Holy F**KING Inundation!!!!

I've been reading about the Johnstown Flood in a particularly dramatic and lurid account, which seems to have been written just after the tragedy occurred and it goes on for 24 chapters, each one more harrowing than the last. It goes on and on detailing the horrific destruction of houses, men, women, children, locomotives, houses, streets, factories, bridges, and even cows in the most heartrending terms. Yikes! No wonder McGonagall had to write a poem about this catastrophe.

Here is an excerpt:

"When the South Fork dam gave way, 16,000,000 tons of water rushed down the mountain side, carrying thousands of tons of rocks, logs and trees with it. When the flood reached the Conemaugh Valley it struck the Pennsylvania Railroad at a point where they make up the trains for ascending the Allegheny Mountains. Several trains with their locomotives and loaded cars were swept down the valley before the flood wave, which is said to have been fifty feet high. Cars loaded with iron, cattle, and freight of all kinds, with those mighty locomotives, weighing from seventy to one hundred tons each, were pushed ahead of the flood, trucks and engines rolling over like mere toys.

    "Sixteen milling tons of water gathering fences, barns, houses, mills and shops into its maw. Down the valley for three miles or more rushed this mighty avalanche of death, sweeping everything before it, and leaving nothing but death and destruction behind it. When it struck the railroad bridge at Johnstown, and not being able to force its way through that stone structure, the debris was gorged and the water dammed up fifty feet in ten minutes.

    "This avalanche was composed of more that 100,000 tons of rocks, locomotives, freight cars, car trucks, iron, logs, trees and other material pushed forward by 16,000,000 tons of water falling 500 feet, and it was this that, sliding over the ground, mowed down the houses, mills and factories as a mowing machine does a field of grain. It swept down with a roaring, crushing sound, at the rate of a mile a minute, and hurled 10,000 people into the jaws of death in less than half an hour. And so the people called it the avalanche of death."

Oddly enough, the above account has many repetitive spelling errors in it, such as the word "road" in many places which clearly call for the word "roar" (the roar of the approaching floodcrest). It sounds to me like the writer of this piece got a bit overwrought. I was at first horrified by the piteous personal details of this tale of utter disaster...the children swept away before their horrified parents...the men and women dashed into houses and crushed beneath locomotives and spat out of chasms in vortexes of splattering debris and driven into the riverbed like nails into a coffin...gasp! pant!...but after awhile it all became so overwhelmingly histrionic and repetitive that my emotional centers went numb, I guess, and it started to seem funny. I began chuckling maniacally! God help me, I think I am becoming unhinged, just like the man who wrote this melodramatic account! This was an event MADE for McGonagall. It's a real shame that he was not there to witness it in person.

And here is another excerpt:

The stream of human beings that was swept before the angry floods was something most pitiful to behold. men, women and children were carried along frantically shrieking for help, but their cries availed them nothing. Rescue was impossible. Husbands were swept past their wives, and children were borne along, at a terrible speed, to certain death, before the eyes of their terrorized and frantic parents. Houses, out-buildings, trees and barns were carried on the angry flood of waters as so much chaff. Cattle standing in the fields were overwhelmed, and their carcasses strewed the tide. The railroad tracks converging on the town were washed out, and wires in all directions were prostrated.

    Down through the packsaddle came the running waters. Clinging to improvised rafts, constructed in the death battle from floating boards and timbers, were agonized men, women and children, their heart-rending shrieks for help striking horror to the breasts of the onlookers. Their cries were of no avail. Carried along at a railway speed on the breast of this rushing torrent, no human ingenuity could devise a means of rescue.

    It is impossible to describe briefly the suddenness with which the disaster came. A warning sound was heard at Conemaugh a few minutes before the rush of water came, but it was attributed to some meteorological disturbance, and no trouble was borrowed because of the thing unseen. As the low, rumbling noise increased in volume, however, and came nearer, a suspicion of danger began to force itself even upon the bravest, which was increased to a certainty a few minutes later, when, with a rush, the mighty stream spread out in width, and when there was not time to do anything to save themselves. Many of the unfortunates where whirled into the middle of the stream before they could turn around; men, women and children were struggling in the streets, and it is thought that many of them never reached Johnstown, only a mile or two below.

    At Johnstown a similar scene was enacted, only on a much larger scale. The population is greater and the sweeping whirlpool rushed into a denser mass of humanity. The imagination of the reader can better depict the spectacle than the pen of the writer can give it. It was a twilight of terror, and the gathering shades of evening closed in on a panorama of horrors that has few parallels in the history of casualties."


Geez...I think I need a valium or something. Look, I know it's not the least bit funny, but....Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!!!! Omigod, I'm so ashamed. Oh! The grieving widows, the dead pets, the minced lovers, drowned, crushed, and mangled in the incredible tangle of wreckage, wrack, and ruin, burnt up the fires that followed....Ayeeee! Utter madness! I blame McGonagall for the whole thing. He is somehow responsible.