Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever (40 page)

The paper in nearby Xavier described the situation thusly: “Without waiting for confirmation, the now thoroughly frightened people are leaving the city like rats from a sinking ship. People are frantic. Children are separated from their parents, women are throwing their babies away in their terrible fright. The streets on the east side are black with hundreds and thousands of fleeing people. They have only one thought and that is to flee.”

One has to think and hope the reporter was mistaken and a little melodramatic himself—babies being thrown away?

But, sure enough, similar to what had happened the day before in Columbus, there was absolutely no foundation for the alarm. And once again, there was an understandable panic in the streets. Of course, it may seem as if there weren't any dry streets to panic in, but there were plenty of neighborhoods in Dayton, particularly in the northwest and southeast parts of the city, away from the rivers, that were relatively untouched by the flood. Hundreds of individuals and families in Dayton gathered their kids and important papers and hopped into their horse-and-buggies and automobiles, clogging the streets that were drivable and made haste to the National Cash Register headquarters, pushing themselves past guards, storming offices, and threatening to overwhelm the already-overcrowded facility.

The mob didn't settle down until Patterson stepped forward and spoke, explaining that if the dam had broken, it was sixty-five miles away, and
that the water wouldn't make their situation much more grave than it already was. In fact, some professor later calculated that even if the dam and its 17,000 acres of water had become free, and assuming there was no water on the ground across the several million acres that it would have spread over, the area would have been one foot deep. Not nothing when you own a half-sunken two-story row house, but not a tsunami either.

The Thoma family were among the people in the crowd at NCR. Norma Thoma's father Albin, an optometrist, wasn't sure how much more fearing for his life he could take. He just wanted to get back to his home in Piqua, although he couldn't have been sure he would have been much better off.

His house was far enough away from any waterways, as far as he knew, but Piqua had serious flooding as well. Years later, on September 12, 1983, Gene Rees, an 89-year-old farmer, told the Shelby County Historical Society of how he had visited Piqua with his uncle, where they saw a house leave its moorings. On top of the roof were a man, a woman, and a little girl. Rees and his uncle were horrified—and completely helpless to do anything but watch. The parents and girl were all crying for help—until it hit a bridge and they plunged into the water and disappeared.

Sometime in the afternoon, Columbus

Even while some people were still trapped in their homes, including 250 very hungry and cold people at the Sun Manufacturing Company, there was a morbid, grim sign that the flood would eventually end: two trucks, full of dead bodies, rolled out of the west side of the city. Relief trains, meanwhile, with food and clothing were coming in, and fifty armed deputies patrolled the city, all with orders to shoot any looters.

2
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., Fort Wayne

It was determined that the St. Mary's River had gone down three inches since 5:30
A
.
M
. With the rain slowing down to a trickle, the end of the flood finally seemed to be in sight.

Throughout the day, Oil City, Pennsylvania

While waterways were going down in the region where the flood first began, Oil Creek was rising at three inches an hour. The river gauge
measured twenty feet, instead of the usual foot or two, or even zero, since often the creek bed was dry. The entire business district was under water. The city's newspapers and industrial plants had also shut down since their power rooms were flooded. But what was really unnerving to the residents was that about four thousand barrels of oil had washed away from the Carmania Refinery plant.

People were afraid that this would be a repeat of June 5, 1892, when something similar had happened: miles of the river had caught on fire and dozens of people had died.

When people heard about the oil barrels, succumbing to humanity's voyeuristic instinct, they ran to the river to look at the barrels rather than getting as far away from it as possible. The railroads were ordered to make sure their locomotives extinguished their fires, and a government order went out saying that nobody was allowed to light a fire. Not even a match.

