Word: flooding
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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...
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...
...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...
...newspapers in the flood's path, Pittsburgh's were hardest hit. When telegraphic facilities failed, Hearstmen on the Sun-Telegraph managed to get a long distance connection with the New York American, had Arthur Brisbane's column "Today" dictated over the wire. In it Mr. Brisbane announced that "Johnstown, Pa. has its second important flood," went on to wonder "whether engineers could not have arranged to let the second flood run around the city instead of through...
Though telephones held out, power failure soon drove all three Pittsburgh papers out of town. To the Washington, Pa. Observer & Reporter scurried the Scripps-Howard Press, ran off 125,000 copies of an eight-page flood extra. Paul Block's Post-Gazette borrowed the office of the Newcastle News, got out enough papers for 70,000 of its 204,139 readers, then slogged on to the larger plant of the Youngstown, Ohio Vindicator. The Sun-Telegraph hurried a crew 30 miles to publish on the presses of the Greensburg Tribune & Review...