The experience of the newspaper correspondents in the Conemaugh valley was the experience of a lifetime. Few war correspondents, even, have been witnesses of such appalling scenes of horror and desolation. Day after day they were busy recording the annals of death and despair, conscious, meanwhile, that no expressions of accumulated pathos at their command could do justice to the theme. They had only to stand in the street wherever a knot of men had gathered, to hear countless stories of thrilling escapes. Hundreds of people had such narrow escapes that they hardly dared to believe that they were saved for hours after they reached solid ground. William Wise, a young man who lived at Woodvale, was walking along the road when the rush of water came down the valley. He started to rush up the side of the hills, but stopped to help a young woman; Ida Zidstein, to escape; lost too much time, and was forced to drag the young woman upon a high pile of metal near the road. They had clung there several hours, and thought that they could both escape, as the metal pile was not exposed to the full force of the torrent. A telegraph pole came dashing down the flood, its top standing above the water, from which dangled some wires. The pole was caught in an eddy opposite the pile. It shot in toward the two who were clinging there. As the pole swung around, the wires came through the air like a whip-lash, and catching in the hair of the young woman, dragged her down to instant death. The young man remained on the heap of metal for hours before the water subsided so as to allow him to escape. One man named Homer, with his child, age six, was on one of the houses which were first carried away. He climbed to the roof and held fast there for four hours, floating all the way to Bolivar, fifteen miles below. A young hero sat upon the roof of his father's house, holding his mother and little sister. Once the house swung in toward a brick structure which still rested on its foundation. As one house struck the other, the boy sprang into one of the windows. As he turned to rescue his mother and sister, the house swung out again, and the boy, seeing that there was no possibility of getting them off, leaped back to their side. A second time the house was stopped--this time by a tree. The boy helped his mother and sister to a place of safety in the tree, but before he could leave the roof, the house was swept on and he was drowned. One man took his whole family to the roof of his floating house. He and one child escaped to another building, but his wife and five children were whirled around for hours, and finally carried down to the bridge where so many people perished in the flames. They were all rescued.