any stored food, clothing or medical supplies, and Governor Curley, proclaiming a state of public emergency, told the Administrator to spend whatever money he needed, without legislative approval.

Warning. That Nature had been kind last week was a thought voiced only by Paul B. Sears, University of Oklahoma botany professor, Department of Agriculture adviser, author of Deserts on the March, fervent and authoritative exponent of soil conservation. As news of Western dust storms reached him in Washington, Professor Sears wrote for Science Service: "Nature has again been good enough to warn us, by a perfectly synchronized drama of dust storms in the West and disastrous floods in the East, of the wrath that is brewing against our Western civilization unless we mend our ways. The two extremes, seemingly unrelated, are absolutely facets of the same picture. The dust storms are not simply a matter of unavoidable drought but a result of the destruction of the living sod. . . . What has this to do with the destructive floods throughout the East? This week, traveling through the oldest Agricultural States of the Union, the writer has scarcely seen a place where the old top layer of soil is left. Careless methods of farming have allowed it to wash away in the last two and three centuries. ... It is this dark, spongy top layer of soil--what the specialists call the A-horizon--which is our only effective protection against flood. One can build dams downstream, construct mazes, of levees and ditches and still not touch the source of trouble. The water must be caught where it falls and the one thing that can arrest it and hold it in place is the dark A-horizon of the soil."

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