Throughout the day, Adams County, Pennsylvania, March 27

Adams County, scene of the infamous 1889 Johnstown Flood, saw their streams two inches higher than they had ever been since that fateful day. Every cellar in the city was full of water, footbridges were destroyed, and travel was virtually impossible. Still, the bigger bridges held, and there were no deaths. Which was something of a minor miracle, or simply better geography than some of the other flood-prone cities. In the days and years after the Johnstown Flood, there was no legislation, in the city, county or state level, that attempted to protect its residents from future floods. Although it was considered a manmade disaster—the dam, for starters, was poorly maintained—the courts saw it as an act of God. The survivors not only received no money for their damages, they had no assurance something like this couldn't one day happen again.

Afternoon, Dayton, Ohio

“Don't send us money. We can't use it,” said J. C. Hale of the National Cash Register company, who was in charge of the relief and wanted food, clothing, and actual life-saving goods. That sentiment would change later, but for the moment there was a cash shortage in Dayton, rendering the checks useless at the city's banks. That may have
inspired Governor Cox to give the state a ten-day banking holiday, knowing full well that people weren't going to be able to pay their bills on time.

Meanwhile, that afternoon, NCR's founder, John Patterson, sent a message out that went on the news wire across the country. It was an urgent yet calm missive, furnishing directives on exactly what the city was going through and what it needed. And it's easy to see why later, after the disaster would pass, the citizens would come to the conclusion that they needed something that a few scattered communities across the country had begun employing: a city manager.

Patterson's message read:

“Situation here desperate. All people except on outskirts imprisoned by water. They have had no food, no drinking water, no light, no heat for two days. We have had no house to house communication by telephone for two days. Dayton water works stopped two days ago. Fire raging for 24 hours in center of city and now spreading. Beckel Hotel burned.”

(He was wrong about that last part.)

“Weather suddenly turned cold with strong wind and snow; water current too strong for rowboats and rafts,” continued Patterson's message. “Need help. Can reach us today from nearby cities. Help should be in form of motor boats and people to run them. We need good rowboats. We need troops for protection and help. Fire engines, motor trucks, and automobiles are needed, also provisions, clothing, and medical supplies. Our factory is safe, it has its own power, heat, electricity, and water plant. We and private houses are caring for many people, but they are only a small part of the sufferers.

“We cannot reach central, northeastern, northern, or western parts of the city. Consequently, cannot answer any of the telegrams of inquiry about safety of the people that are coming in. Railroads reaching Dayton are practically all out of use.”

Patterson sounded like the mayor of the city, and indeed his factory was becoming more like a city within a city every day. If Fred Ward, reporter for the
Columbus Citizen,
was right, NCR even had turned its basement into a jail, where guards were keeping robbers and vandals. Patterson's company not only embraced the idea of reporters visiting NCR, Patterson set up a separate living quarters for them, on the
upper floors of the building, which were now stocked with beds. It made sense, even if Patterson hadn't understood the value of favorable publicity—he did—because the hotels weren't exactly welcoming new customers, unless the new customers had a canoe handy, and the reporters had to stay somewhere. But Patterson not only gave journalists lodging, he had their muddy clothes cleaned and pressed overnight, and the reporters were welcome to use other amenities the company provided, like the dining room, the barber shop, and shoe-shining services. Even more helpful, Patterson managed to get a Western Union wire for the reporters to use at NCR, and for the next three months, newspaper men—sometimes as many as seventy-five—gathered at Patterson's company to collect news.

City Hall couldn't have done it better. As Carlos F. Hurd, staff reporter for the
St. Louis Post Dispatch,
observed, “To me, as I walked through the eleven floors of its administration building, it seemed that its work could not be more effective if it had been built for the express purpose it is now serving.”

But why shouldn't Patterson act like the city's mayor? Dayton's actual mayor, Edward Phillips, had hardly been seen or heard from since the flood started, and while it wasn't first and foremost on people's minds in the beginning, as they struggled simply to survive, it was a question that was coming up more and more: Where was the mayor, anyway?

