In order to prevent the spread of the pestilence which is feared, fires
were late last night started among the wreckage. Thus, in order to
save valuable remaining lives, it has been deemed necessary to destroy
by the other fearful element the festering debris, even if the bodies
underneath have to be cremated with it. It is the only manner in which
the health of the locality can be sustained.
[Illustration: THE THREE HUNDREDTH BODY.]
If Johnstown suffered, Cambria City was almost entirely wiped out.
The work of repairing the wreck in this place will be short, as the
flood did the most of it. Nowhere in all the fifteen-mile course of
the fearful torrent was the surface of the earth swept more clean than
in that place. Cambria City was a borough organized separately from
Johnstown, and lying below it on the opposite side of the river. It
began just below the railroad bridge, and extended for a mile down
the river. The Conemaugh below the bridge makes a long curve from the
mountains, and a flat a mile long, with a curving front half a mile
wide at its widest point, is left. Cambria City was built upon this
flat. There were 600 houses and about 3,000 inhabitants. Most of the
houses were small frame buildings very lightly built. There were a few
large stores, a small brick brewery, street car lines, electric lights,
and other substantial improvements above ground.
The plan of the town in a general way, was of four broad streets
running across the flat lengthwise, with numerous cross streets at
right angles. The first wild dash of the flood, when its advance wave
was shattered against the bridge, was turned aside into the Cambria
Iron Works, across the river from Cambria City. Passing through these
from end to end, the outer half of the flat upon which Cambria City was
built lay straight before it. The flood with a front of twenty feet
high, bristling with all manner of debris, struck straight across the
flat, as though the river’s course had always been that way. It cut
off the outer two-thirds of the city with a line as true and straight
as could have been drawn by a surveyor. On the part over which it
swept there remains standing but one building, the brewery. With this
exception, not only the houses and stores, but the pavements, sidewalks
and curbstones, and the earth beneath for several feet, is washed away
so that the water mains are laid bare. The pavements were of cinders
from the iron works, a bed six inches thick, as hard as stone and with
a surface like macadam. Over most of the washed-out portions of the
city not even the broken fragments of these pavements are left. Along
the edge of the river much of the land was made ground built up of
these cinders. The mass of them was so great, and the surface afforded
so little hold for the flood, that the land here is two or three feet
higher than further inland, where the ground yielded easier. But even
here the water left its mark. Beside the sweeping away of all buildings
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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