Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a selfless act that helped bring both normalcy and assistance to Omaha.
    But not right away. The first news about Omaha’s tornado didn’t go out by telephone or telegraph, because the lines were all down. Instead, a message was sent to the Associated Press from Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska, by train.
    This was bad, because during a crisis, telephone and telegraph operators were always crucial, life-saving links to the rest of the world, especially after a tornado, earthquake, hurricane, or flood. Omaha needed food, water, and help—although the mayor, full of pride and stoicism, would be slow to ask for those things—and the communities near Omaha also would have benefited from immediately knowing what was coming their way. With communication lines down, there was no way to properly warn their neighbors of what was coming. They were on their own.
    What nobody else could know or predict was that this was just the beginning and the start of something else entirely. Weather forecasts were far from useless in 1913; but in this instance, they might as well have been. In Washington, D.C., the United States Weather Bureau issued an alert that “a severe storm is predicted to pass over the EastTuesday and Wednesday.” Storm warnings were issued from Hatteras, North Carolina, to Eastport, Maine, and cold wave warnings for the west lake region, the middle and upper Mississippi Valley were issued. “No decided fall in temperature is predicted for the East until after the passage of the western storm,” concluded the bureau. “Showers are predicted to fill in the time until the storm arrives.”
    No mention anywhere of tornadoes and not a word about flooding.
    The tornadoes were the opening act of a natural disaster that would unfold for the next few weeks, and if one considers the cleanup and aftereffects, months and years. But the disaster would be known not for its wind, but its water. It didn’t help matters that the country was in the midst of El Niño season, a period when the surface ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific become abnormally warm, a phenomenon that tends to give the United States some pretty funky weather, and the night of March 23 was as funky and furious as it gets. The Omaha tornado of 1913 was the opening salvo of the Great Flood of 1913.
    *  One might potentially theorize that he was reaching in his pocket for a key, but this was an age when few people locked their doors, and he was going to a house that had people in it, which means he wouldn’t have been worried about not being able to get inside.
    *  If there’s anything worse than seeing your lives destroyed by a tornado, it’s probably seeing your lives destroyed by a tornado and then being rained on.

MONDAY,
    MARCH 24, 1913

Chapter Two
    The First Flood Deaths
    March 23, Sunday evening, Washington, D.C.
    Once he learned about the Omaha tornado, Ernest P. Bicknell, the Red Cross’s national director, did not waste time. He sent telegrams to Eugene T. Lies, a 36-year-old field worker in Chicago, and a St. Louis fellow who went by the name of C. H. Hubbard, to hurry to Omaha and set up a facility to help the tornado victims. He also telegraphed Governor John H. Moorehead of Nebraska, pledging the Red Cross’s support and promising that relief trains, carrying nurses and doctors, would soon be in Omaha; and he wired additional towns that had been in the tornado’s path to see what the Red Cross could do.
    That done, a restless Bicknell waited for further reports of the destruction. He was in the American Red Cross office, located in the State-War-Navy Building next to the White House, where Woodrow Wilson was settling in, having just been sworn in earlier in the month. As the reports trickled in, Bicknell decided he could do more if he personally oversaw the operations in Omaha.
    The 51-year-old’s resume was like reading a Who’s Who of Natural Disasters for the 20th