The mayor was marooned at his house with his family. He was stuck at home for about seventy hours, only escaping late in the afternoon on Thursday, March 27, after rescuers took Phillips and his family away. As he told a reporter, “The water caught us early Tuesday morning. During Tuesday, the water was fourteen feet deep around the house, and that night, I chopped a hole through the ceiling of a second-floor room, and we spent the night in a little attic. The big west side fire was just two blocks from us, and when the wind began to carry burning embers in our direction, it looked serious. I watched the roof nearly all night.”

Phillips probably had no choice but to wait out the flood, but it didn't help his political career. By the following year, he was out as mayor; and as if to add insult to injury, Dayton would change its system of government, reverting to a then-relatively new way
of running a city, in which a five-member commission—which includes the mayor, functioning as the commission's chairman—chooses a city manager to run the show. Phillips's most enduring legacy may not be as a businessman, but that today most cities employ a city manager.

Not surprisingly, given how many communities were in the flood's way, Mayor Phillips wasn't the only politician who didn't exactly receive praise for how he handled the flood. Governor Ralston of Indiana was roundly thrashed in the editorial pages of the
Indianapolis News.

As it observed in the days after the flood, “The people in West Indianapolis leaped into action to aid flood victims within an hour the night of the flood. The Governor, however, was still struggling more than a day and a half later about the issue of possibly losing control over the distribution of the relief supplies the flood victims needed so desperately. He was worried that some glitch might spring up concerning the method of distribution and then criticism might fall on him. He followed the safest course. He equivocated.”

3
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., New Castle, Pennsylvania

The bridges kept collapsing. The Black Bridge, a wooden bridge, had been the first to fall into the Shenango River, followed by the Grant Street Bridge on Wednesday afternoon, and now the Pennsylvania Railroad bridge. As was a common practice during heavy rains, railroad cars—in this case, coal cars—were loaded up on the edges of a bridge, to keep it weighted down, and so everyone believed the bridge would survive. But the waters proved too strong, and in another three hours the bridge at Gardner Avenue would fall too.

Around this time, Thomas Thomas was joined by an alderman, John H. Gross. Thomas, on continuous duty since Tuesday, was exhausted and must have welcomed having a partner to help him help others. Still, Thomas should have found a warm bed instead and left the rescuing to others after more than forty-eight hours at the helm. But then one wonders if he knew about some of the graft among his fellow officers who were not as pure of heart as he. Maybe he felt that he simply couldn't leave the rescuing to men like William Kerr, who were busy blackmailing stranded families.

Gross was going to help Thomas with his latest rescue. Thomas had brought back a mother of six children. Her kids and the father were back at the house, and Thomas was going to go back for them, or some of them, anyway, since it would be impossible to fit nine people, including the rescuers, in a single boat.

But they never made it. Thomas and Gross's boat overturned. Fortunately, they were in the vicinity of two Shenango Mill employees, John Henderson and Abe Rhoner. They had found themselves trapped at their place of employment, a tin mill, the same that Thomas had worked at before becoming an officer, and they ended up constructing a wooden boat out of factory scraps to use for rescues. It was a rudimentary boat, to say the least. They had no oars; just wooden boards for paddling. By the time Thomas and Gross fell into the drink, Henderson and Rhoner had saved at least twenty-five women, taking them from the windows of two-story homes.

Both men heard Thomas and Gross scream and immediately hopped into their skiff and started rowing toward them. They found Thomas and Gross, their necks just above the churning water, hanging on to a fence, in the middle of a pile of garbage and driftwood, all piling up from the current.

Rohner held the boat to the fence, and Henderson went into the water and took their rope and tied it to the front of the porch. At least whatever happened next, they wouldn't lose their boat.

Neither Gross or Thomas could talk, they were so cold. Their fingers were so cramped that they couldn't hold a rope. Henderson and Rohner were at first at a loss—the men couldn't use the rope to make their way to the boat—but they ultimately helped Thomas onto the roof of the porch. Then they aided Gross, who, when he tried to stand, fell back down.