THE MASSACHUSETTS FLOOD.

Waka Maori, Volume 10, Issue 14, 14 July 1874, Page 175

THE MASSACHUSETTS FLOOD.

A brief mention was made of the Massachusetts flood, in a telegram published in the last issue of the Waka. The following account, abridged from the European papers, will no doubt interest our Maori readers:— _ The most terrible disaster in the annals of the history of Massachusetts, occurred in Hampshire County on Saturday the 23rd of May. The "Williamsburg reservoir, covering a tract of over one hundred acres, gave way early in the forenoon, precipitating the vast mass of water it contained three miles down a steep and narrow valley into the thriving manutacturing village of Williamsburgh, and thence further down the valley, through two or three other villages, to the Connecticut Eiver.

The huge torrent, dashing into "Williamsburg with resistless power, swept away in a moment the manufacturing establishments and numbers of dwellings, causing enormous destruction of property and ,terrible loss of human life. The lower villages suffered only less awfully. The reservoir which burst was a wall of masonry five feet at the thickest, backed and faced with fifty feet of earth. It was twenty-five feet in depth and four hundred and fifty feet long. Behind it was a lake of one hundred and four acres, holding three million tons of water. On Friday night it rained hard. At half-past seven on Saturday morning, Cheney, one of the dam watchers was in front of his dam when he saw in the east branch a spurt of water near the base. In a moment he turned to his barn, jumped on his mare, and ran her for dear life down the road to Williamsburg. He looked back once, and saw that out of an enormous breach in the earth and masonry a torrent of water had burst into the air. There was no dam, there was nothing to be seen but the front of a huge, rolling wave, which was carrying on its very crest the great stone blocks of the wall, and dashing them down the steep incline of the valley. The speed of this torrent increased every moment, but Cheney was gone, riding recklessly over the stony and muddy roads to give the warning where fifty homes were in the direct path of the flood. He went over the terrible two and a-half miles at so rapid a pace, that in ten minutes he was crying and yelling like a madman among the cottages of Williamsburg, " The dam! The dam is burst! Get up to the high ground ; the water is coming!"

It had corrie. Ten minutes was full enough for that mountain of water going down a decline of one foot in six to reach the first victims. There they stood, pretty white cottages in rows and rectangles on the flats. The gorge had been narrow above, and a tbirty-foot moving wall of water and limestone rock undistinguishable were upon them, over them, and spread out upon the plain, roaring like the crash of near thunder and tumbling down the frightened valley at twenty miles an hour. Those who were safe before the news came escaped; for the rest they took the chances of the flood. Some clung to their houses, but houses were mere toys of paper, swept like feathers here and there, piled one upon the other, upset, spun round, lifted bodily and broken in twain against trees, lifted into the air and ground to splinters between the flood, beaten and buffeted and tossed adrift, with all that was human in them, shaken into the terrible railway speed of the deluge of timbers, and quartz rocks, and water. Some fled, and were overwhelmed before the eyes of their friends; some went mad, and rode the deluge down the valley shrieking. Here and there one could be seen sitting upon the roof of his shaking house, and clinging to it as the billows struck it. Of these last, one or two escaped by the sudden staying of the waves. It was all over in a short half hour. One hundred and twenty buildings are destroyed, hundreds of acres covered with stone and mud. As for human life, to-night ninety bodies in all have been found, and squads of men here and there through the valley are looking for the missing. Scarcely a trace has been left of the removal of habitations, so completely had the torrent ploughed up the ground in all directions. Temporary relief committees have been organized and have gone actively to work. Practically, nothing will be saved from the vast quantities of valuable machinery, costly stores, and manufactured products. All day the exhumation and interment has been going on. Nearly every tree in the course of the torrent is filled with shreds of clothing, which the cruel branches stripped from the helpless people whom the flood swept by; and the trees themselves are stripped by the torrent of their bark, and from trunk to twig are left as naked and white and scathed as the corpses of those they crushed and bruised.