The feeling against the Pittsburgh association that owns the lake and
dam that caused the calamity grows more intense the more the truth
about the dam becomes known. The disclosure of the fact that the dam
was simply a heap of dirt with loose stone facings, instead of a
structure of solid masonry, and that the waste gates had been closed up
by the association, which was printed in a Pittsburgh paper the other
morning, made a sensation here, and threatens to bring the matter to a
head. Criminal prosecution is freely talked of, but it is thought that
it will be difficult to sustain a case, even in courts as prejudiced
as those in Cambria county will be against the dam owners. The men are
rich and responsible, however, and the liability of civil action is
generally believed to be complete. If they should be held liable in
civil suits for damages, it is probable that many, if not all of them,
will be financially ruined. There is an abundance of evidence that the
owners were frequently warned by old residents in the neighborhood of
the dam that it was becoming weaker and getting into a more dangerous
condition all the time.
One fact alone, as to the dam, ought to convict the dam owners of
negligence. The stone face that went up each side of the dam was not
continued across the top. In order to maintain a wagon road there
the top of the dirt heap had merely been leveled off and left in its
natural condition. It was a moral certainty that if the water even
rose so high as to go over the top of the dam it would wash it out.
With the water washing over the dirt top of the dam, the rock facing
would amount to no more, as a source of strength, than a sheathing of
cardboard. To have covered the top of the dam with a substantial course
of stone capping, arched, or in some other way arranged to offer as
little resistance as possible to the passage of the water, would have
spoiled the wagon road, but it might have saved the dam.
Better opinion will no doubt prevail, and unless something new
transpires later another scene of devastation will be averted.
En passant, to show the power of the voluminous flood, these incidents
of the awful day are related:
The morning of June 6 the wreck of an express train was unearthed. The
baggage of Miss Annie Chism, of Nashville, Tenn., was found. She was
a missionary on her way to Brazil for the Women’s Foreign Missionary
Society of the Methodist Church.
Among her effects was a Bible, and in it was a message to be filed at
Altoona and addressed to the Methodist concern at No. 20 East Tenth
street, New York, announcing that she was on the train. Her watch, some
money and a Greek Testament were also found. It is evident that many
lives were lost on this train, more than at first supposed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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