Word: pittsburgh
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...flood waters struck hot boilers, explosions and fires flared through the city. An exploding tank car in the Pittsburgh & Lake Erie railroad yards burned three business houses, two homes, a municipal garage. A nut & bolt plant, two steel plants, an oil works blazed away while firemen sloshed and fumbled. In a suburban house some 30 refugees were rocked, showered with bricks, singed when their shelter exploded and caught fire...
...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...
Turning up unwashed and unshaved in Baltimore after being marooned in a Pittsburgh hotel, General Hugh S. Johnson told how he had lived for two days on beer and seltzer water, how one woman guest had taken a bath in three cases of ginger ale. Said he: "It was the most complete paralysis of a large city since the San Francisco fire...
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...
...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...