The Fury Of The Waters

By the bursting of the South Fork dam at Johnstown, Pa.; from 12,000 to 15,000 lives were lost and $25,000,000 worth of property destroyed. Corpses floated down the Ohio river past Pittsburg, seventy-eight miles west of Johnstown. The losses in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia from the great rainfall and nood will not fall short of $40,000,000. The Johnstown calamity was the direst disaster by flood that has ever overtaken an English speaking people. Fifteen years ago the dam at Mili River, Mass. , burst, causing terrible ruin and loss of life. In China, for centuries, the banks of the low lying Yellow river have been dammed and diked up, as ia done at present with the Southern Mississippi. Higher and higher above the heads of the people the levees were built, until two years ago, 1887, the mighty water rose in its strength, burst the bonds which held it as though they had been paper and destroyed half a million people. Within a year two other artificial reservoirs, similar to that at Johnstown, have broken their banks and caused wide ruin and loss of life. The first was at Montreux, Switzerland, the second in South America. There was one feature common to all three of these dam disasters. The embankments were known to be unsafe. Eepeated warnings had been given, which were heeded neither by the hapless souls who dwelt in the path of destruction, nor by those whose duty it was to see that the works were secure. In any case man's puny etrength can never measure itself against the nature forces. Sooner or later, be his achievement what it will, they rise and overwhelm him. Hereafter men should think twice before damming up great reservoirs upon hills above towns and cities. There remains to be recalled the awf ui devastation of the waters in the Straits of Sunda, in the volcanio eruption of Krakatoa in the summer of 1883. Following that eruption, tidal waves forty feet high swept the shores of the straits and islands. Forty thousand persons were drowned by these waves. Vast ruin by flood has come upon different parts of the earth in the past seven years. In 1883 and '84 in America happened the fearf ui successive floods in the Ohio valley. In the spring of 1882 occurred the breaking of the levees and the overflow of the Mississippi, bringing terrible destruction, sickness and loss of life. At Jackson, Miss., the river was at one time sixty miles wide. It would bo interesting to know what peculiar atmospheric or planetary disturbance has been behind it all. The strangest feature of all in connection with the floods and ruin in the United States is that the storm which wrecked Johnstown seems to have gono around the world. Within a day or two after our great storm, a hurricane and water spout caused great destruction and death at Reichenbach, Germany. The same day there came from the other side of the world news that 10,000 lives had been lost in a hurricane at Hong Kong.