Read Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever for Free Online Page B

deadly.
    The problem was that the river bank was no longer there, and the tree, which had been rooted in dry earth was now two hundred yards into the waterway. The three men would have done themselves a favor if they had attempted to climb up the tree to wait for help. Instead, they understandably weren’t thinking that way and tried to pry the boat off the tree.
    The boat overturned.
    The men went into the water.
    The water was freezing.
    Roy was the first to go under, because of his heavy hip boots. The water just poured right into those heavy boots and dragged Roy down to the river floor, where he was trapped, or the current took him for a terrible ride underneath the water and never let him go. Roscoe was perhaps a little luckier, depending on your point of view on how you’d want your life to end in a river on a rampage; he grabbed the edge of his boat and hung on for at least five hundred yards until he went around a bend, just in sight of the Wyandotte Bridge.
    But how he died after he went around the bend is anybody’s guess. Elva Myers watched his friend float away while dangling from two armfuls of willow tree branches. Myers was able to keep his head above the water, but little else. He started shouting for help.
    March 24, noon, Fort Wayne, Indiana
    School wasn’t in session at the Allen County Orphans Home. The basement had started flooding in the morning, and the adults had decided to do some commonsense planning, in case the river crept a little too close to the building for comfort. But while the basement and the moving of furniture and stoves to the second floor was reason enough to cancel school, when the power and heat went out the teachers must have really thrown up their hands in surrender. Instead, the sixty-two children played on both the first and second stories of the orphanage, and some of the teachers, like Theresa Hammond, went about their usual business, only keeping the youngsters entertained instead of trying to fill their young minds with knowledge. That was what much of the staff had to do, anyway. During the weekdays, the orphanage was a school for the older children and a baby-sitting service for the younger; it was also a home providing social services around the clock. There were many children who were toddlers and at least one baby.
    But as the afternoon made its introductions, one can’t help wonder if Miss Hammond or any of the children looked outside at St. Marys’ muddy waters rushing by and started to second-guess the decision to remain. After all, while everyone expected a fast-flowing river during a heavy rain to be littered with the occasional debris and tree branches, there was something different and creepy about some of the cargo floating in St. Marys this time. There weren’t just one or two of these particular items floating down the river, but many, too many for the children to count. At first, nobody knew what they were looking at, but then it became sickeningly clear.
    Dead cats.
    Mid-morning, somewhere in Ohio or Indiana
    Ernest Bicknell’s trip was not going as planned. Because the engineer didn’t want to find his train rushing into an impromptu river, he kept the speed low and often stopped for interminable lengths of time atstations, mapping out a route. So many bridges were being washed out that crossing Ohio and Indiana was becoming a serious challenge.
    As reported in the book Pennsylvania Lines West of Pittsburgh: A History of the Flood of March 1913, author Charles Wilbur Garrett wrote: “Trains which were en route on the night of March 24-25 over most of the system were marooned wherever they happened to be when they came to an impassable piece of road—some at stations, some in the open country; some high and dry, some where they were surrounded with water.”
    Bicknell and the other passengers were continually being told that they would have to be rerouted and would, on occasion, have to wait for other trains to