The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough Page B

way to talk to another old friend, John Dibert, the banker, who was also their next-door neighbor.
    The situation for property holders in the lower part of town was growing serious, Rose and Dibert agreed. This business of flooded cellars every spring had to be corrected. The solution, as they saw it, was to call a meeting to protest the way the Cambria Iron Company had been filling in the riverbanks next to the mills below town. They recalled that town ordinances had fixed the width of the Stony Creek at 175 feet and the Little Conemaugh at 110 feet. This meant that the combined width of the two was 285 feet; but the Conemaugh, which had to carry all the water from both of them, was now less than 200 feet wide near the mills. Obviously, the rivers were bound to back up when flash floods hit, and obviously the Cambria Iron Company would have to restore the riverbed to its original width. With that settled, the two friends parted.
    Rose went directly home, where he found the water now so deep that he was unable to get near his front door. He sent young Forest with the team to a nearby hillside while he and Percy assembled a makeshift raft and floated over to the back porch. Once inside, like nearly everyone else in town, they busied themselves taking up carpets and furniture. Rose also “marked with sadness” that the slowly rising water “with its muddy freight” had already ruined his new wallpaper.
    Then everyone moved upstairs where the morning took on the air of a family picnic. Forest had been unable to get back to the house after leaving the horses but had signaled from a window across the street that he was high and dry with the Fishers.
    Horace Rose called back and forth to Squire Fisher and joked about their troubles while his wife and the others got a fire going in the grate and made some coffee. After a bit Rose got his rifle, went up to the attic, propped himself in a window, and whiled away the time shooting at rats struggling along the wall of a stable in the adjoining lot.
    And so the morning passed on into afternoon; there was nothing much to do but wait it out and make the best of what, after all, was not such an unpleasant situation.

     

    There were hundreds of other families, however, who had seen enough. They began moving out, wading through the streets with bundles of clothing and food precariously balanced on rude rafts, or jammed into half-submerged spring wagons. Here and there a lone rowboat pushed up to a front porch or window ledge to make a clumsy, noisy rescue of women and grandfathers, dogs, cats, and children.
    Some people were simply heading for higher ground, without any particular place in mind; others were going to the homes of friends or relatives where they hoped there might not be quite so much water, and where, come nightfall, there might be electricity and a dry kitchen.
    A few families went over to the big hotels in the center of town, thinking they would be the safest places of all to ride out the storm. Quite a good many, wherever their destination, went a little sheepishly, dreading the looks and the kidding they would get when they came back home again.
    The water by now, from one end of town to the other, was anywhere from two to ten feet deep. It was already higher than the ‘87 flood, making it, by noon at least, Johnstown’s worst flood on record. The Gautier works had closed down at ten, when Fred Krebs, the manager, was reminded by one of the men that the huge barbed-wire plant stood on fill that had been dumped into the old canal basin, and that once upon a time there had been four feet of water right where they were standing. At eleven, or soon after, a log boom burst up the Stony Creek and sent a wild rush of logs stampeding through the valley until they crashed into the stone bridge below town and jammed in among the massive arches.
    Not very long after that the Stony Creek ripped out the Poplar Street Bridge; then, within the hour, the Cambria City Bridge went. At