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 B

where most of the buildings were leveled.
    Six people were snuffed out by a cyclone in northwest Chicago: two railroad men were killed in the northern suburb of Des Plaines, Illinois, when the chimney from a manufacturing plant was hurled into a caboose of their freight train; another man was crushed in the rubble of his house; yet another was electrocuted by fallen wires; a telegraph lineman was in the wrong place at the wrong time and literally blown off his post into oblivion; a second telegraph lineman was also on a telegraph pole and was electrocuted when the wind came through.
    In Terre Haute, Indiana, at 9:45 P . M ., a tornado took the lives of twenty-one people; it was theorized later that even more residents, trapped in their homes, would have died from electrical fires, and fires started by lightning, if the rain hadn’t started falling. The community was a collage of tragedy, but in the midst of it all, there were a couple of miracles. A baby was lifted out of a bed, carried for a block, and set down, uninjured. Another resident was inside a house that flew aquarter-mile, according to some reports. The woman inside emerged from the wreckage, injury-free. Some people chuckled later, remembering defeathered chickens and how one person’s clothing, lain out on a bed, was pulled up into the fireplace and went up the chimney.
    Three more people died in the tiny village of Flag Springs, Missouri, which was described at the time as being basically wiped off the map.
    All in all, it’s believed that 221 people died in tornadoes that night and 761 people were injured.
    While the tornadoes were attacking other towns in the Midwest over the next two hours, Omaha swiftly turned its attention to rescuing its citizens. The telephone and telegraph lines were demolished, enough that there was no way to send a message to warn anyone else in time of what was to come. Everyone would be on their own, including those in Omaha, given that there was no quick way to tell the rest of the nation what had happened. T. R. Porter did his best to share the news, however. He made tracks to Fort Omaha, once a United States Army supply depot and now a training center where soldiers learned how to fly in hot-air balloons, which could come in handy during battle, it was believed, and, indeed, during World War I, they were used for observing the enemy below. The fort also taught soldiers radio communication and telegraphy, and as luck would have it, it had a wireless station. The Associated Press may have received word of the tornado first via train, but Porter was apparently the first to get out a lengthy account of what had happened, relaying the news of the tornado one state to the south, to Fort Riley, Kansas, and from there, the soldiers telegraphed the story of the tornado and its destruction to the rest of the country.
    Throughout the night with the aid of lantern light, men dug into hills of debris, searching for the living. Doctors tended to the hundreds of wounded. The street railway company had men working, hoping to clear some of the wreckage on the tracks by morning. Families wandered around in a daze. One Omaha resident named John Sullivan sent his daughter to fetch a doctor for his dying mother. After his mother died and his little girl didn’t return, Sullivan spent anxious hours wandering the city, shivering and without shoes, looking for her until she eventually turned up. And nobody was particularly excited to see, shortly after midnight, snowflakes falling. It was the beginning of a blizzard.
    March 24, dawn, Mulberry, Indiana
    Roy Rothenberger, twenty-six, and his seventeen-year-old brother, Roscoe, were at Wildcat Creek in a boat that they built themselves. With them was a 21-year-old friend, Elva Myers. They were hunting wild ducks and ironically sitting ducks themselves.
    The boat was a hastily made flat-bottomed vessel with low sides. It was kind of like a johnboat, which is the same thing only with a bench or